Event

This talk centers on the social, political, and affective consequences of living with growing Islamophobia for Indian Muslims. In the years after 2014, memories of riots and curfews from the late 1980s and early 1990s resurfaced among Muslims, young and old, as they confronted growing daily aggressions as well as news of mob-lynchings. All of this led to an affect of wehshat in the Urdu poetic vocabulary, a state of frenzy and horror seen as being on the edge of madness. This widespread wehshat was contained and channeled into forms of artistic expression, poetic speech, and political action that were constructive rather than destructive, imagining new social and political possibilities for Muslim belonging in a pluralist India. What are the practices of and resources through which Indian Muslims, in the years between 2014 and 2020, moved from the wehshat they were feeling to the divine creative madness of junoon?  Centering on the conversations and moral choices that followed the violent death of a young Muslim boy in Delhi in a hate crime in 2018, I explore the everyday acts of askesis, of ethical practice and spiritual formation that contained and creatively channeled the destructive potentials of wehshat.

This talk is cosponsored by the Department of South Asia Studies.

Anand Vivek Taneja is an anthropologist and an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Vanderbilt. He is the author of Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi (Stanford University Press, 2018). His second book, currently under review, is titled The Gabriel of Madness: Indian Muslim Poetry, Ethics, and Politics in an Age of Hindu Nationalism.