ABSTRACT
The Muslim Sidi (African-Indian) community of Gujarat state in western India observes a devotional tradition centering on the veneration of three African Rifai Sufi saints of fourteenth-century Gujarat: Bava Gor, Bava Habash, and Mai Misra. At a memorial shrine of the Sidi ancestor-saints located in the city of Ahmedabad, Sidi women serve as ritual specialists leading public-facing rituals and private, women-only rituals. These rituals demonstrate the role of reciprocal exchange and embodiment of the saints’ charisma in forging devotional relationships between memorialized saints and the supplicants who visit their shrines. This chapter, based on ethnographic field research conducted in Gujarat from 2017 to 2019, draws from historical documents as well as oral narrative histories, devotional songs, and the material culture of the Sidi devotional tradition to examine Sidi women's roles as ritual specialists. Their mediation of the woman saint Mai Misra's blessings to the public calls into question the norm of men's ritual authority at Sufi saint shrines, demonstrating the distinctiveness of the Sidi devotional tradition within the landscape of Sufism in India. Sidi women's veneration of Mai Misra in private women-only rituals illuminates the historiographic potential of the Sidi Sufi tradition while opening new vistas for the comparative study of gender and mysticism in diverse contexts in South Asia and beyond.
