Drawing of Hindu diety Jhoolelal Jayanti

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Sewing Together at a Hindu Temple in Sindh, Pakistan

Hindu and Muslim women socialize amidst interreligious tensions.

Jhoolelal Jayanti. Public Domain

Spring/Summer 2025

By Ghazal Asif Farrukhi

In the spring and summer of 2017, I enrolled as a student in a sewing class offered by a local sewing and vocational center on the premises of a Jhoolelal (Uderolal) temple. The center’s other students, my classmates, were thirty young, unmarried women between the ages of fifteen and twenty who came from Hindu and Muslim households in the neighborhoods surrounding the temple. In the center, students and teachers alike labored to create a shared, convivial space for their daily sewing practice in a context where they could not ignore the broader climate of suspicion and antagonism that envelops Hindu-Muslim interactions in Pakistan. At the same time, longstanding social memories and broader anxieties about religious encounters wound their way into the interstices of daily lives and ordinary interactions in the sewing center.

In some of my other work, I examine ritual comportment and everyday conversations among the young Hindu and Muslim women enrolled in the temple sewing class to interrogate how this particular devotional space helped manage interreligious tensions that could otherwise seem inevitable in this small town. In this essay, I focus on the physical space of the temple, which I conceptualize as a set of relations between the temple patrons, the deity, and others who came and went into the temple, to help argue that the deity Jhoolelal was key to the kind of sociality that this space produced.

In lower Sindh today, most Hindus are primarily landless agricultural laborers. Sindhi Hindus from the mercantile castes, such as the Lohana, are more well-to-do and fewer in number. While such groups do not control religious traditions or devotional life, they dominate many of the organizations that have been formed in the name of the Pakistani Hindu community that increasingly seek to speak to the state. Many of these organizations purport to represent Pakistani Hindus as a whole and have gained some limited recognition in this regard by the provincial government of Sindh since 2004. They have established charitable trusts, NGOs, and other projects aimed at fellow Hindus’ social and economic upliftment. The Jhoolelal Vocational Center was the recent project of one such charitable trust, operated by the caste panchayat council of a temple I refer to as the Mandir.

The Mandir is primarily devoted to the worship of the Sindhi deity Jhoolelal (Uderolal), who is most closely associated with Daryapanthi adherents from mercantile and landed caste-groups.1 Jhoolelal’s name was invoked throughout the space of the temple itself, both within the chambers housing the deity and in banners outside naming the temple’s charitable organization.2 Usually depicted as a white-bearded figure seated on a large pallo fish, sometimes carrying a book, Jhoolelal is closely associated with the River Indus (Sindhu darya), which flows through Sindh, giving the region its life-force as well as its name. The Daryapanthi rituals of Jhoolelal worship, too, focus on light and water, or joti and jalu.3

Jhoolelal’s divinity and hagiographies centrally encompass Islamic (Ismaili and Sufi) and Sikh aspects, moving beyond syncretism to create a multivocal devotional tradition unique to the region. Steve Ramey, for example, describes multiple existing accounts of Jhoolelal’s emergence from the waters of the Indus near Thatta either as an avatar of Vishnu or a manifestation of the Vedic water deity Varuna in the tenth century CE, to settle a contentious religious dispute between Hindu and Muslim groups.4 In some versions, he emerged to save a group of Hindus from unjust punishment by a cruel Muslim ruler. In either case, his resolution was a command to build a space that could be both his samadhi (shrine) and a temple where he could be worshipped on land donated by a Muslim devotee.5

Jhoolelal’s traditional hagiographies “stage relations between Hindus and Muslims in Sindh through a process of pacification, and [do] not erase interdenominational rivalries,” note Boivin and Rajpal.6 They argue that the physical spaces devoted to his veneration are key to articulating Jhoolelal’s devotional tradition.7 These spaces enable what Boivin et al. refer to as the “dual” nature of his divinity, and what Sila-Khan describes as ambiguity, whereby complex relationality and blurred boundaries between Hindus and Muslims are an integral aspect of Jhoolelal’s syncretic personality and his hagiography. Dualism and syncretism evoke two clearly defined and stable objects entirely external to one another, which exist in “purer” forms elsewhere, coming together to create a “corrupted” merger. However, this somewhat modular understanding of Jhoolelal as a dual figure is a limited one.

