Circuits of Secularity or the Aesthetics of Religion in an Age of Cities and Citations

Circuits of Secularity or the Aesthetics ofReligion in an Age of Cities and Citations

MARK ELMORE

AbstractThis article explores the circulation of contemporary discourses on religion andsecularity in the western Himalayas. It traces a media circuit from Himachal Pradesh’sremote villages to its urban centers and back again, using the circuit as a hermeneuticto illuminate how religion and the city become mutually constituted problems in need ofdefinition, defense or reform. The conjoined circulation of ‘religion’and ‘the city’— bothas discursive products and as lived realities — has restructured how Himachalisunderstand, perform and problematize relations to local deities and the rites they enjoinas well as performances in and reflections on urban spaces and their rural exteriors. Inthis new circulatory system, the individual becomes the foundation of authority, the statetrumps competing organizational forms, deities become metaphysical abstractions,particular beliefs are repurposed as religion, and villages emerge as ‘heritage’ to bepromoted and observed. I use this argument to show why, despite the self-evidence ofreligion’s meaning for those mobilizing its powers, a stable definition must remainforever a chimera.

OvertureThis article examines relations between ‘religion’ and ‘the city’ in the lived worlds ofcontemporary Himachal Pradesh, an Indian state found in the western Himalayas. Beforethe arrival of British power, scores of tiny principalities divided the region, each with itsown royal family, its own language, and its own local practices. In the 1860s, the BritishCrown shifted its summer capital to Shimla, a hill station that had grown extensivelysince Captain Charles Pratt Kennedy built ‘the first permanent house’ in 1821. After1857, colonial officials sought a new location from which to govern, a place where theycould simultaneously oversee the subcontinent and free themselves from the demands ofan increasingly insubordinate population. Shimla was perfect. It offered a healthyclimate, a strategic location above their colonies and, perhaps most importantly, its localpopulation was ‘peaceful’ and ‘docile’. In the early nineteenth century, Shimla was littlemore than a shepherd’s camp perched on a ridgeline above 7,000 ft. Governing one of thelargest empires the world has ever seen from this location presented considerablechallenges. The city and its network were carved ex nihilo into the Himalayas. Usingconscripted labor, the British built an extensive network of roads and rail lines,communication networks, schools, churches and hospitals, reshaping the regionincalculably.

Following Indian independence in 1947, national leaders absentmindedly governedthe region from New Delhi. But, beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, a group of elites whohad led the region’s anticolonial Praja Mandal movements began arguing for the state’sindependence. They wanted the right to decide the economic and cultural future of theregion according to regional desires and demands. National leaders finally granted the

Volume 32.3 September 2008 643–57 International Journal of Urban and Regional ResearchDOI:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2008.00802.x

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state autonomy in 1971, and its leadership began an ambitious program of development.This included expanding primary education, village electrification and road networks aswell as preserving local languages, writing local histories and promoting ‘statetreasures’. One of the primary components of this development program was redefiningShimla’s visual space. As a planned colonial city, marked in every detail by the signs ofBritish power, the newly independent state government sought to supplement thislandscape with Himachali narratives. In the 1970s and 1980s, the state governmentcommissioned M.C. Saxena to build sculptures and murals, and to redesign public spacesto make Shimla more Himachali. A ‘son of the soil’ and a ‘living legend’, who had livedthrough Partition, and who combined Himachali and European art, Saxena was anobvious choice to redefine Shimla’s visual economy.

Saxena’s most famous sculpture, Woman with pot (Figure 1), stands in a smallShimla garden between the colonial façade of Gaiety Theater and a public square thatteems with itinerant photographers snapping shots of Bengali tourists in ‘authentictribal clothing’ and Kashmiri migrants selling hashish to young backpackers. Thesculpture, as if mimicking its surroundings, plays across the boundaries separating artand icon, ancient and modern, East and West. It grafts Himachali symbols onto apan-Indian village girl and combines European realism with normative traditions ofSouth Asian iconography. Her scarf is from Kinnaur; her pot is from Kangra; and herjewelry is from Spiti. Her hips and posture resemble Ravi Varma’s traditional villagewomen and the colors evoke Nehru-era nationalist memorials (Pinney, 2004). At thesame time, she is adorned with multicolored lights and rigged with a motion sensorthat, when not broken, sprays water onto the image as visitors approach. Like mostother state-sponsored art, she is painted gold, but the surrounding space shows all thesigns of local ritual exchange.

Figure 1 Woman with pot (source: Mark Elmore)

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International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32.3© 2008 The Author. Journal Compilation © 2008 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Located in the heart of Himachal’s capital city, the sculpture seems an embodiment ofHimachali modernity: ancient yet modern, Indian yet global, beautiful yet simple. Therecould hardly be a better symbol of the aspirations of Himachal’s earliest reformers. Yetfor Saxena and many locals, the sculpture’s importance resides not in its historicalconnections or aesthetic merit but its power. Saxena argues that Woman with potproduces mystical experience, and many people agree with him. Engineers, teachers andilliterate shop sweepers alike all told me the statue possessed extreme spiritual power(sakti) and they attributed miracle after miracle (pratyaksa) to the sculpture, much asthey would to local deities. One woman said she visits the image every week to speakwith her husband who works in the Persian Gulf. Another man who owns a local hotelrecounted how the image’s power helped him realize his financial preoccupations wereinhibiting his ‘true spiritual work’.

