In this chapter, we continue to contemplate the importance of space in the construction of modern South Asian religion. Our focus shifts, however, from the turn of the century period to consider how religious space ‘becomes public’ in contemporary contexts. In making this shift in time, we need to develop a point made right at the end of the previous chapter: that notions of the public have developed rapidly over this period. The channels through which debates over religious space – and images and sounds associated with such space – are communicated have expanded and otherwise developed immeasurably since the days of Rokeya Hossain and Taribai Shinde, even if we have presented the work of these two as entering into very modern public spaces themselves. The case study of the TV Ramayan in Chapter 4 also gives us some idea of the impact of new forms of media on the representation of religious traditions. We might even say that these forms of media construct new public spaces. This is an idea that has been taken up by the influential social theorist Arjun Appadurai (1996), who uses the concept ‘mediascape’ to speak about the influence of forms of media on globalized imaginings of the contemporary world, particularly in relation to connections across diaspora communities. The potential implications here for the imagining of religious space are dramatic, and indeed some authors have worked with Appadurai’s ‘scape’ notion to produce the idea of ‘religioscapes’ (McAlister 2005) as religious maps formulated subjectively in global terms, through different contexts of media and mediation. The TV Ramayan is a good example of this, as it demonstrates the power of such new public spaces to shape broad perceptions of mythic texts (like the Ramayana) into representations ‘of religion’, in this case ‘of Hinduism’. As we move through this chapter we will deploy this idea of a religioscape as we look at how particular religious spaces have been imagined in global terms.
Our analytical focus also shifts in this chapter, returning to our overall theme of how to conceptualize religious traditions in modern South Asia. We want to work outwards from the case study to consider what we will term ‘conflicting paradigms’; that is, different and competing models for understanding religion, in the context of specific religious spaces. In the first part of this book we have seen how South Asian religious traditions consistently challenge established ways of thinking about religion – issues such as ritual, myth and even notions of the divine do not seem to conform to a clear, orderly pattern configured by discrete systems of belief and practice. In the second part of the book, we have examined ways in which ideas about such discrete systems have begun to provide a template (or paradigm), a way of organizing religious traditions in South Asia that has become increasingly influential. This of course is the dominant mode of understanding religion in the modern world, but it is one that much of our evidence suggests has only partial relevance to understandings of South Asian religious traditions. In this chapter we are going to consider different ways of looking at contemporary religious phenomena, and ask directly if one or another is more valid. That this is a significant exercise in terms of contemporary politics and social relations in the region is amply demonstrated by our case study.
Case Study: Ayodhya, a North Indian Pilgrimage Town
Ayodhya is a town in Uttar Pradesh (UP), very close to the city of Faizabad. It is well known as a pilgrimage town, as it has a plethora of Hindu temples as well as other religious sites. You might also know the name from the Ram-katha, as Ram’s kingdom in that story is known by that name. Ayodhya is the realm from which Ram is banished, and to which he returns in triumph, after the defeat of Lord Ravana and the rescuing of Sita. It is important to recognize, of course, that there is what might be termed a generic difference between Ram’s Ayodhya and the town of Ayodhya in UP. Ram’s kingdom exists in the multi-layered, mythic world of the Ram-katha. The Ayodhya in UP is a town that has developed over several centuries; it was previously known as Saketa, before assuming the name Ayodhya by the seventh century CE. It has significance as a site of Buddhist and Jain pilgrimage, as well as being marked as an important Hindu pilgrimage town from the eighteenth century (van der Veer 1989: 37). Ayodhya is recognized as a tirtha; that is, a place that acts as a contact or crossing (literally, a ford) between the divine and the human worlds, often associated with a sacred river (in this case, the Sarayu).
Because of its link with Ram’s kingdom, there are several sites in the town that are associated with the epic tale. In particular, various sites have claimed the status of the place of Ram’s birth, including one on which a mosque has existed since the sixteenth century. During the late nineteenthand twentieth-century period, and especially since the 1980s, this site has become a flashpoint for communal tension between Hindus and Muslims. In 1992 the mosque, known as the Babri Masjid, was destroyed by a large group of Hindus, allegedly with the assistance or tacit agreement of certain state forces. This was a major event in modern Indian politics. In the wake of the destruction of the mosque, many thousands of people were killed in riots that took place in towns and cities across north and western India. The stated objective of those who destroyed the mosque was to build a temple to Lord Ram on this site. As we write in 2010 this has still not been achieved, and the matter is still the subject of legal dispute.1
This rather long introduction provides some background to our case study material, which consists of two short vignettes set in Ayodhya, the north Indian pilgrimage town.
