Most of the Indian cities have witnessed a seemingly contradictory trend over the last two decades. Even as different expressions of modernity have bulldozed through the streetscape, forms of religiosity continue to flourish. For example, a study conducted in Chennai in 2000 estimated the number of pavement shrines in the city to be 1600. The researchers reported that a third of those shrines came into existence after 1985, in the era of economic liberalization in India.
The empirical reality here, however, has come to be framed in terms of a binary constituted by modernity and religiosity. It is no surprise then that many perceive this trend as amounting to “appropriation of public spaces by the pious”. The problem is posited as a conflict between religion and “secular rights of citizens” (read car-owners). In this view, religiosity is something that could be tamed and harnessed. It has no politics of its own which is why protest demonstrations, embedded in the “secular rights of citizens”, are more desirable in public spaces than expressions of religiosity.
Such an argument presupposes certain homogenizing assumptions about our public spaces—that people’s engagement with power in these spaces is mediated only through secular rights. In the Indian context, this is at best an abstraction. Our public spaces are constituted by a series of competing claims. These claims intersect caste, class, religion and secular matters. They constitute public spaces because they remain unresolved—the contestation keeps going on. The practices of religiosity then could also be seen as a dialogue with power, and not just protest demonstrations. This argument is more relevant today than ever as the current government seeks to impose totalitarian plans on our cities which will have major implications for the urban poor.
In his book Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, James C. Scott theorized contestation in a political space where domination or defiance could never be absolute and observed that “the realities of power for subordinate groups mean that much of their political action requires interpretation precisely because it is intended to be cryptic and opaque”. Prior to Scott, Michel de Certeau spoke of tactics and strategies in his classic work The Practice of Everyday Life. Operating in the realm of abstractions, planners, policy-makers and bureaucrats define the institutional framework for everyone else which is referred to as strategies. While those subjected to the governing framework do not overtly undermine it, they seek to gradually erode it. However, the emerging dynamics of street-life in India may not always be accurately captured by these classical academic frameworks. Recent scholarship has pitched in to fill the gap.
This is not to suggest that practices of religiosity and their visible markers like street-side shrines are not amenable to appropriation. However, even ethnographic accounts that detail their mobilization by dominant actors (like Sangh Parivar in Gujarat and elsewhere, for example) observe that these structures often have a “will of their own”. The practices of religiosity in urban spaces are much more complex than what the prevailing popular narratives will have us believe. These narratives often invoke the 2013 Supreme Court order on unauthorized religious structures in an unquestioning manner. Although it is interpreted as “an affirmation of the universal claim over public spaces”, in practice it translates into the opposite.
It promotes a sort of modernity that seeks to erase all forms of counter-occupancies of the streetscape. The small roadside structures exist in opposition to the mainstream religiosity exemplified by mega temple complexes. What the opinion drawing on the SC order fails to see that it promotes and protects the latter from the threat posed by the former. It ends up homogenizing the streetscape as well as spaces of religiosity. It remains to be seen how these competing claims over public spaces unfold in the context of smart cities initiative.