The difference between Woman with pot and images of village deities, he told me,was not style or secularity. While the images of local deities helped people with theirpractical concerns, Woman with pot facilitated true spiritual experience. Trained as apsychologist in Lucknow, this view reflects his belief that true religion is spiritual; itis hidden, immaterial, and produced by what he called ‘self-work’. This conception ofreligion, a perennialist recension of Protestantism, is increasingly common amongHimachal’s urban elites, dovetailing smoothly with the consumer-inflected ecumenicalaesthetics of Himachal’s media worlds. These mystical experiences are foundationalfor Saxena because they reveal truth (satya). External rituals (rıti rivaj), devotion(bhakti) and faith (sraddha) only point us toward what is actually real. They are meansnot ends.

To some, Saxena’s theories may appear stale, nostalgic or even nihilistic, but I amnot interested in the truth value of Saxena’s claims; they are beyond verification. Histheories are more illuminating when read as both an effect and an agent of shifts in theregion’s historical unconscious. They are not so much signs of religion’s persistencewithin the city, or of the hybridity of postcolonial South Asia, as they are indicative ofnew hegemonic sensibilities defining how Himachalis conceive and enact religion andthe city. This article seeks to understand the following question: how does thesimultaneous emergence of religion and the city as problems affect what Himachalisvalue as true and how do individuals style themselves according to these truths? Putanother way, the article examines how new forms of mediation, such as Saxena’ssculptures, simultaneously create and perform particular arts of living shaped byanxieties over ‘religion’ and ‘the city’. It attempts to understand ‘religion’ and ‘thecity’ as aesthetic rather than epistemological or ontological problems. Turning from anormative question about religion and the city to aesthetic questions allows us to checkthe imperialist assumptions of Enlightenment that generally accompany socialscientific research and to reorient analysis towards lived bodies and their variegatedhistories. The appeal to aesthetics is not a clever dissimulation vainly substituting oneobject for another — the body for the mind or experience for the intellect. Nor is it anabrogation of responsibility or a vain plea for cultural difference. This aesthetic turnmarks a transformation in the style, scope and goals of analysis. Only by attendingto minute shifts such as these can we avoid reducing places like Himachali tothe ephemera of European modernity. There is no other way to understand thecomplexities of these places and so address the forms of inequality they encourage,the abjections they enable, and the justice they forestall.

Approaching a circleThis article argues in circles. It traces a media circuit from the remote villages of theupper Himalayas, through a small regional city museum and into the state capital. It thentracks the return of a newly ‘modernized’ conception of religion as it returns to a village

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transformed as a governmental dictum. This circle is a hermeneutic, as much spatial ashistorical, that uncovers how religion and the city become problems in need of definition,defense or reform. Like the photographs of Eadweard J. Muybridge, it reveals thedynamics of circulation, but these dynamics cannot be reduced to the images themselves.The article mimics the media circuits — some rural, some urban, others translocal —which intersect in the lived experience of contemporary Himachalis. As these circuitsfeed back on themselves, centripetal forces draw in energy and inspiration from colonialreformulations of Hinduism, new forms of governmental and spatial organization, andan ascendant cosmopolitan subjectivity, even as centrifugal forces throw off newpossibilities for creativity and new forms of subjection.

We will see how individuals and institutions embody and exploit ‘secular’ post-Enlightenment critiques of religion, even as they attempt to preserve and celebrate their‘timeless’ religious heritage. These media reflect and enforce a normative conception ofHimachali religion authored by urbanized elites and authorized by a constellation ofinterdependent forces (the modern state, neoliberal economics and global visual norms)that reproduce themselves in the subtlest desires and imaginations of those theyrepresent. Local ritual practices are indexed as signs of authenticity; evacuated ofspecificity and materiality they are transformed into symbols in new regimes of meaning.Knowledge, rather than practice, becomes the guarantor of truth (Foucault et al., 2005).The individual becomes the privileged site of religious experience; the state becomes theprimary locus of communal identification; and villages become estranged from thedetails of their pasts as they become ‘ancient Himachali villages’ that model themselveson museological simulacra.

How do these circuits work practically? Where do they appear and to what effect?How do the city and religion mutually articulate one another? Obviously, a satisfactoryanswer to these questions would require more space than I have. Here I can only gestureat this complexity. The above example shows how the supposed secularity of agovernment-sponsored image capitalizes on a spiritualized conception of religion whilediscouraging forms of ritual exchange like possession and ritual sacrifice. Inthis example, religion-as-mystical-experience and urban monumentality combinesynergistically. But how do such sensibilities circulate back into villages and to whateffect?

