Paper short abstract:

With this paper I wish to argue that understanding a place like Sehwan means that we pay attention to both its material and discursive dimensions keeping in mind that its historical particularities must make space for its imaginative continuities.

Paper long abstract:

Sehwan Sharīf, in Sindh, Pakistan is best described as a 'religious crossing space'. The antinomian character of its patron saint, the thirteenth century mystic Lāl Shahbāz Qalandar (d. 1274) continues to shape the particular character of Sehwan as a destination for qalandari fakirs. Following Amira Mittermaier's position that "understandings of saint shrines are incomplete unless they are conceptualized within a space which includes both the material and the imaginary", I wish to argue that understanding a place like Sehwan means that we pay attention to both its material and discursive dimensions such that its historical particularities must make space for its imaginative continuities.

Drawing from field research among fakirs, the proposed paper aims to highlight the ways in which fakir imaginations of Sehwan surface in the overlay of self-representations and bodily dispositions, in spatial choices and ritual itineraries, in engagements of material space with dialogical dream-space - suggesting in the person of the fakir crossings of space, body and notions of charismatic authority. Following Watenpaugh (2005), this paper demonstrates that spatial activity, in addition to self-fashioning and social behavior is instrumental to the construction of a fakīrī self. I will argue that a honing of inward and outward dispositions is not independent of fakir mastery of space putting the question of space and embodiment at the center of fakir self-representations. Furthermore, it adds to the discussion on the spatialising of bodies as well as the embodied ways in which antinomian notions of space are articulated and maintained in Sehwan.