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Wolf: How long will the drums play before the procession starts? Bashir Husein Mazhar (Multan, Pakistan): The drums are playing for this, to show the sorrowness ... one drum will be beating for happiness and also the drums beating are for, to show the sorrowness ... and it is in our Arab culture to show the drums in our sorrowness.In this article, I pursue a line of inquiry that contends with music and the emotions: how and in what circumstances does music represent or generate the often subtle range of emotions characteristic of mourning rituals for participants in those rituals? My preliminary insights draw on two-and-a-half years' fieldwork with ritual drummers, during which I lived in Lahore, Pakistan and Lucknow, India and traveled extensively in the subcontinent.2 Using the practice of drumming during the ShT'T observance of mourning, Muharram, as a case study, I wish to illustrate how localized interpretations of drumming contexts tend to bleed into interpretations of drumming content, and suggest that the study of musical culture may provide a unique perspective on the emotional multivalence or ambivalence that diverse participants experience in Muharram more generally. In Section I, I begin with a brief theoretical review of two themes, "embodiment" and the "complexity of emotions." In Section II, I proceed to provide further background on Shi'ism, Muharram, and the status of music. The body of the paper examines three ways in which drumming signifies in a general sense: Enduring contextual associations (Section III); assignments of meaning (Section IV); and aesthetics of drumming (Section V). Before laying the theoretical backbone of this exploration, however, it will be necessary to know a bit about Muharram as an occasion and why a person might feel ambivalent about it in the first place.Muharram commemorates the pitched battle (680 C.E.) of Karbala, in present day Iraq, which many now understand to have been a struggle over the political and spiritual leadership of Islam. As always, the present colors the interpretation of the past, and the "presents" I was exposed to were those of south Asian ShT'T Muslims. Emerging discussions of culture and the emotions in the humanities and social sciences -ever the past fifteen years especially -provide critical tools to probe the meanings of Muharram drumming. Implicit in my approach is that the study of musical culture may contribute to the ongoing problematizations of "emotion" in the fields of anthropology, cultural studies and psychology. Here the scope is limited to two themes, which I will weave throughout my discussion: 1) embodiment; and 2) emotional complexity: ambivalence-multivalence. I shall briefly trace the background of these themes and their relevance to the following discussion. EmbodimentRecent critiques in cultural anthropology have attacked stereotypically "Western" dichotomizations of mind and body, implied in such (gendered) contrast sets as "rationalism" and "emotion," and "thinking" and "feeling" (Lutz 1988; Myers 1988). Some scholars h...

I develop an approach to the “poetics” of music and movement, vis‐à‐vis language, in the context of popular Sufism in South Asia. Bringing Michael Herzfeld's notion of “social poetics” into creative dialogue with Katherine Ewing's notion of the experiencing subject as a “bundle of agencies,” I attempt to cope with the problem of “meaning” in a highly heterogeneous event, the ‘urs in Lahore, Pakistan, commemorating the death of the Sufi saint Shah Husain. My pragmatic approach to navigating through an excess of meanings is to focus on what I call “common terms of understanding.” The analysis illuminates how Islam is popularly grounded in South Asia, more generally, and is suggestive of how music and movement might be construed as forms of religiopolitical “embodiment.”

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This chapter describes Muharram Ali's life after his journey. Ahmed Khan told Ali to get two old volumes hidden in the inner compartment of the almirah: a thick leather-bound folio with flaking gold foil and a neatly bound diary. According to Ahmed, the big volume is his family's rūbakār. It contains information for organizing Muharram in Aminabad. Flipping to a random page in the rūbakār, Ali found specifications for the ziyārats. The smaller volume is Ahmed's journal. After Sufiya's mother died in Lahore, Ali traveled to the city and married Sufiya. They were never to live in the same country together.