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Introduction

On another occasion I invited one of my informants to witness the development of photographic plates, … and he saw in the process … the actual embodiment of ripples into images, and regarded this as a demonstration of the truth of his clan.

—Gregory Bateson, Naven

Diaspora consciousness is entirely a product of cultures and histories in collision and dialogue.

—James Clifford, Diasporas

Ta‘zi̅yeh/Muḥarram/Hosay

Each year during the first ten days of Muharram (al-muḥarram), the first month of the Islamic lunar calendar, Shi‘i Muslims throughout the world join in a common observance to commemorate the martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, the imām Husayn. Husayn died in the seventh century on the plains of Karbala, in what is now contemporary Iraq. The dramatic commemoration, known variously as ta‘zi̅yeh in Iran, muḥarram in India, and Hosay in Trinidad, is the focal point in the religious life of the Shi‘i mourning community. Because Imam Husayn’s suffering and death is seen as the most important tragedy in history, the annual reactualization of the event is the central Shi‘i ritual observance of the year. Muḥarram is a metahistorical phenomenon because the observance related to it makes possible individual identification with, and direct experience of, Imam Husayn’s vicarious suffering. During the observance, subjective apprehension is not spatially and temporally bound, for the historical battle that occurred in 61 A.H./680 C.E. is made present through the pious actions of Shi‘i Muslims the world over.

The temporal and spatial transcendence of the tragedy fit in well with the anthropological notions of liminality as developed by Arnold van Gennep and elaborated by Victor Turner.¹ They place the passion of Imam Husayn at Karbala in an atemporal and aspatial framework beyond all fixed points of classification. Turner sees liminality as a state of transition during which “liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial.” Moreover, the ambiguity of the liminal period “is frequently likened to death.”² Muḥarram, being an annual rite of communal passage bridging each year to the next is thus a process of symbolic community death and rebirth, a ritual of renewal par excellence.³ Although this is a universal overview applicable to the observances throughout the world, we find that the event is a complex, polysemic affair when viewed from an ethnographic perspective. In actuality, the ritual complex in context is comprised of a plethora of regional and local symbols; we find a variety of observances unique to given locales. In this book, I focus on local expressions of the Muharram rituals in Trinidad, but not without first situating them within the global development of Shi‘i popular piety in Iran and India, the geographic trajectory along which the rite passed during its lengthy odyssey that ended in the Caribbean.

As is the case with many Shi‘i observances, the various modes of ritual action expressed during the month of Muharram share the common aforementioned goal of identification with the martyr Imam Husayn. This identification pervades all domains of Shi‘i life. The pervasive notion of Husayn’s drama providing an ideal model for human action in everyday affairs is what many scholars of Shi‘i Islam, following Michael Fischer, refer to as the “Karbala paradigm.”⁴ I situate my study within this model in Chapter 1 to show that Trinidadian Shi‘i Muslims act locally within a much broader transnational frame of reference, that is, from within a global ethos and worldview. Having stated this, however, I wish to note that the ways in which the goal of subjective apprehension is reached differ considerably in their performative aspects in Iran, India, and Trinidad, the three main sites of my study.

Participants share a common core of symbolic meaning but create separate emergent realities unique to their respective cultural, geographic, and linguistic environments. Common sense alone should tell us that the ritual performance of a shared core of faith and belief can take peculiar turns in specific geographic locations even when tied to a historical story or, to borrow Fredric Jameson’s term, a “master narrative,” with relatively stable motifs embedded in it.⁵ But the ethnographic record also demonstrates that firm links with the original event are maintained in various religious contexts through processes of material and verbal enactment such as the building of cenotaphs and biers or the telling of the story of Imam Husayn’s tragic death through numerous forms of narrative. These narrative events pertaining to Husayn’s ordeal provide much of the collective global knowledge that serves as the basis for the construction and performance of lasting ritual reenactments on the local level.

