Ursula Rao

The City as Secular Spaceand Religious Territory
Accommodating Religious Activism
in Urban India

Working Paper #21

Working Paper Series of the HCAS
“Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities”#21: Ursula Rao. “The City as Secular Space and Religious Territory: Accommodating
Religious Activism in Urban India.” Leipzig University, 2020.
© Ursula Rao
This Working Paper has been published online and can be downloaded fromwww.multiple-secularities.de/publications/working-papers or ordered in print via
email to multiple-secularities@uni-leipzig.de
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Please cite as:Rao, Ursula. “The City as Secular Space and Religious Territory: Accommodating
Religious Activism in Urban India.” Working Paper Series of the HCAS “Multiple
Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities” 21. Leipzig University, 2020.

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Content
Introduction ...................................................................................................... 3
Multiple Secularities and Religious Space ..................................................... 8
Negotiating Sacred Space ............................................................................... 13
Enshrining the Divine in the City ................................................................. 17
Conclusion ...................................................................................................... 24
Bibliography .................................................................................................... 26

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The City as Secular Space and Religious Territory
Accommodating Religious Activism in Urban India
Introduction
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 andproviding space for religious festivals and community activity. In thisarticle, 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 isan 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
Indians appreciate the notion of cities as planned places, the organisationof which is influenced by multiple concepts, systems and institutions, suchas the city’s master plan, a capitalist land market, building by-laws, or urban
1
2

Employee of Bhopal’s City Administration, Interview, November 6, 1996.
This paper is based on material collected over a total of 20 months of immersive
fieldwork in the Indian city of Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh) in the period between 1995 and2001. During research I mapped informal temples in the city of Bhopal, and researched
the history of and ritual activity at two major temples, the Durga Temple at Peer Gateand the Kali Temple at Pul Pukha. I spoke to and formally interviewed members of thetemple committees, regular visitors, religious authorities, people from the surrounding
neighbourhoods, members of the police force and the administration, as well as
politicians and political activists.
3infrastructure. However, many also insist that in addition to these humaninstitutions, gods and goddesses have agency and impose their own will on
the city. In dense neighbourhoods, the idea that humans must satisfy thedesire of divine agents leads to tensions that are hard to resolve.
By taking a close look at the coexistence of a planning perspective anda spiritual reading of the city, this paper addresses a topic that has only
recently begun to attract some attention from scholars of urban public
religion.3 In India, the continuously growing strength of Hindu nationalist
tendencies has prompted researchers to explore in much detail the multiple
intersections between politics and religion, and how these shape urban
cohabitation.4 Less explored is the critical conflict between bureaucratic
rationality and public expression of belief in divine agency that occurs inconflicts over shrines, mazars, temples, mosques, and occasionally churches.
The city administration’s position vis-à-vis informal/illegal religious sites isinformed by complex reasoning, and may be an expression of antipathy
to or sympathy for particular political projects or organisations.5 In thisarticle I will focus on concerns about urban spatial order and the responseof bureaucrats to the provocation of mushrooming urban sites of worship.6
A city littered with informally constructed sites of worship upsets notions ofmodernist urban planning, because the sites contribute to the widespread
problem of unregulated urban growth,7 and more specifically, are visible
3
4

5

6

7

José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
Edward Anderson and Arkotong Longkumer, “‘Neo-Hindutva’: evolving forms, spaces,and expressions of Hindu nationalism,” Contemporary South Asia 26, no. 4 (2018); Julia
M. Eckert, The Charisma of Direct Action: Power, Politics, and the Shiv Sena (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003); Thomas Blom Hansen, Urban Violence in India: Identity
Politics, ‘Mumbai’, and the Postcolonial City (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001); Ursula Rao,“‘Inter-publics’ Hindu Mobilization beyond the Bourgeois Public Sphere,” Religion &Society 2, no. 1 (2011).
Ursula Rao, “Eine Frage des Glaubens: ‘Illegale’ Tempel und der Kampf um die Gestaltung
des urbanen Raums in Indien,” Sociologus 50, no. 2 (2000); Ursula Rao, Negotiating
the Divine: Temple Religion and Temple Politics in Contemporary Urban India (Delhi:
Manohar, 2003); Ursula Rao, “Partition in Contemporary Struggles over Religious Spaces
in Bhopal,” in The Partition Motif in Contemporary Conflicts, ed. Smita Tewari Jassal andEyal Ben-Ari (Delhi: Sage, 2007).
The majority of religious buildings in India are constructed gradually without formal
permission. In the eyes of the administration, this makes them illegal constructions,while worshippers would see them as legitimate and thus necessary and justified. In areligious reading of the city, the legal/illegal dichotomy does not appear to be a useful wayof judging the religious sites, since they are associated with the will of non-human actors.
Gururaja Budhya and Solomon Benjamin, “The Politics of Sustainable Cities: The
4

evidence of belief in divine intervention. To urban planners, the city is
structured by human intention, while religiously attuned people insist thatthe agency of gods and goddesses must be taken into account alongsidehuman needs when organising urban neighbourhoods. By analysing thesocial negotiations that shape compromises between these two approaches,
this paper characterises a style of governance that defends the principle ofsecularism by carving out spaces of exceptions. In these spaces of exception,a human-centred understanding of territory is partly suspended to allow
for the construction of buildings that, according to believers, emerge indirect response to divine intervention.
To allow for an in-depth understanding of the contextual embeddingof such negotiation, I chose a case study of the contentious establishmentof Bhopal’s famous temple to the Hindu Goddess Durga. My discussionof this case illustrates the practices and procedures the administration
adopted to arbitrate in the dispute surrounding the temple.8 In this dispute,the city administration carefully moved back and forth between religious
and secular discourse, maintaining a fragile distinction between religion
and non-religion, while interlacing them in practice. The Durga Temple islocated at Peer Gate, one of the entrance gates to the famous grid-shaped
old city of Bhopal, which serves as a bazaar area and is also the locationof the Jama Masjid (Friday Mosque). In this densely populated part of
Bhopal, land is scarce and highly contested. Every major building activity
is noticed and easily read as a social assertion, whether it be by a richbusiness family, a caste group or a religious community. This applies inparticular to new sites of worship, which in a multi-religious society easily
fuel tensions between Hindus, Muslims and the administration, because
what to some is use of a valued site of worship appears to others as an act

