The Many Names of Sacred Power

        “Back when I was a young girl, our family would wait avidly for the Therukoothu troupe to put on a show,” my grandmother said. “The Mahabharatam reenactments would go on for days, if not weeks. But my most favorite play was that of the Narasimha legend.” 

         “Once, we were all watching Hiranya smash the pillar open and Narasimha burst forth from it. The audience leaned closer in suspense. But that was when the unexpected happened—the actor playing Narasimha began to shriek and stamp his feet and gnash his teeth. It wasn’t acting anymore. He had become Narasimha himself, consumed by ‘ugraham’—so much that he didn’t realize he was mauling not Hiranyakashipu, but the poor Prahlada actor, who in terror had to scramble off the stage!” 

         I was always aware that Narasimha was a complex character; his angry grimace and ugraham (Divine Wrath) contrasts sharply with the smooth, cherubic countenance of the un-incarnated Vishnu as well as of his more popular incarnations, Rama and Krishna. Delving deeper into the evolution of this lion-man deity, one will uncover his origins in the totemic faiths of various Adivasi communities, namely that of the Chenchu people, who to this day still offer animal sacrifice (bali) for Narasimha in the Ahobilam shrines. However, this was my first instance hearing of possession by Narasimha—my grandmother further surprised me by explaining that repeated events like the above were what led various Therukoothu troupes in the area to take cautionary measures, such as ensuring the actor for Narasimha never spoke his own lines, and that he always had ropes bound to his waist for the ease of pulling and restraining him. It appears that despite absorption into the Vaishnavite pantheon, Narasimha never truly lost his beginnings in DBA (Dalit-Bahujan-Adivasi) modes of religious expression. 

         Orthodox religion is not particularly fond of passionate displays of emotion. As a Shi’a today I hear echoes of my upbringing when Salafis criticize the fervent nature of aza (Shi’a ritual mourning), which can include chest-beating, self-flagellation, the recitation of elegies, and pilgrimage to the shrines of the Imams. Among Shi’as themselves of course there are inner divisions regarding just how much emotion is acceptable. Is self-flagellating with knives allowed? Or should it be limited to chest-beating? Is open cursing mandatory? Or does tabarra (dissociation) have more diplomatic modes? Spending most of my life in the West meant I became accustomed to this discourse—without realizing just how lukewarm and unprepared it was for the South Asian spheres of azadari. 

         A few days after speaking with my grandmother, I would hear the term ugraham again—not in a Hindu temple, but in the Royapettah “Chota Naqsha” ashurkhana, where an azadar with bluish eyes greeted me and Kombai Anwar sir, who had taken me along during his research. The azadar explained the importance of the various relics not only in that building but also in the wider area: “Do you remember the upper section of the Thousand Lights ashurkhana? It used to be that the zari (mausoleum replica) of Hazrat Abbas was the only thing there. The energy from that whole section, the ugraham of Abbas, made people afraid to even venture up the stairs. It was only when the zari of Bibi Zainab was installed behind it and the zari of Imam Hussain was built across from it that this kovam (anger) of Hazrat Abbas became appeased.” 

         It is important to note here that when the azadar references “ugraham” and “kovam,” he was merely localizing for our sake what is otherwise known as “Jalali” (‘powerful’, and a derivative of Allah’s majestic attribute as “Al-Jalal”) in Deccan azadari. That being said, we did then run into another ashurkhana with another set of Mutawallis (custodians)—not Muslims, but Marathi Hindus—for whom ugraham was truly the proper mode of encapsulating this phenomenon: 

         “These are all ‘samy’ (lords),” said the custodians as they named each alam as if they were the murthis of local gods—as Qasim-samy, Abbas-samy, Hussain-samy, Asghar-samy, etc. “We are not sure how they got to us, but they have been in our family for five generations, and we duly sit them up every year and observe their rites with great respect and devotion. When we firewalk, we feel their ugraham come into us, we go into haal (trance)—you know, like when we lift the karagam of Goddess Amman? It is the same here. They desire very little from us, only simple things like cloth, flowers, incense, sandalwood paste, and other pleasant-smelling objects. Our Naal Saab over there has always been covered in chandan. This is how we keep them satiated.” 

         Anwar sir and I left overwhelmed by the uniqueness of what we had run into, and I would not stop excitedly recounting these events as we caught our train back home. 

