ABSTRACT
This chapter listens to the sonic landscape of Muharram majlises (ritual mourning) as an interpretive tool to understand the formation of collective and individual agency within the Shi‘i community, a double minority community in the Indian context. The chapter focuses on the interiority of the sound, performed by the community women in the closed cloisters of the imambaras. While male mourning rituals are brought to the social exterior by microphones and phone cameras, women’s laments and chest-beating remain exclusively private sonic practices. Is the interiority of female sonic landscapes of mourning susceptible to the larger socio-religious context that the community negotiates with? I reflect on how the sonic offers an understanding of the trans-/multilocal connections that the community inherits and develops.
