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Embodiment and Ambivalence: Emotion in South Asian Muharram Drumming

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2019

Richard K. Wolf
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Extract

Wolf: How long will the drums play before the procession starts? Bashir Husein Mazhar (Multan, Pakistan): The drums are playing for this, to show the sorrowness … one drum will be beating for happiness and also the drums beating are for, to show the sorrowness … and it is in our Arab culture to show the drums in our sorrowness.

In this article, I pursue a line of inquiry that contends with music and the emotions: how and in what circumstances does music represent or generate the often subtle range of emotions characteristic of mourning rituals for participants in those rituals? My preliminary insights draw on two-and-a-half years' fieldwork with ritual drummers, during which I lived in Lahore, Pakistan and Lucknow, India and traveled extensively in the subcontinent. Using the practice of drumming during the Shī'ī observance of mourning, Muharram, as a case study, I wish to illustrate how localized interpretations of drumming contexts tend to bleed into interpretations of drumming content, and suggest that the study of musical culture may provide a unique perspective on the emotional multivalence or ambivalence that diverse participants experience in Muharram more generally. In Section I, I begin with a brief theoretical review of two themes, “embodiment” and the “complexity of emotions.” In Section II, I proceed to provide further background on Shī'ism, Muharram, and the status of music. The body of the paper examines three ways in which drumming signifies in a general sense: Enduring contextual associations (Section III); assignments of meaning (Section IV); and aesthetics of drumming (Section V). Before laying the theoretical backbone of this exploration, however, it will be necessary to know a bit about Muharram as an occasion and why a person might feel ambivalent about it in the first place.

Type
Articles
Information
Yearbook for Traditional Music , Volume 32 , 2000 , pp. 81 - 116
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 by the International Council for Traditional Music

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Footnotes

1

Versions of this paper were delivered at the 1999 Conference on South Asia at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and at the workshop, “Text, Context and the Constitution of Difference in Middle Eastern Studies” at the Ben-Gurion University in the Negev (June 2000). I would like to thank participants in these events for their critical suggestions. I also wish to thank Amy Bard, James Kippen, Frank Korom, C. M. Nairn, and Regula Qureshi for their helpful comments.

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