IISA 2024 | Resisting religious labels in Early Modern Punjab: why place matters-Purnima Dhavan

Recorded as part of the online colloquium, Interreligious interactions in South Asia. 4 April 2024.
South Asian scholars of religion have long been familiar with a diverse number of spiritual figures who actively resist framing their practice within already established faith traditions. A vast scholarship has emerged to explain this phenomenon, but broadly it still associates many of these figures within the broader sweep of Bhakti or Sufi trends. This paper examines what we lose when we confine ourselves to examining such figures and the communities they lead only through the confines of such analysis. In what ways does grounding our understanding in the specific regional ecology of the spaces from which the emerged--geographically, politically, culturally-help us to understand the ideas associated with such figures and also the communities associated with them with more specificity?
Examining the life and works of two lesser-known figures in seventeenth-century Punjab, Bhagat Jallan and Shah Murad, I probe the ways in which the avoidance of sectarian labels in Punjab was also a process of intricate mapping which connected these men to deeply-rooted local traditions, ecologically significant shifts in their time, and self-location in oral cultures of their home districts. Rather than absorbing the legacy of both these figures into a generalized concept of Bhakti and Sufi traditions, I point to the micro-histories and geographies that matter in the emergence of these figures, and even more significantly in their lasting hold on public memory in the same places in which they lived, worked, and died.
About the speaker
Purnima Dhavan is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her publications include When Sparrows Became Hawks: The Making of the Sikh Warrior Tradition, 1699-1799 (OUP 2011) and essays on Mughal and Sikh History. She is currently working on a new monograph exploring the ways in which literary networks created new identities and notions of public good in Mughal India, The Lords of the Pen: Self-Fashioning and Literary Networks in Mughal India.
This series was convened by Hina Khalid (Cambridge), Pranav Prakash (Oxford) and Ankur Barua (Cambridge) with support from the Cambridge Interfaith Programme.