8Case of Bengare, Mangalore in Coastal India,” Environment and Urbanization 12, no. 2(2000); Ranu Desai and Romola Sanyal, eds., Urbanizing Citizenship: Contested Spaces inIndian Cities (Delhi: Sage, 2012); Janaki Nair, The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s
Twentieth Century (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005).
The conflict at Bhopal’s Peer Gate concerns questions of religious devotion andpolitical Hinduism. Here I highlight the devotional aspect. For a detailed discussionof the political dimension of the controversy, see Rao, “Partition in Contemporary
Struggles.” For a discussion of the relation between spiritual inclination and Hindu
nationalism, see Rao, “‘Inter-publics’ Hindu Mobilization.”5

of aggression against other religious groups, a manifestation of irrational
belief, or a tactical move to encroach on public land.

Durga Temple, Peer Gate Crossing, Bhopal

The Durga temple is an example of such complex multi-directional
negotiations. From the beginning, this Hindu temple’s anti-Muslim
bias was apparent from the attitude of the members of its founding
committee who openly expressed their desire to marginalise Muslims
in the inner city of Bhopal. Equally, the successful establishment andformal installation of this embattled temple would have been impossible
without the activism of a large group of pious individuals who gathered
spontaneously at Peer Gate to pray to the Goddess Durga. These people,
who were not part of the core group investing in the temple, rallied behindthe construction of the establishment of an auspicious place of worship.
To prevent riots or violent clashes between believers and the police, orHindus and Muslims, the city administration had to carefully arbitratein the dispute over the temple, taking into consideration both its own
interest in implementing the law and activities associated with a Hindu
pantheon. The city administration was aware that for devout Hindus
the world is populated with non-human agents who are experienced inacting in this world and bestowing blessings on faithful devotees, while
punishing evil-doers. To command respect and arbitrate effectively,
the city administration had to take seriously this understanding of the6

world, while insisting that they – and not a goddess – have the authority
to allocate land for a temple. To work towards a resolution, bureaucrats
accounted for and accommodated religious belief within their planning,and suspended their secular reading of urban space for a specific timeand place.
I propose an analytical differentiation between secularism as an idea
and secularism as a practice. Secularism as an idea makes a conceptual
distinction between religion and non-religion when looking at society;secularism as a practice is a technique of rule for intervening in society
and negotiating the relationship between the religious and non-religious.
In this paper, my focus is on secularism as a practice. I am not asking what
secularism is, but how it is done.
While in India, the state is separate from religious institutions andgrants religious freedom, there are multiple examples of the state directlyintervening in religious matters or arbitrating between religious groups.
While the Indian notion of secularism as ‘equal respect for all religions’has been debated extensively in political philosophy,9 there is much lessresearch on the operationalising of the concept of secularism on the ground,beyond a few select examples, such as the notorious Ajodhya controversy10
or the contentious debates about the existence of separate civil laws.
In these debates the potential bias of state institutions in favour of
one religious community often figures prominently. There has been lessresearch on the bureaucratic practice of arbitrating between religious
groups, or balancing religious and non-religious interests, which is partof the ordinary flow of everyday life in India. This throws up multiple
challenges since every act of arbitration or interference might be interpreted
differently by different social groups. In this situation, state agents are
hard-pressed to maintain the image of neutrality and struggle to establish
a widely accepted politics of fairness.
Rajeev Bhargava, ed., Secularism and its Critics (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998);
Rajeev Bhargava, The Promise of India’s Secular Democracy (Delhi: Oxford University
Press India, 2010); Akeel Bilgrami, “Two Concepts of Secularism: Reason, Modernity
and Archimedean Ideal,” Economic and Political Weekly 29, no. 28 (1994); Anthony
Copley, “Indian Secularism Reconsidered: From Gandhi to Ayodhy,” Contributions toSouth Asia 2, no.1 (1993).
10 For a recent publication, see Manoj Mate, “Constitutional Erosion and the Challenge to
Secular Democracy in India,” in Constitutional Democracy in Crisis?, ed. Mark Graber,
Sanford Levinson, and Mark Tushnet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

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The case of the Hindu Durga Temple in Bhopal involved forging acompromise that members of all affected communities would accept as
just, fair and appropriate. As Hindus wanted to build a Durga temple in alocation that Muslims opposed, there was a need for arbitration by neutral
outsiders. Defined to mean ‘equal respect for all religions,’ the commitment
to secularism obliges state institutions to take seriously the needs of all
religious communities, which in this case included assertions by people who
believe in divine intervention. What should be done when the purported
will of a Hindu deity interferes with the interests or rights of anotherreligious community? Should the state be required to shift registers andaccommodate the alleged will of the Goddess, even though non-believers
would frown on such a practice and accuse the administration of giving into superstitious beliefs? In the following, I will present how Bhopal’s secular
city administration resolved the tension between Hindus and Muslims, andin doing so analyse secularism as a practice. Here, secularism describes a
particular set of actions that inform political practice.