In a later example we see how urban sensibilities are transmitted via the managerialcapacities of governmental officials, but these ‘spiritualized’ religious sensibilities alsocirculate in more subtle ways. The steep mountains and extreme geography of thewestern Himalayas make communication and transportation difficult. Himachal’sBritish-built rail line is obsolete, few Himachalis have cars, and television is availableonly in major cities. Not surprisingly, state-run buses are the primary mode oftransportation for most Himachalis and the Hindi journals and pamphlets sold at busstands allow them to imagine the beliefs and practices of others in nearby villages and inthe state’s cities. Cheaply reproduced and widely available at transport hubs, thesevernacular media encourage a politics of truth that values internal mental assent overlocal practice. The sine qua non of Himachal’s vernacular media is the metonymicassociation of any one village’s beliefs and practices with those of the region as a whole.These metonymic associations were originally developed by Shimla’s urban elite tobuttress the region’s claims for independence in the decades following 1947 and theyhave been used since at least the 1960s to unify the population and to modernize thepopulation. In this space, where the practices and beliefs of one village stand in for anyother, a common denominator emerges that erases all particularity. It articulates theessence of Himachali religion in a dematerialized spirituality very similar to that whichSaxena espouses. More than a discursive product, they have material consequences,facilitating bans on animal sacrifice, the translation of local deities into pan-Indian gods,and the transformation of local shrines into translocal pilgrimage sites. Yet as these newaesthetics circulate, they also produce their own resistances — what Foucault callscounter-publics (Foucault et al., 2007).

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I witnessed a powerful example of such counter publics at a spring rite near theTibetan border. This rite culminates with the establishment of a fresh cedar tree in thetemple compound. Before raising the tree, the senior priest (kardar) and a young girlanoint the tree with a mixture of clarified butter and blood. As the young woman and thepriest perform their symbolic coupling, young and old women alike shout sexualizedinsults at village men and boys. As an opportunity for public verbal expression, theseperformances are highly creative — some are invitations to sexual acts, others are simplystatements of sexual inadequacy. While this rite is ripe with possibilities for symbolicinterpretation, what interested me was an energetic debate that preceded the rite. A locallegislative representative (MLA) well known for his Hindu orthodoxy had been invitedto the festival and many in the community argued the rite should be performed privatelyand the women should be gagged. They feared it would offend the MLA and prevent thevillage from receiving much needed state assistance. While they made cogent practicalarguments, the deity (through its medium) rejected these suggestions and temple officialsallowed, even encouraged, their performance. Yet the story does not end here. Thisresistance to urban aesthetics generated its own energy as newspapers and localtelevision reports of the rite circulated back to Shimla and India’s major cities. All ofthese reports framed the performance as an ancient ritual, but some used ancient as asynonym for superstitious, arguing that the region needed reform, while still others(predominately television reports) edited out the verbal abuses allowing the rite to standas a signifier for the region’s rich cultural heritage.

Focusing on circuits such as these illuminates how new relations between cities andtheir peripheries are implicated in reshaping religion and secularity. Until recently, thetextual bias of religious studies and the presumed inevitability of secularizationdramatically inhibited analysis of religion and modern cities as interdependentproblems. The extensive body of research on religion and place focused instead oncosmological and spatial mimesis (Gill, 1998a; 1998b), which has been unhelpful forunderstanding the dynamics of contemporary urban formations. Further, most worksthat explicitly address religion in modern urban spaces tend to understand religion asa substance to be mourned, resurrected or excised like the diseases of poverty orunemployment. Ironically, even more historically oriented research, guided by thehobbled hope of recuperating the rich pasts lost in secularization’s heady embrace,continue to abuse the feeble categorical caricatures we recognize as ‘world religions’(Fitzgerald, 2000).

While guided by radically divergent methods, all these studies make severalproblematic assumptions. First, they assume religion is a natural category. It may takemany different forms, go unrecognized or be miscategorized, but its essence is the sameacross time and space. It is as natural and common as carbon or nitrogen. Thisassumption is clearly evidenced in the unreflective usage of religion, the sacred andspirituality as synonyms. Similar to current discussions of ‘liberals’, ‘neocons’ or‘pornography’, debates about religion and the secular intensify as the slippage betweenthese terms feeds back into the debate as ignorance, insensitivity or imperialism. Whilesuch escalation between rival sects is common (if not constitutive), it is all the moreshocking when it occurs in the reflective and critical utopia of the modern academy.

Second, these studies assume that religion and the secular are mutually exclusivecategories providing definitional foundations for other domains (Lakoff, 1987). Further,as the preeminent space of secular modernity, the city does not, or will not, have religion.The individual conscience — the location of ‘natural religion’ — can be cloaked by thesecular, but remains unscathed even when covered by the secular (Byrne, 1989; Harrison,1990; Derrida, 1996). Setting aside the problematic understanding of religion as asubstance to be cleansed or accumulated — like disease or wealth — these assumptionsconfuse the constant negotiation between religion and its others across spaces ofdifference. By contrast, this article tracks the effects of an increasingly importantdiscourse on religion, a discourse that understands itself as nonmaterial and apolitical,which proves effective in urban spaces and delocalized media worlds.



Religious experience and the promiscuity of ‘religion’Examining how ‘religion’ circulates from margin to center and back reveals a puzzle:even as ‘religion’ becomes more concrete, repeating itself in visual and verbal media, thesignified it references becomes more abstract. We will see how the definition anddelineation of religion as a distinct sphere of life comparable with politics or economicsdefines the term’s scope. This redaction culminates in the ineffable experiences of anindividual. While many would argue that such a transformation is a necessary effect ofmedia (or Protestantism), this development is not inevitable. The widespread disclosuresof political violence and dictatorial dissimulations suggest a more rational anddeliberative future; however, despite the good intentions of judicial inquiries andmultilateral institutions, neither constant surveillance nor international treaties canameliorate the bloody belligerence of war. Televising ‘surgical strikes’ and passingresolutions against ‘terror’ does not make them any less violent. The violence of warafflicts bodies as much as it does imaginations.

