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The Negative Theology of Nund Rishi (1378-1440): Poetry and Politics in Medieval Kashmir A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Abir Bashir Bazaz IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Ajay Skaria, Adviser August 2016 © Abir Bashir Bazaz, 2016 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my teacher, and adviser, Ajay Skaria for his encouragement, support, guidance and enthusiasm for this project. I must also thank Simona Sawhney who guided the project from its beginnings and helped me through every stage of its development. I am deeply indebted to Thomas Pepper for his guidance and inspiration. I also thank Jason McGrath for his help and encouragement. I am grateful to all of my teachers and mentors for their generosity and patience. I am immensely grateful to Rahman Rahi, Muzaffar Alam, late Akhtar Mohiudeen, Thomas Gunning and the late Miriam Hansen. In Kashmir, I have been been sustained by the love and friendship of Irfan Rahim Guru. I would also like to thank Hilal Mir and Mahmud Rashid. Rahman Rahi Sahib inspired me to study Kashmiri language and the late Agha Shahid Ali persuaded me to abandon science for literature. Among other friends in Kashmir, I must thank Jasir Haqani, Showkat Motta, Suvaid Yaseen, Najeeb Mubarki, Bilal Bhat, Wasim Bhat, Mufti Mudasir, Maroof Shah, Feroz Rather, Shahnawaz Majid, Azhar Qadri, Baba Umar, Zahid Rafiq, Inshah Malik, Arshi Javed, Muzaffar Karim, Muzammil Karim, Wajahat Peer, Shahnaz Bashir, Naseer Ganai, Syed Tariq, Arshad Malik, Ruhail Amin, Shahid Iqbal, Showkat Katju, Faraz Yaseen, Hakeem Irfan, Inder Salim, Arshad Malik and Vivek Kaul. Anmol Tikko and Vivek Kaul are like brothers to me. Maroof Shah has been exemplary with his sage advice and generous with his love. I owe more than I can express in words to Masroor Malik and Massarat Malik. i In Delhi, I must thank my teacher and friend, Shohini Ghosh. Thanks are also due for conversations past and present to Pratap Pandey, Shiva Kumar Srinivasan, Manash Bhatacharjee, Sabeena Gadihoke, Madan Gopal Singh, Sanjay Kak, Suvir Kaul, Neeti Nair, Prashant Keshavmurthy, Soumyabrata Choudhury, Venugopal Maddipatti, Gaurav Banerjee, Prasanta Chakravarty, Saiba Varma, Madhura Chakraborty,Vidura Jang Bahadur, Rajarshi Ghose, Luther Obrock, Anubhuti Maurya and Pothik Ghosh. I thank Saityabrata Das for inviting me to speak at Religion/Politics Conference at the Centre of English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and to Tyler Williams for inviting me to the Bhakti conference at IIAS, Shimla. Ajit Singh and Deepali Gaur have been like family to me. In Karachi, I must thank my aunt, Dilshad Mir, and her lovely family, and also Meenu Gaur and Mazhar Zaidi. I would also like to thank Muhammad Hanif and Nimra Bucha. My years in the US were made easy by the friendship and generosity of Manan Ahmed, Prithvi Datta Chandra Shobhi, Rajiv Kinra, Richard Delacy, Bret Beheim, Junko Yamazaki, Dianna Oles, Rehanna Kheshgi, Raquel Valadares, Casandra Silva Sibilin, Nancy Hammond and Lyubomir Uzunov. In Chicago, thanks are also due to Jeff McMahon and the late Iftikhar (Ifti) Nasim. I also thank Emily Durham, Sravanthi Kollu, Joya John, Sucheta Kanjilal and Aniruddha Dutta. Thanks are also due to Kashmiri comrades in the US and Canada: Nishita Trisal, Mohamad Junaid, Rakshanda Aslam, Hafsa Kanjwal, Matteen Rafiqi, Shazia Naqshbandi, Sonam Kachru, Ather Zia and Huma Dar. Sonam’s work on Kashmiri pasts and presents is a source of constant inspiration for ii me. I must also thank Griselda Pollock, Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Haley Duschinski, Sudipta Sen and Suad Joseph. I am also indebted to the scholarship and insight of Muneebur Rahman Sahib. In Minneapolis, my thanks are due to Shiney Varghese, Richa Nagar, David Faust, Vinay Gidwani, Qadri Ismail, Joseph Allen, Travis Workman, Paul Rouzer, Christine Marran, Joseph Farag, Suvadip Sinha, Nida Sajid and Maki Isaka. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Harshit Rathi, Quỳnh N. Phạm and María José Méndez. I thank Quỳnh and Harshit, in particular, for their support and friendship through the final days of writing. I also thank Lalit, Julia, Haley, Miranda, Sristi, Courtney, Victor, Maheen, Devika, Gabriel, Jesse, Sravanthi, Joe, Ketaki, Kriti, Anuradha, Akshya, Anil, Koel, Mike, Hui, Ateeb, Soo, Guanda, Sejung, Saena, Camila and Devon. Omar Tesdell and Elizabeth Tesdell have been like family to me in Minneapolis. I am also thankful to Pravin Shrestha and everyone at Himalayan. My thanks are also due to Max Kramer and Sarah Lina Ewald. In Davis, I would like to thank Najia, Arooj, Aroosa, Tayyaba, Asma, Ambar, Nadia, Aisha, Mansoor, Aneil, Sadaf, Shezad, Rishi, Aysha and Nidhi. I must in the end thank my mother, Shamshad (Shama), for her love and patience, and Lala (Trilok Singh) for unconditional love and support through the years. Thanks are also due to M S Gaur and Asha Gaur. I would also like to thank Aishwarya Iyer for her support and encouragement. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgements……………...… ………………………………………..…...…i Table of Contents………………………………………………..……...…..……...iv Chapter 1: Introduction…...…………………………………………...............…...1 Chapter 2: Practicing Death: Closing Time………………………………..…..…45 Chapter 3: “Die before you die”: Becoming Nothing…………………...…...……92 Chapter 4: Vernacular Apocalypse ……………………………….…….……….151 Chapter 5: The Sahaja Islam of Nund Rishi …………………….………………219 Conclusion…………………………………………………..……..………..……308 Bibliography……………………………………………………………….. ……313 iv Chapter 1 Introduction On May 25, 1995, at the end of a two-month long siege, the shrine and tomb-complex (astān) of Nund Rishi (1378-1440), Kashmir’s most revered Sufi and the founder of a fifteenth century Kashmiri Sufi Order called the Rishi Order, was destroyed in a gun battle between the militants of the Ḥizb al- Mujahidīn, a pro-Pakistan Kashmiri guerilla group, and the Indian Army.1 The Ḥizb al- Mujahidīn and the Indian Army kept accusing each other of destroying one of the most popular Sufi shrines of Kashmir even as most Kashmiris retreated into shocked silence and mourning. The gratuitous destruction of a revered Sufi shrine, a centre of Kashmiri Rishism, epitomized the everyday fate of Kashmiris in the early 1990s at the receiving end of a low-intensity war between India and the different Kashmiri nationalist, pro-Pakistan and Islamist groups over the future of the disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir. The Central Kashmir town of Chrar was also destroyed in the gun battle. It is in Chrar that Kashmiri nationalists had gathered in March 1990 at the beginning of an armed insurgency to demand self-determination and vow to struggle for azādi (freedom): a demonstration that also cost many Kashmiri lives. The shrine at Chrar symbolized the distinctive history of Islam in Kashmir for some (in another variant, a form of the multi-religious, even syncretic, Kashmīriyat, or Kashmiriness) or the beginnings of Islam and Islamic culture in Kashmir for the others. Nonetheless the Chrar shrine was, and remains, clearly one of the most sacred religious spaces for Kashmiris. It is no surprise then that the pro-independence Kashmiri 1 John F. Burns, “Muslim Shrine in Kashmir is Destroyed,” New York Times, May 12, 1995, accessed June 25, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/1995/05/12/world/muslim-shrine-in-kashmir-is-destroyed.html. 1 nationalists (or Kashmiri nationalists who are pro-India), pro-Pakistan Islamists, and the Indian State (with its official ideology of secularism at the cornerstone of its claim on Kashmir) all lay claim to Chrar as a centre of Rishi thinking and philosophy. But neither the Kashmiri nationalists, Kashmiri Islamists or the Indian State have articulated any serious understanding of the religio-political movement of the saint who lies buried at Chrar. This movement known in the later Urdu scholarship as the Rishī tahrīk or in English scholarship as the Rishi movement has been a unique phenomenon in the history of religion in Kashmir soon after the advent of Islam there in the fourteenth century. What makes Nund Rishi and his movement so fundamental to Kashmiri ideas of self, faith, sovereignty, and loss? This is one of the questions we would like to examine in this dissertation through a reading of Nund Rishi’s mystical poetry itself. Kashmir is a disputed territory and the region remains divided between India and Pakistan.2 The claims of both India and Pakistan on Kashmir depend on the way these two nation-states approach its status as a Muslim-majority region (for India, the inclusion of Kashmir as a Muslim-majority region in the Union of States ratifies its official ideology of secularism; for Pakistan, a country created as a homeland for South Asia’s Muslims, the State’s Muslim-majority status is the cornerstone of its political claim on the region). It is not at all surprising then that the history of Islam in Kashmir is a controversial subject. The Rishis, central to Kashmir’s transition from a Hindu-Buddhist society to an Islamic society from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, are fundamental to that history. Nevertheless, most accounts of the Rishis in Kashmir have focused on 2 Some of the erstwhile territory of the State of Jammu and Kashmir, a princely State in British India, is controlled by China. 2 religious and political history and few have examined the thinking of Nund Rishi. There have been a few book-length studies of the history of the Rishi Order of Kashmiri Sufism but of these Muhammad Ishaq Khan’s Kashmir’s Transition to Islam: The Role of Muslim Rishis remains the most influential even if controversial.3 The collections of Nund Rishi’s mystical poetry have also been published since the arrival of the printing press in Kashmir in the early twentieth century. But there has been no detailed critical study of the mystical poetry of Nund Rishi. Nund Rishi left behind no written records or mystical theology except his mystical poetry.