Voices from the African Diaspora in India

Abstract The Islamic devotional tradition of Sidis, Indians of East African ancestry, in Gujarat and Mumbai in western India involves the performance of devotional songs. These songs constitute an oral archive that the Sidi community has preserved over generations. This article examines the lyric poetry of the Sidi devotional song corpus, contextualizing the corpus with reference to genres of premodern and early modern Indian Sufi poetry composed in regional registers of the lingua franca, Hindavi. The article analyzes Sidi devotional songs and their ritual performance contexts to characterize the Sidi devotional tradition as Sufi. At the heart of this tradition is the Sufi practice of remembrance of God, the Prophet, and Sufi saints, especially the Sidi ancestor-saints. In Sidi ritual contexts, remembrance engenders ecstatic states through which devotees mediate the blessings of the ancestor-saints. Sidi women, as saints or ritual musicians, specialists and participants, play a critical role in this process.