From guests of the Imam to unwanted foreigners: the politics of South Asian pilgrimage to Iran in the twentieth century

Abstract

Until the 1930s, Mashhad, Iran received thousands of pilgrims from South Asia yearly, a central node in the Shiʿi shrine city network spanning the Persianate world. Within decades, South Asian pilgrims had all but disappeared from Iran. This article examines how Reza Shah’s drive to ‘nationalize’ Iran spelled the end for this transregional network, leading to harassment of South Asians, increasingly seen not as ‘guests of the Imam’ but as foreigners tied to British colonialism. These decrees included dress codes that banned turbans and veiling, requiring South Asians to wear distinct national clothing that visually marked them as foreign. As Reza Shah sought to demonstrate Persia’s development as a power on a par with European states, pilgrimage became a battleground for anti-imperialist sentiments–taken out on colonial subjects themselves. South Asians in Mashhad–primarily British Indian but also British Afghans–bore the brunt, including as victims of the Gauharshad Massacre. Modern Iranian nationalism required disentangling Iranians from pre-existing transregional linkages and subsuming local identities rooted in mobility, as in the shrine cities, to a homogenous national identity defined by borders and territory. Those inassimilable to the project of Iranian national sovereignty, like the long-standing South Asian community from Iran, were expelled.