"Jinnealogy: Everyday Life & Islamic Theology in Post-Partition Delhi" talk by Mr. Anand Vivek Taneja at Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg > 3pm on 8th August 2012

Time : 3:00 pm

Entry : Free (Seating on First-Come First-Served basis)

Place : Seminar Room, Nehru Memorial Museum & Library (NMML), Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg, New Delhi
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Event Details : 'Jinnealogy: Everyday Life and Islamic Theology in Post-Partition Delhi' talk by Mr. Anand Vivek Taneja, Doctoral candidate, Department of Anthropology, Columbia University, New York.

Abstract:
In this paper, I will look at the expanding presence of jinn (djinn/genies) in the landscape of post-Partition Delhi, and the respectability given to the jinn anew by reformist Muslim theologians writing popular tracts in the decade after Partition in 1947. I argue that this new acceptability of the jinn is linked to the failure of human memory and its institutions when faced with the destructive and all-pervasive violence of Partition. Memory needs work. It needs documents and stories, spaces of ritual, and sites of mourning. The Partition of the subcontinent was a death-blow for prior modes of memory-work, particularly for the Muslims of Delhi. For the Partition didn't end for them with the violent catcalysms and mass displacements of 1947, but still continues. Muslim houses were expropriated by the state, and Muslim tombs, mosques and graveyards, many of them centuries old, were leveled to make way for the planned modernist city of the 1960s. It is with this destruction of the landscape of memory that everyday Muslim life in Delhi now operates. What kind of effect does this texture of everyday life have on Muslim theology? Here, i argue, lies the renewed interest in the jinns and their growing presence in Delhi's landscapes. The jinn are said to live much longer than humans and hence their memory equals several generations of human history, and there are several anecdotes in the literature of the transmission of knowledge by jinn linking human characters centuries apart in time. Transmission through the jinn, jinnealogy as it were, is both tactic and tragedy; a way of making authoritative claims without any other evidentiary basis; but also an acknowledgement of the overwhelming destruction of records and cityscapes and social relationships within which human memory now has to operate.

Speaker:
Anand Vivek Taneja is a Doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. His work is concerned with Islam in contemporary Delhi, and with the intersections between history, ecology, everyday life and sacrality. His previous training is in history and in film-making.He recieved his BA (Honours) in History from Ramjas College, Delhi University, and his MA in Film and Mass Communication from the AJ Kidwai Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia.   


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