A sacred space (that) is not merely discovered, or founded, or constructed; (but) it is claimed, owned, and operated by people advancing specific interests. (Chidester & Linenthal, 1995, p. 15)
BORN IN A Brahmin family, I was introduced to Hindu religious texts and rituals at a very young age. Regular visits to temples were a standard feature of my upbringing, thanks to the numerous religious festivals in India. I was (and am to this day) always intrigued to note how people behave differently inside and outside a temple. Many followers believe that a temple is a āsacredā living abode of God and anything that takes place in it should be āpureā in all respects. To maintain purity, some Hindu temples prohibit the entry of women at all times (a few restrict their entry only during menstruation), labelling them as āimpureā. The notion of sacred place is mostly restricted to the interior of a temple, although rituals are often performed around it. This interrelationship is an interesting illustration of the working of āsacredā in the Indian context and how it sometimes creates a boundary between genders and even followers of the same or diverse religions.
My interest in understanding the working of sacred places grew further while conserving various religious sites ranging from medieval churches to cathedrals in the United Kingdom. I was completely baffled to see the de-consecration of several churches due to the lack of a congregation and later, their conversion into secular places ā sometimes even pubs. For me, it was unthinkable for a temple in India to be converted into a place with a non-religious function due to the perceived values associated with religious structures. I decided to delve deeper into understanding the sacred and its construction, which culminated in my doctoral thesis, āThe Control of āSacred Placeā: Conflicts over the MahÄbodhi Temple at BodhgayÄ in Northern Bihar, India, from 1874 till 2012ā. I visited BodhgayÄ several times between 2009 and 2013 for fieldwork during my doctoral studies and was amazed at the paucity of knowledge and scholarship on BodhgayÄ as a contested multivalent place, the interrelationship between ritual events that occur in the immediate surrounding landscape of the MahÄbodhi, and the (re)construction of the āsacredā. My experiences in the United Kingdom and India and four years of active interaction with BodhgayÄ and its people made me aware that socio-cultural aspects play a significant role in understanding and experiencing the sacred.
As per a well-known Asian proverb, āThere are a thousand Hamlets in a thousand peopleās eyesā ā one text, a thousand interpretations. Similarly, the notion of the sacred can be interpreted in different ways by different cultures, but none should be treated as either good or bad, but equally appropriate. Once I completed my doctoral studies on the construction and reconstruction of sacred places, I turned my attention to the complex socio-cultural history of BodhgayÄ and how it influences the development and understanding of its contested sacredness. The complex roles of various local communities, pilgrims, and tourists in the power dynamics of BodhgayÄ and the authoritative heritage discourses became immensely enjoyable to me. The seven chapters that make up this book are a result of that research.
After several years of experiencing sacred places both in the East and the West, I became convinced that in the Indian context, the significance of sacredness goes beyond scriptural texts and archaeological remains per se. It lies mainly in the active interaction of sacred architecture with its dynamic ritual settings. For example, in the case of the MahÄbodhi Temple, it is inherently not a sacred place. It is an ordinary physical place that has been constructed as extraordinary mainly through dynamic ritual-architectural events. This statement is an assertion that I will qualify by assessing the attributes of sacredness in the following chapters. I make this statement at the very beginning of this book to highlight the theoretical problem that since āsacredā is associated with āsupernaturalā, the construction and constitution of a sacred place must be devoid of profane forces. However, by exploring specific instances, such as the Great Case of 1895, I argue in this book that since ādivineā and āsupernaturalā have multivalent meanings in different religions or even different sects of the same religion, it is highly likely that a sacred place would be interpreted in different and even conflicting ways by various communities that use it for various religious performances. Therefore, it is vital that the sacredness of a place is not recognized only in terms of architecture and canonical scriptures, but also how its users interact with it socially, culturally, and politically and produce various identities through such activities.