Passages from dramatic ta‘zi̅yeh scripts recited during staged “passion plays” in Iran suggest that salvation is guaranteed for all mourners because the imām is able to mediate between God and man on the Day of Judgment, the ultimate moment of reconciliation for one’s deeds on earth. Interpreting the observance from this emic, or insider’s, point of view concretizes the notion that participating in annual renewal on the human level is not only desirable but absolutely necessary in terms of the overall soteriological goal motivating the event. Participation in the annual muḥarram renewal is humankind’s chief role and responsibility in this lifetime, according to the Shi‘i perspective. Through participation in performances, systems of abstract theological meaning are shaped into emotional, experiential, and subjective local forms of knowledge comprehensible to the individual and his or her community. My study seeks to unravel the variety of local meanings attributed to Hosay in Trinidad. Thus the bulk of the study focuses on the Caribbean. To explicate fully the Trinidadian variant of muḥarram, however, I have provided the historical background of the rite’s origins and observance in Iran and Iraq in Chapters 1 and 2 in order to inform my ethnographic observations included in the later chapters. Once having completed this task, I trace in Chapter 3 the rite’s diffusion to South Asia, from where it was eventually transported to the Caribbean in the mid-nineteenth century via indentured laborers who were brought from India to work on colonial plantations under the British Raj.

Ta‘zi̅yeh in Iran

In Iran, staged performance grew out of processional observances that were recorded by Muslim historiographers as early as the tenth century. The reactualizations first took place at locations where large numbers of people could gather, like crossroads or public squares. Ritual battles would take place in front of an audience while tableaux of bloodied martyrs moved past the stationary audience on wheeled platforms. In the sixteenth century, a private tradition of verbal martyr narration called rauz̤eh khvāni̅ also began to flourish. These two traditions—public performance and private recitation—existed side by side but separately for nearly two hundred and fifty years. The two fused in the mid-eighteenth century to create what we know today as ta‘zi̅yeh. Ta‘zi̅yeh, like the muḥarram processions, developed historically as a communal event. The important element in the observance was participation. An audience member could not just observe passively. The viewer had to show emotion by weeping in order to experience the suffering of Husayn, and only in this way could he or she completely identify with the martyr.

In spite of the numerous historical changes that have contributed to the shaping of ta‘zi̅yeh as we know it today, the soteriological purpose has remained constant: participation in the performance helps an individual to obtain salvation through the intercession of the martyr. The vicarious suffering and death of Husayn has been an instrument of redemption for all believers, and belief has been most readily manifested by performance participation. This underlying theological goal is central to the observance worldwide, and a host of scholars have identified it as the theological core complex of the Karbala paradigm adumbrated above. I intend to elucidate the paradigm as an overall frame for discussing the dialectics of the local and the global with regard to the rite’s development in Trinidad.

Muḥarram in South Asia

Although many similarities exist between the Indic subcontinent and Iran in terms of performing muḥarram rituals, there are some great differences as well. A survey of Indian variations on the rite is the theme of Chapter 3, with special attention being paid to Banaras, where I first observed the event in the early 1980s.⁶ Perhaps the greatest and most significant difference in muḥarram rituals as observed in Shi‘i countries and in India lies in the use of the word ta‘zi̅yeh (Ur. ta‘zi̅yah). In Persian it is used to denote the ritual drama, or passion play, of Husayn’s death. The term has a different meaning in South Asia, however. There it is the name given to the model tombs, the focal point of the public processions that take place during the event, and it is this aspect of the observance that becomes the dominating material feature of the rite in Trinidad. It is thus to India that we must look closely to identify the most salient aspects and morphological features of the observance in Trinidad.

