The changing dynamics of Shi‘ism in Kashmir: the influence of transnational identity on the religious rituals since the Iranian Revolution

From politics to socio-cultural practices, transnational developments in Shīʿa identity play a significant role at the local level. The Iranian Revolution of 1979, which gave Shīʿa transnationalism powerful new impulses, has come to inform the questioning and re-orienting of historically and culturally embedded concepts and practices among Shīʿas in Kashmīr. For instance, a religious procession, which is central to collective Shīʿa worship and self-expression the world over, reflects this influence in its slogans, nauhas (laments), flags, and symbols. In my thesis, I examine the continuity and change in the significant identity markers of Shīʿa identity in the Valley, covering the period before and after the Iranian revolution of 1979. I analyse how the rites of remembrance and mourning celebrated on ʿĀshūrāʾ and Majlis have evolved in Kashmīr in the recent past, and how far, in the wake of the Iranian Revolution, revolutionary frameworks are invoked to make sense of the religious rituals that form the important markers of Shīʿa identity. Using a variety of literary sources, oral life-history accounts and direct observations of the rites, I make this assessment to illustrate the changing dynamics involving a wider network of interaction and exchange. Religious rituals among Shīʿas in contemporary Kashmīr serve as a field of contestation among actors such as the Firqa-yi jadīd, Firqa-yi Qadīm, and the new class of religious preachers trained in Iran. In this thesis, I examine how these actors have competed to reshape religious identity over the period under scrutiny and accommodated a transnational form of expression. The Iranian revolution of 1979 became involved in the rapidly changing identity articulation of ordinary Shīʿas in Kashmīr and directly backed new religious practices like Jumuʿa prayers that resulted in the constant dilution of the religious traditions and the local power structure’s charisma in the Valley. With my focus on ordinary Shīʿas in Kashmir and their public religious rituals, I explore how transnational developments in Shīʿa identity create local variations in the forms and extent of religious rituals.