Mapping grave diggers and fowl thieves

I’m not actually mapping grave diggers, nor am I mapping fowl thieves. I’ve taken huge poetic license in the naming of this map. The title nevertheless captures something of genealogical uncertainty, an ambivalence but also a creativity that one finds in a curious type of performance in Penang. During my time there, I became interested in learning more about the Muharram celebration that had been recorded in nineteenth-century Penang. Over time, this culture of public assembly and procession had been curtailed by the colonial authorities.

The festival was also disapproved of by a new wave of reformist Muslims who thought that spending of money on the construction of a tower-like effigy was wasteful. They also saw the competition between various villages for ritual honour as debilitating to the new ‘racial’ cause for progress, and the ritual syncretism rooted in Shi’ism as religiously deviant. The space it carved out for the transgender community was also seen as morally reprehensible in a new conception of the Islamic faith that wanted to present itself as respectable in the eyes of Europe. The Muharram celebration did not die out entirely, one strain of it apparently survived in a particular form of song-dance and play-acting culture called ‘the Boria’.

KOLI KALLEN is a story about Penang, it begins with an altercation during the Muharram festival that precipitated a ten-day riot in 1867 and ends with the account of the 1919 Boria performing season published in the journal of a learned society. The Muharram procession and Boria offers an interesting lens to think about indentured migration, both cover issues that continue to resonate with many of the issues we grapple with in the study of labour migration today. This story, however, offers a historical caution to any of us who possess enough hubris to believe that we can rely exclusively on our judicial and legislative system in seeking redress against the social injustices of global capitalism.

Thinking alongside Priyamvada Gopal’s Insurgent Empire, this project explores public processions and performances as occasions that drew attention to the limitations of any modern claims to an effective universal and impartial rule of law. It is by recognising the limits of a legal discourse or political language through which their subjectivity is always already disadvantaged that the Muharram and Boria festival looked elsewhere to explore a different poetics of relation.

The term Koli Kallen is generally thought to derive from Tamil language, in which it can be translated as ‘chicken thief’. It describes a day time performance during the 10 days of Muharram where groups of people would cover their faces with rag clothes, dressed as beasts or cross-dress as women, to roam the streets and beg for alms.

More likely though, is that it is named after a stock masquerade character found in the Muharram celebrations across India, known as the Khodrun Garun, the gravedigger and undertaker. This character is closely connected to the Red and White Flag Societies because these secret societies were initially established as a mutual-aid group to assist in funerary expenses.

During the Muharram festivities, Koli Kallen groups are fond of chanting a chorus with the line, ‘Sayappa anak Koli Kallen!’ (We are the descendants of the Koli Kallen). I retain both the meaning of fowl thief and grave digger to describe this mapping exercise and to locate the exercise of mapping as a creative form of genealogy-making, which is also a good way to describe what the Boria’s opening chorus is really about. The above photograph taken in Singapore of a group of Muharram celebrants should give you a sense of why this was a cause of concern for colonial authorities desperately trying to maintain a semblance of order and respectability.

*You can explore the original map below via Google Maps. It is arranged in roughly chronological order. If you select the icon on the upper left it will open the legend, which shows the pins in order with more information.

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