Between Ethnography and Hagiography: Allegorical Truths and Representational Dilemmas in Narratives of South Asian Muslim Saints

Abstract

The paper compares my anthropological monograph about a Pakistani Sufi cult founded by a living saint, known as Zindapir, with a translated hagiography written about the same saint by a devoted poet-khalifa. It aims to compare two representational strategies of an historical figure—on the one hand, that of an anthropologist writing for a wider audience of expert social scientists and Islamic scholars and, on the other hand, an indigenous devotee who knew the saint well, claiming divine inspiration in his writings intended to honour his departed saint and to sacralize his name. The paper interrogates the fuzzy boundary between hagiography and ethnography, literary and descriptive text, fact and fiction, truth and myth, history and archeology in order to raise questions about the limits of dialogical anthropology.