Description
Even if India remains largely rural, hundreds of millions of people live in cities and mega-cities across its territory. This massive urban concentration is accompanied by a number of social and material rearrangements and innovations that affect the lives of these city dwellers. From the religious perspective, in the last twenty years or so, a new “temple-building boom” along with many old temples now undergoing an “urban renewal” (Waghorne 2004) can be observed. However, the development of cities has also seen an increasing number of “wayside shrines”. By this term, I mean –as a preliminary working definition– a site of worship that is immediately adjacent to a public path, visible from it, and accessible to any passerby. Using Lefebvre’s rhythm analysis the paper looks at a number of religious sites in this area: shrines, temples, mosques, make-shift altars, etc. and looks at how these multi-religious sites are produced, maintained, and erased within specific biological, psychological, and social rhythms, orchestrating a unique form of everyday religion. Drawing from my current fieldwork material collected in the neighborhoods of Somvār Peṭh and Rāstā Peṭh, in the city of Pune this presentation creation and negotiation of “sacred” space and the often illegal material expression of religiosity in public space. Although wayside shrines often appear in many ways as non-threatening to anyone —a reason why perhaps they have been largely ignored by both scholarship, but also not given much importance by organized religion themselves— wayside shrines are certainly an important alternative to official places of worship.| Period | 19 Feb 2021 |
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| Held at | Mythouse, United States |
| Degree of Recognition | International |