The dreamed guru: The entangled lives of the amil and the anthropologist

Abstract

This story starts with a dream that I happened to tell a friend living in a lowincome neighborhood in Delhi during the course of my work on urban poverty over the past decade. 1 The protagonist of this story is a Muslim man known for his piety. He has performed the haj, is engaged in local politics and is also a healer (amil) who uses forms of occult knowledge within the bounds of legitimate practice as set by the Quran and the hadith (the sayings of the Prophet). Hafiz Mian, as I shall call him, has often shared with me his concerns over how to maintain the purity of Islamic teaching in his life and especially in the healing practices he deploys to cure the many ills caused by beings of the unseen world. The term for the unseen world is neadeeda duniya - that which one cannot see with the eyes - and refers to beings of the occult world whose presence can be sensed with other organs such as that of hearing and touch, even if they cannot be seen. The figure of the guru emerges in this chapter not directly but in the context of our conversations about my dream and the story of Hafiz Mian’s own travails that it elicited. Hafiz Mian puzzled over the question of whether Hindu symbols in dreams of a Hindu man or woman could be regarded as the secret working of Shaiytan as some passages in texts on interpretation of dreams within Islam might be read to mean. Guru Maharaj, an unnamed guru - a figure of imagination - appears at an odd moment in Hafiz Mian’s stories though his actual relation to Guru Maharaj, or for that matter, any other guru, never emerges clearly. The guru here figures not in his own right but as someone who haunts the possibilities of transgression for a Muslim amil. I shall argue that unlike some other figures in Hafiz Mian’s narrative such as ‘the priest of the black knowledge (kale ilm ke pujari)' - Guru Maharaj cannot be characterized as ‘evil’ though he has, of necessity, to traffic with evil. Hafiz Mian’s narrative manages to unsettle notions of clear boundaries between Islam and Hinduism, which does not imply that we can either assimilate his narrative within secular notions of equality of all religions, or, within notions of syncretism as a relational possibility between Hinduism and Islam.