A: A Report by the BBC Journalist Mark Tully
On 6 December 1992, I was standing on the roof of a building with a clear view of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. A vast crowd, perhaps 150,000 strong, had gathered and was listening to speeches given by BJP and right-wing Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) leaders. Trouble first broke out in the space below us when young men wearing bright yellow headbands managed to break through the barriers.
The police stood by and watched, while some men wearing saffron headbands and appointed by the organizers to control the crowd did try to stop them. They soon gave up, however, and joined the intruders in beating up television journalists, smashing their cameras and trampling on their tape recorders. Encouraged by this, thousands charged towards the outer cordon of police protecting the mosque. Very quickly, this cordon collapsed and I saw young men clambering along the branches of trees, dropping over the final barricade, and rushing towards the mosque.
The last police retreated from the mosque, their riot shields lifted to avoid being hit by stones the crowd was throwing at them, and two young men scrambled on top of the mosque’s central dome and started hacking away at the mortar.
(Tully 1992)
Figure 11.1 Ayodhya, 6 December 1992: kar sevaks on top of the Babri Masjid.Credit: Douglas E. Curran/AFP/Getty Images.
B: A Report by Indian Journalist T.K. Rajalakshmi on Sufi Shrines in Ayodhya, which Appeared in the Indian News Magazine Frontline in 2003
The Dargah of Sayyed Mohammad Ibrahim, named after a seventeenth century figure, was fiercely protected by the local people, including several Hindus, when its dome was attacked in December 1992. Sayyed Mohammad Ibrahim is believed to have been born during the reign of the Mughal emperor Shah Jehan and ruled a small principality. Influenced by Sufi teachings, he renounced his worldly pursuits. According to local legend, he arrived in a boat, pictures of which are depicted on his shrine. A large number of Hindu halwais, or confectioners, from the Hanumangarhi area visit the shrine every Tuesday and make offerings and distribute prasad.
(Rajalakshmi 2003)
Figure 11.2 The Dargah of Sayyed Mohammed Ibrahim Shah. Reproduced courtesy of Vidya Bhushan Rawat.
Task
Examine the two vignettes and jot down or discuss what questions they pose to us about religion in Ayodhya.
These two scenarios obviously depict very different views of religious life in Ayodhya. You may have been prompted to ask which is more representative. Does vignette A represent an approach to religion that has been influenced much more by outside pressures, whereas B reflects a longer, internal tradition of religiosity? You may also have asked whether scenario A reflects Hinduism, and B Islam. Considering this issue, you may have noted that scenario B includes reference to Hindu involvement with the shrine, even if it is nominally Islamic as the shrine of a Sufi saint. This includes protecting the shrine during the dark days of 1992 when the Babri Masjid was being destroyed. Such evidence points us away from the stark and simplistic qualitative division implied by a Hindu/Muslim dichotomy between these vignettes.
One question you might have raised is what scenario A has to do with religion at all. Many commentators have indicated that the dispute over the Babri Masjid is really the work of politicians, and its objectives more to do with enabling certain political forces to gain power than with religious conviction. Certainly this is a view that is expressed by some local people as recorded in Rajalakshmi’s article. It is also a common view of communal conflict in general: that it is largely caused by power-hungry elites who are able to manipulate the emotions of the general public as and when they need to (see also Chapter 9 on this). In order to test such statements, we really need to understand the context within which the specific actions described in vignette A came about. We will do this below. As with the idea that one reflects Hinduism and the other Islam, we need to be careful here of the conceptual binary that lies behind this marking out of religion and politics as two separate spheres. As we have seen in Chapter 10, the way in which religion enters the public sphere is frequently contested, subject to the play of a range of discourses. The idea that shrine worship is a kind of ‘traditional’, or quietist, activity, as implied by this binary, is also something that has been challenged in Chapter 6. We will see a reiteration of this idea in some of the instances we look at in this chapter. At the same time, we need to ask whether these two scenarios do indeed represent two different paradigms of modern South Asian religion: the one configured by practices based on relationships between gurus and their followers, and on spiritual pathways associated with divine forces; the other configured by religious systems marked out as discrete and even conflicting in terms of belief and practice. As we explore Ayodhya and other sites in more depth, we will see how far such paradigms can help or hinder our understanding of the realities of South Asian religious traditions.