Our understanding of a place as a shared resource is limited when our attention and gaze is on historic structures and events related to a specific cultural group. It limits our understanding of a place as a shared resource. In BodhgayÄ, such narrow consideration in the last century or so has created boundaries that often exclude non-Buddhist communities from being a part of a more diverse and large cultural community. In this book, I explore specific narratives to illustrate BodhgayÄs rapid transformation from a shared sacred place to a fractured touristscape due to the decisions or recommendations made by so-called religious doyens, heritage experts, and bureaucrats attempting to safeguard heritage with too little understanding of the workings of sacred sites and limited or no community engagement to make any significant impact on the lives of stakeholders/users. In addition, several proposed development projects in BodhgayÄ in the past few years have created a divide between the authorities responsible for policy planning and the actual users of the local heritage, who are often apprehensive about the idea of rapid development, rather than managing the change through better understanding about the continuing evolution of the place and its immediate surroundings. The MahÄbodhi Temple complex and its surrounding landscape are ālivingā heritage, which has been produced socially and embraces differential densities of human involvement, attachment, and experience. It is highly unlikely that everyone can equally share and experience these places in a similar way as written in the official discourses, which are often produced without a developed understanding of ālivingā culture.
A Brief History of Sacred Scholarship
Emile Durkheim (1915/1964), Rudolf Otto (1923/1936), and Mircea Eliade (1957/1959) are some eminent scholars who have written significantly on the supernatural sacred. By this, I mean the sacred that is predominantly related to the spiritual world, which is separate from the profane. Most of the past monumental work described the sacred as something fundamentally opposite to profane. However, none explained the origin of the sacred. It is interesting that several past scholars who have written about the sacred have mainly examined only one aspect of religious belief ā totemism. The methodological rationale for not examining their own contemporary and complex religion, like Christianity, or any other religion, say Hinduism, to discuss religion and the sacred is never convincingly explained by the scholars mentioned earlier. Additionally, some of them, including Durkheim, obtained their information on totemism from other ethnographers, mainly Christian missionaries and administrators working in remote areas. They later interpreted the material obtained from other sources based on their understanding of Judeo-Christian religious traditions. For example, in Ottoās view, āChristianity ā¦ stands out in complete superiority over all sister religionsā (1923/1936, p. 146). Such Western-centric thoughts about the sacred have informed and even expanded my thinking in significant ways while writing this book. I have tried to recognize and emphasise in the following chapters what Smith (2004) stated while citing LĆ©vi-Strauss, among others,
When we confront difference we do not encounter irrationality or bad faith but rather the very essence of thought. Meaning is made possible by the difference. Thought seeks to bring together what thought necessarily takes apart utilising a dynamic process of disassembling and reassemblage, which results in an object no longer natural but rather social, no longer factual, rather intellectual. Relations are discovered and reconstituted through projects of differentiation. (p. 246)
It is through the careful study of differences that subtle similarities can be discovered. BodhgayÄ is undoubtedly one such interesting layered, living, religious place, having related to various world religions. Thinking about BodhgayÄ, I strove to apply the established theoretical discussions of a sacred place to understand its intricate workings. However, I was unable to grasp its intricacy and cultural significance fully until I explored the concept of the āhuman sacredā that is entirely different from the āsupernaturalā. The human sacred is all about peopleās experience and interaction with the existing real world. A humanized meaning-laden sacred place like BodhgayÄ is far different for everyone as it is infused with various densities of human experiences and understandings. Several studies have approached the topic of sacred architecture in India.
For example, research by Meister and Dhaky (1983; 1986; 1988; 1991; 1996; 1998; & 2001) primarily focus on the evolution of ancient north and south Indian temple architecture affiliated to various dynasties of that time; Michell (1977) provides an excellent introduction to the meaning and forms of the temple in Hindu society, but somehow fails to offer a link between the sacred architecture and the religious rituals and other agendas these buildings served; Kramrischās (1946/76) magnum opus illustrates the vastu-purusha mandala as the ritual diagram of squares, which she argues is the basic plan form of all Hindu temples; a brief discussion by Coomaraswamy (1992) on the pre-Aryan origins of the popular sacred tree cult, which according to him was later adapted by the local Buddhist cult, is significant in understanding the latterās development; Vatsyayanās (1991) edited volume studies the concepts of space through multidisciplinary studies such as art, architecture, and religion. It highlights the role of ritual space as an intermediary between the human mind and the divine.
