- 192 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
This book asks us to consider what is absent, rather than what is present, when studying religions. Priya Swamy argues that absent religious spaces are in themselves abstract locations that painfully memorialize feelings of shame, oppression and marginalization. She shows that these 'traumas of absence' – the complex, entwined and emotional responses to absent spaces – can be articulated through mob violence and destruction, but also anticolonial struggles or human rights issues. This study focusses on the absence of temples across the global Hindu diaspora, taking the tumultuous narrative of the Devi Dhaam community in Amsterdam Southeast as a central location to detail the over thirty-year struggle to build a Hindu temple in a neighbourhood of vibrant mosques and churches. In 2010, their makeshift space was pulled away from them, provoking tears among elderly devotees, rage among board members and devastation in the wider community. Leaving their goddess with no place to live, some devotees feared for the dangerous repercussions that would follow from uprooting a divine presence from its home. By exploring the ways in which the trauma of absent religious spaces has become a formative aspect of localized but also globalized Hindu identity, this book rethinks the way that empty lots, piles of rubble and abandoned buildings around the world are themselves powerful monuments to the trauma of absent temple spaces that mobilize campaigns for Hindu spaces.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Halftitle Page
- Title Page
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- A note on spelling and in-text interviews
- Introduction
- 1 Absence: Affect, space and Hindu religiosity
- 2 Absence, secularism and the conditions of belonging: Situating the Devi Dhaam struggle
- 3 Late and lost: Absent temples and racialized time in southeast Amsterdam
- 4 Makeshift religious space: Remembering the Devi Dhaam temporary space (1997–2009)
- 5 Acts of refusal in the Devi Dhaam office space: Absence, return and darshan
- 6 Politics, refusal and resistance: Absent temples in global contexts
- Notes
- References
- Index
- Imprint