Rather than concepts of dualism or syncretism, the elements of Jhoolelal veneration as well as his hagiography . . . seem to suggest a somewhat different mode of Hindu-Muslim relationality, where neither identity was erased or transgressed but came together to become mutually co-constitutive.

Rather than concepts of dualism or syncretism, the elements of Jhoolelal veneration as well as his hagiography that are referenced by the scholarship on Jhoolelal seem to suggest a somewhat different mode of Hindu-Muslim relationality, where neither identity was erased or transgressed but came together to become mutually co-constitutive, emerging in a new assemblage through a confrontation that Jhoolelal himself resolved. Building on this, I argue that the particularities of Jhoolelal’s hagiography thus made the Mandir, as a sacred space devoted to his veneration, particularly conducive for the agonism which shaped the Hindu-Muslim encounters among the students of the Jhoolelal Vocational Center. The temple’s dedication to Uderolal (Jhoolelal), a deity whose veneration is steeped in agonistic social relations, was key to the production of an agonistically intimate site where young Hindu and Muslim women could come together in a shared pursuit, albeit with suspicion, hesitations, and looming pitfalls.

Through Lefebvre’s insight that space is always a production of relations,8 I conceptualize the Mandir as a place where a unique arrangement of memory, neighbourly social relations, and wider-scale politics could be traced out, lending its shapes and scars to the formation of relationships and sociality in the sewing class located on the temple premises.9 The neighborhood from which the students came, which I call Mandir Para, nurtured its linkages to the temple and a very different past through forms of historical memory that made themselves felt in unexpected ways during the sewing class.

The temple was the focal point of a vibrant local congregation and community, which hosted prayers, festivals, large weddings, and other gatherings as well as political meetings, invited visiting religious speakers, and hosted large events for them. The temple’s activities formed a backdrop to the class itself and often framed conversations and discussions within the class as well as helping regulate comings and goings—people leaving early, arriving late, skipping class all took place to the rhythms of the temple’s various other activities. Part of the reason for this was the center’s location, which was to the very back of the temple compound such that one walked past the panchayat offices and the temple proper, past the janitorial staff’s living quarters, and then to the back of the garage. The sewing center was nestled deep within the compound. Consequently, all activity within the temple could make its presence felt on the center’s routines.

Lingering anxieties and unspoken—even unbidden—suspicions between Hindus and Muslims, especially on the part of the Muslim students, produced often fraught interactions. I describe these interactions in more detail elsewhere. Here, I focus on the way that the very space of the temple also necessitated an intimacy with the fact of religious difference among neighbors and the potential spiritual force of Hindu deities for Muslim students. The center’s location in a Hindu sacred space shaped its social interactions, albeit through guarded aversions and silent crises in the middle of a robust gathering. Jhoolelal, who nourished such forms of intimate agonism between Hindus and Muslims as the main deity in this particular space, further shaped the contours of these interactions.

The affective circulation of caution, aversion, and notions of blockage which characterized such social interactions also trouble straightforward assumptions of public and private space. It was as small groups of neighborhood friends that many of the students had signed up for the class, rather than being enrolled by their families or volunteering out of individual initiative. Most of the students saw the class as a daily social activity with friends that offered a break from the litany of daily chores at home, and they would voice this explicitly. Some absences were explained by the excuse that there was too much work at home to be able to get away that day; in the weeks leading up to special occasions when new clothes were required, some students pulled in extra hours because they felt they had no time to focus on themselves at home.

The daily class routine was straightforward. Beginning at 3 pm, students began turning up and almost immediately got to work on their projects. Only the very beginner students waited around for the teachers to assign tasks for the class—the beginning lesson was learning to measure and cut, and then later sew, knickers for babies. The primary role of the teachers was to look over what the students showed them, demonstrate corrections, or suggest ideas for a different cut or easier method. For the intermediate students, the teachers also aided in accurately marking the measurements onto the fabric for cutting. Only the most senior students were confident enough to make their own graphs (draft their own patterns), and they were usually assigned to help other students whom the teachers could not oversee directly.

The most contentious issue, other than vying for the teachers’ attention for graph-making (marking the pattern on the fabric), was access to sewing machines. The class did not teach sewing by hand. Instead, we had ten pedal-operated sewing machines. Each student was allotted thirty minutes every other day on the machine and expected to do the rest of the actual sewing at home. Although many students finished the course and left, it was very common for alumna to continue coming to the class for advice on particular suits, or to pass the time with friends, or both.

While students could socialize with friends and relative strangers outside the home, these interactions were marked by intimacy and yet remained fraught.

Students and teachers alike marked out the sewing class as a space separated from the obligations of the home.10 As students used this time to focus on themselves in multiple ways that they felt they could not do at home, the sewing center did function as a kind of public space where those who would otherwise have been strangers to one another were thrown together to form relationships beyond the home. While students could socialize with friends and relative strangers outside the home, these interactions were marked by intimacy and yet remained fraught.

Many discussions of gender and public spheres re-inscribe the binary between public and private by tracing how women (normally relegated to the private sphere) can break into the traditionally male-dominated public space. Nilüfer Göle, for example, has argued that women’s bodies and visibilities constitute “the boundaries of the public sphere” within modernity.11 For her, participation in public life exists in binary opposition to the “seclusion and segregation of women” and their confinement to the domestic. Women’s participation in the public sphere, Göle has further argued, consists of their crossing the border between inside and outside.12

However, scholarship on non-Western sociability and conviviality (conceived here as affective social relations) has stressed the need to break down the difference between Enlightenment-era divides of the domestic and the social spheres.13 By contrast, Laura Ring posits that the spaces and associations of modernity, in the material sense of a modern apartment block housing nuclear families, are the reason to move past pre-given divides between the domestic and the social (or the public and the private) and to consider the power of liminal spaces.14 The social practices which produced the Jhoolelal Sewing Center as a space did not fit into the public/private binary in the sense Göle has understood such spaces of female social life in the postcolonial non-West.

Crucial to the production of such duality or ambivalence in the sewing center were the relationships the class cultivated between Hindus and Muslims, marked by aversion, ambivalence, awareness, and tacit ignorance. It was neither strictly a public institution nor a straightforward continuation of the domestic. It was separated by gates, curtains, and strict rules from the public (male) eye, and yet it provided an opportunity to leave the cares of the home to interact with “outsiders” (not members of one’s household). This quality of the center mobilized a concern with social propriety and adherence to certain mutually agreed-upon norms and goals on the part of the students which filtered in and out of the domestic register.15 The transferal of crucial domestic skills in a setting outside the cares and burdens of the home was fundamental to the social life of the sewing class.

The sewing center’s unmistakably Hindu presence in the city, through the temple, indexed a further layer of complexity to the kind of public space it could occupy. As mentioned above, most urban residents gave the Jhoolelal Mandir a wide berth in their day-to-day affairs, though the residents of Mandir Para had a different relationship with their neighbors. Danger surrounding a Hindu public presence in Pakistan remains a present and enduring fact, creating a topology of danger that all neighborly social relations have to navigate. Hindu temples continue to be vandalized, attacked, and sometimes outright demolished by mobs or smaller groups across Pakistan, including in nearby urban areas such as Karachi, Hyderabad, and Ghotki.16

Soon after the creation of Pakistan in 1947, the government of the time pledged that those who did not identify with Islam would never be treated or governed as ahl-al dhimma but rather as minority citizens of a nation-state. Pakistan has also explicitly disavowed the kinds of secular discourses usually underpinning guarantees of minority citizenship elsewhere. In the decades since independence, that promise of citizenship has vacillated between discriminatory neglect and overt regulation of religious minorities through forms of state identification, electoral rolls, and the adjudication of Hindu families.

In turn, Hindus have negotiated around these governance techniques in various creative ways, and they continue to imagine different modes of political claims-making in places their ancestors inhabited for generations. The anxieties and pitfalls about having been rendered strangers in such a place seep into the everyday; from neighborly or intimate relations through the constitution of domestic life, to embodied histories and practices. This leads to a burden of sustaining communal and intimate life which falls primarily on Hindu women. In such a landscape, the physical spaces and devotional rituals which structure everyday life can inform alternative forms of belonging and exclusion.

Notes:

  1. Daryapanthis form one of the Hindu belief systems prevalent in Sindh, with Nanakpanth and Nathpanth being the other two historically prominent systems. The paths are not mutually exclusive groups or sects but differ in ritual emphasis.
  2. Steve Ramey argues that Jhoolelal’s importance to Sindhi Hindus as a “universal Sindhi figure” increased substantially in the aftermath of Partition; in that sense Jhoolelal is now most strongly associated with diasporic Sindhi Hinduism, though remaining important for many Hindus who remained in Sindh; see Hindu, Sufi, or Sikh: Contested Practices and Identifications of Sindhi Hindus in India and Beyond (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 107.
  3. In “The Super-Natural in Nature: Sindhi Tradition,” Lachman Khubchandani argues that the bahrano rituals associated with Jhoolelal worship among the Daryapanths substitutes the fire of the Vedic havan ritual with water; see Primal Elements: The Oral Tradition, ed. Baidyanath Saraswati (Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, 1995). In contrast, Anita Ray suggests a reverse process that highlights Jhoolelal’s primordial connection with pre-Vedic venerations of water, particularly the sacred and life-giving water of the Indus; “Varuŋa, Jhūlelāl and the Hindu Sindhis,” Journal of South Asian Studies, vol. 35, no. 2 (2012): 219-38.
  4. Ramey, Hindu, Sufi, or Sikh. Jhoolelal’s emergence in this historical context thus speaks to the complex influence of Islam on Indic religious traditions and vice versa.
  5. See Dominique Sila-Khan, “Jhulelal and the Identity of India Sindhis,” in Sindh through History and Representations: French Contributions to Sindhi Studies (Oxford University Press, 2007), 76; and Ray, 228.
  6. Michel Boivin and Bhavna Rajpal, “From Udero Lal in Sindh to Ulhasnagar in Maharashtra: Partition and Memories Across Borders in the Tradition of Jhulelal,” in Partition and the Practice of Memory, ed. Churnjeet Mahn & Anne Murphy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 48.
  7. In many accounts, for example, Jhoolelal and the Islamic mystic figure Khawaja Khizr are depicted as dual aspects of the same sacred being; and Jhoolelal is also the given epithet for the extremely popular Sindhi Muslim saint Lal Shahbaz Qalandar.
  8. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Wiley-Blackwell, 1992).
  9. Similarly, in Space, Place, and Gender (University of Minnesota Press, 1994) Doreen Massey argues that “the particularity of any place is . . . constructed not by placing boundaries around it and defining its identity through counterposition to the other which lies beyond, but precisely (in part) through the specificity of the mix of links and interconnections to that ‘beyond’. Places viewed this way are open and porous” (5). Swayam Bagaria has recently shown how the physical space of Hindu temples can accrete layers of meaning and relationality, which then emerge through specific ritual practices, sometimes transformed beyond immediate recognition; see “Ritual Disintermediations: Tradition and Transformation of Sati Worship,” Material Religion, vol. 17, no. 3 (2021): 381-404.
  10. In her history of nineteenth-century public sewing education for American girls, Sarah A. Gordon describes how the emphasis on sewing skills enfolded multiple ideas about women’s appropriate roles in society; “Make it Yourself”: Home Sewing, Gender, and Culture, 1890-1930 (Columbia University Press, 2009). She shows how sewing education imparted a particular set of ideas about appropriate femininity and domesticity, such as discipline, thrift, aesthetic beauty, ‘respectable’ income, and productivity (40).
  11. Nilüfer Göle, “The Gendered Nature of the Public Sphere,” Public Culture, vol. 10, no. 1 (1997), 61.
  12. Ibid., 69.
  13. See Joanna Overing and Alan Passes, The Anthropology of Love and Anger: The Aesthetics of Conviviality in Native Amazonia (Routledge, 2002).
  14. Laura A. Ring, Zenana: Everyday Peace in a Karachi Apartment Building (Indiana University Press, 2006).
  15. I borrow this sense of liminality from Laura Ring’s Zenana, her ethnography of Pakistani social life in an urban apartment building complex where women labor towards peace even as ethnic warfare rages outside the apartment block. She carefully sketches out the ways in which the corridors of the complex were a similar kind of liminal space, neither the clear domestic sphere of the apartment proper, with a locked front door, nor the dangerous world outside on the main street.
  16. While I did not encounter such an attack in this town while I was doing fieldwork, nor was this particular temple threatened during the time I was there, incidents elsewhere every so often did show up on social media and informal news networks (they are rarely reported on official news channels).

Bibliography:

Bagaria, Swayam. 2021. “Ritual Disintermediations: Tradition and Transformation of Sati Worship.” Material Religion 17 (3): 381–404.

Boivin, Michel, and Bhavna Rajpal. 2017. “From Udero Lal in Sindh to Ulhasnagar in Maharashtra: Partition and Memories Across Border in the Tradition of Jhulelal.” New York, NY: Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Farrukhi, Ghazal Asif. 2024. ““So That We May be Counted”: Religion, Caste, and Untimely Numbers in Pakistan’s National Census.” American Ethnologist

Göle, Nilüfer. 1997a. “Secularism and Islamism in Turkey: The Making of Elites and Counter-Elites.” Middle East Journal 51 (1): 46–58.

Göle, Nilüfer. 1997b. “The Gendered Nature of the Public Sphere.” Public culture 10 (1): 61–81.

Gordon, Sarah A. 2009. “Make it Yourself”: Home Sewing, Gender, and Culture, 1890-1930. New York: Columbia University Press.

Henn, Alexander. 2014. Hindu-Catholic Encounters in Goa: Religion, Colonialism, and Modernity. Bloomington (Ind.): Indiana University Press.

Khubchandani, Lachman. 1995. “The Super-Natural in Nature: Sindhi Tradition.” In Prakṛti: Primal Elements, the Oral Tradition, edited by Baidyanath Saraswati,

Lefebvre, Henri. 1992. The Production of Space. Wiley-Blackwell.

Massey, Doreen B. 2012. For Space. Los Angeles, Calif.: Sage.

Overing, Joanna, and Alan Passes. 2002. The Anthropology of Love and Anger: The Aesthetics of Conviviality in Native Amazonia. Routledge.

Parwani, Lata. 2010. “Myths of Jhulelal: Deconstructing a Sindhi Cultural Icon.” edited by Michel Boivin, and Matthew A. Cook, Karachi: Oxford University Press.

Ramey, Steven Wesley. 2008. Hindu, Sufi, or Sikh: Contested Practices and Identifications of Sindhi Hindus in India and Beyond. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Ray, Anita C. 2012. “Varuṇa, Jhūlelāl and the Hindu Sindhis.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 35 (2): 219–38.

Ring, Laura A. 2006. Zenana: Everyday Peace in a Karachi Apartment Building. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana Univ. Press.

Sila-Khan, Dominique. 2008. “Jhulelal and the Identity of Indian Sindhis.” edited by Michel and Matthew Cook Boivin,

van der Veer, Peter. 1994. “Syncretism, Multiculturalism and the Discourse of Tolerance.” In Syncretism/anti-Syncretism: The Politics of Religious Synthesis, edited by Rosalind and Charles Stewart Shaw, 185–200. London: Routledge.

Ghazal Asif Farrukhi is a 2024-25 visiting assistant professor and research associate in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School, and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at LUMS, Pakistan. Her writing has been published in American Ethnologist, Inter-Asian Cultural Studies, and South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies.

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