The Study of MahÄTemple at BodhgayÄ
Some scholarly work (both published and unpublished) on how the MahÄbodhi Temple has been approached theoretically are available to us from the existing literature: Geary (2009) uses the metaphor of āglobal bazaarā to illustrate the commercial activities that are linked to and around the UNESCO World Heritage Site that is the MahÄbodhi Temple. Geary, in his thesis, highlights the ongoing commercial activities that happen in BodhgayÄ and associates them with the recent World Heritage Site designation of the temple complex, however, he completely overlooks the appropriateness of the World Heritage Site boundary, which was forced onto the locals by the authorities, who are based a few thousand miles away from BodhgayÄ, oblivious to the state of the locals. This high-handed top-down approach is the only reason for the failure of the implementation of several development plans prepared in the last few decades for the benefit of the stakeholders of the temple complex.
Trevithick (2006) highlights the role of Anagarika DharmapÄla in the history of the Buddhist ārevivalā at BodhgayÄ in particular, and in India at large. He uses the term ārevivalā to describe Buddhist pilgrimage at BodhgayÄ from 1811 to 1949. However, this apparently is not the actual picture at BodhgayÄ, since it is known that pilgrims regularly visited the site even before the arrival of the British East India Company officials at BodhgayÄ and their discovery of the Buddhist sites in subsequent decades. Since the Great Temple of MahÄbodhi was never lost and faithful pilgrims regularly visited this most sacred place, the question of its revival was out of the question and irrational. However, the in-depth detail of the legal case between DharmapÄla and the Hindu mahant (elder) of the BodhgayÄ Math provided by Trevithick is commendable.
Nugteren (1995) describes the rituals around the Bodhi tree(s) in the MahÄbodhi Temple complex to highlight the āmultivalentā nature of this sacred place. Doyle (1997), with the help of ritual performances, illustrates the two faces of BodhgayÄ ā one that is sacred to Hindus and the other to Buddhist pilgrims. Interestingly, all scholars overlook (either intentionally or un-intentionally) the presence of Muslims in BodhgayÄ. As per the Imam of Jami mosque in BodhgayÄ, Muslims have been living in the town since at least the fifteenth century CE. Furthermore, as increasing land prices in recent years are transforming BodhgayÄās traditional agricultural activities and sacred landscape into a fractured touristscape, it is not only important, but also necessary, to involve local mosque authorities in any discussion regarding the future of BodhgayÄ, as they own significant stretches of land adjacent to the World Heritage Site boundary of the MahÄbodhi Temple. By teasing out the polities and the politics of the temple site and thus removing the chaff and noise, this book attempts to understand and authenticate the longue durĆ©e practices as distinct from the short ones.
Shared Place, Contested Meanings: The Transformation of BodhgayÄ
BodhgayÄ is situated on the banks of the river Phalgu, which is located 8 miles south of the famous Hindu pilgrimage site of GayÄ in Bihar and is believed to be the place of the Buddhaās enlightenment. It is one of the four most sacred sites associated with the life of the Buddha and is also noted in the annals of Buddhism. The other three are ā Kapilavastu, his birthplace; SÄrnÄth, where he first promulgated his doctrine; and Kushinagar, the place of his parinirvana (nirvana-after-death). This holy place has found special mention
in several canonical texts and pilgrimsā accounts, which designate it as the only place where SiddhÄrtha Gautama could have attained the Bodhi, or perfect awakening, as well as the enlightenment place of all the fifty-two Buddhas of the past and future.
Xuan Zang, a famous seventh-century Chinese pilgrim scholar, visited BodhgayÄ in 629 CE and described it as a prosperous, flourishing town, especially when compared to GayÄ, which, according to him, was a desolate place. In a legend recounted by Xuan Zang, SiddhÄrtha spent six years of painful and profitless penance in an isolated cave (now known as MahÄkÄla cave) on a hill (presently known as PrÄgbodhi hill or DungeÅwarÄ«-devÄ« hill) before realizing the futility of self-mortification. He was admonished by the mountain deva of severe consequences if he continued his quest on the same mountain: āThis mountain is not the fortunate spot for attaining supreme wisdom. If here you stop and engage in the āsamÄdhi of diamondā, the earth will quake, and gape and the mountain be overthrown upon youā (Beal, 1884, p. ...
