Modernities Remade: Hindu temples and their publics in southern India

Abstract

This paper deals with the contending visions of self and community that are imagined, enacted, and critiqued in the social space of religious institutions. It focuses specifically on the ideological claims made on Hindu temples during the 1990s in Chennai, a large south Indian city that has seen capitalist transformation and increased Hindu nationalist sentiment during the past decade. While temples at times have served as stages for nationalist claims, more often they are visible in consumer and tourist discourses as nostalgia-infused emblems of Indic "traditions." As such, they are popularly described as being threatened less by Muslims and Christians than by unplanned and speculative development. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, I focus on the competing visions of modernity and publicity that are engendered in the contentious relations among temple constituencies in the context of recent debates on "heritage." These debates reveal that Hindu temples are sites on which pasts are imagined, encountered, and deployed in a variety of ways-bodily practices, prayers, mythic narratives, iconic images-and I argue that these are media for vernacular expressions of modernity.

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