Babri Masjid/Ram Janmabhoomi
As indicated above, several sites in the town of Ayodhya have claimed to be the birthplace (janmabhoomi) of Lord Ram, the hero of the Ram-katha. The site we are concerned with, of course, is distinctive, in that it had been occupied by a mosque since 1528. This mosque was established by Mir Baqi, a general of the Mughal emperor Babar, in the wake of the pacification of the region, then known as Awadh. It is alleged by Ram Janmabhoomi supporters that Mir Baqi destroyed a temple in order to build the mosque, and one dimension of the dispute has subsequently been detailed argumentation over archaeology, as the veracity of this claim has been explored and tested (Mandal 1993; ASI 2003).
For many, the destruction of a temple and building of a mosque is perceived as symbolic of a wider idea: that the period of Mughal rule was accompanied by the mass destruction of Hindu temples as a means of oppressing and exerting power over the ‘indigenous’ population. This view is indicative of a particular paradigm of religiosity at work: one that perceives Hinduism and Islam as two different religious systems, associated with separate communities who act in relation to one another on the basis of that difference (for examples from press reports that place this confrontation in a broader, global perspective, see Ludden 2005: 2–4). As we noted above, this kind of essential binary is suspect when exploring the messy pathways of human history and social relations. Certainly, the idea that the Mughal dynasty was responsible for this kind of systematic action is highly debatable. Richard Eaton (2000, 2004), the distinguished historian of the medieval period in northern India, has demonstrated that temple destruction, where it did occur, was most often the result of particular political circumstances associated with conquest and patterns of patronage. For the most part, he says, ‘temples lying within Indo-Muslim sovereign domains … were left unmolested’ (Eaton 2000: 127). The historian Peter van der Veer concurs, noting that ‘there seems to be nothing definite to say about the attitude of Muslim rulers and officials in the Mughal period towards Hindu institutions’ (1987: 287). In addition, the representation of medieval Hindus as ‘indigenous’ and Muslims as ‘outsiders’ is also highly dubious, as by far the largest number of Muslims across India were people who converted to Islam or otherwise assumed a Muslim identity over time (on conversion, see also Eaton 2000); only a very small minority of the ruling Mughal elite could trace their ancestry to the Persian origins of this dynasty. On the projection of Indian Muslims as outsiders, Eaton refers to a much earlier eminent historian, Mohammad Habib, who comments rather wryly and with some feeling:
the peaceful Indian Mussalman, descended beyond doubt from Hindu ancestors, was dressed up in the garb of a foreign barbarian, as a breaker of temples, and an eater of beef, and declared to be a military colonist in the land where he had lived for about thirty or forty centuries.
(Eaton 2000: 95)
Important though it is, however, in one sense this historical work is beside the point, as the Babri Masjid has, in a manner similar to that noted about the veil in Chapter 10, assumed larger, symbolic meanings in different public contexts. A key force in the development of this process has been the so-called Sangh Parivar, or ‘family of organizations’. This network, led by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), or National Volunteer Force, is the principal exponent of Hindu nationalism, the form of militant Hindu identity we have referred to at various points in this book. For the Hindu nationalists of the Sangh Parivar, the existence of the Babri Masjid was symbolic of the dishonouring of the Hindu nation. As the female Hindu nationalist politician Sadhvi Rithambara noted in a speech in 1991, ‘the Ram temple is our honour. It is our self-esteem. It is the image of Hindu unity’ (quoted in Kakar 1996: 221).
The kar sevaks (volunteer activists) mentioned by Tully as the protagonists in the destruction of the mosque in 1992 were mostly members or supporters of this network. The two organizations mentioned, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), are key institutions in the network. In the decade prior to the mosque’s destruction, these organizations were highly instrumental in bringing the issue to a national stage, particularly through a series of processions that sought to locate the Ram Janmabhoomi site at the heart of a sacred Hindu geography (Jaffrelot 2004: 212). Other campaigns looked to mobilize Hindus worldwide, through, for example, the provision of blessed bricks to be used in the building of a magnificent new temple (Davis 2005) (Figure 11.3).
