ABSTRACT
Dreams and memories offer crucial insight into the processes that led to the reconfiguration of everyday ritual practices at popular Sufi shrines post-partition. For a large number of people who migrated from Pakistan, as well as for spaces in Indian Punjab that were emptied of ritual intermediaries who left for Pakistan in 1947, the dream experience and memorialization enable a fascinating trope of rupture as well as continuity. This chapter situates the social and cultural repertoire of dreams, particularly focusing on the interpretation and meanings of dream narratives. It is intriguing to understand the process of the construction of memorial shrines for Sufi mystics spread across urban and rural landscapes of Indian Punjab, particularly in the first decade of the twentieth century. Memories are also tools, a cultural template, that locate, mediate and sustain as well as articulate dissent and inscribe shrines on the popular landscape that is deeply embedded with dialectics of caste and community structures.