As in Trinidad, there is not an emphasis on staged performance during the month of Muharram in India. Rather, the reenactment of Husayn’s passion occurs as an unfolding social process within a larger symbolic space. The arena of performance, be it the house, the neighborhood, the village, or the city, becomes a microcosm of Karbala. Although Iran provides the underlying logic and symbolism for the event in the form of the Karbala paradigm, India provides the ritualistic precedent for the observance in Trinidad. Instead of staged drama, we find a greater emphasis on conveying the tragedy through the recitation of mars̲i̅yahs (martyr poems) and the singing of nauḥahs (dirges) at majālis (sing. majlis), social gatherings for ritual mourning. The development of mars̲i̅yah composition and recitation in India is obviously an innovative continuation of the rouz̤eh khvāni̅ tradition of Iran.⁷ Although the private majlis is the central focus of the muḥarram observance in India, as it is elsewhere in South Asia, the public processional rituals that occur on the streets are also important on the level of popular piety. There is a distinct dialectic between these private and public spheres of action that is evident in Trinidad as well. But whereas India continues the verbal narrative tradition of Iran, Trinidad has transformed language to rhythm, replacing verbal performances with a series of drum “hands” to convey the tragic story in a nonverbal, musical fashion. I wish to suggest that these two spheres allow for the emergence of multilayered understandings of the event by different interpretive communities. To make this point, I introduce the notion of “esoteric” and “exoteric” interpretations of the rite depending largely on the interpreter’s level of participatory intimacy with the rituals performed.

Again as in Trinidad, the ambulatory public observances and stationary private ones converge on the tenth of Muharram (‘āshūrā’) in India, the culminating day when participants embark on a symbolic pilgrimage by carrying their ta‘zi̅yahs in a huge procession to graveyards representing the plains of Karbala where Husayn was murdered. The ta‘zi̅yahs are then buried ideally during the noonday hour, the legendary time of Husayn’s last breath.⁸ In some parts of India, the ta‘zi̅yahs are immersed in rivers, oceans, or sacred tanks of water following the Hindu custom of deity immersion (visarjan) after a religious festival. The last point above indicates another important theme of my study: cultural accommodation. I wish to argue that the necessary process of a minority religious community adopting local customs has allowed the rituals to thrive creatively in each of the environments discussed. I refer to this process as “cultural creolization,” an appropriate alternative to the outdated and problematic concept of syncretism.⁹ Syncretism, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, suggests an “attempted union or reconciliation of diverse or opposite tenets or practices.”¹⁰ With its emphasis on an “attempted union,” the dictionary definition suggests an inconsistency in doctrine and practice. More appropriately, exploring creolization and the concomitant concept of “decreolization” as an alternative to syncretism allows me to emphasize human agency, the conscious decisions made by human actors, in my analysis of a rite’s historical transformation. Such work is sorely needed in ritual studies.

In their discussion of South Pacific spirit possession, Alan Howard and Jeannette Mageo follow Nicholas Thomas to argue that “parts of cultures often become metonyms for cultural continuity,” which results in “specific segments of reconfigured historical experience” becoming tradition.¹¹ Hosay is one such metonym, an emblem of identity that is reworked constantly in different contexts. In stating this, however, I do not want to imply naive and syncretistic adaptations, for that would deny the essential role of human agency in the reinvention of tradition. For my purposes, the concept of creolization is more suitable to get at the “highly self-conscious and reflective” dimensions of cultural borrowing and subsequent reinvention to which Howard and Mageo refer.¹²

Hosay in Trinidad

The Trinidadian style of commemorating Husayn’s martyrdom seems very different from the Iranian and Indian forms at first glance, and much of the scarce literature on the rite makes ample mention of its purported creole nature.¹³ A closer look at the complex event reveals continuities with its older counterparts, constantly reminding us of its north Indian sources of origin. Hosay, as it is expressed today, is a direct by-product of earlier muḥarram observances that were brought to Trinidad by indentured East Indians who came to work on plantations as early as May 30, 1845. However, although the Indian origins of the rite can be observed clearly in Trinidad, there is no question that the ritual performance has gone through a fairly lengthy process of indigenization. The ethnographic portion of my text draws extensively on the words and opinions of the people involved in the rite.

While Trinidadian Shi‘i Muslims ideally show emotion for Husayn through public displays of drumming to signify the incidents pertaining to Husayn’s death and through the painstaking construction of the model tombs known as tadjahs, we also find that the observance becomes marked by gaiety and celebration for the revelers who participate in the public processions as audience members. The Trinidadian form of the rite becomes “carnivalized,” to use Mikhail Bakhtin’s term, so that it takes on aspects of observances occurring during periods of carnival in the Caribbean.¹⁴ At least that is how it seems to the outside observer. I argue that while this might be true to a certain extent, these carnival aspects are not new elements in the Trinidadian variant of the rite because similar occasions for festive behavior were already noticeable in India and even in Iran. This is not to say, however, that the nature of the observance’s outward appearance is uncontested in these countries. Indeed, the same sorts of ideological debate that emerge in Trinidad each year as Hosay approaches find expression in India and Iran as well.

The craftsmen and others associated with the forty-day preparation of Hosay do not condone the merrymaking on the streets during the public processions. Nonetheless, the historical transformation of muḥarram from a predominantly solemn observance to a public celebration is a distinctive process on the island. It marks the event as a characteristic form of Trinidadian performance. Through it, East Indians participate in Creole culture, but they also reassert their own Indian ethnic identity by performing a tradition that is perceived to have come to Trinidad from India in an unaltered state. The various uses and understandings of tradition as something unchanging and frozen in time are a vehicle for the ongoing negotiation of ethnicity in a relatively new and multicultural nation-state.

The theme of identity politics is addressed most forcefully in Chapter 6, where I argue that the Hosay phenomenon manifests multiple discourses about national culture, race, and ethnic identity on the island. The domains of these discourses can best be visualized as a series of concentric circles starting from the center and radiating outward like the proverbial ripples on a pond. In his study of the naven ritual among the Iatmul of New Guinea, Gregory Bateson mentions that they also see the world and all its inhabitants as ripples and waves on the surface of water: “It is said secretly that men, pigs, trees, grass—all the objects in the world—are only patterns of waves.… On one occasion I took some Iatmul natives down to the coast and found one sitting by himself gazing with rapt attention at the sea.… He was gazing at the waves which were heaving and breaking when no wind was blowing, demonstrating the truth of his clan’s myth.”¹⁵ Like Bateson’s Iatmul friend, I too sat gazing pensively, but at a different ocean, with a friend in Trinidad as he wondered what India, the imaginary homeland of his ancestors, was like. I imagine ripples bursting out in concentric rings around my friends in Trinidad to connect them religiously and culturally with ever widening social circles. The image allows for the conceptualization of how the global becomes incorporated into the local. Roland Robertson cleverly refers to the process as one of “glocalization,” which is a subtle blend of the local and the global.¹⁶

In Trinidad the rituals are at the center personal and subjective. From this subjective core, we move to the kinship unit or family circle within which ritualistic and customary activities occur in the esoteric, private realm of the “yard” compound. From here we move out to the tertiary ring of the small community of Shi‘i worshippers on the island. In a largely Shi‘i-populated country such as Iran, one would expect the circular ripples to end here, but Trinidad, being a polyethnic island, offers further ripples to consider. From the circle of the community of Shi‘i worshippers, we move to the public or exoteric sphere of the fourth circle, which is the ethnic domain. It is on this level of discourse that non-Shi‘i Indo-Trinidadians may claim the esoteric rite as a secular Indian pageant. Next comes the circle of the nation-state. As more and more Trinidadians of non-Indian descent become involved in the public display and performance of the Hosay rituals, the spectacle moves from the ethnic to the national realm. If we are to place Hosay in a transnational context, however, we need to engulf the inner circles with a globally constituted one that connects the innermost three spheres to the all-encompassing outer circle. Within this larger sphere of concentric circles, Caribbean Shi‘i Muslims become part of a worldwide community of worshippers, for better or for worse. The fairly recent impact of orthodox Shi‘i missionary activity on the island is the subject for my closing reflections in the epilogue on ideological challenges confronting Hosay participants after more than 150 years of residency.

