In this article I explore stories and rituals surrounding sanctified birds, snakes, cats, and stones in contemporary Delhi and rural Uttar Pradesh. These stories and rituals, while drawing on long-standing Indic and Islamic traditions that centrally feature animals, are in many ways novel and unprecedented. They serve as a critique of dominant anthropocentric discourses of religion, and they point us toward possibilities of reimagining the relations between animals and humans, especially in the face of the ecological devastation we inhabit.
This article is centrally concerned with understanding the perceived presence of Muslim saintly figures at various medieval ruins in contemporary Delhi. I explore how popular relationships with these ruins, centred on the presence of the saint-figures, are not ‘historical’, but still indicate meaningful connections to the medieval past. To understand these connections, this article explores the epistemological and ontological privileging of the imaginal (manifesting as dreams and visions) in Islamicate thought and everyday life, arising from the influence of Ibn ‘Arabi, by looking at both contemporary popular practices and beliefs around these ruins, as well as the significance of these ruins in Urdu antiquarian and literary texts from the early twentieth century. I argue that the ontological primacy of the imaginal is also inextricably connected to an ethics of diversity and non-sectarian ideals of justice. The imaginal becomes increasingly important for connecting to the past in the aftermath of colonial and post-colonial state violence, not only because of the destruction of the usual (discursive) modes of historical memory, but also because it poses a moral vision of the pre-modern past against the violence of the modern (state). This article ends by suggesting that the rituals around these ruins create a sensory and affective ‘archive’ of the city’s history that needs to be explored further.
This essay introduces six articles in the special section on animals and enchantment. The ethnographic bent of many of the essays in this special section demonstrates how the copresence of animal and human beings continues to make everyday life in South Asia a site of embodied philosophical engagement with questions regarding the bounds of self and community and our ethics toward others. We turn to these rich traditions, both textual and embodied, to confound and erase the sharp boundaries between the human, the animal, and the environment that have been, and continue to be, sites of incredible violence. The question of who gets the privilege to be considered a human is not an idle question. Animality is a constitutive part of the discursive terrain that marks out which life matters and which life can be erased.
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