Lost worlds

Abstract

This article thinks about decline as part of the sociology of time, by exploring ways former politically dominant communities seek to negotiate their ritual traditions by forging newer relationships to modern time. It offers an ethnography of decline among the Shia community of Hyderabad old city, whose weakened political status by colonial modernity speaks in different ways of the experience of the contemporary as diachronic and not in succession with the past. These perceptions of decline describe the moral loss of the Shia community through the spatial decline of Hyderabad old city, as a fallen state that has been produced by Muslim actors in time. It reflects on the contradictory perceptions of decline that describes the deprivations produced by time as well as implicates community actors as offenders in time who persist with the performance of what appear to be meaningless rituals in the present context. What are the relations to time that make communities redefine culture in ways that are temporally meaningful to them is of interest here.