Publications
Explore Chenganakkattil's publications
Hajj literature in the Indian Ocean
This article engages with the hajj narratives in the age of oceanic travel, focusing on how the hajj has influenced the trans-oceanic mobility of Muslims from various Indian Ocean regions to Hejaz, a religious cosmopolis, and how they have shaped the experiences of the pilgrims in its articulative forms of self-narratives. These narratives written from a particular worldview explicate the nature of Muslim writings and their exchanges and encounters with the Other. Putting some select narratives produced from the different historical backgrounds set in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries (1870–1930), this article grapples with the role of cosmopolitanism and imperial encounters in forging peculiar persona and lifeworld of Muslim pilgrims. I consider that the pilgrimage to Mecca serves as a connective space in which various socio-cultural and political aspects entangle together. The hajj accounts written in the period of oceanic mobility can give us ways to understand political encounters of pilgrims with the imperial Other—British, Ottoman, and Wahhabi and make sense of how Muslims articulate their experiences from their specific pilgrim habitus. Furthermore, the article analyses the potential of these ‘connected stories’ to decentre the dominant discourse on travel and how they are imbued with a decolonial possibility.
Jinn Mosque
Scholarly engagements with material religion are generally built upon ideas related to the materiality of objects and spaces. Research on sacred space, too, is predominantly conceptualized from such perspectives. In India, pilgrims visit sacred architectures, on a ritual basis, for religious and secular purposes. In this context, studies on sacred space have primarily focused on the phenomenon of visiting 'visible sacred spaces'. However, the concept of 'invisible sacred space' has received less attention. This concept refers to a sacralized space associated with invisible beings who are venerated by people. This space is constructed around an 'imagined sacredness' through which various practices emerge. Jinn mosques are instances of such invisible spaces which are thought capable of acting on believers' imaginations. This article analyzes the making of such space through different aspects of sacredness, ranging from various sensorial experiences to sacred objects and livings. Along with a discussion of the sufi-jinn amalgam, the contribution considers the practice of writing letters to jinns as a textual construction of sacred space. Discussing various aspects of jinn architecture, this article deals with new modes of constructing sacred space and suggests that the idea of invisible sacred space blurs the dichotomy between the concepts of the visible and the invisible.
Politics, Sacred Space and Islamic World
Rebellions have been a constant thematic of the socio-political imaginations in the early history of the Muslim world. Mainly the prevalent discourse of rebellion focuses on the ‘uprising’ against the existing political power of and figures to gain political legitimacy. However, the problem of rebellion with its particular connection to delegitimizing the political authority, reclaiming and shifting of space exporting symbolic religious objects, is rarely addressed in academic studies. In this paper, I engage with the characteristics of ‘three rebellions’ related to the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca focused on the questions of sacred space and the emergence of new religiopolitical imagination in the early Islamic world. To do this, I deal with the reimagination of Kaaba and sacred objects as the legitimate loci for rebels to claim authority over the pilgrims from different parts of the world. In a different approach, I show three ka’abas in juxtaposition with three distinct nature of rebellion of various contexts; firstly, setting a new Caliphate imagination by Ibn Zubair resorting to the sanctified premises of Kaaba, secondly, shaping an alternative political space by Qarmatain by robbing Hajar-al-Aswad, the black stone in Mecca, and thirdly, proposing a new spiritual rebellion against the unjust rulers by Hallaj, the rebel Sufi martyr, by asking his followers to consider one’s own home as Kaaba and space for substitute pilgrimage. By highlighting the possible questions of ‘political’ entangled in the religious reality of Muslims, I examine the role of new spatial imagination in actualizing the rebellious potentials of various kinds. This paper is guided by three interconnected concerns: space, rebellion, and Muslim socio-political thought. To understand these three rebellions within their specific contexts, I use hagiographical sources and testimonials of the political turmoil.
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