Across Bihar, Rajasthan, Odisha and beyond, non-Muslim families have for centuries kept alive the remembrance of Karbala — not out of obligation, but out of something older and harder to name
I. Ahmad Wani
There is a village in Bihar where no Muslim has lived for generations.
Yet every year, as Muharram arrives and the air turns heavy with remembrance, the same families wake before dawn. The same hands — calloused from farming, hennaed for festivals, folded in prayer before entirely different gods — begin constructing something that would surprise most urban Indians. Bamboo frames rise. Coloured paper and tinsel catch the morning light. And slowly, painstakingly, a *taziya* takes shape: a replica of the shrine of a man these families have never encountered in their own scriptures, in a city most could not find on a map.
They do it anyway. They have always done it.
And when you ask an elder why, she pauses, wipes her hands on her sari, and says something unremarkable in its certainty: “Hussain did not die for Muslims. He died for truth. Truth belongs to everyone.”
The Day That Refused to Be Forgotten
To understand why a Brahmin family in Odisha has led a *taziya* procession since 1664, why Dalit women in Uttar Pradesh recite elegies before dawn, why a Hindu craftsman in Rajasthan approaches the making of a *taziya* with the same seriousness he brings to a Durga idol, one must first understand what happened at Karbala.
It was 680 CE. Imam Hussain, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, stood in the Iraqi desert with his family and 72 companions against an army of tens of thousands. They had been denied water for three days. Children were thirsty. And still, Hussain refused to pledge loyalty to what he considered tyrannical rule.
He was killed. His companions were killed. The children watched.
But the story refused to disappear. It travelled across the subcontinent, carried by Sufi saints, traders and ordinary people who heard what had happened and felt something shift inside them. Here was a man who chose death over dishonour. Who stood between the powerful and the powerless and did not move. Who surrendered everything — not for conquest, but for conscience.
That story did not require a particular religion to land. It required only a human being willing to listen.
Fifty-Seven Villages, No Muslim Residents, Full Processions Every Year
Cultural documentation from Bihar records something that sits uncomfortably with received wisdom about religious boundaries in India. In 57 villages— among them Jahanabad, Karuna, Beldani and Bhabhnauli — with zero Muslim residents, full *taziya* processions are organised every Muharram without fail.
Not occasionally. Not as a curiosity. Every year, across generations.
Hindu families build the structures, carry them on their shoulders through the village lanes, and perform the mourning observances with complete seriousness. For young men who have grown up doing this, there is no sense of participation in another community’s tradition. This *is* their tradition. It was their father’s, and his father’s before him.
One of the quieter rituals in these processions involves parents lifting their small children and passing them gently beneath the *taziya* as it moves through the village — a gesture they associate with blessing and protection. The instinct is the same one that leads a grandmother to hold a child beneath a temple arch or church doorway. Sacred geography, it turns out, is wider than any single faith can draw.
“We see Imam Hussain’s sacrifice as a universal call to stand for truth,” one elder explained in community records. “Religion does not stop us from honouring such a stand.”
The Craftsmen of Rajasthan and Their Mustard-Seed Shrines
In Sambhar town, Rajasthan, in the weeks before Ashura, the workshops of Agarwal and Kayal families fill with a particular kind of quiet. These craftsmen are building *taziyas* from mustard seeds and local materials — intricate, eco-friendly structures that carry the faint smell of the fields they came from. Every seed placed is unhurried. Every arch shaped is deliberate.
These are families who worship at Hindu temples, who observe Diwali and Holi with full commitment. And yet the *taziya* work is not experienced as a departure from that commitment. It is experienced as continuous with it.
“Our religion has never taught us that because we are Hindus we should not respect others’ traditions or participate where the heart feels moved,” one craftsman from a long-involved family said in community accounts. The statement carries no drama. It is simply what he believes, and what his family has practised.
Similar patterns hold across the country. In Madhya Pradesh, Sharma Hindu families in certain districts have carried *taziya* processions for more than **120 years**, describing the practice as ancestral duty rather than adopted custom. In Hyderabad and parts of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, Yadava communities shoulder the alams — sacred standards — during processions. In Tamil Nadu’s Pulimankulam, large-scale Hindu participation in *taziya* processions was documented in the mid-2000s. In Delhi’s Mehrauli, certain Hindu families have maintained active roles in historic processions for so many generations that no one alive knows when they began.
In Uttar Pradesh’s Awadh region, organisations such as *Anjuman-e-Hind-e-Abbasia* and *Anjuman-e-Haaye Sakina* count significant numbers of Hindu devotees among their active members. These individuals recite elegies, participate in *matam* and lead or accompany *taziya* processions with the same regularity as other participants. Several *imambaras* in Lucknow and nearby towns were historically funded by Hindu nobles and citizens, some still maintained today through inter-community involvement.
The Brahmin Family Who Has Kept This Going for 360 Years
In Sambalpur’s Modipara area, a Brahmin family has overseen the local *taziya* tradition since **1664**. They make the structure. They lead the procession. They perform the immersion rites.
Three hundred and sixty years. The Mughal Empire has come and gone. Partition happened. Independence happened. The country outside that family’s courtyard has been remade several times over.
Every Muharram, the family rises to the same responsibility their ancestors accepted centuries ago. There is no word that fully describes what this continuity represents. The closest approximation is simply: inheritance.
The Dalit Women Who Recite Elegies Before Anyone Else Wakes
Across Awadh’s villages in Uttar Pradesh, Dalit women hold a practice that speaks directly to why the Karbala narrative finds particular resonance in certain communities.
