Devotion on the Margins

In my first meeting with Meedan, she handed me an old, fading photograph of herself. Stylishly dressed in a fitted white dress and contrasting green dupatta with a golden border, she was unrecognizable from the worn, gray-haired woman in baggy clothes sitting in front of me. Golden earrings, which she wore two in each ear, a clutch of hair framing the top half of her face, and liberally applied pink lipstick completed her carefully arranged look in the photograph. Her stiff expression and the awkwardness with which she held a long metal tong as a prop in both hands further cemented the impression that much thought and effort had been expended for this pose (see Figure 4.1). Meedan had been reminiscing about her trips to Shahbaz Qalandar's mela in her younger years when she brought out this photograph. Pointing to it, she chuckled, “Now you know how I used to go to sarkar.” “You should have seen her dhamal. She was known for it,” Meedan's younger brother, Azeem, chimed in. Meedan went on to elaborate that she had been hearing stories of Qalandar from her father when she was a child. These tales stirred a growing desire, which quickly turned into an obsession, to visit his shrine herself. She then started putting aside 5 rupees from her daily earnings in a pot that she kept hidden under her charpoy. After doing this for a whole year, she finally had enough money to attend Qalandar's urs in Sehwan. In subsequent years, Meedan made a habit of saving money to attend this annual festival to celebrate her saint.

Meedan's story is not, by any means, unique in her community, as many others express similar sentiments of devotion to Shahbaz Qalandar and other Sufi saints. She identifies as a member of the Muslim Sheikh, a low-caste pakhi waas tribe of Punjab. Literally, camp dwellers, the pakhi waas describe themselves as former nomadic tribes that historically existed outside the social structure of caste-based Punjabi society. As a result of the gradual collapse of the nomadic economy and systematic efforts to curb their mobility and regulate their lives by the British colonial state (Major 1999; Schwarz 2010), these tribes were coerced to join settled society and adopt its ways.