WHEN places of collective memory are attacked, what is being targeted is not merely stone, brick, or timber but the collective history, affective attachments, and plural inheritances they sustain. Since the 2024 July mass uprising, Bangladesh has witnessed an unsettling escalation in attacks against mazars 鈥� tomb-shrines and dargahs that for centuries have functioned as cultural, spiritual, and communal anchors across South Asia. Far-right religious factions have increasingly deployed allegations of blasphemy or 鈥榦ffense鈥� as mobilising tropes to justify such violence. Ranging from the desecration of small village shrines to the arson of renowned complexes, these incidents mark a dangerous shift in the politics of religious and cultural life.
On the surface, these acts may appear as spontaneous eruptions of moral outrage, yet they are deeply political interventions. To vandalise or burn a shrine is to attempt the erasure of layered histories of syncretism, where Islam, Hinduism, local folklore, and Sufi traditions have long intermingled. Each attack seeks to overwrite collective memory, restructure the spatial order of community life, and impose authoritarian exclusionary symbolic boundaries of belonging. These attacks are not politically isolated acts of criminality but deliberate political interventions seeking to erase plural histories and reshape religious and cultural practices of this region.
From a historical and cultural perspective, these acts of violence are better understood as deliberate attempts to reconfigure the archive of quotidian life 鈥� an effort to discipline both religious practice and historical consciousness. The mazar embodies more than a spiritual resting place: it is a living site of mediation between the sacred and the profane, the local and the transnational, and the orthodox and the heterodox in South Asian history. To destroy it, therefore, is to intervene in the cultural politics of memory, identity, and power. Defending mazars, thus, becomes both a task of historical recovery and democratic defence. This essay situates mazars within their longue dur茅e cultural history in South Asia, outlines their historical significance, and explains why their preservation is an urgent call for democracy.
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Cultural history of mazars in South Asia
TO CLAIM why mazars matter, we must situate them in the syncretic history of South Asian religiosity. From the mediaeval period onwards, the tomb-shrines of Sufi pirs served as vital nodes in the social, economic, and spiritual life of villages and towns. Sufi tomb-shrines in Bengal facilitated the spread of Islam through networks of accommodation and local conversion (Eaton 1993). Mazars became hubs where spiritual practice, communal interaction, and cultural exchange converged, allowing communities to constitute a socio-religious hybrid institution that blended Muslim devotional forms with Hindu, Buddhist, and indigenous traditions. Across the subcontinent, shrines served as cosmopolitan centres of cultural exchange, hosting vernacular poetry, healing practices, and pilgrimage economies that connected disparate communities (Green 2012). Mazars also acted as sites of moral and social guidance, where local leaders and devotees negotiated norms, resolved disputes, and created shared civic imaginaries. The annual urs and other shrine festivals structured communal calendars, linking agricultural, spiritual, and social rhythms into cohesive networks of interdependence. Pilgrimage to mazars reinforced not only religious devotion but also the circulation of ideas, stories, and cultural practices across linguistic and regional boundaries. These shrines were economic as well as spiritual centres, sustaining artisans, storytellers, and itinerant performers, thereby embedding themselves in the material and symbolic life of communities. They fostered plural forms of religiosity and communal intimacy that transcended doctrinal boundaries, embodying the subaltern and everyday negotiations of faith and identity (Nandy 1983). These religious monuments historically served as living cultural sites 鈥� places where language, ritual, music, social interaction, and multilingual communication co-produced a plural but common religious and social public.
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Significance of mazars: memory, economy, and social mediation
MAZARS serve as three important and intertwined historical functions. First, they are repositories of what Assmann calls 鈥榗ultural memory鈥� (Assmann, 2011). Local narratives about saints, miracles, and sacred lineages are conserved in oral histories, ritual calendars (urs), and material objects at shrines. As Assmann emphasises, cultural memory is materially anchored and vulnerable to erasure by iconoclasm or state neglect (Assmann, 2011). This cultural memory is enacted not only through texts and archives but also through material sites, rituals, commemorations, and embodied practices. Mazars perform annual urs festivals, local stories of miracles, genealogies of saints, and even their architecture and inscriptions as vehicles for transmitting the collective memory of communities. They serve as loci of identity for local communities, offering continuity, cohesion, and a sense of belonging across generations. Second, mazars have historically been centres of local economic activity 鈥� from charitable kitchens and land grants to craftspeople, musicians, and marketplaces 鈥� providing livelihoods and social patronage (Green, 2012). Local economies around mazars thrived through ancillary markets, artisan production, and the circulation of ritual objects, textiles, and food. The pilgrimage economy generated by the annual urs drew travellers, performers, and traders, linking rural and urban areas and reinforcing networks of interdependence. In many villages, mazars functioned as hubs for both spiritual and material exchange, embedding economic benefits within communal and ritual life. Third, Mazars are sites of social mediation. Eaton (1993) demonstrates that Sufi shrines functioned as centres of social mediation, providing spaces where disputes could be resolved outside formal state institutions and where marginalised groups could access social recognition. Stoler (2009) introduces the concept of 鈥榓rchives of affect鈥�, emphasising that archives are shaped by emotions, rituals, and embodied practices beyond formal institutions. Shrines operate as such affective archives, where emotional attachment, remembrance, and intergenerational transmission of stories sustain social norms and collective memory. They allow communities to maintain localised forms of care, moral guidance, and cultural knowledge that might otherwise be invisible or neglected. During colonial rule, Sufi shrines navigated relationships with colonial administrations, managing lands, disputes, and providing charity, healing, or sanctuary; after independence, mazars continued to function as social safety nets and spaces of communal identity, where the state鈥檚 presence was less immediate, yet local social and spiritual life remained vibrant. Mazars, thus, function as social spaces where moral, cultural, and communal knowledge is enacted, reproduced, and transmitted across generations. Mazars have historically mediated between communities and broader authorities.
