ABSTRACT
Afsar Mohammad is a celebrated poet, short story writer and literary critic in Telugu who has extensively contributed to minority writing. Like Dalit and Bahujan writing, minority writing also has raised crucial questions about aesthetics, content, language and style of literature that is hierarchical on the basis of every dividing identity. There have been a number of Muslim writers who have written in Telugu attempting to be part of the mainstream Telugu discourse. Similarly, there have been Muslim writers who have written in Urdu trying to be part of the Urdu discourse. This essay by Afsar Mohammad taken from “A Garden of Mirrors—Retelling the Sufi Past and Contemporary Muslim Discourse”, in Dandekar Deepra and Torsten Tschacher (ed.), Islam Sufism and Everyday Politics of Belonging in South Asia (2016) significantly contributes to the Muslim minority discourse by closely examining the festival of pirs and connecting this celebration with the Sufi Muslim identity. Similar to the manner in which other marginalised sections are reclaiming and recreating histories, celebrations and myths, Afsar Mohammad reclaims the images of the pirs and their importance in the cultural and religious domain of Sufi Muslims in order to understand the changing political dynamics in the Telugu-speaking states. He observes that the histories of local Sufi saints are now transformed into identity markers for the social groups. The modern mode of historicising medieval Sufi aspects is functioning as a device for the production of an alternative discourse for the post-1990s Muslim resistance politics in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.