Multiple Secularities and Religious Space

By introducing the concept of Multiple Secularities, Monika Wohlrab-Sahrand Marian Burchardt11 developed an analytical tool for speaking about
various contextual ways of distinguishing religious from non-religious
domains. Thereby they can account for multiple institutional differentiations
and conceptual distinctions, which might differ significantly from theparticular European experience of secularisation or secularism. Linked to the
Enlightenment, modernity and accompanying political struggles, the term
‘secularism’ signifies the ideology of separating church and worldly rule inEuropean history, as well as the push towards privatising religion. In a postcolonial order, it is also associated with European imperialism and its effects
on societies across the globe. However, in the history of religions across theworld, many different ways of drawing boundaries between religious and

11 Monika Wohlrab-Sahr and Marian Burchardt, “Multiple Secularities: Toward a Cultural
Sociology of Secular Modernities,” Comparative Sociology 11, no. 6 (2012).
8

non-religious domains have prevailed. Calling these “secular dynamics,”12
Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt seek analytical language to speak aboutsuch instances comparatively:
In order to make visible what we regard as the foundational effect of secular
dynamics, namely the social construction of the boundaries of religion,
we pursue a strictly analytical understanding of secularity. This social
construction is the outcome of contestations over the way in which religion
is culturally defined, socially and legally delimited, politically regulated andspatially as well as temporally arranged.13

According to Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt, secular dynamics respond toreference problems, or specific social challenges that prompt reflections
on the public role of religion, which in modern nation states might beconcerns over individual freedom, national integration, inter-religious
relations or institutional independence.14 This sociological view on religion
serves as a useful lens when analysing the official meaning of secularismin India. Taking into account the continuing prominence of public religion
in the everyday life of India’s multi-religious society, secularism became
understood as ‘equal respect for all religions’ (sarva dharma sambhava).
This definition emerged gradually during India’s struggle for independence
from British colonial rule and serves as a reminder to honour a long
tradition of religious tolerance. As a political ideology, it militates against
two alternative political models: India as a Hindu nation15 and the European
concept of secularism as separation of state and religion.16
In practice, the notion of ‘equal respect’ means that the state is tasked
with protecting all religions. State institutions should function as neutral
authorities, arbitrate between religious communities, preserve religious
12 Monika Wohlrab-Sahr and Marian Burchardt, “Revisiting the Secular: Multiple
Secularities and Pathways to Modernity,” Working Paper Series of the HCAS “Multiple
Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities” 2, Leipzig, September 2017, 6.
13 Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt, “Revisiting the Secular,” 6.
14 Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt, “Multiple Secularities.”
15 The notion of India as Hindu Nation has several roots, prominently among them thesaturation of the movement’s figurative language with symbols and concepts borrowed
from a Hindu religious universe, as well as, in the political realm, the two nation theory,
according to which Pakistan is imagined as a Muslim nation and India, in contrast to this,as the home of Hindus.
16 See for example Bhargava, Secularism and its Critics; Bilgrami, “Two Concepts ofSecularism.”9peace, and ensure that the needs and desires of every religious community
are taken into account.17 The non-partisan approach of Jawaharlal Nehru,
the first Prime Minister of independent India, firmly anchored secularism
as a political principle informing governance in India and established trustin the secular credentials of the state. The approach was confirmed in
1976 when the adjective ‘secular’ was included in the preamble to India’s
constitution. However, despite an official commitment to secularism, thepolitical class is not free from doubt. Belief in the state’s neutrality remains
fragile and there are many instances when it has been called into question.
There is the notorious debate about separate civil laws for religious groups,
the disturbing chain of events in the Shah Bano case, the opening of theBabri Masjid for Hindu worship and the subsequent demolition of mosquesby radical Hindus.18 Beyond accusations of wilful manipulation of religious
sentiments or incitement of violence, there are other troubling concerns
during the operationalisation of the concept of ‘equal respect.’ Here I focus
on the predicament of divine agency.
Among other things, Hindus believe that humans have a relationshipwith deities who directly act in the world.19 Deities are able to impose theirwill in ways that breach social norms or cause conflicts between socialgroups. While some people insist that the state must respect such beliefs,
others argue that the notion of divine agency is mere superstition, or worse
serves as façade to hide acts of political manipulation. These differing
perspectives become particularly problematic when claims of divineintervention are used to hurt the members of another religious community,
as occurred in the case detailed below. In these contexts, the ideal state
steps in as a pacifier. It then might face the predicament of having to taking
seriously the clashing claims emerging from incompatible ontologies.
While many Hindus experience the intervention of deities, others interpret
17 There are also more specific tasks. In absence of a universally accepted religious authorityfor Hindus, state law codified in the Hindu code bills regulate family affairs of Hindus,
such as marriage, divorce or adoption.
18 A. A. Engineer, ed., Babri-Masjid Ramjanambhoomi Controversy (Delhi: Ajanta
Publications, 1990); Jan-Peter Hartung, Ayodhya 1992–2003: The Assertion of Cultural
and Religious Hegemony (Delhi: Media House, 2004); Arun K. Patnaik and Prithvi R.
Mudiam, “Indian secularism, dialogue and the Ayodhya dispute,” Religion, State andSociety 42, no. 4 (2014).
19 Diana L. Eck, Darshan: Seeing the divine image in India (Chambersbury: Anima, 1981);
Christopher J. Fuller, The Camphor Flame: Popular Hinduism and Society in India (Delhi:
Penguin Books India, 1992).
10the world in materialist terms. This is true also for advocates of a politics of‘equal respect’, revealing the commitment of secularism to Enlightenment
thinking.
The notion of ‘equal respect for all religions’ assumes the possibilityof a neutral position. Governing institutions are conceived as operatingfrom outside any specific religious universe, which enables them to takeon a neutral position, judge fairly and adjudicate claims. This is in linewith a tradition of liberal thinking that is well-illustrated in Habermas’20
idealised framing of the role of religion in deliberative democracy. Tracing
the emergence of the public sphere in Europe from the eighteenth century
onwards, Habermas sees democracy as founded on reasoned debate
upheld by educated citizens who negotiate the interests of the polity.21
Religions can play a constructive role in public deliberations, because they
provide solid bases for formulating ethical standards, and thus shouldbe heard. However, for religious believers to be taken seriously in publicdebates, they must use a language of universal reason. Religiously founded
ideals can be rendered valid if they are made accessible to non-believers
through a process of translation. Here, the public sphere remains a very
specific and narrowly defined social arena in which people meet as equal
participants under the condition that they adopt a common hegemonic
language to become effective political agents. While some celebrate
Habermas’ repositioning as an invitation to develop new forms of public
religious debate,22 or even a public theology,23 many others question thecultural neutrality of the notion of a secular public sphere,24 and reject
20 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Enquiry into a
Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992 [1962]); Jürgen Habermas,“Religion in the Public Sphere,” European Journal of Philosophy 14, no. 1 (2006).
21 In the original formulation, he is unconcerned with religion, which he believed would
lose importance or be relegated to the private domain, and then revisits this assumption
in the mid-2000s, when it is apparent that religious engagement has persisted as well as
the desire of religious institutions to influence politics.
22 Craig Calhoun, Eduardo Mendieta, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, eds., Habermas andReligion (Maden, MA: Polity, 2013)23 Jaco S. Dreyer and Hennie J. C. Pieterse, “Religion in the Public Sphere: What can Public
Theology Learn from Habermas’s Latest Work?,” HTS Theologiese Studies 66, no. 1 (2010).
24 David Zaret, “Religion, Science, and Printing in the Public Sphere in SeventeenthCentury England,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1992); Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, eds., Religion and Media(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001).
11

