Religion And The City In India

This book offers fresh theoretical, methodological and empirical analyses of the relation between religion and the city in the South Asian context. Uniting the historical with the contemporary by looking at the medieval and early modern links between religious faith and urban settlement, the book brings together a series of focused studies of the mixed and multiple practices and spatial negotiations of religion in the South Asian city. It looks at the various ways in which contemporary religious practice affects urban everyday life, commerce, craft, infrastructure, cultural forms, art, music and architecture. Chapters draw upon original empirical study and research to analyze the foundational, structural, material and cultural connections between religious practice and urban formations or flows. The book argues that Indian cities are not ‘postsecular’ in the sense that the term is currently used in the modern West, but that there has been, rather, a deep, even foundational link between religion and urbanism, producing different versions of urban modernity. Questions of caste, gender, community, intersectional entanglements, physical proximity, private or public ritual, processions and prayer, economic and political factors, material objects, and changes in the built environment, are all taken into consideration, and the book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of different historical periods, different cities, and different types of religious practice. Filling a gap in the literature by discussing a diversity of settings and faiths, the book will be of interest to scholars to South Asian history, sociology, literary analysis, urban studies and cultural studies.

The speed and scale of urbanisation in India is unprecedented almost anywhere in the world and has tremendous global implications. The religious influence on the urban experience has resonances for all aspects of urban sustainability in India and yet it remains a blind spot while articulating sustainable urban policy. This book explores the historical and on-going influence of religion on urban planning, design, space utilisation, urban identities and communities. It argues that the conceptual and empirical approaches to planning sustainable cities in India need to be developed out of analytical concepts that define local sense of place and identity. Examining how Hindu religious heritage, beliefs and religiously influenced planning practices have impacted on sustainable urbanisation development in Jaipur and Indian cities in general, the book identifies the challenges and opportunities that ritualistic and belief resources pose for sustainability. It focuses on three key aspects: spatial segregation and ghettoisation; gender-inclusive urban development; and the nexus between religion, nature and urban development. This cutting-edge book is one of the first case studies linking Hindu religion, heritage, urban development, women and the environment in a way that responds to the realities of Indian cities. It opens up discussion on the nexus of religion and development, drawing out insightful policy implications for the sustainable urban planning of many cities in India and elsewhere in South Asia and the developing world.

The speed and scale of urbanisation in India is unprecedented almost anywhere in the world and has tremendous global implications. The religious influence on the urban experience has resonances for all aspects of urban sustainability in India and yet it remains a blind spot while articulating sustainable urban policy. This book explores the historical and on-going influence of religion on urban planning, design, space utilisation, urban identities and communities. It argues that the conceptual and empirical approaches to planning sustainable cities in India need to be developed out of analytical concepts that define local sense of place and identity. Examining how Hindu religious heritage, beliefs and religiously influenced planning practices have impacted on sustainable urbanisation development in Jaipur and Indian cities in general, the book identifies the challenges and opportunities that ritualistic and belief resources pose for sustainability. It focuses on three key aspects: spatial segregation and ghettoisation; gender-inclusive urban development; and the nexus between religion, nature and urban development. This cutting-edge book is one of the first case studies linking Hindu religion, heritage, urban development, women and the environment in a way that responds to the realities of Indian cities. It opens up discussion on the nexus of religion and development, drawing out insightful policy implications for the sustainable urban planning of many cities in India and elsewhere in South Asia and the developing world.

"Handbook of Religion and the Asian City highlights the creative and innovative role of urban aspirations in Asian world cities. It points out that urban politics and governance are often about religious boundaries and processions--in short, that public religion is politics. The essays show how projects of secularism come up against projects and ambitions of a religious nature, a particular form of contestation that takes the city as its public arena. Asian cities are sites of speculation, not only for those who invest in real estate but also for those who look for housing, for employment, and for salvation. In its potential and actual mobility, the sacred creates social space in which they all can meet. Handbook of Religion and the Asian City makes the comparative case that one cannot study the historical patterns of urbanization in Asia without paying attention to the role of religion in urban aspirations"--Provided by publisher.

