Making Sufism popular. A few notes on the case from the Marathi Deccan. Dušan Deák Department of Comparative Religion Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia In: Deccan Studies (July-December), Vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 5-24, 2013. ISSN 0973-2292 Introduction However contradictory it may seem, holy men of India are religious figures only in a very narrow sense. Emphasizing their role in religion, their spirituality, deep knowledge of the world around, and (let us not forget) supernatural powers, can blind us to recognize the man behind the holiness. Indeed, holiness is such a broad category, and perhaps completely wrong category to match the South Asian societal beliefs and practices, that it is worth looking at the man behind the holy than solely getting lost in the latter. Certainly, viewing the people who, in several ways and with different degrees of intensity, are respected, venerated, talked to, resorted to, or addressed with pleas for help, and last but not least, considered to be God’s people on Earth, only through the lens of religion would mean omitting all social, economic and political contexts that relate to their personalities and that were well documented long before today. 1 Holy men of India are much more. They make their societal presence so vivid that avoiding it would not only be a mistake, but closing the door to them as the very people of the social. 2 In other words, even if their celestial association may be for a social scientist rather unclear, let us at least not forget how terrestrial they appear to be. Many religiously venerated figures of Indic past have a strong presence in the various self- articulations of South Asian society. Holy men write literature (consider the popular pre- modern texts in new Indo-Aryan languages); are among the first to express social protest; initiate social reforms; or enter the sphere of socio-politics to become a spokesmen of the local and national social collectives. 3 So, there is hardly any walk in the Indic cultural life which would be devoid of some aspect of their presence. Broadly understood, holy men may, therefore, be the mirror in which we find society rather than them themselves. And wasn’t this perhaps what they live for and why they become remembered as special, as helpful, as holy? Understood as perfect and perfected societal figures, holy men allow us to delve deeper into the mechanisms/processes of societal functioning. Examining tradition is certainly one way to approach the latter and for this paper a crucial one. Clearly, traditions do change, evolve, revolve and get invented too, as Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger along with their collaborators and other scholars showed us many years ago. 4 Perhaps the most important for our purpose here is to recognize that invented traditions become as valid as those that preceded them. Many people who keep certain beliefs and practices may not be even aware of any of their invented character. Of course, the people do not keep track of the history of the changes which the practices and ideas they believe to have come from their ancestors have undergone. For a social scientist it is then worth observing, documenting, and analyzing how that which changes turns real in terms of social beliefs and practices. In this paper I will try to