My paper traces in part the historical itinerary of a Muslim saintly family, which traveled from the Hadhramawt in Yemen to the Malabar coast of South India and “back again” within two generations between the mid-eighteenth and the end of the nineteenth century. The father-son legacy continued to have an impact on religious and political life in India through the twentieth century and to this day, whereas, in the Arab world, their significance was mostly forgotten. Hence, in addition to offering a historical narrative of Indian Ocean connections, the paper interrogates the conventional historiography of “global transformations” and shows its inadequacy when confronting the changes that would have had to have taken place within and between these two distinct spatial areas—the Arab and the Indian—in order to effect this particular temporal divergence in the re-constitution of history and memory. How was such a constitution connected to the advance of European imperialism, colonial rule, and the reconfiguration of territorial divisions along the new international order, if at all? What were the local vectors of the transformation of religion globally? Quite simply, the history and memory of this family was contingent on the very specific fact of death and burial. However, the enshrinement of Sayyid Alawi’s grave in Malabar as a sacred site of pilgrimage was not the full story, and this is where the use of gender pries open a space between the global and local, between the synchronic and diachronic dimensions of death and (after)life. I attend to the formation, through colonial violence, of a local “Muslim masculinity” that was mediated by the trans-local Arab stranger-saints and the British but was not a spawn of either. I also examine the gender politics around converted Hindu women’s right to cover their torsos, a case in which the British “intervene” by refusing to recognize that it was even a question of right. Thus, the particular form of masculinity and femininity among the indigenous Mappilas (Muslims of Malabar) would emerge fractured along religious and secular lines that were drawn in interesting ways and illuminate the formation of a hybrid cultural space. At different historical moments within that space there were varying political intensities, which seemed to depend on the specific mix and intersections of local, national, and international networks.