Increasingly, in Himachal, religion is recognized as the secret sinew stitchingHimachalis together. It is the subject of endless cultural production, and it plays astarring role in history museums and hotel advertisements alike. Across the mediascape,religion is given an awesome power even as its materiality dissolves; its spaces ofpractice are systematized and resignified; its gods are transformed into abstractions; andits activities are replaced with intentions. Let us look at this process more carefully.

Village videos and the theological work of postproductionEvery Himachali village with even the smallest of bazaars has a photo studio. If there isa chai stall and a bus stop, there is a photo studio. As well as offering photographs, manyof them also offer video services. While the commercial dimensions of these servicesrevolve around wedding videos, many of the videographers would rather spend their daysrecording local rituals. At nearly every festival I attended over the past several years,there was at least one local videographer recording the event and at some of the morewell known events there were as many as four.

These popular videos range in length from 10 minutes to several hours and circulatemainly within the village itself, passed from house to house as VHS tapes or VCDs. Thecontent is remarkably consistent and postproduction work is almost nonexistent. Theyfocus mainly on the main ritual transactions of the festival (ritual preparations, includingrope sliding, ecstatic ‘playing’ (khelna), sacrifices and various types of transgressiveacts). There is little concern that individual sections of the rite should be interpretedsymbolically or to have the rite stand in metonymically for the village, region or state asa whole.

A representative example of these videos is a 4-hour VCD of a Kahika festival that isenormously popular with locals. This VCD, filmed over 5 days, includes all the majorritual events of the festival and includes no commentary, interviews or explanations byparticipants. Instead it shows all the important ritual moments. This elaborate andexpensive festival performed every 5 or 7 years revolves around the transfer of sins (pap)by the temple officials and the village deity itself onto a man from the Nar caste (asubgroup of Kolis). The festival climaxes when the Nar, reciting Pahari mantras andthrowing leaves of barley and bhekhal, takes the sins of those present upon himself, asacrifice that will kill him. He is then enclosed in a circle and he begins verballyassaulting the deities and the temple officials. After this, the deity’s mediums (gur)become violently possessed. The music is frenzied, some of the spectators also becomepossessed, and several of the men pierce their cheeks or tongues. At this time, the Nar islying under a special cloth and the primary gur shoots an arrow over him. This marks thefinal death of the Nar. According to many I interviewed, shooting over the Nar, asopposed to directly into him, is a recent addition to the festival, as is the final rite. In this

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rite, the Nar who is unconscious is loaded onto a funeral bier and carried around thetemple seven times. As he does this, others from the Nar caste hurl insults at the templeofficials. Again the deity’s mediums become possessed and attempt to revive the Nar. Inthis particular video he is revived, but many villagers tell stories of other festivals wherethe Nar died from the weight of the sins he had assumed.

How can we account for the popularity of videos depicting rites that most Hindunationalists would find abhorrent and many others would denounce as primitive orsuperstitious? I believe their popularity highlights the absence of religion as a problemfor these filmmakers and their audiences. This is not to say that these villagers do nothave religion in the normative sense articulated by early European travelers, missionariesor colonial administrators. My argument is that the separation of religion as anautonomous sphere of life — distinct from governance, economics or politics, andcomposed of specific beliefs and practices — has no palpable reality in these videos.Accordingly, there is little need to defend or define it. This lack of conscious defense ordefinition is reflected in the response I was repeatedly given when soliciting explanationof the rite and its various elements. Whether I was asking why they circle the templeseven times or why they needed bhekhal thorns instead of cedar branches, the answerwas always the same: ‘because this is our devıdevata sanskriti [our god-goddessculture]’. I will return to this idea later. For now, we need only note how this phraseprovides its own explanation. It does not need further clarification.

In postulating the absence of religion as a problem, I am not suggesting that villagersproducing and watching these videos cannot recognize the difference betweengovernment and temple authorities; nor are they unaware of categories like Hindu,Buddhist and Muslim. They are as acutely aware of governmental property regulationsand their neglected schools and roads as they are of disputes between Hindus andMuslims across the subcontinent. It is only to recognize that the rites appearing in thesevideos are not understood as markers of communal difference, as somehow distinct frompolitical economy, as foundations of personal identity, or signs of superstition orauthenticity.Yet as these videos, and the people making and watching them, move towardurban centers, they are reimagined in precisely these ways.

As these videos circulate, they are increasingly subjected to delocalizing pressures inpreparation for their arrival in cities. In the villages of their production, they were neversold. They were passed from house to house, occasionally being shown to small groups.Yet as they move outside these villages they are subjected to market forces and theparticularities of Himachali urban sensibilities. New aesthetics, new public demands, andnew audiences redefine what can be shown and what will sell. Accordingly, videos offestivals and local temples undergo extensive postproduction work. This is elucidated bythe lumbering arrival of a talented young filmmaker to the state’s capital in Shimla.

