Thinking Beyond Religion and Resistance: Hierarchy, Sufism, and Subaltern Subjectivities in Downtown Karachi

My project intends to study modes of hierarchy, by which I mean the organised relationships of people with unequal status, practiced among two sets of interlocutors: Sufi religious ascetics (Fakirs) and feminine presenting gender variant people (Khwaja Siras). I believe this can offer new insight into arguments that situate egalitarianism as the normative goal of resistance: relations of hierarchy and not equality are what organise these subaltern groups, as well as characterising the status they seek to achieve with mainstream society. These actors qualify as subaltern as they are denied access to hegemonic power, and are situated at the margins of mainstream discourses, appearing only as objects of ridicule or victims of poverty. Drawing on mystic Sufi discourses, Fakirs and Khwaja Siras set up alternative hierarchies within their own communities building on master-disciple relationships, bringing to life distinct forms of kinship, politics, and economic activity that compromises the boundaries of the received analytical category of religion. Simultaneously, this association with Sufism allows them to enter into desired relations of patronage with hegemonically positioned actors who rely on them as spiritual resources, and in so doing reify their claims to the spiritual. Whereas existing scholarship on Fakirs and Khwaja Siras/Hijras in South Asia has had a tendency towards being overdetermined by the anthropologically vogue 'domination-resistance' paradigm, I intend to explore how these subaltern subjectivities constitute alternative moral economies that complicate an easy distinction between resistance and hierarchy. The fieldwork will take place in the heterogenous inner-city Karachi neighbourhood of Kharadar.