Shared Sacred Sites in South Asia

Description

Across the world, religious and cultural identities are being weaponised for political gains. South Asia is no exception, with frequent conflicts between faith communities strengthening politico-religious organisations, and severely straining social cohesion. Yet this region also has a history of religious intermingling, exemplified by shared sacred sites such as saints’ tombs, temples, churches, and natural elements serving as places of worship.

Such ‘sites in common’ offer rich insights into the dynamics of religious interaction. This book investigates them through two key questions. First, it examines what shared places of worship can reveal about plural societies in the midst of persistent religious and ethnic nationalism. Are they exceptional? Do they reflect or transcend socio-religious fault lines? The authors approach coexistence as a tensile equilibrium, in which conflict is no stranger to sharing: South Asia’s shared sacred sites are seen as social laboratories, where communities experiment with pluralism and its challenges. Second, the contributors consider the politics of belonging, questioning the boundaries between groups and religions. They examine the logics at work in people’s visits to places outside their own religious affiliation, challenging theoretical frameworks of religious demarcation and showing the importance of other markers, such as caste, class, language and gender.

Author(s)

Laurent Gayer is CNRS Senior Research Professor at CERI-Sciences Po. He is the author of Karachi and Gunpoint Capitalism, and the co-editor of Muslims in Indian Cities; Armed Militias of South Asia; and Shared Sacred Sites in South Asia (all published by Hurst). He is also the co-author of Proud to Punish: The Global Landscapes of Rough Justice.

Christophe Jaffrelot is Avantha Chair and Professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at the King’s India Institute, and Research Lead for the Global Institutes, King’s College London. He teaches at Sciences Po CERI, where he was director between 2000 and 2008.

Aminah Mohammad-Arif is Research Director at France’s CNRS (Centre national de recherche scientifique), and an affiliate member of the Centre d’études sud-asiatiques et himalayennes (CNRS-EHESS). She is the author of numerous journal articles, and of books including Politique et Religions en Asie du Sud. Le sécularisme dans tous ses états? (co-edited with Christophe Jaffrelot).

Grégoire Schlemmer PhD is an anthropologist and researcher at the Institut de recherche pour le développement, based at the Migrations and Society Research Unit (URMIS), Université Paris Cité. His research focuses on issues of religion and belonging in Nepal and Laos.