Figure 11.3 Bricks imprinted with the name of Ram, to be used in the building of the temple. Credit: DIPTENDU DUTTA/AFP/Getty Images.
As we noted in Chapter 4, it has also been argued by some commentators that Ramanand Sagar’s screening of the Ramayan on national television during the late 1980s was influential in popularizing the Sangh’s campaign. Overall, this panoply of strategies has been flagged by the Religious Studies scholar John Stratton Hawley (2006: 259) as signifying the development of ‘a sleek new Hinduism that could circumvent, cut through, repackage and obscure the old’, in which the figure of Ram is situated at the heart of a glorified, assertive Hindu identity.
Although Hawley has marked this out as something new, we should remember that the dispute at the Babri Masjid does have a history. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the site became a focus for tensions in the locality, which sometimes developed into full-blown dispute. A key moment occurred in 1855. Ayodhya was at this time under the control of the Nawabs of Awadh, a succession of rulers who had replaced the Mughals as the dominant regime of the region in the eighteenth century. Peter van der Veer (1987: 288) argues that it is during the period of Nawabi rule that Ayodhya flourished as a pilgrimage town. By 1855, however, real power lay with the dominant force in the subcontinent, the British, and Awadh was to be annexed in 1856 to become part of the British empire. In these last, unstable days of Nawabi rule, a dispute developed at another major religious site in Ayodhya, the Hanumangarhi temple complex. Some familiar themes emerged. A group of Sunni Muslims under the leadership of one Ghulam Hussain claimed that a mosque had earlier been present at this site, and that it should now be re-established. This dispute spilled over to include the Babri Masjid site, where violence between followers of Hussain and Ramanandi naga ascetics resulted in the death of about seventy Muslims. Subsequent unrest threatened to develop across Awadh, but a potential retaliatory assault under the leadership of Maulvi Amir-ud-din was quelled by British troops. Soon afterwards, Awadh was annexed by the British, with the events in Ayodhya seeming to indicate the Nawab’s loss of control of the region.
Some writers have suggested that the focus on the Babri Masjid site in this early dispute is misplaced – it was a dispute about Hanumangarhi, with the role played by the Babri site being inconsequential, only to become more central in subsequent years as an act of retaliation (Panikkar 1990). Whatever was the case, by 1859 the colonial authorities had constructed a railing at the Babri Masjid site, with the perceived objective of bringing some order by dividing Hindu from Muslim worship. This strategy provided a kind of spatial re-ordering of religious practice at a site where, as the then-commissioner P. Carnegie observed, ‘up to that time the Hindus and Mahomedans alike used to worship in the mosque-temple’ (quoted in van der Veer 1992b: 98). Note here that Carnegie refers to the site as a ‘mosque-temple’, evoking a sense of cross-tradition worship that is reminiscent of the Dargah of Sayyed Mohammad Ibrahim. Of course, the key point of installing the railing was to attempt to prevent further disorder in the wake of 1855, but behind this motivation we may detect a deeper assumption: that the idea of a ‘mosque-temple’ is itself threatening, as it cuts through an understanding of Hindu and Muslim practice as discrete and separate. In this sense, we might see the installation of the railing as an attempt also to install a different paradigm of religiosity in Ayodhya, one that fitted more clearly with established British understandings of what religions are. You may see this as a little fanciful (after all, it was only a railing!), but a key theme of Part II of this book has been to consider how the ‘encounter with the West’ in the modern era (from the nineteenth century onwards) has instigated some quite radical changes to the ways in which religions are perceived and organized. If, then, in Chapter 9 we focused on the construction of religious boundaries, the railing in Ayodhya is a kind of physical manifestation of this process.
One of the arguments we put forward in Chapter 9 was that these boundary-constructing processes were related to the development of antagonism and the notion of communalism in South Asia. Notwithstanding the apparent motivation behind the installation of the railing to diffuse tension at the Babri Masjid site, we can see that here also the ‘construction of religious boundaries’ appears to have encouraged some measure of antagonism and separation. Even though Ayodhya was by no means a communal hotspot in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it did suffer major riots related to cow slaughter/protection in 1912 and 1934. In both these instances, the Babri Masjid was attacked. In the immediate post-Independence period, the situation came to a head with the placing of an image of Ram within the mosque itself. In the wake of this act, the site was locked and public worship disallowed, apart from Hindu worship once a year. This situation remained unchanged until the mid-1980s, when the cause of Ram Janmabhoomi was taken up so vociferously by the Sangh Parivar.
