Historiography, fieldwork and popular Sufi shrines in the Indian Punjab

Abstract

Based on three case-studies of popular Sufi shrines that have been in continuous existence in post-Partition Indian Punjab, this article examines the prevalent discourse of ‘secular’ historiography in India that privileges the archive and situates the narrative strategy of the popular as marginal or outside of historical discourse. Instead, I argue that a fuller understanding of social processes, outside of prescribed imaginary binaries of secularity and/or conflict, can take place only through attention to lived experience and communitarian formation. It is these registers of religious practice that suggests non-statist histories which demand the evolution of critical theories and methods to account for lived experiences that persist outside of nationalising discourses.