| Sumario: | Khiṭābat (oratory) is a regular and integral part of the ritual lives of Urdu-speaking Shiʿa devotees in contemporary Karachi, Pakistan. Drawing on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that indexicality, the physical relationship between a sign and its context of use, is necessary to any analysis of oratory. My emphasis on the physical contexts redresses the existing emphasis on referentiality (meaning) or pragmatism (function) with which scholars approach oratory. I make my argument by attending to the ways in which the first, fifth, seventh, and ninth Shiʿi imams, the male descendants of Prophet Muhammad and around whom the Twelver Shiʿi tradition later coalesced, were invoked by orators during my fieldwork, with each invocation indelibly intertwined with the physical contexts in which it took place.
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