Bus-Stop Sami: Transient Temples in Urban South India

Abstract

Wayside shrines are a ubiquitous feature of urban India. A site for community building and income-generation for their mostly poor and working class patrons, they are increasingly a source of anxiety for middle class residents who fear their capacity to morph quickly into full-fledged temples. Through a comparison of two roadside shrines, one that was successful at attracting a group of followers and one that was not, the paper analyzes the rhetorical and ritual means that the human representatives of a deity employ to transform ordinary, homogenous public space into sacred space, where a deity may take Her seat and be honored. Such a transformation of the way that space is experienced and understood can have a catalytic effect on the people who move through it, creating new publics who exist in tension with an increasingly influential vision of public space as hygienic, orderly and free from religion.

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