the reductionist view of religion as solely comprising ethics and reason.25
Judith Butler26 argues that historically, the public sphere has emerged
from within a Christian Protestant context. Thus, it already encompasses
particular religious traditions, while locating other religions outside thepublic sphere. She adds that religions might exist in proximity without
sharing a space for defining common ground. Coexistence might then be
possible only through accepting a right to alterity.
Butler’s formulation provides an important starting point for analysing
what I call the practice of secularism. This differs from an ideal-typedefinition of secularism as a principle. The official notion of Indian
secularism as ‘equal respect for all regions’ embraces a liberal approachakin to Habermas’ notion of public religion, and frames the problem of
religious co-existence in terms of the need for maintaining symmetry
between religious communities. It presupposes that interests are madeintelligible in the universal language of reason and then weighed against
other interests. Such an understanding of the problem leaves no space forthe notion of divinities as capricious agents who directly intervene in thisworld and must be respected not just by believers but also by the leadersof a secular nation. Officially, a bureaucrat cannot act at the behest of agod or goddess. Yet, in practice, they give in to projects undertaken in thename of non-human agents under certain circumstances. Hindus – orother religiously minded people – are given a right to alterity within clearly
defined limits delineated by the state on the basis of a compromise between
all human stakeholders.
Below, I will explore one such process of delineation that allowed asecular administration to maintain its integrity while accommodating
belief in supernatural powers within the realm of urban planning. The
controversy not only encompassed a clash of interests between Muslimsand Hindus, but also concerned the ontological status of temples. For
some, temple buildings are mere architecture that should be fitted
25 Nicholas Adams, Habermas and Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006); Antoon Braeckman, “Habermas and Gauchet on Religion in PostsecularSociety: A Critical Assessment,” Continental Philosophy Review 42, no. 3 (2009); Austin
Harrington, “Habermas’s Theological Turn?,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour
37, no. 1 (2007).
26 Judith Butler, “Is Judaism Zionism,” in The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, ed.
Judith Butler, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Cornel West (New York, NY:
Columbia University Press, 2011).
12

harmoniously into the urban setting. For others, they are delicate power
centres that must be approached with respect and caution. The pragmatics
of urban management compels decision makers to reckon with beliefs indivine agency, which from a materialist point of view is irrational, while
keeping in mind the principles of urban management and arbitration
between religions. Indian secularism faces an internal tension. Grounded
in principles of the Enlightenment rationality, it must accommodate thenon-rational side of religion in order to respect religious sentiments.

Negotiating Sacred SpaceAt the entrance to Old Bhopal’s bazaar area, near Peer Gate, visitors
encounter a sparkling marble structure dedicated to Our Lady of theCurfew (darbar curfew mata ka). It houses a statue of Durga, who, as isevidenced in the inscription on the marble beam over the entrance, is firmly
associated with the controversy that hit the city during the establishmentof this temple. The events are part of the city’s public memory and easily
surface when a probing anthropologist seeks to find out more. In theyears between 1998 and 2001, while I listened to the various versions of
this history, I learned about Hindu aggression, Muslim domination andBhopal’s history. I was also told of administrative wisdom and police
neutrality, and, finally, I heard about fear of the goddess and divine agency.
The fate of Durga at Peer Gate was eventually decided by motivating all
stakeholders to work out a compromise between political desires, secular
ethics, and devotional experiences. The following re-collection of eventsis accompanied by narrations of various layers of meaning that shape atemple’s history.
The trouble started during the autumn festival of Navratri in 1981. At
this auspicious time of the year, Hindus honour the goddess Durga27 on nineconsecutive nights at temporary shrines erected in multiple locations acrossthe city. For weeks in advance, Navratri committees busy themselves withpreparations to impress the crowds and compete with other shrines during
this spectacular festival. The Peer Gate Durga committee participatedevery year, and in 1981 installed an expensive statue carved from Rajasthani
27 In some temples or regions other incarnations of the goddess, e.g. Kali are also honoured.
13

marble at the centre of Peer Gate crossing instead of the usual mud-crafted
image of Durga. The act was suspicious. People reasoned that no committee
would discard an expensive statue they had painstakingly brought from
Rajasthan in the usual ritual way after the end of the worship. The headof the district administration, the Collector28, recalled that the activities atPeer Gate drew attention, and complaints from Muslim neighbours poured
in almost instantaneously. In an interview, the Collector remembered that“the Muslims place strong trust in the administration so telling them that I
would do something was enough to calm them down.”29 The Collector had
the shrine inspected, called Muslim leaders and begged them to calm thecommunity. In return, he promised to find a solution as soon as the festival
was over. He first wanted to see whether the statue was indeed to remain on
the spot. Moreover, he was concerned that immediate action would disturb
the peace of the festival and fuel religious tensions.
On the tenth day, after all temporary shrines other than the one atPeer Gate had been dismantled, the Collector acted on his promise. He
recruited a priest to help him to remove the statue in a night-time mission.
Under the cover of darkness, a religious procession was organised to lift
the image in a ritually prescribed manner and carry it to an alternative site,a temple near the big lake. He also passed an ordinance that restricted theright to assemble at Peer Gate. Despite this precaution, the next day “hellbroke loose,” remembered a police officer who fought in the front line ofwhat became a battle that lasted several days. During the festival, temple
committees across the city had been informed about the new temple andmany people had planted saffron flags in honour of the goddess. Whennews broke of the clandestine removal of Durga, people flocked to Peer
Gate and, ignoring the directive restricting the right to assemble, started amarathon of uninterrupted prayer and devotional singing (bhajan). Freshly
appointed to his first major position and determined to show strength, theCollector called in the police to enforce the ordinance. The police officer
Kamal Singh remembered shouting, protest and flying stones and all thehardship it took to clear the place.
28 The Collector or District Collector is an Indian government official and a memberof the state bureaucratic cadre (Indian Administrative Service, IAS). He or she is theprinciple revenue officer of the district, the head of district administration and works incollaboration with the superintendent of police to maintain law and order in the district.
29 Interview, February 3, 1997.
14

