NURTURING ABSTRACTIONS OF THE NATION IN RELIGIO-CULTURAL IDENTITY ASSERTIONS AND SPACES OF GENEROSITY IN SUFI DARGHAS OF KARNATAKA

Abstract

Socio-political reality is often brought into being through performative acts. To say that religio-cultural identity stakes its claim on the socio-political through performative utterances is to also state that socio-political realities appear as effects of articulated ideology. It has been well acknowledged that socio-political ideology presents itself as if it were offering some ‘deeper, extra political truths’ of being and becoming that are constant. This brings forth a believing community, which functions as a stabilizing occurrence for these ‘deeper, extra political truths’ of being and becoming. Assertions of essential religio-cultural identity constitute one such discursive practice that brings into effect communities that nurture binarizing abstractions such as what it is to be ‘Indian’, the idea of who is a ‘Hindu’ and the notion of nationalism that elects an umbilical connect to the Hindu Vedic lineage. It is to understand the processes that are involved in the crafting of these extra political truths of being and becoming, to examine whether these truths are in fact extra political, and to come to an understanding of how the believing communities which are effected preserve an abstraction of pure national identity that this study engages shared sacred spaces that have been claimed by Hindu right-wing assertionists in India. In such an effort, the juxtaposition-ality of these shared sacred spaces of grace that harbor a substratum of generosity and sharing, marks the essentializing procedures of right wingers and their aggressive mining for a pure Indianness. Except that the ground they mine is amorphous.