Before the processions begin, before the taziyas are lifted, these women gather and recite dahe— devotional poetry — in the quiet before dawn. Their voices carry the grief of the desert at Karbala. Running through that grief, unmistakably, is their own historical experience: the knowledge of what it means to stand without power against those who have everything.
Hussain stood in that same position. He faced an army with his family beside him and refused to surrender his conscience. The Dalit women who mourn him each year are not performing an act of theological adoption. They are recognising a shared experience of injustice and honouring a man who, thirteen centuries ago, chose resistance over surrender.
This recognition happens in villages that most urban India has never visited, before most people are awake. It is among the less reported and more significant things occurring in Indian public life every Muharram.
The Hussaini Brahmins
A Community for Whom Karbala is Ancestral Memory
Among the most striking threads in this story are the Hussaini Brahmin families, found particularly in Punjab’s Hoshiarpur district and elsewhere across northern India. These families carry the belief that an ancestor, **Rahib Das**, fought alongside Imam Hussain at Karbala. Whether one reads this as documented history or as the deep truth of a community’s spiritual identification, the practical effect is the same: for these families, Muharram is not another community’s commemoration. It is their own.
Their participation in the month’s observances proceeds from this place. It is family grief, not interfaith solidarity.
One articulation from within this community, shared in recent years, holds up beyond its immediate context: “Muharram is the time when there is a voice to stand against oppression. Remove religion from your ideology for a moment — move towards humanity. That is what Karbala teaches.”
What the Quranic Verses Say — and Why They Are Relevant Here
The Quran does not prescribe *taziya* rituals. But several of its verses illuminate the ethical ground on which this participation rests.
Surah Al-Hujurat, verse 13 states: *”O mankind, indeed We have created you from male and female and made you peoples and tribes that you may know one another. Indeed, the most noble of you in the sight of Allah is the most righteous of you.”* The verse places righteousness, not religious identity, as the measure of a human being. The *taziya* traditions across communities are, in their own way, an expression of precisely this.
Surah An-Nisa, verse 135 commands standing as witnesses for justice even when it is personally costly. Imam Hussain at Karbala is the embodiment of that command. Many Hindu participants invoke the same moral clarity when explaining their involvement.
Surah Al-Maidah, verse 32 speaks of the sanctity of a single human life — that killing one innocent person is as the killing of all humanity. The massacre at Karbala, in which martyrs lay unburied in the desert heat, sits directly in the shadow of that verse.
And Surah Al-Baqarah, verse 256 affirms: “There shall be no compulsion in religion.” The Hindu families who build taziyas, carry them and make personal vows before them come voluntarily. They come because something in the story of Karbala calls to something in them. The Quran itself, in this verse, leaves the door open.
In Bengal, Grief Became a Shared Art Form
In Bengal, the Muharram tradition produced jarigan— narrative elegies performed during the month of mourning. Hindu musicians have historically participated in these performances alongside others, bringing their instruments and their particular tradition of devotional music to the shared work of remembrance.
This is a documented pattern across Indian culture: grief, when it is large enough and old enough, stops belonging exclusively to those who first felt it. It becomes material that artists from different traditions work with, each contributing what their own inheritance has given them. The result belongs to the region, not to any single community within it.
What These People Are Actually Doing
Consider the full picture: a Hindu grandmother in Bihar passing her grandchild beneath a *taziya* for protection. A Brahmin family in Odisha who have led the same procession for 360 years. Dalit women in Awadh reciting elegies before sunrise. Craftsmen in Rajasthan pressing mustard seeds into the shape of a shrine. Hussaini Brahmins in Punjab for whom Karbala is family memory. Sharma families in Madhya Pradesh for whom the *taziya* procession is older than any living person’s recollection.
None of these people are performing tolerance. Tolerance is a low bar: it means bearing something foreign without objection.
What these people are doing is different. They have encountered the story of a man who gave up everything rather than surrender his conscience, and they have found in it a reflection of values they already held. The farmer who will not give up his land. The mother who will not abandon her child. The young man who refuses to accept that power and right are the same thing.
They bring mannats — personal vows — to the taziya: prayers for sick children, for troubled households, for the harvest, for protection. They bring the full weight of their lives to the memory of a man who, in a desert in Iraq thirteen centuries ago, decided that some things cannot be surrendered. And in doing so, they have kept that memory alive in places where, by any demographic logic, it should long ago have faded.
The Taziyas Rise Again
Every Muharram, across India, the taziyas* rise.
In Bihar villages where no Muslim has lived in anyone’s memory. In the lanes of Hyderabad where Yadava men carry the sacred standards. In Rajasthan workshops where craftsmen press mustard seeds with patient hands. In the courtyard in Sambalpur where a Brahmin family prepares for a tradition their ancestors began in 1664. In Awadh villages where Dalit women lift their voices in the dark before dawn.
The structures themselves — bamboo and paper and tinsel and mustard seeds — are not built to last. They will be immersed, dissolved, returned. What lasts is the practice: the annual decision, made across communities and generations, that the events of Karbala deserve to be remembered.
Hussain stood in a desert with 72 people against an army and chose principle over survival. Fourteen centuries later, in villages and cities across India, non-Muslim families are among those ensuring that choice is not forgotten.
The *taziya* moves through the street. Hands that fold before different gods reach out to hold it steady.
That, without embellishment, is the story.