In deploying the metaphor of ripples on a pond, I do not envision a seamless stream of harmonious continuity emanating from a quiet center. Rather, we may wish to imagine another pebble dropped at the periphery, which would lead to a collision between the rings bursting forth from the center and those moving inward from the periphery. This more complicated picture is more consonant with the quote from James Clifford that opened this Introduction. The image of colliding concentric rings offers an opportunity to look deeper at the contentions that have surrounded the event over time and across space.

The discourses revolving around issues of pious observance versus antinomian celebration and ethnic pageant versus national culture are serious points of contention in Trinidad, and it is through the discourses surrounding these debates that meanings and identities are negotiated on various levels. I argue that the levels of discourse described above can be identified very clearly. Essentially, the above circles can be reduced to three. On the most intimate level, the Shi‘i families who lovingly nurture the Hosay observance collectively preserve the most esoteric (bāṭin) and symbolic level of the ritual complex’s meaning. On the secondary level of Indo-Trinidadian ethnicity, Indians of other religious persuasions perpetuate the idea of Hosay as an Indian “cultural performance,” in Milton Singer’s term, divorced from its esoteric and sacred meanings.¹⁷ Finally, on the tertiary level of the nation-state, non-Indian Trinidadians (most significantly those of African descent) see the performance as a purely secular and exoteric (ẓāhir) Trinidadian event with close parallels to the island’s famous Carnival.¹⁸ What I want to suggest is that the terminology used for the event, as well as the social organization of the yards within which the tadjahs are built, exemplifies the Caribbean nature of the performance quite well, providing ample evidence for cultural creolization. Having posited this, however, it is equally important to underscore the remarkable continuities that one finds as a result of the odyssey from Iran to India to Trinidad. These continuities suggest to me a cultural strategy of what the linguist Derek Bickerton calls decreolization along a pidgin/creole continuum.

Decreolization, as I use the term here, allows Indo-Trinidadians to resist the totalizing effects of creolization by consciously identifying concepts in Afro-Trinidadian culture to parallel their own Indic-inspired ones as a method of tolerance and accommodation. Bickerton, following Langacker, speaks of linguistic change in the process of decreolization proceeding through a phase of reanalysis during which “no overt change in surface structure occurs but the underlying structure is re-interpreted.”¹⁹ I do not assume, however, that changes in the expressive culture of Indo-Trinidadians are unidirectional in favor of the dominant social class. For as Christine Jourdan warns, “if decreolization means a move in the direction of a standard, it does not mean … a loss of other varieties” because “not all changes in creoles are in the direction of the acrolect.”²⁰ Rather, actors in public ritual drama have a repertoire of options from which to choose, depending on the situational context of their performances, which allows for a relatively free flow of ideas in both directions. My findings argue against a movement toward standardization defined by the dominant class, and they are supported by Kean Gibson’s recent study of Comfa religion and Creole language in Guyana.²¹ Gibson draws upon the work of Robert LePage and Andrée Tabouret-Keller and shares my interest in developing a multidimensional approach that acknowledges the coexistence of more than one linguistic or religious system operating within any given polyethnic society.²²

By applying the above linguistic model of culture viewed through a ritualistic lens, I aim to move beyond the binaries of extreme retentionism and extreme creolization, two positions that have plagued Caribbean anthropological debates.²³ In so doing, I am in agreement with Stuart Hall when he suggests that diasporic traditions retain strong links with their places of origin without harboring the illusion of any possibility of returning to the past. As he writes, “They are not and never will be unified in the old sense, because they are inevitably the products of several interlocking histories and cultures, belonging at the same time to several ‘homes’—and thus to no particular home.”²⁴ Hall’s comment very clearly suggests that diasporic citizens are well aware that they may never go home to the motherland. It also suggests that they have the shifting option of expressing multiple allegiances in the negotiated form of various identities, be they religious, ethnic, national, or global. The imagined homeland abroad serves as a template for the bolstering of oscillating local identities, even while it remains largely unfathomable and incongruous to most.²⁵

