Hinglaj Devi

Abstract

The shrine of the Goddess Hinglaj is located in the desert of Balochistan, Pakistan, about 215 kilometers west of the city of Karachi. Notwithstanding its ancient Hindu and Muslim history, the establishment of an annual festival at Hinglaj took place only recently, “invented” in the mid-1980s. Only after the construction of the Makran Coastal Highway (MCH), a road that now—coincidentally—connects the formerly distant desert shrine with urban Pakistan, was the increasingly confident minority Hindu community able to claim Hinglaj as their main religious center, a site for undisturbed religious performance and expression. This book describes the dynamics that emerged after this dislocation, examining the political and cultural influences at work at the Hinglaj temple, and tracks this remote desert shrine’s rapid ascent to its current status as the most influential Hindu pilgrimage site in Pakistan. Primary among these dynamics is the influence that the temple organization, the Hinglaj Sheva Mandali (HSM), has exerted and continues to exert on the holy site’s ascent to prominence. The book demonstrates how the HSM’s members from the Lohana community (a Sindhi merchant caste) utilize discourses of rationality and enlightenment to propagate and solidify their own parochial beliefs and rituals at the shrine, holding them out as the only “proper” interpretation of the tradition for the Goddess’s worship. The book deals with the overarching theme of the Pakistani-Hindu community’s beliefs and practices at their largest place of worship in the Islamic Republic today.

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