Muslim Mobilities and Legacies of Sacred Place-Making in the Islamic Indian Ocean: ISM Fellows Lunch Talk with Harini Kumar

This talk draws from ongoing research for a new project that examines religious mobilities between South India, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia. Using the enduring legacy of a 16th century Sufi saint—Shahul Hamid of Nagore—as the starting point, this talk explores Nagore’s expansive sacred geography across the Indian Ocean World. Sufi sacred geographies are moored to shrines on land but deeply informed by histories of travel, mobility, and circulation. In this talk, I ethnographically trace the ruptures and continuities in producing, sustaining, and sometimes dismantling the sacred in these various sites by different actors. The specific racialized contexts and moral geographies, therefore, connect and differentiate each of the sites where Shahul Hamid is venerated. As an anthropologist of religion, I bring a ‘lived religion’ framework that prioritizes the social and ritual life in and around his shrines. This includes questions that community members in each place are grappling with in the present regarding the validity and relevance of rituals, the practices of devotees that are scrutinized by state authorities and religious bodies, and the aesthetic and spatial changes to the shrine buildings. 

This event is free, but registration is required. Lunch will be provided.

Open to Yale Community only.

Contact: Katya Vetrov

Speaker Bio:

Harini Kumar is a postdoctoral research associate at Yale University's Institute of Sacred Music and Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology. A sociocultural anthropologist, she received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and has research interests in lived religion, Islam and Muslim societies, material culture, gender, ethics, and migration. She is currently completing her first book manuscript, which is an ethnography of everyday religious life and Muslim belonging from the perspective of Tamil-speaking Muslims. Her new project on transoceanic Muslim mobilities explores the connections between South and Southeast Asia and the Americas through the enduring legacy of a 16th century Sufi saint. It traces present-day continuities with older, racialized networks of trade, indentureship, and migration, providing new perspectives on religious belonging that emerges from an interconnected ocean space.

Kumar's research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Center for Islam in the Contemporary World (Shenandoah University), Yale’s Inter-Asia Initiative, and most recently by The Canadian Friends of Sufi Arts, Culture, and Knowledge. She held a two-year postdoctoral position at Princeton University prior to joining Yale, and her writings have appeared or are forthcoming in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (CSSAAME), and the South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal (SAMAJ).