Raj Kumar is an ambitious young artist from a small village near Kotkai in the Shimladistrict. Buoyed by the success of his films in Kotkai and surrounding villages, he movedto Shimla to sell them to local cable networks and national distributors. Yet he quicklydiscovered the aesthetic in Shimla was not like his natal village. His films were well shot,well lit and well framed. From a strictly technical perspective, they are much better thanmost videos airing on local television or for sale in Shimla; however, producers anddistributors have been hesitant to broadcast or distribute them. Kumar has not been tofilm school and had spent little time outside the valley of his birth before moving toShimla. The style and content of his films developed from intimate engagement with theritual practices he has known since childhood. Like the videos of Kahika they revolvearound pragmatic ritual transactions picturing ritual preparations, sacrifice, possessionand ritual piercing (Figure 2).

Recognizing the need to adapt his videos for new audiences, Kumar and a small groupof editors laboriously reedited his videos — all images of ritual slaughter were removed,calendar art of pan-Indian goddesses was added to translate local deities into trans-regional mythospheres, and new scenes of snow-capped mountains and local danceswere shot to fill the holes where the controversial rituals had once been. None of these



transformations helped the commercial success of the videos. So Raj Kumar isattempting a new approach, reflecting the cinematic norms of documentaries produced inShimla and the short clips that pepper local news broadcasts, clips the producers referto as ‘soft stories’. He is adding voiceover commentaries by several local experts onHimachali traditions, who are able to translate onscreen bodies into marketable idioms,rather than simply making structural comparisons between the rites or stories of oneregion with another.

This final attempt to render his films marketable highlights the agency of a new classof experts integral to the production of Himachal as a site of identification. Over the pastthree decades, local historians, scholars and thoughtful villagers (they call themselvessahityakars, writers) have developed a large body of information about the diversetraditions of the Western Himalayas. These writers acquire the authority to speak forHimachali culture by mastering this body of literature, becoming the gatekeepers ofauthentic Himachali religion. The addition of expert voiceovers by these writers shouldbe the final addition Kumar’s films need to break into the market. While expertvoiceovers have been a common element of documentary films since the beginning, theiraddition here is much more than a response to new media methods. It reveals theintroduction of religion as a problem that must be addressed by anyone representingHimachal.

Devıdevata sanskrtiThe introduction of this problem is further evidenced by the changing meaning ofdevıdevata sanskrti (god–goddess culture), which Kumar’s commentators use to referto Himachali religion. In most rural areas, the term denotes the practices represented inKumar’s unedited videos. It depicts the diverse forms of performance and thoughtaccompanying Himachal’s local deities. It can refer to traditions of propitiating deitiesin towns, villages, springs, mountains, fields, among others. It also includes thepractices associated with these gods, including fairs and festivals (mela, utsav), ritualprognostication (puchna/pana), temple management (adhikarı) and even songs and

Figure 2 Sacrifice video produced by Raj Kumar (source: Mark Elmore, Producer)

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stories (gatha, katha). However, when used in these village settings it is a descriptivenot a normative term. Here the term is used to refer to what people do, not what theyshould do.

In urban centers and elite-authored media the term asserts normative force becomingvirtually synonymous with the English word religion. In fact, the terms are often usedinterchangeably. Thus, to return to our metaphor of the circuit, we see how a term thatarose out of everyday practices begins to circulate, arriving in Shimla and other urbancenters, attaching itself to broader national and global norms before returning to thevillages from whence it came. Yet when it returns it is suffused with new meanings thatassert a normalizing force.

The semantic condensation and authorizing force implied in this shift is similar tothat which has occurred to the Hindi word dharm in much of Northern India. In thiscompression, as Simon Weightman and S.M. Pandey have argued (1978: 217–27),the English word religion becomes the ‘determinate factor in Hindi usage’. Thetransformation of dharm into religion demonstrates an amazing feat of linguisticcompression and homogenization. The term is common in early Vedic sources andtexts of the classical period, yet the range of usage is enormous, including everythingfrom ritual action, law and duty to universal order and customary practice (Halbfass,1988; Olivelle, 2005). Moreover, the term hardly ever signifies something like avoluntary system of beliefs before the nineteenth century. The term closest to thisconception was darsana (viewpoint), and is generally translated as philosophy orschool of thought.

Impressive as this compression is, the increasing understanding of dharm as religionfrom the early nineteenth century did not mean that the people making these equationshad the same conception of religion. Weightman and Pandey, like most scholars who failto appreciate the nuanced conceptual and practical histories of religion, assume whatthey call ‘the English concept of religion’ was unified. The semantic slippage herebetween English as a language and the English as a colonial power is instructive. Theshift Weightman and Pandey identify was first formulated under colonial rule and wasfacilitated by missionary activity, colonial forms of knowledge, new state organizationand the increased use of English as an administrative and educational language(Halbfass, 1988; Radice, 1998). Yet the conceptions of religion mapped onto dharmawere anything but singular. For early Christian missionaries in Bengal and theirinterlocutors it signified a system opposed to their true religion, which they termedsatyadharma (Dayananda et al., 1970). For radical reformers like DayanandaSaraswatı, founder of the Arya Samaj, dharma sounded a lot like the natural religion ofEnlightenment philosophies: ‘I believe in a religion based on universal and all-embracingprinciples which have always been accepted as true by mankind . . . called the primevaleternal religion [sanatana dharm]’ (ibid.: 724). Tweaking Dayananda’s formulationsalmost two decades later, the sanatana dharma textbooks, written with the help oftheosophist Annie Besant, understood dharma as an inclusive ecumenical framework inwhich all traditions could be situated within Hinduism. Finally, for V.D. Savarkar, thepatron saint of Hindu Nationalism and whipping boy of Indian secularism, neitherdharma nor religion could encompass what he meant by Hindutva. We can see a similartransformation occurring to devıdevata sanskrti in Mandi’s famous photo gallery,Himachal Darshan.