So far religion has been seen as cause for dramatic developments in the history of cities, it has contributed to the monumentalisation of centres and or has given importance to ex-centric places. Very recently, anthropologists have been discovering religion in the contemporary global city. But still awaiting historical investigation is the specific urban character of religious ideas, practices and institutions and the role of urban space shaping this very ‘religion’ in the course of history. The time-span from the Hellenistic age to Late Antiquity was crucial in the establishment of concepts and institutions of ‘religion’ and witnessed extended waves of urbanisation, Rome being central to this. In addressing this problem, this book fills a significant gap in the scholarship on urban religion across time. Taking seriously the proposition that space is condition, medium and outcome of social relations, the development of ‘urban religion’ in lived urban space and urban culture or urbanity offers a lens onto processes of religious change that have been neglected for the history of religion and for the study of urbanism. The key thesis is that city-space engineered the major changes that revolutionised religions. »This stimulating book makes use of archaeology and history to address religion as an essential component of urban life in both the past and the present. -With a strong basis in the ancient Mediterranean as well as an insightful view of modern urban life, Rüpke emphasizes that the practice and performance of religion at the everyday level is as essential in the creation of an urban ethos as the grand temples and institutions promulgated by the elite.« Monica L. Smith, author of Cities: The First 6,000 Years »Jörg Rüpke offers a characteristically original and learned series of reflections on some of the many ways in which the history of religions and the history of cities might be entangled. Urban Religion offers no single overarching thesis, but it is consistently thought-provoking and suggests many intriguing lines of investigation for the future.« Greg Woolf, Institute of Classical Studies, London

With more than 150 million people, Muslims are the largest Indian minority but are facing a significant decline in socio-economic as well as political terms - not to say anything about the communal waves of violence that have affected them over the last 25 years. In India's cities, these developments find contrasted expressions. While Muslims are everywhere lagging behind, local syncretic cultures have proved to be resilient in the South and in the East (Bangalore, Calicut, Cuttack). In the Hindi belt and in the North, Muslims have met a different fate, especially in riot-prone areas (Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Jaipur, Aligarh) and in the former capitals of Muslim states (Delhi, Hyderabad, Bhopal, Lucknow). These developments have resulted in the formation of Muslim ghettos and Muslim slums in places like Ahmedabad and Mumbai. But (self-)segregation also played a role in the making of Muslim enclaves, like in Delhi and Aligarh, where traditional elites and the new Muslim middle class searched for physical as well as cultural protection through their regrouping. This book supplements an ethnographic approach of Muslims in 11 Indian cities with a quantitative methodology in order to give a first hand account of an untold story.

Handbook of Religion and the Asian City highlights the creative and innovative role of urban aspirations in Asian world cities. It does not assume that religion is of the past and that the urban is secular, but instead points out that urban politics and governance often manifest religious boundaries and sensibilities—in short, that public religion is politics. The essays in this book show how projects of secularism come up against projects and ambitions of a religious nature, a particular form of contestation that takes the city as its public arena. Questioning the limits of cities like Mumbai, Singapore, Seoul, Beijing, Bangkok, and Shanghai, the authors assert that Asian cities have to be understood not as global models of futuristic city planning but as larger landscapes of spatial imagination that have specific cultural and political trajectories. Religion plays a central role in the politics of heritage that is emerging from the debris of modernist city planning. Megacities are arenas for the assertion of national and transnational aspirations as Asia confronts modernity. Cities are also sites of speculation, not only for those who invest in real estate but also for those who look for housing, employment, and salvation. In its potential and actual mobility, the sacred creates social space in which they all can meet. Handbook of Religion and the Asian City makes the comparative case that one cannot study the historical patterns of urbanization in Asia without paying attention to the role of religion in urban aspirations.