Sailing across Duniyāv: Sufi Ship–Body Symbolism from the Malabar Coast, South India

Abstract

The paper examines Sufi ship–body symbolism in a painting on the wall of an eighteenth-century mosque from the riverine hinterland of the Malabar coast as well as in two poems, one in Arabic and the other in Arabi-Malayalam, produced in the region. Focusing on the intricate details of the painting and poems, the paper shows how the ship’s semantic field (sea, storm, pirates, pearls, shore, and so on) is connected to everyday Islamic rituals and mystical ideas and beliefs. In discussion, the paper draws attention to the creative hermeneutics of the local Muslim scholars and the use of an imagery which has a deep resonance in the intellectual history of Islam as well as in the littoral–cultural context of Malabar. The paper highlights the need to include imageries and motifs from inside the mosque when looking at artistic agency in the mosque architecture of the region. The paper argues that the ship painting in the spatiality of the mosque and in the Arabi-Malayalam poems is intended to induce wonderment among its audience, and thereby to inculcate ethical and pietistic dispositions among them.