At 7:45 p.m., we got the order to clear the crossing. We assembled 250 men.
The Collector took one street, I took another. It was night and the operation
was difficult. With a jeep [...] we entered the lane [...]. The [police] men
followed us in a jail van. This way they felt secure. We cleared one barricade
after the other and secured the area and returned to Peer Gate. It was likewar. It was difficult to keep the men under control. A boy, for example,
threw a stone. Some men then pulled him out from the house and started
beating him. In the end we had to save the boy. Then there was Mishra, myright-hand man, he wanted to be extra brave and got hit on the head by astone. After that the police went wild. They were afraid [...] Besides the fear
the policemen are all religious [that is: Hindu, U.R.] so you had to convince
them that the operation was necessary. But fortunately in Bhopal the police
force are mostly secular [...] That time I had an excellent gunman, Amar
Singh. After I got out of the jeep someone threw a rock, and he jumped andpushed me aside. The rock then landed on his foot and he had to be rushed
to hospital. That was a dangerous situation, not that I would have got killed,
but… By 9:40−10:00 p.m. we had cleared the lane.30

Once the crowd had been dispersed, the Collector imposed a curfew in acontroversial move. Considering that nothing serious had happened yet,the measure seemed a disproportionate restriction of personal freedom.
However, despite internal opposition, the Collector stood his ground,arguing that after a major causality an eruption of violence would beunstoppable. He then called upon respected senior Hindu and Muslim
leaders of the city who began negotiations along with the head of thetemple committee and representatives of the city. Stakeholders were seatedin a comfortable room, supplied with meals and made to stay until asolution was found, which apparently took two days and a night. The cityrepresentatives suggested that a place somewhere else in old Bhopal could
be assigned for the construction of the temple, but the Hindus insisted onPeer Gate. After long and heated discussions, the parties agreed that the
temple should remain on the crossing, although not in the middle of thestreet but to one side. A space equivalent to four shops (10 feet by 12 feet)
was allotted for the Durga Temple. As compensation for the destructionof the original temple, the municipal corporation agreed to prepare thefoundations for the new building. They also agreed that the statue should
not immediately be taken to the new spot. Instead it was to be re-installedin its original place at the middle of the crossing, whence the committee
members would transfer it to the new ground. In return, the Durga Temple
30 Interview, Police Officer, Police Headquarter, April 3, 1997.
15

Committee agreed to refrain from any further agitation and to help restore
an atmosphere of peace and goodwill in the city.31 On October 15, 1981, thetemple was officially inaugurated and it stands as a sign of the benevolenceof the Lady of the Curfew, and as a symbol of the strength of a Hindu
community, representing a ‘victory’ against the secular administration andMuslim neighbours.
As indicated by these narratives, people who watched the emergence of
the Durga Temple from close-up emphasise the Hindu-Muslim dimensionof the project. In Bhopal, this is set against the sense of disempowerment of
the Hindu majority in the Muslim princely state of Bhopal, such that Hindu
struggle for a visible presence in the Old City is celebrated as correcting ahistorical legacy. Along with Muslims, the city administration was sternly
against the construction. The spacious Peer Gate crossing had been built
in 1971, ten years before the Durga Temple, to improve connectivity
between old and new Bhopal through an arterial road that cuts across theheart of Bhopal’s historical centre. During construction, many heritagebuildings and homes of influential Muslims had to make way, creatinga traffic corridor that stands as a material sign of Bhopal’s changing
character. After India’s independence, the former princely state joined theunion and Bhopal was turned into the capital of what was to become thestate of Madhya Pradesh, and an influential centre of power. Although
the Union Carbon gas tragedy of 1984 casts a long shadow over the city,
overall Bhopal’s rapid urban development is seen as a success story, and hasturned Bhopal from a former capital of a Muslim kingdom into a majorstate capital dominated by Hindus. For those envisioning India as a Hindu
nation, this development must be marked by religious signs of triumph,
ideally at the most visible spots in the city.32 As a person committed toa secular vision of India, the Collector opposed a “communal”33 readingof the urban landscape and stood his ground. He valued Hindu-Muslim

31 Agreement signed on October 11, 1981.
32 Syed Ashfaq Ali, Bhopal: Past and Present (Bhopal: Jai Bharat Pub. House, 1987); P. N.
Shrinivastav and S. D. Guru, Madhya Pradesh District Gazetters: Sehore and Bhopal (Bhopal:
Directorate of Gazetteers, Department of Culture, Government of Madhya Pradesh, 1989).
33 “Communal” here is used in a specific Indian sense of the term. The Webster’s Third
New International Dictionary defines it as “3. of or relating to rival communities, esp.
the communities of India.” (William Benton, ed., Webster’s Third New International
Dictionary (Springfield, MA: G. C. Merriam, 1971), 460.)
16

cooperation and was committed to modern urban planning, in this case,seeking to maintain efficient flow of traffic at a typical bottleneck.
Listening carefully to the narratives of witnesses, there are otherdimensions to the establishment of the Durga Temple beyond the story of aneutral state seeking to pacify politically motivated religious communities.
The goddess emerges as an agent to be reckoned with. She needs to behandled with care, attracts donations of flags from across the city andmight react furiously if disrespected.
While the Peer Gate activism had definite political overtones, its
success was contingent on the support of a large community of believers,
who experienced the presence of the goddess in myriad ways and had
their respective personal reasons for favouring the temple, or shying awayfrom opposing it. The conviction of believers that goddesses act in thisworld complicated the task of restoring communal peace and compelled
the secular government to take note of the potential will of non-humanactors. A carefully operating Collector in Bhopal showed respect forreligions by taking seriously claims to divine agency, or at least people who
believed in divine agency and giving them a voice in the process withoutcompromising the administration’s secularity.

