Singing to the saint: labour of healing at Jaunpur dargahs Chanter pour le saint : travail de guérison dans les dargāhs de Jaunpur

Abstract

On visiting Sufi saint shrines in India, one encounters terminologies reminiscent of legal courts where protocols facilitate active engagement of pilgrims in their own healing. With practices that induce participation in the social world of dargahs, pilgrims not only seek the miracles of saints for material, spiritual, and bodily transformation, but pro-actively ‘work’ to materialize blessings. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at three shrines in Jaunpur, Uttar Pradesh, I argue that the exhausting work of singing to the ‘listening’ saint, is illustrative of ‘devotional labour’. Through a sung bayan, or witness statement, I show how people deploy devotional labour to achieve the desired restoration of health. The muakkil’s ability to confer with possessing spirits, based on his former experience of possession, facilitates interpretation and legal clarification like that provided by solicitors, hence the demand for his expertise by the afflicted. Finally, that possession can be traced to the malicious intent of close relatives raises questions about dargahs as spaces for healing, and the internal and external transformations sought by shrinegoers estranged from familial and social environments. Centred on the category of healers at shrines, termed muakkils, this article seeks to advance ongoing discussions in the anthropology of healing in the subcontinental context.