Presence in Absence: The Formation of Reliquary Shiʿism in Qutb Shahi Hyderabad

Abstract

This paper focuses on relics as indexical forms of remembrance that are powerful manifestations of the “presence in absence” of the Shiʿi saints and Imams. Examples of representational material religious culture in Shiʿism include relics, replicas of tombs (ẓarīḥ, tābūt, and taʿziya), battle standards (ʿalam), funerary biers (nakhl), sacred foot- and handprints, posters, and votive talismanic objects. Relics assumed a defining role in shaping a specific form of religious material culture that would find spiritual and political valence among the diverse religious and ethnic polities of the Deccan region of south central India during the Qutb Shahi period (ca. 1518–1687 ce). This paper describes how the Qutb Shahi sultans encouraged the translation of Shiʿism from an essentially Persianate form into an Indic and Deccani idiom through several complex processes of translation and indigenization that transformed the ritual-devotional, literary, architectural, and reliquary material practices into systems that were mutually intelligible to a diversity of Hindu and Muslim communities alike.