ABSTRACT
Prevailing tools of ‘modern’ historical scholarship, particularly methods to understand religious practices, were inept to chart the process of continued existence and also the emergence of a new set of popular Sufi shrines in Indian Punjab, intriguingly within a decade after violent militancy in the region. This work therefore ventured into some fascinating debates on dreams, memory, spatiality and circulation and argued that academic territorialization of religious practices hinders any objective exploration of the complexity of popular shrine spaces. Amid the impossibility of crossovers in the historical landscape of Punjab, divided and sustained by heavily guarded borders, popular Sufi shrines emerge as significant ‘sites of memory’, particularly for the partition migrants to Indian Punjab. Sufi shrines also present a fascinating insight into the processes that societies forge to reconcile their violent past. These ‘sites of memory’ are forging reconciliation around the tragedy of Punjab’s partition, and therefore, offer an intriguing insight into ‘in the making’ processes of historical formations.