Himachal DarshanMandi is a small regional capital experiencing rapid urban growth. The city sits at theconfluence of two rivers and is a crossroads between the upper Himalayas and the NorthIndian plains. On the outskirts of the city, on the bank of the Beas River, there is a smallconcrete building with a brick and cedar façade and a name that unites regional identity



with pan-Indian temple practices, ‘Himachal Darshan’ (Figure 3). This space is thebrainchild of Birbal, Himachal’s most famous photographer. Displaying more than 100of his photographs, the gallery combines the aesthetics of a museum, a temple and aresting place. The physical space is similar to many provincial Indian museums: thelighting is poor, the guard is disinterested and the dry smell of unwashed floors hangs inthe air.

While innumerable writers have attempted to represent Himachali culture in textualform, Birbal’s photo gallery is the first to represent it in images. He chose these imagesfrom an archive of more than 30,000, many of which had been used in magazinebrochures, tourist ads and newspapers of the 1980s and 1990s. As the visualcondensation of three decades of visual memory work, their collection reveals some ofthe most characteristic assumptions about Himachal, particularly of what is shown asHimachali religion. Yet Birbal’s intervention is more than a translation from one mediumto another. Taken as a whole, the museum advances two positions that may strike someas antithetical. It presents Himachal as simultaneously modern and spiritually authentic,and in so doing, I argue, it both shows and promotes a new aesthetics, a new manner inwhich ‘Himachal’ pierces the flesh.

Two themes dominate Birbal’s photos: the modern and the timeless. Old temple spiresare pictured against snow-capped peaks, and cedar carvings are set in verdant gardens.Next to these images are panoramas of the state’s major cities and its industriallandmarks. This strategic juxtaposition of the ancient and the urban must not be read asa sign of incomplete modernization. It illustrates the style of Himachali modernity. Thestate’s authenticity is simultaneously grounded by its antiquity and its progressiveness,a unique combination that, for present-day Himachalis, testifies to the state’s divineelection. This style is hypostatized in a popular slogan that is as common in buses, hotelsand filling stations as in Birbal’s museum, which announces Himachal as ‘dev bhumi’,the land of gods. Invoking divinity to justify claims of cultural singularity is hardly novel,but Birbal’s museum is more than a simple reflection of the region’s changing character.It is an integral part of the creative matrix from which this character is created, generatingthe very practices it represents.

Figure 3 Himachal Darshan (source: Mark Elmore)

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To understand this matrix we must probe beyond the gorgeous scenery and boastfulslogans to that which is excluded from the frame. The gallery contains no pictures ofanimal sacrifice, ritual possession or even the dancing of the deities in the chariots (rath).These practices are the most common rites performed in and around village temples, andthey are foundational to the ritual logics linking villagers and their deities. Birbal’somission of these rites is as conscious as it is understandable. It is precisely these ritesthat are excluded from the normative understanding of Himachali religion; they are signsof ‘superstition’ and ‘backwardness’ to be removed from devıdevata sanskrti (Parmar,1977; Parmar and Sabha., 1994). This exclusion refocuses the shape and scope ofHimachali religion. However, if the most common ritual interactions between villagersand their deities are not permissible, what replaces them?

In a 2000 interview with The Tribune, Birbal offers us some clues. He is mostinterested in picturing ‘the innocent people [of Himachal], their dances and songs, theirfaith in the village gods’, but the urge to present these images is impelled by more thanartistic impulses. For him, ‘It is a matter of regret that today we are leading anostentatious life and are oblivious of our rich cultural heritage . . . With my camera I amtrying to preserve this heritage. The camera freezes particular events which becomevaluable for our future’ (Gupta, 2000). This quote illuminates the normative dimensionsof Birbal’s project, as he seeks to ‘freeze particular events’ that can be ‘valuable for ourfuture’. The key to understanding which particular events will become valuable lies in thegallery’s name itself, which is a conscious play on the pan-Indian temple practice ofdarsana. Understood in this light, the gallery is simultaneously a place where one seesthe natural and cultural diversity of the state as well as a space to participate in the ritualof darsana, which is a visual exchange between the eyes of the deity and the petitioner.While darsana has been an important part of temple practices at sites across South Asiafor centuries, only in the late colonial and postcolonial periods has it functioned as glue,binding the domestic rites of urban dwellers in Mumbai with the village practices ofMadhya Pradesh in what Diana Eck calls ‘the central act of Hindu worship’ (Eck, 1981:3). In both the style of engagement it elicits and the content of its images, the galleryconstructs Himachali ritual practice as a personal visual exchange. This constructionallows all Himachalis as well as tourists from Kerala and Canada to have HimachalDarshan. Moreover, it defines, as it simultaneously performs, the essence of Himachalireligion. As one visitor aptly put it in the gallery’s comment book, ‘Birbal Sharma hasrevealed the true inner form of Himachal’ (Sharma, 1997). This revelation alsotransforms Himachal, much as India itself was transformed during colonial rule, into adeity capable of participating in darsana (Mayo, 1927; Ramaswamy, 1997).