         But this would not be the last time I would witness these concepts in action. The first night I arrived back in Hyderabad, on the 8th of Muharram, my friend Mubbashir Ali Khan took me to the firewalk (“alawa”) ceremony of a Sufi ashurkhana dedicated to Hazrat Abbas and Hazrat Ali Asghar. “What Hindus call ugra,” Mubbashir explained, “here it is actually ‘jalali.’ If you see in this ashurkhana, they have Ali Asghar’s alam always accompanying Hazrat Abbas. You cannot leave the latter’s alam by itself. It is too jalali.” I watched first the main alambardar growl and groan as he went into haziri/haal, and as we watched the firewalk procession get ready, another member of the congregation too fell into trance, and despite the restraints, he leapt into the fire pit and kicked up a few coals onto us as he thrashed about. “If it is hot for us here,” Mubbashir said, “imagine how it must feel to step in!” I let myself bake in the heat—both that of the alawa, and that of Hzt. Abbas’s jalali atmosphere. 

         Academics, mainly from the West, might be quick to box in these concepts as being “Hindu-influenced.” Hinduism (if we are to understand it as Brahminism claiming authority over various Indic faiths) is not default; it too must shift and morph and become uniquely localized in various regions. In the way even the hyper-Vaishnavized, “Sattvic”-ized ugraham of Narasimha had to succumb to the modes of Dravidian cultural theater and spirit possession, the Karbalai story too must communicate itself through localized enactments and understandings of Divine Anger, albeit in Islamic vocabulary. 

         Even then, the ugraham of Narasimha, the shakti of Amman, and the jalal of the Karbalai martyrs—even with similar underlying cultural currents—have their nuanced differences; while I was quite familiar with the first two, I was a complete foreigner to the realm of things like haziri and jalal. Haziri is not entirely understood as spirit possession in the way marulaattam is; Haziri translates to something close to “presence,” that is, as if one is witnessing the energy and power of the martyrs overtake their senses. Jalal too has its own uniquely Islamic understandings; as Mubbashir explained to me recently, some alams for example become “Khooni” (“khoon” = blood) when they are broken—not because the alams themselves feel insulted (as it is not an idol which ‘feels’ anything), but because the djinns guarding them become irate with this transgression. Meanwhile, ugraham is an anger which is felt directly by the deity and contains mainly only destructive properties, while the violent energy of shakti is not solely anger, but also a source of fertility and the rejuvenation of the earth as much as it is a vehicle of disease and destruction. The specific definitions of all these different terms for Sacred Power therefore do matter, even if they are expressed outwardly in the body of the believer in very similar ways. 

         Ultimately, of course, in the heat of the moment, what good does vocabulary do? To my embarrassment, I had to discard my role as an unbiased observer during the 9th-day juloos from Bargah e Hzt. Ameer Mukhtar when I unexpectedly entered a state of haziri after a very young alambardar with tired arms handed me the alam of Hzt. Qasim. I do not remember much of it other than its onset, of feeling something crawling up my spine and tugging at my scalp, of mistaking my increased heart rate for a panic attack, of swaying once forward and then once back; when I later slowly came back to my senses, I was being restrained by several people before being led to a parked auto where I could sit. Two young men came up to me to introduce themselves and to shake my hand, though I am not entirely sure why. Another man handed me my glasses, which I had dropped in all the commotion. Later in the day, a band of very eager and loud children vividly reenacted to me how I had apparently sprinted, leapt, yelled, and hit one of their friends amid all my flailing. Like I said: embarrassing! 

         Mubbashir appeared vexed at first, pacing back-and-forth between me and the juloos which had made its way ahead as I struggled to catch up. As I gradually readjusted, he seemed a bit more assured. As we entered another Ashurkhana, he turned to me with a flash of mischief in his eyes. “Nabi sahab,” he said, “That place where you had haziri was the centerpoint in Laal Darwaza of the Maisamma and Poshamma festivals in Hyderabad. So tell me, did you experience the haziri of Hazrat Qasim, or was it the haziri of Maisamma?” 

         I thought back to how more orthodox Chennai Shi'as were generally not so enthusiastic about the practices of haal among the neighboring Sufis. To them, these were bidaat—innovations. Did it really matter then which kind of trance I experienced, if it was something considered "unorthodox" anyways? In that moment, all the this-and-thats of our divisions evaporated. Whether marul or ugraham or jalal, what I had experienced felt like meeting the Divine in a fit of love and passion that wracked the body senseless all the same—one which I could fit neither into academic semantics nor the religious instructions I had painstakingly noted and made sense of before.  I looked towards Mubbashir and said, “To be honest with you…I have absolutely no idea!” 

1. A zari from the upper floor of Thousand Lights mosque's 'Ashurkhana-e-Hazrat Abbas' (Chennai) 

2. The "Marathi Panja" Ashurkhana (Chennai) 

3. The firewalking ceremony commencing at the Sufi ashurkhana for Hzt. Abbas and Hzt. Ali Asghar (Hyderabad) 

4. The procession from Bargah e Hzt. e Ameer Mukhtar making its way up the street (Hyderabad)