ABSTRACT
This article focuses on how ritual drummers and other coparticipants in Muharram relate the meaning of drumming to themselves, to others and to aspects of Islam in the wake of the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. 1 These participants are concerned with the ‘connotations’ (in Barthes's sense [1967: 89]) of music, both socioculturally and theologically. 2 Connotational meanings arise not only from differences in perspective, but also from differing motivations of participants to present their actions as meaningful in one or another context. Some actors perpetuate performances whose meanings are accessible at one level and veiled at another; others strategically resist commonplace forms of meaning; and some aspects of meaning are not so much hidden as lost, owing to social changes that have impeded the transmission of knowledge.
