This panel brings together scholars of religion, anthropology, and law to analyze the spatial politics of contested sites of worship in South Asia. It examines how legal structures in colonial and postcolonial South Asia have served to shape the spatial politics of contested sites, and the interrelations between the multiple religious communities in the region. The papers delve into the dynamics between multiple groups of worshippers, navigating fluid spatial histories and analyzing ritual expressions of practice and solidarity. They investigate a range of previously-unexplored contested sites in South Asia, including the Baba Budan Shah Dargah in Karnataka, Mughal-era mosques legally confirmed as "temples," the Sufi Shrines in Sri Lanka, and, finally, the public spaces of Chennai associated with Muslim women’s ritual presence and solidarity. Together, they serve to connect the politics of particular religious spaces with the broader legal and cultural themes of making and unmaking of sacred spaces.
This paper traces the birth and journey of the Hindu image, from its inception in English colonial jurisprudence to its hasty and irregular application in post-colonial India. Through a tactful use of ancient Hindu texts, colonial legislations, practices and case laws, this paper argues that the image of the Hindu deity occupies a unique position in Indian society, such that it is unfit to belong or be justified by any of the western theories of legal personhood. It is the hasty, colonial application of these theories and its subsequent development that has today created a phenomenon that can no longer be justified by the contours of law.
The campaign to ‘liberate’ the Baba Budan Shah Dargah in Karnataka from any Islamic history and purify it for exclusive Hindu usage as a Dattatreya Peetha has proceeded through multiple strategies: political, judicial, and devotional. Today the fate of the site remains ambiguous as some tactics gain traction and others become less salient. By examining the ebbs and flows of the spiritual, legal, and partisan approaches to laying claim to this site, this paper will elucidate the tensions and contradictions between the arenas of authority mobilized in the struggle to claim exclusivity at a once-shared sacred site.
Sufi shrines in Sri Lanka are vital nodes of Islamic piety and materiality amidst a landscape of Buddhist majoritarianism and ethno-religious violence against Muslim minorities. Contemporary shrine cultures are a generative prism through which to understand this political, social, and religious context. In my ongoing fieldwork, spanning ten years, I have been mapping Sufi shrines to understand both their historical and contemporary developments, especially in relation to saints (awliya). In this paper, I show that though stories of saints via shrines embed the islands’ geography within Muslim cosmological and metaphysical roots and routes, they are also fragile archives due to the island’s ongoing ethno-religious contestations.
This paper argues that the seemingly apolitical aspects of religious and social life—prayer, marriage, and domestic rituals—are also expressions of political and moral will.rom December 2019 to March 2020, India was engulfed in protests against the new Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). The CAA is the first time in the post-colonial Indian legal landscape that religion is being used as a criterion for citizenship. When protesters exclaim that they will not show their papers, it is not just a form of political dissent; they are also alluding to affective ties to place, kinship, and traditions that temporally and spatially exceed the prescriptive nature of the demands of the state to prove one’s citizenship via documents.