The Presence of Absence: Using Stuff in a South Asian Sufi Movement

The “presence of absence” here refers to a process by which a fi gure no longer physically in the world of lived reality is made manifest through the ritual use of stuff formerly belonging to or associated with the entity no longer present in the mundane realm, some of which may be termed relics. To develop this concept, I draw upon one contemporary Sufi group called the Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship, which has branches in the United States, Canada, and Sri Lanka, the place of origination of Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, a Tamil speaking saint who died in 1986, and is buried outside of Philadelphia. The study focuses on members’ use of photographs of Bawa, sound recordings of his sermons, and items such as slippers he wore, chairs in which he sat, beds on which he slept, artwork he painted, and vegetarian recipes he prescribed to visualise and remember him constantly in the present. In so doing, it allows the community not only to “see” him but also to touch, smell, hear, and taste him. The argument assumes a form of “corpothetics,” as Christopher Pinney has termed it, in which the entire sensorial range of the body is engaged in the process of practicing lived religion. This moves us beyond the now tired concept of auspicious sight (darsan) in South Asian religions to penetrate even deeper into how the entire range of the body’s capacities are employed and engaged in the mystical process of making present that which is currently absent.