The Sticky Shia Sonics of Sehwan by Omar Kasmani

Audible Spectres: The Sticky Shia Sonics of Sehwan by Omar Kasmani This text draws on three inter-related sound recordings from two affiliated saints’ shrines in Sehwan, a renowned place of pilgrimage on the banks of the river Indus in Pakistan[1]. The shrine of Bodlo, though much smaller, is second only to that of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, the principal saint of Sehwan, and of whom Bodlo is the penultimate disciple. The two sites are materially and © Omar Kasmani discursively conversant with each other amid flows of legend, ritual, relics and people, also sound. The sources I discuss here are sonic- lyrical offerings[2] performed by pilgrims facing saints’ tombs at the two shrines. Though of varied emotional tenors and composed in different languages, these offerings move pilgrims and saints alike evoke related Islamic holy figures and point to shared scenes and spheres of affect. The first one – recorded at the shrine of Bodlo in 2013 – documents a pilgrim’s lyrical tribute to Hussain, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad martyred at the Battle of Karbala in 680 CE. Hussain remains a key figure of devotion for Muslims, especially the Shia in Pakistan. The Punjabi song "like Allah listens, listens Hussain” recounts his miraculous attributes and projects him as a figure of petition, one who is attentive and ever-listening. To the childless, he grants children, the man sings, and to the needy, a patron, their saviour. Hussain is as much admired for his willingness to battle against odds in these verses as he is remembered for his ultimate act of sacrifice. Puncturing the song time and again is the echo of a fakir in the background who concurrently calls out to Hussain, also to Ali, his father, the paramount imam of the Shia[3]. In addition to the ambient buzz of the tomb-hall, hard to miss is the sporadic clang of ankle-bells as the fakir circumambulates the tomb of Bodlo. The second recording – also from 2013 at the same shrine – features the voice of a Shia woman pilgrim whose late afternoon offering is dedicated to Abbas, the other hero of Karbala and Hussain’s half-brother. The Urdu song of praise, "here surrender the kings" portrays the exemplary valour and devotion of Abbas who as the flag-bearer of Hussain’s army defends the family of the Prophet until his last breath. No place is like the place of Abbas, she sings, and how could it possibly be when the heaven itself leans over to kiss the flag he bears. Not only in verse, countless commemorative standards in black (alam) rise from rooftops in Sehwan making Abbas the most ubiquitously enshrined figure in town. In yet another stunning confluence of the lyrical and the local, the ‘here’ of the verse is rendered continuous with the here of the pilgrim – also of those listening to her. As she poignantly sings the refrain, "here surrender the kings,” the shrine in Sehwan is audibly imagined as the doorstep of Abbas: Where all hardships are removed. She closes the offering with chanting aloud the call to Ali. The third recording – from 2011 – features a group of pilgrims at the shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, Sehwan’s primary site of devotion. The Seraiki song "let me be by my brother’s corpse" is a mournful text in the voice of Zainab, the sister of Hussain, who witnesses and survives the tragedy of Karbala. As the lead performer delivers the opening lines, he sets the scene of a dawning catastrophe. Others in the group can be heard wailing and sobbing before they begin to sing the lament in unison. In this latter part of the text, a bruised Zainab addresses her tormentors to turn their gazes away so that she may come to her brother’s corpse, cover his wounds with her chador, and recite Koranic verses to him on his final journey. As the men sing, Zainab’s suffering cuts through the ambient noise of the large tomb-hall, stirring emotions at the shrine. A sense of emotion in a mise-en-scène of sound Petitioning saints in South Asia takes very sonic forms. Yet not adequate analytical attention has been devoted to the complex auralities of saints’ places[4]. As I point to the sonic-emotional spheres of saints’ shrines in Sehwan, I wish to discuss the particular sonic-scenes and the affective charge of these 1 / 4 recordings. I attend to the politics of sound, its sensibilities and affects though not in a way that privileges the shrines’ pious or ethical soundscapes[5]. I dwell instead in the metaphor of scenes to accentuate the fleeting and ephemeral interplay of sound, better still to capture how sonic-scenes are continually inflected by the messy and incremental character of atmospheres within which they arise and come to pass. Even at their sonic barest, these recordings reveal how sounds are political, inevitably layered, affecting