Pleasurably Pious: The Case of Muslim Wedding Songs (Oppana) From Kerala, South India

Presenter:

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Abstract

The terms “tradition” and “reform” have often been mobilized to understand Muslim subjectivities and forms of sociability. Alternatively, a textualist/lived Islam dyad has provided the model for analyzing disparate Muslim practices, “religious” or not. The bone of contention within these debates has often revolved around what is “more Islamic” or “less Islamic” about Muslim practices. While piety/everyday Islam models offer important yet divergent insights into Muslim “self-fashioning,” these models often tend to privilege piety or pleasure—each to the exclusion of the other. Against this backdrop, my paper explores the wedding song-tradition (oppana) of Mappilas from the South Indian state of Kerala with an emphasis on how this tradition brings into relief a situation wherein the piety/pleasure binary is pushed to its limits and comes undone. Oppana inhabits an ambivalent as well as ambiguous space, a space that is invested with both piety and pleasure without being reducible to either. Arabi Malayalam songs celebrating the marriage of the Prophet Muhammad and his wives form the mainstay of the Mappila performance art known as oppana. While the religious content of the oppana songs inspires devotional piety, the (oppana) performance renders itself “carnivalesque” such that its devotional value gets tempered by the aesthetic dimensions involved. Oppana, a contentious practice, throws up subtle questions of theological legitimacy for “devout” Muslims. This notwithstanding, it serves as a site that destabilizes any neat and rigid distinction between sacred/profane, piety/pleasure, and tradition/reform. My paper will illuminate this nuance in ethnographic detail.