Guises of the Protective Hand: The ʿAlam and the ‘Domestication’ of Qutb Shahi Shiʿism

Abstract

The Qutb Shahi formation of Shiʿism with its material culture, sacroscape, literature, and ritual practices, sought to understand local Deccani religious grammars of the body and integrate its metaphors, metonymies, and scripts. This paper examines the use of the panjah (hand) and the n‘al (crescent-shaped nose-plate or horseshoe) as a means of cultivating a ‘context-sensitive’ process of domestication of Shiʿism by the Qutb Shahs. This domestication of Shiʿism was effected in three different yet integrally related ways: (1) Through the formation of a Deccani form of Gangā-Yamunī tahzīb (culture) as a means of integrating Qutb Shahi Shiʿi religious practice with local Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava traditions; (2) Through processes of intersemiotic exchange of indexical sign and referent of religious objects among religious communities, and (3) In the polytropically relational nature of Muharram ritual and material practice that was fostered by the sultans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which encouraged people to cross religious boundaries and participate in rituals and devotionally engage sacred objects from their own perspectives.