but also intervene-able, in a sense airborne affects that are constantly interacting with a whole range of forms, embedded in scenes yet rising from place-specific sonicities. In other words, the affective makeup of these recordings, past their thematic content, is inflected in liaison with other sonic inputs. This means that the ordinary tinkering of tea-sellers, the guttural roar of motor-cycle rickshaws, the five calls to prayer, the daily bustle of surrounding markets as well as the occasional fights, brawls and conflicts on site are as much part of an emergent yet already drifting sonic-scene as are dissonances triggered by ritual performances themselves. Too often are acts of flagellation affectively at odds with festive offerings and celebratory processions in Sehwan; Punjabi eulogies in male voices intersect curiously with screams of women releasing co-habiting spirits in the company of saints; fakir cries pierce through the cloak of silence during the ritual bathing of saints’ tombs undertaken each morning; and emotive offerings in verse occasionally drown in the highs of drumming in shrine courtyards. Discordant as this may sound, yet of these particular samples, it can be said that when pilgrims sing, they summon sonic mises-en-scène of affect that – among other things, in an interface with the emotional cadence of the text being recited and in the effecting presence of the place’s living, non-living and non- human participants – steer the articulation of certain feelings in potential ways within particular settings. Painful sighs or crying along mournful texts that describe the tragedy of Karbala, also the contagion it effects among its listeners in the form of participant weeping or beating of chests are in this sense oriented outbursts, if not exactly unforeseen, not entirely scripted either. My use of mise-en-scène points to the heterogeneously constituted, always-unfolding prospects of arrangement[6], which is to say the delimited yet variable shapes in which the what of these texts poetically interacts with the where of their performances, generating a charged sense of time and place, feeling and mood. The generative affectivity of sonic-scenes aside, it must be said that neither are sonicities of shrines exclusively about singing nor is its stock of emotions limited to the tragedy of Karbala. In fact, saints’ places make room for pilgrims to channel their emotions in a variety of ways, both in guided and impulsive modes, involving tenors that span the tragic and the ecstatic. If anything, singing to saints, or chanting and crying in their presence gives voice to the perception that buried saints and distant historical religious persons are listening, actively and sensationally in dialogue with the world of the living. Questions of perception are local questions. Pilgrims’ view that offerings of lyric and verse at saints’ places are primarily addressed to deceased holy persons helps us grasp how to be at specific shrines for believers is to be confirmed in the emotional knowledge that certain holy persons are here and therefore not outside their ambit of sense perception[7]. To the extent that turning to affect advances a localised interface of what is sensed with what is known, I pursue the idea that beyond their singular salience such individual emotive performances at Sehwani shrines reference a collectively lived situation and thus acquire historical and political charge when read in alliance or as part of a wider sonic-scene that advances the perception that Shia holy figures are aurally immediate and in that sense, sense-able, in a place like Sehwan. A Politics of Sound: Audible spectres in cacophonies of the present The recordings I have chosen to discuss in this text are unequivocally Shia in lyrical content. This is representative of the sample I recorded between 2009 and 2013 in Sehwan. Yet as I read the sonics of Sehwan as particularly Shia sonics, I am aware of the intellectual liberty I take especially when I would otherwise be inclined to argue that distinctions of what is Shia and Sunni in a place like Sehwan are often hard to register, at times harder to maintain. Sehwan is a place multiply haunted. An ancient river deity loiters in pre-modern saintly guises. A deep Shivaite heritage shines through its devotional landscape[8]. The multiple and irreconcilable genealogies of its saint linger in local and national contests over its material and spiritual legacies. Not least, its modern governance under institutions of the state is consistently at odds with its many pasts. One of the ways in which the Department of Awqaf – a subsidiary of the ministry of religious affairs that administers shrines across Pakistan – deals with such ghosts is through material taming and architectural interventions in saints’ places.

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