The site, then, has a history that includes both dispute and cross-community co-operation, interwoven with and responding to the history of other sites in the locality, which also include incidents of dispute and co-operation. The actions in the 1980s and early 1990s of the Sangh Parivar, and in response the hastily formed Babri Masjid Action Committee, are part of this history. In the contemporary era, however, the implications of these dynamics are projected onto a radically broadened stage, as the media techniques of the Sangh and the interest of global news agencies engender the dispute over the Babri Masjid/Ram Janmabhoomi site as symbolic of larger truths, involving much larger imagined communities. As the historian K.N. Panikkar (1990: 33) remarks, ‘a local tradition … is now sought to be made into an matter of national faith.’
During this same period, the Dargah of Sayyed Mohammad Ibrahim continued to function, providing a focus (one of many in the town) for the devotional activities of both Hindus and Muslims in Ayodhya. There are two differences between these sites that we can point out at this point. First, of course, the Dargah has not been ‘made into a matter of national faith’ – that is, it does not exist in the same kind of religioscape as the Babri Masjid/Ram Janmabhoomi, and so perhaps does not carry the same kind of symbolic value. Second, the Dargah continues undemonstratively as a shared space, whereas the Masjid/Janmabhoomi dispute is increasingly articulated in terms of monopoly – the site is claimed exclusively by two apparently mutually exclusive communities. We will return to the idea of the religioscape in the final section of this chapter. First, we should focus in on that idea of the organization and ownership of space.
Space and Power in South Asian Religious Traditions
The dichotomy between a shared and a monopolized perception of religious space seems to be at the heart of the conflicting paradigms we have proposed in this chapter. Moreover, the history of the Babri Masjid/Ram Janmabhoomi site seems to suggest that shared space is giving way to monopolized space as religious traditions in modern South Asia develop. Is this the dynamic through which we should understand contemporary, postcolonial traditions? To address this question, we explore two further examples of shared space in a contemporary context. Examining trends in these spaces will give us some indications of how we might understand the significance of our conflicting paradigms.
Madhu
The first example provides us with another context of conflict, although this conflict has developed rather differently from that at Ayodhya. The shrine at Madhu in northwestern Sri Lanka has in recent years been caught up in the civil war that has raged on the island since the early 1980s. The shrine is constituted through the presence of ‘Our Lady of Madhu’, a statue of the Virgin Mary that is said to have been present at the site since the seventeenth century, even though the church on the site dates back only to the 1870s. The shrine and the community around it is said to have suffered persecution in the mid-seventeenth century, from a combination of Dutch colonists and the local ruler of Jaffna. In the context of this persecution, the statue was removed and concealed, only then to be miraculously rediscovered in the trunk of a tree on the site of the current church compound. The spot where the tree is said to have stood is now one of the focal points of the shrine, as the earth is recognized as carrying healing power.2
The recent conflict provides the context for a kind of echo of this sacred history. In 2008 the compound came under fire from government troops as Tamil Tiger forces stationed themselves within the compound itself. At this point the statue was removed again, sharing, as the Sri Lankan journalist Amantha Perera (2009) states, ‘the fate of many Sri Lankans, becoming a refugee as it was carried from church to church’. The statue was restored to the Madhu shrine in November 2008, and in July and August 2009 it was the site of major celebrations, attracting an estimated 500,000 pilgrims (Perera 2009) who travelled to the site in the wake of the war. Although the statue itself was unharmed, other parts of the Madhu shrine were damaged by shelling during the war, including the side church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, where the image of Jesus and the structure of the church have both suffered severe damage – in this state, this area has now become a key focal point of the shrine, with pilgrims tying coins to and taking blessing from the broken statue.
Sri Lankan Catholics are drawn from both the Sinhala and the Tamil communities, and both attend the shrine. More than this, however, the shrine is very much a cross-tradition space, with Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims also attending the festival. At the 2009 festival, the symbolism of this cross-tradition experience was very much apparent, in terms of both comment in the press and reflection amongst pilgrims at the site. Here, then, the shrine’s power is presented as a kind of pathway to reconciliation, as the country reflects on the terrible consequences of the civil war.
