Presenter
Bhattacharjee Tannishtha - Department History, University of California Santa Barbara, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, United StatesPanel
121 – Religious Infrastructures and City-Making: Governance, Governmentality and Urban Moral GeographiesAbstract
When their homeland, Sylhet was ceded to Muslim-majority East Pakistan in 1947, a
considerable number of Hindu-Sylhetis migrated to Shillong, then the largest city in India’s
north-eastern frontier, and originally home to the Khasi tribe. This paper examines two frontier
guru-cults that proliferated after 1947 in Shillong’s neighborhoods specifically occupied by lowcaste
and economically weaker Sylheti refugees. It analyzes these cults as a practice of
‘rehabilitation’ adopted by these marginal communities in the context of absences and
interruptions in the state’s refugee rehabilitation infrastructures in their areas. The paper
examines both collective community practices, such as festivals, kirtans, dhamail, yatras, and
sermons, as well as quotidian individual practices such as dietary habits and personal religiosity.
Utilizing a combination of archival and ethnographic research, my paper first exposes the
hagiographic universes and the ritualistic repertoire that these communities produced particularly
after the Partition. The stories, the songs, the chants, the meditative activities, I argue, reflect
nostalgic geographies of a lost homeland on one hand. On the other hand, they also reveal how
these communities interpreted ‘rehabilitation’ differently and used the spiritual economy of
hagiographies to assert their sense of place and self and also negotiate their belonging in an
upper-caste dominated and a tribal-majority urban space like post-Partition Shillong
