This [Temple] is an illegal construction, a typical case of land-grabbing. People do this to get power and earn money. This is not the right type of temple [...] 99% of the temples are constructed illegally [...]. The people don’t build houses but temples because they know that in this case no one can do anything against it and they can simultaneously earn money with it. Behind the shrine they can build their house in peace. All this happens because people are uneducated.'1
This statement by a top bureaucrat in the Bhopal administration summarises a widely felt sentiment among urban planners in India. For many bureaucrats, temples are nuisances, traffic obstructions, acts of landgrabbing, or means of political assertion that contribute to inter-religious tensions. By contrast, builders, trustees or worshippers defend temples as spaces of divine manifestation, as responding to religious needs and providing space for religious festivals and community activity. In this article, I use the case study of the establishment of a controversial goddess temple in Bhopal to shed light on a fundamental rift between two ideal-type approaches to the city – as a secular place and as religious territory. This is an abiding theme of my research on urban temples, which was undertaken in Bhopal, the capital city of the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, over a total of twenty months between 1995 and 2001.2
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa:de:qucosa:70900 |
| Date | 04 June 2020 |
| Creators | Rao, Ursula |
| Contributors | Kolleg-Forschergruppe 'Multiple Secularities - Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities |
| Source Sets | Hochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/submittedVersion, doc-type:workingPaper, info:eu-repo/semantics/workingPaper, doc-type:Text |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | urn:nbn:de:bsz:15-qucosa2-167259, qucosa:16725 |
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