At the same time, there are some signs of contestation over this space. Part of its power emerges from its recognition as sacred to the Buddhist goddess Pattini Amma, a fertility goddess associated with smallpox and protection against other dangers.3 For many, this multiple perspective is of course simply a reaffirmation of the sacred power of the site itself, a space of spiritual power. There is, however, some indication of dispute at Madhu, associated with the Catholic Church’s initiative in the early twenty-first century to have the site recognized both nationally and internationally as a Catholic institution of special significance. At this point, some Sinhala commentators objected to the idea that the site should be ‘claimed’ by one religion in this way, with one contributor to a Sri Lankan social networking site commenting that Madhu is ‘equally sacred to Buddhists, Hindus, Mohammedans and non-Catholic Christians’. The Catholic church, the article continues, should ‘tender an apology for misappropriating a place sacred to other religions and return the site to its original incumbents, the Sinhala Buddhists and move their Church somewhere else’ (Gamage n.d.).
Here, then, we can see different tendencies at the Madhu shrine. On the one hand, its modern trajectory is as a shared space, symbolizing reconciliation in the wake of the war. On the other hand, there are signs of contestation, which are articulated in terms of both resisting and claiming monopolization over this space.
Saundatti
Our next example is drawn from the work of the anthropologist Jackie Assayag (2004) on shrine worship in the state of Karnataka, south India. Assayag describes the myriad interactions in a sacred space near Saundatti, where the shrine of the Sufi saint, Bar Shah, exists side by side with a variety of Hindu sanctuaries, dominated by the temple to the goddess Yellamma. The shared nature of this space is demonstrated at a range of different levels – physical, yes, but also architectural, mythical and in forms of worship. Importantly, however, the nature of this sharing is mediated by specific identifications amongst devotees.
For example, Assayag (2004: 200) recounts two local myths about the establishment of the site as sacred. One of these tells of how the goddess, afflicted with leprosy by her vengeful husband, the ascetic Jamadagni, came upon Bar Shah, who took pity on her and cured her leprosy (Yellamma is a goddess much associated with leprosy and other diseases of the skin). In gratitude Yellamma served Bar Shah faithfully for twelve years, after which time the saint granted her space to settle freely at Saundatti, where she had remained ever since. However, when Assayag recounted this story to some local devotees of Yellamma, belonging to the low Banajiga caste, they denied any knowledge of it, and instead recounted a story whereby Bar Shah antagonized Yellamma through his constant cursing of her. In response the goddess blinded the saint, who thereafter realized his mistake and began to worship the goddess faithfully. Through this constant devotion Bar Shah was able to regain his sight, and remained indebted and devoted to the goddess from then on. Here, then, we can see the entanglement of mythic tales at Saundatti, whilst they remain quite separate in some ways for different groups. Even in the localized environment of Saundatti, as you can see, this group of Banajiga devotees appears not to have heard the alternative myth of the establishment of the sacred space, nor of course would they countenance its authenticity.
This kind of ‘discrete entanglement’ is also evident in forms of worship. Observing Hindu practice at Sufi shrines such as that of Bar Shah, Assayag (2004: 197) comments that they:
readily visit Muslim shrines, where they break coconuts, burn incense, offer flowers and clothes and give money. For example, the saris given by these devotees are used to cover the poles of the panjahs when they are taken out in procession during Muharram. Just as the Muslims ‘describe a circle’ (hajj) around the dargah, Hindus too make a pradakshina of the shrine. While the former go right inside the dargah to touch the saint’s tomb, the latter only go there to have a darshana at the figure they treat as a god. But whether it is just by looking or by direct touch, the result is the same. They both absorb a part of the extraordinary charisma.
Assayag comments that this is an important form of cultural adjustment. It does not work by some form of syncretism, but precisely by a differentiation that works by dissociation: particular groups retain (or reshape) their underlying values and practices to preserve their distinctness while participating alongside one another at the same shrine, in a manner reminiscent of the reports of ‘Buddhist’ and ‘Hindu’ involvement at the Madhu shrine in Sri Lanka.