Enshrining the Divine in the CityMy study on the Hindu religious infrastructure of Bhopal started with asurvey of Hindu temples to provide context for selecting case studies andunderstanding the character of urban religion. A map in hand, I was systematically scanning the streets of Bhopal to create a register of religious
buildings and found the task unexpectedly difficult. Was I looking for large
buildings, or road-side shrines, or even anointed stones or sacred trees? As
I began to speak to people, seemingly apparent differences between theseplaces melted away. Locals call all these places, regardless of their size,
mandir34, which is conventionally translated as ‘temple.’ 35 While wayside
34 There are, of course, other vernacular terms used across India, however they do notnecessarily give away much with regards to the distinct socio-religious characters ofdifferent religious spaces (Borayin Larios and Raphaël Voix, “Introduction: Wayside
Shrines in India: An Everyday Defiant Religiosity,” South Asia Multidisciplinary
Academic Journal [Online] 18 (2018), https://journals.openedition.org/samaj/4546).
35 See also William Elison, “Site, Sight, Cite: Conceptualizing Wayside Shrines as Visual
17

shrines and large temples are visually and organisationally distinct,36 theyshare a common feature. Devotees speak about them as auratic locations
that anchor deities in a place, and by doing so transform the place, filling
it with their blessing. The twenty-six-year-old Mumbai actress, Shivani– interviewed by Osterberg37 – finds a modern metaphor to explain thephenomenon.
[S]hrines are like certain spots where the Wi-Fi is good.’ Smiling, [Shivani]
explains that you can connect with Hanuman wherever you are but just asa Wi-Fi connection is better in certain places than in others, shrines areplaces where the connection of Hanuman is stronger.38

Temples and shrines provide people with an opportunity to ‘take darshan.’This phrase connotes the act of receiving divine blessing by being beheldby the deity.39 It requires little more than stepping into the field of visionof a deity and often devotees perform a small gesture of polite greeting,concentration or repentance when face-to-face with the image of a god or
goddess. Delving into the history of various temples, it becomes obviousthat most are built illegally without building permit and have emerged
gradually, growing from small wayside shrines to become major temples

36

37
38
39

Culture,” South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal [Online] 18 (2018), http://
journals.openedition.org/samaj/4540. There is no clear demarcation between temples
and wayside shrines, which in the literature are also called footpath or pavement shrines.
Temples and shrines often grow and popular wayside shrines with a patron may well turninto a full-fledged temple (Vinayak Bharne, “Anointed cities: The incremental urbanismof Hindu India: The Emerging Asian City,” in The Emerging Asian City: Concomitant
Urbanities & Urbanisms, ed. Vinayak Bharne (London: Routledge, 2013); Vinayak Bharne
and Krupali Krusche, Rediscovering the Hindu Temple: The Sacred Architecture of Urbanismof India (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012); Eliza F. Kent, “Bus-Stop Sami:
Transient Temples in Urban South India,” South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal[Online] 18 (2018), https://journals.openedition.org/samaj/4554; Rao, Negotiating theDivine; Yasumasa Sekine, “Sacralization of the Urban Footpath, with Special Reference toPavement Shrines in Chennai City, South India,” Temenos 42, no. 2 (2006)).
Small wayside shrines, may well turn into full-fledged temples when they are very
popular and many modern temples started initially as small sacred sites and gradually
grew through patronage and donations (Bharne and Krusche, Rediscovering the Hindu
Temple; Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi, “The City Threshold: Mushroom Temples and Magic
Remains in Ahmedabad,” Ethnography 13, no. 1 (2012); Rao, Negotiating the Divine).
Anna C. Osterberg, “The Role of Roadside Shrines in the Everyday Lives of Female
Devotees in Mumbai,” South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal [Online] 18 (2018),
https://journals.openedition.org/samaj/4565.
Osterberg, “The Role of Roadside Shrines,” 11.
Eck, Darshan.
18

through numerous additions built as the sites became popular and drew
large sums of donations that were invested in constructing, extending andbeautifying them.
Typically, temples are associated with divine agency. Believers areconvinced that deities seek a home in the world and do so by magicallyappearing in certain spots. Svayambhu (or divine self-manifestation) is
evidenced by a strange elevation of the asphalt, the sudden appearance ofa stone that turns out to be a lingam, the phallus of the Lord Shiva, or the
surprising emergence of a termite hill as an indicator of a Snake Goddess.40
People also notice the twisted branches of a tree describing the upper
torso of the elephant-headed God Ganesh.41 While deities often ‘appear’on their own in this way, sometimes the help of humans is required tosecure their presence in this world. A pious person might speak about thegoddess paying him a visit in a dream, asking him to search for her image
at a particular juncture or install a statue to mark her presence.42 A local
resident might plant a neem tree (tulsi) and install an object to mark a spot
reverberating with divine energy. Once established, shrines and temples
resist demolition. The city administration does not touch them for a varietyof reasons, which might include fear of public frenzy, the wrath of the deity,or support for the religious or political project of devotees.
A number of studies explore social reasons for the popularity ofthe prolific number of sites for worship. Shrines and temples provide
busy urbanites with places to fulfil daily religious duties.43 They foster ameaningful and inclusive local and national identity.44 They present womenwith an excuse to loiter in public and experience relief from domestic
40 Diana L. Eck, Banares: City of Light (Delhi: Penguin Books, 1993 [1983]); David
L. Haberman, People Trees: Worship of Trees in Northern India (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2013); Christian Haskett, “On Varanasi’s Tiny Temples,” South Asia
Multidisciplinary Academic Journal [Online] 18 (2018), https://journals.openedition.org/
samaj/4524; Kent, “Bus-Stop Sami”; Sekine, “Sacralization of the Urban Footpath.”
41 Haberman, People Trees.
42 Kent, “Bus-Stop Sami”; Rao, Negotiating the Divine.
43 Ghassem-Fachandi, “The City Threshold”; Alexander Henn, “Crossroads of Religions:
Shrines, Mobility and Urban Space in Goa,” International Journal of Urban and Regional
Research 32, no. 3 (2008); Borayin Larios, “From the Heavens to the Streets: Pune’s
Wayside Shrines,” South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal [Online] 18 (2018),
https://journals.openedition.org/samaj/4549.
44 Uma Kalpagam, “Secularism, Religiosity and Popular Culture: Chennai’s Roadside
Temples,” Economic and Political Weekly 41, no. 43/44 (2006).
19

