Topics in Religion list

Religious lives together

The heritage of Hinduism

The heritage of Islam

Religious spaces

Devotionalism

The living dead

Domestic religion

An important, shared factor among the healing brahm and Sufis of Arampur is that they are dead. Stuart Blackburn has observed that, "As a source of Indian religious thought, death is probably unsurpassed." Of course, death becomes primarily important insofar as it affects the living and one way in which the dead do so – for many Hindus and Muslims – is through healing. Many believe these dead individuals act as animated agents who can affect, for good and ill, the health of the living. If, as Blackburn argues, death plays such a central role in much of Indian religious thought and behavior, it is partly because it denotes neither the end of life nor its opposite but, rather, marks a milestone in an individual's life. This milestone marks the appropriation, for some, of remarkable powers which can influence the lives of others in the community in which they formerly resided.

A wide variety of the dead actively inhabit the Arampur area. We might roughly divide these between those socially incorporated and those that are not. Among the latter which residents identify are the bhut, brahm, pret, PaÝhan, Íayyid, jhureyal, pahalvan, and jinn which roam the area or inhabit solitary places like trees or graveyards. Anyone who bothers them – intentionally or not – may become possessed or otherwise troubled. The socially incorporated dead include the various bir babas which protect the entrances to villages, Shastri Brahm, Sufis and shahid ("Islamic martyrs"). A key difference between the two groups is that, whereas the former are seldom associated individually with any particular place, the latter have shrines (sthan), temples (mandir), courts (dargah), or tombs (mazar) dedicated to them where devotees can propitiate them.

Because these sites are often established by local devotees at places associated with the life or death of the active dead, they act not only as locales for devotion but also as spatial and temporal markers for the current community. Such sites serve as spatial intersections between the life of an individual healer and a local community. Meanwhile, annual festivals at these sites, often commemorating the death and expanded empowerment of the healer, create a temporal intersection. With its time fixed on a community's annual calendar, these festivals relate the mortal life of the healer to his (all of those in Arampur are masculine) continuing presence in the community. A date, perhaps associated with a singular event in the mortal life of the healer (e.g., his death) becomes an annually repetitive holiday observed by and demonstrative of the continuous community. These temporal and spatial elements as manifested at the places associated with dead healers establishes them as a permanent part of the social order which they had been on the verge of departing. As such, they reflect the nature of that order.