The Theoretical Scope of the Study and Its Relevance to the Field

As suggested in the above narrative, the observances have many levels of meaning that deserve close scholarly attention. Published works on the topic of muḥarram practices in Iran, India, and many other parts of the world are abundant, but no comprehensive monograph of the phenomenon in Trinidad currently exists. My aim is to fill this void with Hosay Trinidad. I trace the patterns of continuity and divergence mentioned above within the galaxy of muḥarram observances from their origins in the Middle East to the Caribbean via the Indian subcontinent as an example of transnational cultural production and flow. It was, after all, the military expeditions and expansions of Muslim conquerors from Central Asia that opened the door for the migration of the Shi‘ah from Persia to India in the fourteenth century. Moreover, it was the British colonial economy of indentured labor after the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century that allowed for the rite’s diffusion from the Indian subcontinent to Trinidad. These very facts force me to consider unequal power relationships as motive causes of ritual change in the social, political, and economic arenas within which rituals are publicly enacted. Although I need to situate my Trinidadian research in this broader historical and geographic context, the main thrust of my work focuses on Trinidad. Comparative materials prove useful for drawing structural and symbolic parallels between the three sites as well as for discussing the local/global dialectic. I am most interested, however, in focusing my discussion on the ritual complex as performed in Trinidad in order to present the first full explication of this understudied and neglected phenomenon.

I want to convey to the reader a sense of the creative processes, aesthetic evaluations, and community spirit that go into the making of the objects of veneration. At the same time, I want to address how these expressive practices are connected to contested social issues surrounding ethnic identity formation and the undying importance of racial relations in a nation-state still in the process of defining itself and its national culture. I hope that one of the major contributions of this study will be my interpretation of interethnic dialogue, cultural change, and religious persistence over centuries of historical interaction. On the theoretical level, I reflexively engage in an extended discussion of a diasporic culture in the making. Diaspora studies have grown immensely as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry over the past decade, and I situate my own position within that body of literature.²⁶ Diaspora scholars have been attracted by the notion of “hybridity” in recent years to talk about the ways that selves are situated on the margins of society in a transnational and deterritorialized world.²⁷ Although the idea of hybridity is an intriguing way to describe the “hyphenated” nature of diasporic identities and cultures, the term has some definitional problems because of its intentional ambiguity.²⁸ Moreover, Robert Young has shown that the term has a questionable colonial history not often acknowledged by contemporary theorists who use the concept.²⁹ Creolization also has a checkered colonial history, but it is a concept that has become well established in sociolinguistics, a field that provides one of the theoretical models that I employ in this book. My logic for using the creolization concept is that it is commonly used by creole makers themselves. People in Trinidad often evoke the word when talking about the dynamic processes involved in cultural mixing.

Essentially, the two terms have much in common, and I see hybridization as a postmodernist rendering of creolization. First, both terms emphasize a social process of mixture. Second, they both imply a strategy of empowerment used by “mixed” people to resist the hegemony of the dominant class. Homi Bhabha, for example, writes that hybridity is a “camouflage” that provides hybrid individuals with a “contesting antagonistic agency” to deal with the rules of social engagement.³⁰ Others also make much of the strength afforded by hybridity’s “strategic biologism.” Just as hybrid corn exhibits strength and resistance, the argument goes, the hybrid individual can persevere under a variety of conditions.³¹ Camouflage and versatile strength are implied in the term creolization as well, because it provides creolized individuals a similar strategy for concealing certain things from the dominant class, thereby strengthening their own marginal positions in society.³² My alternative is to opt for a more extended discussion of creolization, a well-established part of the Caribbeanist vocabulary, and a term that is still often used as a time-honored synonym for the more recent theoretical development of cultural hybridization.³³