Revealing the region’s true form, Birbal helps to establish the boundaries betweenreligion and the secular. While many would consider the collapse of a photo gallery anda temple a transgression of the secular, it is deft negotiations such as his that define theboundaries and relations between religion and the secular. Selecting specific images,excluding others, and framing the experience in terms of darsana defines the boundariesof what is and is not legitimately religious. All those things excluded are subjected todifferent logics — of politics, of economics or of social reform. In spaces like this, wewould do well to pay close attention to how these boundaries are established rather thancondemning or celebrating the space as a challenge to notions of ‘religion’ and the‘secular’. Instead, they are part of a broader, ongoing negotiation to define Himachal andits god–goddess culture, a process facilitated by the circulation of these new conceptionsto and from cities.

Religious feedbackTo completely understand the process of religious feedback, a thorough study of differenttypes of media and the development activities of different state ministries would benecessary, but here I can only offer a short example symptomatic of these interactions. In



addition to creating and distributing different types of media, the Department ofLanguage and Culture as well as the Department of Tourism employ officials to mediatethe state’s relations with its villages (Sharma and Gupta, 2006). These officials aresupposed to promote local literature, to write about village practices, to preserve ritualsin danger of disappearance, to help manage local temples, and to prepare village templesfor pilgrim traffic.

Radha Sharma, a language officer working in Kullu district, is typical of theseofficials. She is well educated, articulate and compassionate. She attends planningmeetings in Shimla, designs policies for the development of her district, allocatesgovernmental resources and attends nearly every festival in Kullu district. As one of theprimary links between remote villages and Shimla, her influence can hardly beoverestimated, as the following story illustrates.

After returning from a distant village festival one afternoon, she boasted of her workthat week. The festival was an annual celebration attended by other deities in the regionbound together by mythic family relations. The festival was accompanied by dancing,prognostication rites, and the reestablishment of a sacred tree outside the village temple.Traditionally it culminated with the sacrifice of several hundred goats, the meat of whichwas shared by all those in attendance. But Radha, a vegetarian and advocate of ahimsa(non-violence), was offended by these rites. She had been deeply influenced by this newconcept of religion that identifies ritual slaughter (bali) as a superstitious vestige of thepast. Radha told me she was ashamed of such practices and appalled they were stillhappening. She was offended by the sight of blood and disturbed by the rapacity withwhich villagers consumed the meat.

So rather than helping coordinate the festival, as she normally would, she offered itsorganizers a choice. She told them she would eliminate the modest monetary supportprovided by the government unless they agreed to forego the sacrifices. Alreadyhamstrung by migrating populations, decreasing crop yields and the seizure of templelands in the 1960s and 1970s, the temple administrators were in no position to argue.‘How could she’, I asked, ‘restrict religious practices in the name of the government?Doesn’t the Indian constitution prohibit this?’ ‘Yes’, she said. ‘Of course we have asecular constitution. We cannot interfere in religion, but animal sacrifice is not religion.It is a barbaric and violent practice’. Like Shimla’s video editors, Birbal and the TourismDepartment, Sharma performed a separation defining the boundaries of religion. For her,as for the others, true religion is contemplative, devotional and peaceful. It cannot bedivisive or violent. Religion is that which binds Himachalis to one another andencourages what Ashok Thakur, director of both the Department of Tourism and theDepartment of Language and Culture, calls Himachal’s ‘culture of peace’.

Urban orbits: completing the circuitThis short article orbits the perimeter of several interrelated issues. We have traversed theregion, from its remote villages to its state capital and back again. We began with roughcuts of sacrificial rituals, largely unedited footage circulating within small villages andvalleys. As these videos moved toward urban centers, they were edited. Voiceovers wereadded, potentially offensive rites eliminated, and images of pan-Indian deities added.Even with these additions their circulation was limited to the homes of curious elites.They had to be further digested, stripped of their practices and contexts, to serveas cultural masala to the daily news. From there, they circulate back to villages ininnumerable forms, including vernacular media and governmental officials, as describedhere. But what exactly are we are orbiting? If this is not a pallid academic imitation ofthe region’s popular pilgrimage circuits, what is the gravitational force attracting videoediting practices, exhibition aesthetics, and ‘religion’ in contemporary HimachalPradesh? And more importantly, why does this matter?