Destroying a mazar, therefore, ruptures the practices that sustain community memory, local economies, social cohesion, and social care, thereby destabilising the crucial balance of communal, economic, and spiritual life.
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Who benefits when mazars are vandalised?
ATTACKS on mazars are never ideologically neutral; they unfold within a political economy of erasure in which the dismantling of plural cultural institutions yields both symbolic and material dividends for specific actors. For over a year now, shrines across Bangladesh have been subjected to serial vandalism and desecration, yet the interim government has persistently failed to halt these assaults or to bring perpetrators to account. Such sustained inaction can no longer be dismissed as mere administrative incapacity; it increasingly manifests as a biopolitical strategy (Foucault, 1978): a form of selective governance wherein permissive inaction authorises far-right religious groups to discipline communities along axes of orthodoxy, sectarian identity, and political loyalty. In this configuration, inaction does not simply reflect weakness but assumes the character of intent 鈥� a technique of rule that deploys fear, precarity, and the latent threat of collective violence as instruments for regulating conduct, suppressing heterodox practices, and consolidating conformity to dominant religious鈥損olitical agendas. The recurrent targeting of shrines thus acquires the quality of a structural mechanism, at once producing material destruction and transmitting symbolic messages: sacred sites are rendered perpetually vulnerable, while the state implicitly demarcates the boundaries of sanctioned religiosity and delegitimised dissent.
Religious purists and far-right religious groups gain significant ideological and symbolic capital in this context. Advocates of literalist or orthodox interpretations of Islam construe Mazars as obstacles to the project of religious homogeneity. Drawing on Asad鈥檚 (2003) analysis of how religious and political authorities define orthodoxy through exclusion, the demolition of mazars can be read as a public ritual that enacts purification: a symbolic performance through which heterodox practices are cast out and orthodox authority consolidated. Crucially, the repeated assaults produce an image of Bangladesh as a society where religious extremist factions are consolidating influence, an image that is then leveraged both domestically and internationally. Locally, far-right groups leverage this perception to legitimise their authority and mobilise new adherents; globally, external actors 鈥� particularly political opponents 鈥� instrumentalise the spectacle of extremist violence to frame Bangladesh as unstable, thereby elevating security concerns as the dominant lens for governance and international engagement.
Such vandalism becomes a site where political and religious power is actively staged. Drawing on Jalal鈥檚 (1995) analysis of religion in South Asia, it is evident that powerful political and religious factions often mobilise religious idioms to assert authority, marginalise rival groups, and consolidate control over contested spaces, particularly during periods of transitional governance. Each attack, thus, becomes a performative spectacle of religious dominance, a staging of power that reinforces fear, extends social control, and entrenches hegemonic norms across contested communal spaces. Collectively, these dynamics crystallise into a system in which all the actors converge to profit from erasure, while the state鈥檚 selective inaction perpetuates hegemony. This convergence sends a dual message to citizens: that plural religiosity and heterodox practices are expendable, and that conformity to dominant agendas 鈥� however coercively imposed 鈥� constitutes the only viable mode of belonging. In Gramscian terms, such a conjuncture fuses coercion and consent, embedding fear into everyday life while normalising far-right hegemony as the horizon of political and social order.
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Preserving mazars, preserving South Asian memory
THE urgency of preservation is underscored by the sustained assaults on mazars since August 2024, which reveal organised pressures threatening permanent gaps in Bangladesh鈥檚 cultural and religious landscape. Beyond material destruction, such attacks erode intangible heritage, disrupting stories, rituals, and local histories that sustain collective identity 鈥� a form of 鈥榗ultural amnesia鈥� (Assmann, 2011) whereby societies lose vital links to their past. As Chakrabarty (2000) argues, acknowledging multiple, coexisting pasts is essential for plural modernities; to flatten those pasts into a single myth of purity is to deny the coevalness of diverse histories. Alongside shared memory, vandalism of such sites erases a networking hub for marginalised communities, which offers charity, healing, and communal spaces for mourning and connecting with each other.
Preservation of mazars cannot remain rhetorical; it demands coordinated legal, social, and scholarly interventions. Legally, attacks on shrines must be treated as crimes against cultural heritage and public order, with prompt investigation and prosecution not only to punish perpetrators but also to deter future assaults. Administratively, a comprehensive registry of mazars and dargahs should be maintained, prioritising vulnerable sites and providing local communities with training in heritage protection. Social preservation must centre the shrine communities themselves 鈥� devotees, khadems, women caretakers, musicians, and artisans 鈥� since sidelining them would erode the living cultural and spiritual practices that give mazars their significance. Academically, historians, anthropologists, and public humanists must urgently document shrine practices through oral histories, ethnographies of rituals, and digital archiving of songs, photographs, and inscriptions. Their desecration constitutes social harm, disproportionately affecting rural and marginalised populations, women, religious minorities, and the economically disadvantaged. At the global level, mazars are integral to South Asia鈥檚 religious and cultural heritage; their loss diminishes both Bangladesh鈥檚 cultural patrimony and broader human understanding of religious pluralism and historical continuity.
Preserving mazars, therefore, is not merely an act of heritage conservation but a critical intervention in sustaining social cohesion, reinforcing democratic accountability, and protecting the shared beliefs, memories, cultures, and identities that have shaped Bangladesh and South Asia over centuries.
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Tina Nandi is a part-time faculty member of the Department of English and Humanities at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh and a former broadcast journalist.