Caribbeanists earlier had opened up extensive discussions of the processes of cultural synthesis and multivalent identity formation through using the linguistic metaphor of creolization. Moreover, Ulf Hannerz states that “a concept of creole culture with its congeners may be our most promising root metaphor.”³⁴ I build on this earlier corpus of work by employing linguistic and cultural models of creolization as a method to understand the complex phenomenon of Trinidadian racial and ethnic relations as exemplified through public displays of ritual behavior during Hosay. In my discussion, I employ, analyze, and interrogate the concept of creolization to understand the dynamics of indigenization on the local level. Simultaneously, I look at concepts of situated or emergent ethnicity as a viable strategy for allowing change to occur within a canonized form of global theology that remains open to innovative local interpretations. An emic model based on the Shi‘i philosophical concept of taqi̅yyah (dissimulation), which allows believers to conceal their religious affiliation in particularly stressful contexts, combined with the etic s/x factor (esoteric/exoteric), provides a useful precedent for understanding indigenous modes of cultural and linguistic adaptation.³⁵ The concept of taqi̅yyah as a religiously based strategy for cultural adaptation in a multicultural environment fits well with current social scientific discourses concerning the fluid notion of ethnic identity. I believe it can provide a viable theoretical complement to linguistic models of creolization and Bhabha’s concept of camouflage.

Sociolinguistic research over the past few decades has questioned the outdated and less useful devolutionary basis of language decay as the defining criterion of pidginization leading to creolization on a linear continuum.³⁶ The more recent movement to understand such mixed forms as dynamic and expansive systems has allowed researchers to look at grammar and syntax in the specific social contexts within which they formally develop. Looking at the development of cultural grammars both diachronically and syncronically in the context of convergence—not as devolving from complex to simpler forms but the reverse—signals, as Dell Hymes puts it, a shift to adaptive creativity.³⁷ It also provides richer possibilities for developing further the multidimensional approach advocated above. Such a strategic shift allows us better ways of explaining the negotiated and contested nature of cultural production. Similarly, a dynamic model of cultural grammars of maintenance, accommodation, and change allows me to look at the various modes of inflection that occur as religions and cultures increase their rate of encounter with other worldviews in the polyethnic environment of Trinidad. I therefore draw on this body of literature as well to counter certain misguided opinions about the decaying nature of Indian culture on the island.

The concept of creolization offers, in my opinion, the opportunity to account for the newly emergent and complex forms of culture that develop creatively through a synthetic process of convergence. In the context of Hosay, convergence can be understood either as the grafting of local elements and lexical labels borrowed from the socially dominant group (the superstrate) onto a structural substrate derived from historical precedents originating in India and earlier in Iran or as a coming together of parallel traditions. I argue that in the former we notice aspects of accommodation and acculturation as part of the creolization process, while in the latter we see resistance to creolization by way of decreolization. I understand these concepts not as either/or propositions that are mutually exclusive. Instead, one must see the processes as necessarily complementary and working in tandem with one another. In other words, creolization always implies decreolization; hence resistance can be accomplished through creative accommodation. What I mean by creative accommodation is that what might seem like acculturation on the surface may simultaneously be a valid form of resistance to total cultural absorption. Understanding the dialectics of creolization and decreolization from this point of view allows us to think metaphorically of the theological, esoteric, or global level of Hosay as the grammar of the ritual, while local innovations serve as the vocabulary of creative adaptation. I am aware, however, that no such distinction can be absolute because influences flow in both directions. I therefore do not posit any clear-cut binary distinction. Instead, I use sociolinguistic ideas about creolization as a heuristic for refining our understanding of cultural mixing in postcolonial contact zones, where diverse peoples come together to create local culture anew out of historically descended practices. By using the linguistic analogy described above, I identify and analyze both latent continuities and manifest changes that have occurred within this performance tradition over a fairly lengthy period of time and through space.