chores or oppressive homes.45 They are the weapons of the weak who wish
to protect their informal shelter from demolition in unaffordable megacities.46 They are a source of income for religious entrepreneurs.47 Or, in thedismissive words of city planners and some upper-class residents, they are
the mischievous activities of crooks who exploit the gullibility of citizens to
grab land, make money and gain status.48 This social function of religious
sites can also be noted in stories with political overtones, such as that of theageing ascetic seeking a place to settle down permanently, or women’s needfor nearby places of worship.
In practice, religious experience and social motivation amalgamate toproduce the force that results in the successful establishment, maintenanceand continuous growth of a temple. This is true also for a project withstrong political overtones, such as the Peer Gate Durga Temple project, as isapparent when listening carefully to the many small stories about the nittygritty of pacifying the communities. For many, uncertainty about Durga’s
divine will lurks beneath the narration of a communal clash. While theCollector confesses not to believe that gods and goddesses punish people
for handling statues, he knows that many people do and that ordering
employees to collaborate in the exercise of preventing an illegal temple canbackfire.
The committee member tried to appeal to my Hindu sentiments. However,just because I am a Hindu, I was not willing to decide in their favour. They
kept saying “you are a Hindu from the East where everyone prays to thegoddess. You should understand”. However, I responded that there are no
permanent Durga Temples. Yet, there are many Kali Temples, but Durga
does not stay. She comes for nine days and then leaves.49

Throughout, the Collector acted cautiously in order to maintain his
authority and also convince adherents of the goddess. He argued that he
was acting as a bureaucrat and not a Hindu, and simultaneously assured
that building a permanent temple was unlikely to be the explicit will of
the goddess. Secularism as respect for all religions was complicated in thiscase because the clear political interference by Hindu nationalist forces
45
46
47
48
49

Osterberg, “The Role of Roadside Shrines.”
Sekine, “Sacralization of the Urban Footpath.”
Kent, “Bus-Stop Sami.”Rao, Negotiating the Divine; Sekine, “Sacralization of the Urban Footpath.”
Interview, Central Secretariat, January 6, 1997.
20

could not be clearly distinguished from an opaque divine will. Onlookers
wondered whether this was communal politics, or the goddess using fierce
supporters to manifest among her beloved followers. The Collector played
down the religious angle to avoid offending Durga. He abstained from theinauspicious act of disrupting a festival and, importantly, recruited a priest
to remove the statue in the traditional manner and by following rituals asprescribed by Hindu sacred writings. He also organised a festive paradewith music for the re-location of the goddess.
I went to action only when after Dashera the statue had not been immersed
into the water. I had the whole temple destroyed at night – no stone wasleft. The statue was lifted to another temple with due respect. I had engaged
a pundit who did the puja and we carried the statue to another temple atthe big lake.50

Publicly, his actions were criticised by the committee, yet, they musthave made an impression, since I did not once hear accusations against
the Collector of interfering with religion or offending the goddess. The
clandestine removal led to an escalation during which the goddess wasinvited once again. A photograph was used as a substitute for the statue,
firmly anchoring Durga’s auratic presence in the place. This maintained asacred centre for ongoing devotional singing and prayer. The Collector was
keen to remove the image, but faltered. When he asked the security guards
to take away the image, they pleaded with him, saying: “Please, Sir, do notmake us move the picture. The wrath of the goddess will hit us.” At thispoint in the interview, the Collector looked at me and posed a rhetoricalquestion: “Did I want to be held responsible if the children of these people
had an accident the next day that was interpreted as divine punishment?”51
He then emphasised that he would have not lasted long in his position
had he offended the sentiments of the Hindu majority. The police officer
Kamal Singh touched on a similar subject when he remembered withhorror having to motivate Hindu policemen to fight in a dangerous battle
against their brothers and sisters in faith, who might have had a legitimate
cause. Here too doubts about who was acting – the committee, Durga, orboth in conjunction – caused anxiety. Imposing a curfew was a way to
avoid putting citizens at risk and triggering stories of divine interventions,and thus paved the way for negotiations.
50 Interview, Central Secretariat, February 3, 1997.
51 Interview, Central Secretariat.
21

