South Asia in Motion. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018. xvi, 313 pp. (Maps, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$29.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-5036-0393-6.
In Islamic theology, jinns occupy an ambivalent place. In the Quran, they are described as invisible spirits, created by God from scorching fire. Jinns interact with humans by taking the form of people or animals; they can be demonic, but can also intercede on behalf of pious petitioners. As the boundaries of the Muslim world expanded, the Islamic notion of jinns, itself rooted in ancient Arabian mythology, came to interact with other beliefs about animated spirit worlds. (A variant of this can also be found in European culture in the form of the jinn’s homonym, the genie.) Anand Vivek Taneja’s fluently persuasive study traces the role of jinns in the unusual social and religious space of a medieval ruin in Delhi. Along the way, his Jinneaology offers a surprising subaltern history of India’s capital city.
Firoz Shah Kotla, the place around which the book revolves, is a fourteenth-century fortress complex on the banks of the Yamuna River, nestled between a cricket ground and the inner ring road. It was conceived as part of a new imperial capital, Firozabad, by Firoz Shah Tughlaq, who ruled over the Delhi Sultanate between 1351 and 1388. Today largely in ruins, the citadel comprises a palace, mosque, stepwell, gateways, bastions, and various other structures, including an ex situ Ashokan pillar. The building of two adjoining imperial cities, Shergarh and Shahjahanabad, by later rulers in the sixteenth and seventeenth century encroached on the site and contributed to its dilapidation through the large-scale removal of building materials. Paradoxically, the very fact that Firoz Shah Kotla lies in ruins has kept it alive as a space of worship, ritual, and hope for people otherwise marginalized in the modern metropolis.
The book relates the practice by Muslims, especially women, of visiting the ruins of Firoz Shah Kotla to entreat the resident saints and jinns for favours and mercies. Strikingly, these appeals are made not just as prayers but in the form of written petitions, which are posted in photocopied multitudes to walls, niches, and alcoves across the site. In these letters, Taneja finds “a strange and transient archive of [the] challenges and pathos of life in Delhi: a chronicle of loveless marriages, alcoholism, unemployment, disease, promises broken, debts unpaid, love unrequited” (20). He links these kaleidoscopic intimations about Muslim lifeworlds in the contemporary city back to the time of Firoz Shah. The direct, written appeal to the sovereign, a Perso-Islamic legal form known as shikwa, was a prominent feature in the political culture of the Delhi Sultanate. For most subjects, it was the only way by which they could hope to find redress for official injustices. The fourteenth-century traveller Ibn Battuta describes how such letters were thrown at night into the palace compound. (He also describes how, enraged by the incessant complaints, the sultan resolved to lay the city to waste… .) Taneja suggests that the depositing of these letters—composed in a form that is derived from the practices of Indo-Islamic kingship and submitted to invisible spirits in the grounds of a medieval ruin—takes place in contrast to the actual experience of government as inaccessible, inscrutable, and corrupt. Appealing to the jinn-saints of Firoz Shah Kotla, then, functions as “a counter-memory of precolonial ideas of justice ‘flashing up’ against the violence and illegibility of the postcolonial state” (63).
The ritualized petitioning of the jinns is rooted in a vision of a specifically Islamic sovereignty. This brings it into tension not only with conceptions of the modern nation-state but also with competing visions of Islam. The book describes the “adversarial reactions” (8) by Muslim religious scholars, including the imam at the mosque at Firoz Shah Kotla, to the petitioning of the jinns, which was described as ignorant, misguided, and superstitious. Taneja’s ethnographic engagement with these practices, by contrast, reveals the many layers and deep meanings that these rituals hold. It reveals what he calls an “Islam of plenitude” (8), a faith of practice that rather than constrained by theology and history stands in conversation with it and that embeds this discourse into the wider stream of Indic culture and ethics.
Jinnealogy is a rich and enriching book. As though meandering through medieval ruins, it takes its reader down unanticipated passageways, evocative detours, as well as some dusty dead ends. Along the way, it repeatedly offers unexpected vistas onto old issues such as secularism, heritage, and community. Its deep commitment to ethnography inevitably roots it in its particular time and place. This at times limits its scope; for example, given its title, it would have been instructive to take a comparative look at the place of jinns in Islamic thought and rituals across different periods and societies. On the other hand, this tight focus unquestionably succeeds in conveying a sense of enchantment about Firoz Shah Kotla: like jinns emerging at night to read the petitions of the faithful, the reader is irresistibly drawn into the stories of its diverse protagonists.
Sebastian R. Prange
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada