For our February Brownbag, Religious Studies is delighted to host Rahul Rastogi, currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Folklore! Rastogi will present the talk “At an Edgevantage: Listening for Lament from the Edge of Lucknow’s Muharram.” This event is open to all interested students, faculty, staff, and members of the public! Please share widely with anyone who may be interested.
Description: Lucknow has long been a major center of Shia life in South Asia, where Muharram developed as a richly layered tradition shaped by courtly patronage, vernacular religiosity, and shared urban cultural forms. In Lucknow, Muharram came to be marked not only by ritual mourning for the martyrdom of Husain but also by distinctive poetic, sonic, and spatial practices through which grief is publicly expressed and shared.
This talk approaches Lucknow’s Muharram from an interstitial positionality—close to the practices, communities, and expressive forms of mourning, yet not fully embedded within them. From this vantage, I examine the relationship between aesthetics and sorrow in Muharram observances, asking how grief is shaped and mediated through ritual, sound, and form. Drawing on observations of communal participation, mourning rituals, poetry, and song across the first ten days of Muharram, the talk reflects on questions of gender, spatiality, violence, and genre within Lucknow’s mourning practices.
Date & Time: Friday, February 27, 2026, 12 Noon – 1:00PM
Location: Room 202/204, Bradley Memorial Building (Street Address: 1225 Linden Dr. Madison, Wisconsin, 53706)
Download the event poster as a PDF here.