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The force binding these different themes can be summarized by turning the subtitle ofPankaj Mishra’s (a Himachali native) new collection of essays, Temptations of the West:how to be modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and beyond, into a question (Mishra, 2006).What does it mean to be modern in Himachal Pradesh? This question pervades the issuesdiscussed here, but not as an imperial assessment of ‘how natives really think’, asopposed to what they say they think or what they ‘do’. While the question’s history is toocomplicated to be adequately discussed here, we must recognize that it is coextensivewith the question of Himachali identity. It is a question Himachalis feel compelled to askthemselves, inflecting their self-understandings and their relations with others. Since atleast the early post-independence period when Y.S. Parmar first equated Himachali andmodern in his struggle for the recognition of Himachal as an independent state within theIndian federation, these two questions have been coextensive.

Examining this problematic as the gravitational force aligning the disparate sectionsof this article, it is now possible to understand why ‘religion’, ‘the city’ and ‘media’ mustbe examined as dynamic and mutually constitutive. In contemporary Himachal it is notpossible to separate them or to use terms like modern, secular or liberal, which placethem in historicist narratives. Religion in contemporary Himachal does not persist inspite of urbanization or mediation. As Bob Orsi has argued, the city and its technologiesare ‘the very materials for such expressions and experiences’ (Orsi, 1999). Urban spacesand mediascapes are more than locations where religion happens. They shape the veryconditions in which modern ‘religion’ is allowed to appear and are reflexively altered bythese appearances, producing nothing less than a new aesthetics, a new way of being inthe world.

This article has attempted to enact the gravitational force described above rather thanbelaboring its implications or tediously cataloging the inadequacies of other scholars.However, to avoid misreading, allow me to lay a few cards on the table. From theperspective of this article’s orbit, many questions driving present-day work on religion inthe present — whether in religious studies, urban studies or media studies — are illconceived. The ‘problem’ of religion’s resurgence in so-called modern secular states, ofhow media distort Islam’s ‘peaceful’ character, or of Christian charlatanry are ‘problems’only in relation to erroneous assumptions. Modern is not equal to agnostic; worldreligions are not natural, timeless categories; secularism is not equivalent to religiousequality; and cities are not only spaces with public sanitation and high populationdensities. To make these assumptions is to perpetuate the politics of truth many of thesestudies criticize (MacIntyre, 1988).

By contrast, this article employs a radically localized concept of religion in its limitedattempt to understand the circulation of religion in particular debates in an increasinglyurban, globalized region of the Western Himalayas. I have attempted to resist thesticky-sweet seductions that reduce religion to religious experience, that assumemodernity equals secular, and use ‘sacred’, ‘spiritual’ and ‘religious’ as synonyms. I havealso tried resisting globalization, urbanization or mediation as either limitations onhuman creativity or salves against global poverty and inequality. Resisting thesetendencies creates, I believe, an analytic space where religion and the city emerge asproducts of human agency and creativity while simultaneously being implicated in thevery production of this agency. Arguing that thought and desire are positioned isnot to invoke a ‘culturalist’ position that validates the arbitrary boundaries dividingcontemporary geopolitical arrangements; it is a turn toward the messy vitality of humanlife with its inconsistencies and assumptions, its blind spots and illuminations. Mostimportantly, this approach avoids unproductive debates over origins, authenticity andteleology (whether historical or theological), which reveal little more than personalagendas and the limitation of imagination.

My goal in this article is not to lament the loss of local specificities or to celebratecosmopolitanism. I am interested in the how Himachal’s conceptual, practical andaesthetic reorientations manifest themselves across Himachal’s mountains and media.Tracing how the question of being modern is framed, answered and embodied discloses



much more than ‘local culture’ in global media, or the persistence of religion in ‘secular’cities. We see how each of the actors in this story embodies, and thus theorizes, religion,media and the city. And perhaps most surprisingly, we glimpse, if only in flashes, why astable definition of religion continues to elude social scientists while simultaneouslybeing self-evident for those who mobilize its powers.

Mark Elmore ([email protected]), Department of Religious Studies, University ofCalifornia at Davis, 918 Sproul Hall, Davis, CA 95616, USA.

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RésuméCet article examine la circulation des discours contemporains sur la religion et lasécularité dans l’Ouest de l’Himalaya. Il retrace un circuit de médias qui va et reviententre les villages reculés et les centres urbains de l’Himachal Pradesh, en utilisant cecircuit comme herméneutique pour expliquer comment la religion et la ville deviennentdes enjeux qui se constituent mutuellement et qui appellent à une définition, unedéfense ou une réforme. La circulation conjointe de “la religion” et de “la ville” —toutes deux étant des produits discursifs et des réalités vécues — a restructuré lamanière dont les Himachalis comprennent, pratiquent et considèrent les relations àl’égard des divinités locales et des rites prescrits ainsi que les célébrations et lesmatérialisations dans les espaces urbains et leurs extérieurs ruraux. Dans ce nouveauréseau de circulation, l’individu devient le fondement de l’autorité, l’État prévaut surles formes organisationnelles concurrentes, les divinités deviennent des abstractionsmétaphysiques, des convictions particulières refinalisées en religion, et les villagesapparaissent comme un “patrimoine” à promouvoir et respecter. À partir de cetargumentaire, il est montré pourquoi, malgré l’évidence intrinsèque de la significationde la religion pour ceux qui mobilisent ses pouvoirs, une définition stable doit resterune chimère à jamais.



Circuits of Secularity or the Aesthetics of Religion in an Age of Cities and Citations

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