The idea of creolization, of course, raises important issues of authenticity, especially now that a virtually obscure and local rite has received international attention through media exposure. Partially, I have been to blame for this exposure due to the film on which I collaborated.³⁸ The film and my previous publications on Hosay have, to a certain degree, alerted not only Islamicists and anthropologists but also, and more significantly in terms of ideological impact, Shi‘i missionaries to this relatively unknown Caribbean ritual phenomenon. Since 1994, for example, orthodox Shi‘i missionaries of East Indian descent from Canada have started a campaign to reform Hosay so that it will more closely resemble the rite as it is performed in Iran and other more conservative areas in the Shi‘i world. The missionaries aggressively argue that the Trinidadian variant is not “correct,” seeing it as an ill-informed deviation from the Iranian model. In my epilogue, I analyze this most recent development by situating the discourse of authenticity within the idea of emergent culture. By emergent culture, I mean “culture in the making,” always in the process of taking new forms to accommodate the needs of contemporary sensibilities. Like identity and ethnicity, ritual is produced dialogically through ongoing negotiations between the various parties concerned, and it is precisely in these negotiations that we can observe how a ritual gradually changes and adapts to suit local needs through the conscious actions of individual social agents. The question then becomes the following: “How does the local respond to external forces of globalization?”

I address the dialectics of the local and the global by analyzing the subtle debates that take place annually between clerics and practitioners, as well as in the popular press, as the month of Muharram approaches. The transnational quality of the muḥarram phenomenon is most apparent in the debates and the rhetorical posturing resulting from them. My conclusion suggests that while recent global influences in the form of proselytizing activities place certain constraints on Trinidadian Shi‘i practice, the local nonetheless is resilient enough to devise strategies of accommodation to external pressures and concerns. The ritual complex at the heart of this book is an important case study for describing how the local/global dialectic unfolds over time, but it also addresses some general issues of relevance to the study of festivity and public performance.

The ta‘zi̅yeh/muḥarram/Hosay rite, however variegated in the three locations explored here, is an apt vehicle for expanding the discourse on festivity in general because it raises some broader issues concerning parades and power.³⁹ The rite also functions within an idiom of conspicuous display shared by many festive events. Language analogies are useful here as well, for all festivals share an expressive vocabulary. Writing about the “language of festivals,” Roger Abrahams notes that they are “resounding times and elaborated places for excited exchange, for bringing out, passing around, for giving and receiving the most vital emblems of culture in an unashamed display of produce, of the plenitude the community may boast, precisely so that the community may boast. The emblems explode with meanings, for they are invested with the accumulated energies and experiences of past practice. They epitomize not only the seasonal passage but the history of the culture, a history spelled out in terms native to the group and appropriate to the place and the season.”⁴⁰ He could easily have had the rituals discussed here in mind when he wrote the above passage. The Muharram rituals clearly manifest the transactional nature, emblematic multivalence, and collective history embodied in the festivals to which Abrahams alludes. Néstor García Canclini further adds that economies of consumption need to account for the reception of the products conspicuously displayed in the marketplace of culture.⁴¹ I contribute to the concerns of Abrahams and Canclini by situating the Muharram ritual complex in the discourse of power relations that condition both the language of the event and how it is received, consumed, and interpreted by various agents present in the audience at the time of public display.

The fruits of my labor will be of interest to scholars in a number of disciplines within the humanities and social sciences, for I consider my study an interdisciplinary exercise. I blur genres to understand a very complicated and multivocalic performance event from both a textual and contextual point of view. To perform this feat successfully requires me to be somewhat of an academic bricoleur, but crossing disciplinary borders in the social and human sciences while using a variegated theoretical toolbox is absolutely necessary for the type of multisited study presented here.⁴²

In short, my overall study demonstrates the remarkable resilience of the local vis-à-vis certain globalizing forces impinging upon it. Readers will find that my data fill a gap in studies on Indo-Muslim culture in Trinidad. Those especially interested in diasporic culture will benefit from the triangulation of my field sites, which has allowed me to tell a story that spans half the globe and more than 1300 years. I have intended, however, to keep the discussion in this work as free of jargon as possible to let the descriptive data speak on their own accord, for I believe, along with Paul Rabinow, that representational facts themselves are theoretically loaded.⁴³ Most importantly, it is my hope that because I have kept the text relatively accessible to a broader reading audience the people of St. James, Trinidad, who have befriended me over the past ten years will take the time to read this book. It is for them that I wrote it.