Rather than essentializing the underlying identities at Saundatti as Hindu and Muslim, we need to see them as locally inflected. This is not to deny that the person who also participates in namaz at a particular mosque does not recognize him- or herself as differentiated from the person who performs puja in a particular temple, but that the grounds for differentiation may themselves be multiple – based on caste, area inhabited and so on – as also may be the ways of thinking about the self. This multiplicity enables groups and individuals engaged by these sacred spaces to develop a common, related yet also separated tradition. As Assayag (2004: 206) says, they do this by ‘devising stories to suit their interests, adjusting behaviour and adapting opinions and practices according to varying needs and circumstances’. What this demonstrates, he continues, is that ‘neither religious symbols nor social behaviour remain static as systems inherited from the past and followed mechanically’, but rather that ‘ideological and pragmatic patterns are being periodically renegotiated by the protagonists’ (p. 206).
This then is a nuanced view of the dynamics of religious identification and practice; these are frequently in a process of ‘renegotiation’, in dialogue with the various contexts that inform and embrace them, including of course the contextualization provided by other protagonists sharing the space. Our examples have demonstrated that these dialogues include disputation and claims to monopolization in the act of sharing, as well as (at Madhu) projections of shared space that are informed by the discrete ideas of religious identity we have earlier identified as paradigmatic of a possible trend towards monopolization. The paradigms with which we began this chapter, it seems, move in mysterious and unpredictable ways. Although we began by presenting them as a binary, two opposed models for South Asian religious traditions, it seems that as we look at actual practice, this dichotomization is not clear. Ideas of shared and monopolized space seem to overlap each other and lead to different trajectories of development in different contexts. This evidence, then, suggests that the answer to our question about whether shared space is giving way to monopolized space is a cautious ‘no’, simply because the patterns of practice and associated pronouncements do not preclude the presence of one or another understanding of religious space: they seem to exist and operate together.
The Religion Twist: Looking Across Religioscapes
From the point of view of the student of South Asian religious traditions, then, you may be quite justified in asking where this leaves us. In Part II of this book, we have seen how notions of specific, discrete religions have gained influence in South Asia in the modern period. In Part I, we explored the evidence of equally modern religious practice and ideas, some of which emphasized the relative lack of significance of these discrete religions. Monopoly and sharing. What the evidence in this chapter shows is that these are not so much two ways of being; more that they are two (or more) ways of seeing. In exploring the reality of South Asian religious traditions, there are times when approaches based on recognizing and working to explore layers of connection and diversity will bear rich fruit. There are other times when recognizing the operation of distinct and discrete religious systems is the only way to understand the logics behind particular ideas and practices. These models (paradigms) act as heuristic devices. The point is to remember that they are devices, that they constitute ways of seeing, rather than mistaking them for reality itself. In the examples provided in this chapter, we can see that both have a value, both can be deployed in a way that develops understanding, but neither is sufficient. Even when considering the dispute over the Babri Masjid, which seems to epitomize the paradigm of discrete religions, understanding the value of shared space is important, as it enables us to see the dynamics of Carnegie’s ‘mosque-temple’ in a broader context, part of a much wider and deeply rooted tradition. A critical approach to the issue of the dispute in Ayodhya needs to acknowledge multiple contexts, rather than allowing any particular one to constitute an absolute reality.
This point brings us back to an issue with which we began this chapter: the spaces we have been studying are constituted differently ‘in reality’, because they are contextualized in different religioscapes. To recap, the idea of the religioscape develops from the theoretical work of Arjun Appadurai (1996), who has recognized the influence of different forms of media on the ways in which people understand or construct social life. Some scholars have articulated this idea in terms of religion, to represent the notion of layers of meaning for different forms of religiosity, formulated in the context of different media spaces. Earlier in this chapter, we noted that the Babri Masjid seems to carry a very different symbolic meaning from the Dargah of Sayyed Mohammad Ibrahim, because they are projected in different religioscapes.
A useful and very quick task that might illustrate this idea is to google three of the terms used quite frequently in this chapter: ‘Babri Masjid’, ‘Madhu shrine’ and ‘Yellamma’.
In carrying out this task, the first thing you will notice is the dramatic contrast in the number of hits between the first, which figured for us at nearly 8 million, and the last two, which numbered in the tens of thousands. Beyond this, you might have noted the range of issues to do with law, politics, communalism, Islam and Hinduism that are immediately apparent in the Babri Masjid hits. This contrasts with the narrower results that come up for both Yellamma and Madhu. The Babri Masjid, it seems, exists in an entirely different set of spaces. It has a range of meanings that resonate much more broadly than those associated with the Madhu shrine or the Yellamma temple in Saundatti. This is ironic in one way, as it is the only one of these three buildings that does not have a physical existence. Its meanings are nevertheless resonant in forms of politics and social relations that are perceived as significant to people not just in India, but across the region and indeed the globe. It has been put in this position, of course, because of the influence of a range of powerful groups who view it as a building with a wide significance, much beyond its (erstwhile) physical dimensions.