I wanted to see what Hindu women would have to say about thedevelopments at Peer Gate. In India, many middle and lower class womenin particular tend to think of politics as a male domain, yet, they are keenon auspicious places of worship near their home and thus often initiate
temples, or support their stabilisation.52 To find out more about their views,
I joined a group of women who congregated every morning at the feet of
the Peer Gate Durga to chant devotional songs. One by one, I got to know
the more regular devotees, visited their homes and learned about theirlives through long conversations with them and a whole series of family
members. Asked about the controversy at Peer Gate, many said that they
had held their breath when a curfew was declared. They avoided making
clear statements in favour of any political party and kept a distance from
Hindu fundamentalist groups. Yet, they remembered having favoured theestablishment of a temple from the beginning, because they wanted a sitefor Hindu worship near their home. It helped them to fulfil their duties ashousewives and mothers, while also finding time for necessary religious
activities. For them, time at a temple was a relief and part of their duty.
The day of these middle-class housewives starts early at 5 or 6 am witha short prayer at their house shrine. Next, these women busy themselveswith family chores; they cook breakfast and lunch for all family members,
and send them off to school and work. There is time for a bath and thena break which is devoted to the goddess. In many private conversationsin their homes, women explained to me in much detail that the goddess
protects their families, and sometimes they added with a gleam in their
52 The movement of women in India is highly restricted and monitored. Feminist literature
is littered with examples of the sense of policing women endure. Public space is perceived
as male and women cross it only to reach a legitimate destination, such as work, thehomes of relatives, or the steps of the temple. I regularly heard women telling me that noone could object to them going to the temple. They did it out of free will and sometimes,
while they egged each other on to finish their singing and rush home to resume theirduties, they dragged their feet and stayed for a bit longer. “What will you say when you
come home?” I asked and was told: “My husband will be home and shout at me for beinglate, but I will say that I had work at the temple. That disarms him. What can he say
against praying? It is a sacred duty!” Women afford the liberty of a daily temple routine
when it is easily accommodated into the flow of life. “We cannot travel far! We needed
a temple near the house,” was what I heard whenever I spoke about temple construction
and why the city was strewn with temples and shrines and also why the Durga temple
was needed. See for example Reena Patel, Working the Night Shift: Women and India’s
Call Centre Industry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); Shilpa Phadke,
Sameera Khan, and Shilpa Ranade, Why Loiter? Women & Risk on Mumbai Streets (Delhi:
Penguin, 2011).
22eyes that going to the temple means freedom. Due to the historical layeringof the city, the old town had few temples, and none of them were devoted
to the goddess. They perceived a gap. More than a wayside shrine, a temple
gives comfort, access to regular rituals, draws together a community andprovides a home for the believing. Female solidarity was apparent at thepeak of the protest. Women congregated to sing bhajans as a statement of
empowerment. This was a form of gender politics that was deeply entwinedwith devotional longings. At the feet of the goddess, women found peaceand freedom.
Respect for religion involves taking different religious and social
commitments seriously. This is difficult when interests clash and bringfundamental differences between religions and inconstancy in themultifarious universe of Hindu traditions to the forefront. In Bhopal,
the Collector operationalised secularism as equal respect for all religions
through a clear division of labour. His intervention was firm, while also
circumventing any direct involvement in religious or ritual acts. He pacified
Muslims, called in the police, had Hindus arrested, imposed a curfew,
and compelled religious leaders to negotiate. The statue was moved by apundit, the policemen abstained from removing the image of Durga, andthe religious leaders negotiated an agreement on the location of a Durga
Temple.
Interviews with a series of leading individuals from the city’s
administration, who spoke about negotiating the establishment of temples
in public space, illustrate that decision makers can draw on a wellestablished script. Each one had stories to tell about Hindu temples, or
religious sites of other religious communities that appeared overnight.
Some of these were conceived as nuisances, because they occupied busy
locations, emerged in sensitive spots or infringed on recreational spaces.
They were typically dealt with by destroying the profane parts, leaving
the naked statues. In some case, the religious sites underwent repeatedconstruction and demolition before a truce was reached, with an informal
agreement on what was considered an acceptable size. In the case of thePeer Gate Durga, the anger of the Muslim community complicated matters,
and forced more intricate efforts to retain a separation between religion
and state while showing equal respect.

23

Conclusion
Studying temple construction unearths a foundational predicament ofIndian secularism, which is not typically discussed in debates concernedwith individual freedom and communal harmony. While the secularism
debate often focuses on questions of fairness, and whether state institutions
are free of bias, it leaves unexamined the underlying assumption thathuman beings have the power to define the meaning of religion and its
position in public life. How does one accommodate the claim to divineagency? In this article, I have argued for an expanded understanding of
secularism that moves beyond a liberal notion based on Habermas’ idealtype public sphere as an arena for rational argumentation. Secularism ismore than an ideal. It is a practice mobilised to solve real-life problems, inthis case that of negotiating the use of urban space.
Making use of their right to religion, Hindus have demanded thatworship spaces be built on sites identified by their deities. From analternative point of view, their claim can be questioned. Some treat the
belief in divine agency as superstition, while others say that reference
to divine will is used to cover up vested interests and thus constitutes a
powerful tool in enforcing particular political projects. In a heterogeneous,
multi-religious society, it is unfeasible to try and resolve this issue. There isno ultimate position of rationality from which questions about the realityof divine agency can be resolved. Liberal democracy requires arbitration
between different interests, which in the case discussed here are rooted inincongruous ontologies. Secularism as a technique of arbitration focuses
not on the justification for a demand, but its consequences and forces
stakeholders to agree on a shared action plan, regardless of their privately
held beliefs regarding the rationality or even the legitimacy of the other’sargument.
Such a conclusion shares in the notion that no clear boundary can be
drawn between politics and religion. The case of the temple in Bhopal
illustrates how a group of politically motivated Hindus, who openly
admitted to their goal of seeking to marginalise Muslims in the city centreof Bhopal, were only able to pursue their project due to a particular Hindu
understanding of divine agency. Despite their political motivations, theDurga Committee was able to mobilise support for their project across thecity due to the tendency of Hindus to respect what they see as the will of24

deities. Women in central Bhopal supported the move because it helped
develop a neighbourhood in which they could fulfil their religious duty
and ensure the safety of their family. Others wished to respect divine will
and were motivated by the Goddess Durga’s visible desire to support thegroups of traders instigating the movement. Rather than break up thiscoalition, or demand rational argumentation, Bhopal’s administration
treated the event as an instance of political negotiations that must be
decided by the authorities of the affected religious communities together
with the administration. By doing this, they ensured that the decision
would be communicated back to the respective groups in their own terms,
so that believers and non-believers would equally respect the arbitrated
resolution.

25

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