1. Barkat and Happiness: South Asian Sufi Shrines in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

During the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, architectural spaces of Sufi shrines in South Asia affected the ideas, feelings, and behavior of the shrine-based communities. Acting as/Being a medium between humans’ thinking, memory, feeling, and their surroundings, architecture has the capacity to invoke various emotions such as happiness and sadness in them. The intensity with which architecture can influence the human emotion can at times be quite overwhelming. Sacred Sufi architectural spaces in South Asia perform similar functions, where people perform various rituals to attain baraka and experience the emotion of joy and happiness