Understanding religion in South Asia means taking account of these differences, acknowledging the power of such projections. In particular, we should acknowledge that the global religioscape in which the Babri Masjid exists is one that is deeply influenced by the dominant discourse of ‘religion’. In 1855, the difference expressed in the vicinity of the Babri Masjid may be understood in terms of the varying practices and counter-claims of local Ramanandi nagas and Sunni Muslim groups. In the context of a global contemporary religioscape, the dominant lens through which these differences have been articulated is this discourse of religion. The totalizing tendencies of this discourse, the vast resources of the groups involved and their ability to deploy a range of media techniques mean that the manifestations of difference at this site have had a very wide and at times deadly significance. The power of these factors also means that the identification of this dispute as indicative of an inexorable difference between Hindus and Muslims is quickly constituted as reality. It is important, however, to maintain the capacity to see these events in a different way, as part of a broader history of contestation and negotiation in South Asian religious traditions. In this context, we hope that you will see the value of our conflicting paradigms as heuristic devices that can be deployed effectively to maintain critical distance and provide a range of perspectives on this most contentious of examples of modern South Asian religious traditions.
Concluding Thoughts
About ten kilometres from Ayodhya lies the small village of Shahnawan, with about 2,500 Muslim and 1,000 Hindu inhabitants. Amongst other small shrines, you will find here the mazar (tomb) of Mir Baqi, the general of the Mughal emperor Babar who constructed the Babri Masjid. It so happens that the army general was also a Sufi practitioner, and his burial place has since become a shrine, attracting devotees amongst the villagers and further beyond from a range of different communities. Interestingly, in recent years the villagers of Shahnawan have been approached by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, who have offered to rebuild the Babri Masjid at the site of Mir Baqi’s mazar, as long as all Muslim claims to the site of the Babri Masjid/ Ram Janmabhoomi are dropped. These offers have been resisted, with one Muslim villager commenting, ‘We already have two mosques and three mazars. We don’t need any more. Besides, these people cannot be trusted. Our village will become a hub of VHP activities if we agree to their offer’ (Srivastava 2010). Another villager, Shamsher Singh (a Hindu), is recorded as commenting:
We have a strong oral history. Muslims of this village used to maintain not only the Babri Masjid but also the temples, including Hanuman Garhi in Ayodhya… . My father Kanhaiya Baksh Singh was village chief for 45 years because Muslims voted for him. He would clean the mazars every day. We clean it even today whenever we get time. Our sons and daughters offer prayer there.
(Srivastava 2010)
How do different ways of looking, the application of different paradigms and an awareness of the idea of different religioscapes help to analyse and understand the predicament of Shahnawan, and the comments of these villagers? We will close this chapter in, as it were, an open fashion, by leaving this as a discussion point, bearing in mind our discussions of the contested perceptions and multiple meanings of religious space explored in this chapter.
Questions for Further Discussion and Research
Assayag, Jackie (2004) At the Confluence of Two Rivers: Muslims and Hindus in South India, New Delhi: Manohar.
A wide-ranging anthropological analysis of shrine worship and other contemporary religious practices in Karnataka.
Eaton, R. (2000) Essays on Islam and Indian History, New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
A range of essays based on careful historical work that explore the relationship between different social groups in medieval South Asia.
Hawley, J.S. (2006) ‘Militant Hinduism: Ayodhya and the momentum of Hindu nationalism’, in J.S. Hawley and V. Narayanan (eds) The Life of Hinduism, Berkeley: University of California Press.
A short but very thought-provoking account exploring different approaches to Ayodhya.
Ludden, D. (ed.) (2005) Making India Hindu: Religion, Community and the Politics of Democracy in India, 2nd edn, New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Some interesting and challenging essays on the development of militant Hindu nationalism.
Van der Veer, P. (1987) ‘“God must be liberated!” A Hindu liberation movement in Ayodhya’, Modern Asian Studies 21 (2): 283–301.
An early but stimulating essay on the Ayodhya dispute, based on ethnographic work in Ayodhya.