The Politics of Mourning: Reliving Karbalāʾ in Performance and Fiction
This article studies the performance of mourning for the martyrs of Karbalāʾ as the commemorative and ritualized cultivation of grief as perpetual reminder of the possibility of commitment against injustice. It takes Ismat Chughtai’s (d. 1991) Urdu novel Ek Katrā Khūn or One Drop of Blood as exemplifying the narrative-...