The city as secular space and religious territory: accommodating religious activism in urban India

This [Temple] is an illegal construction, a typical case of land-grabbing.\nPeople do this to get power and earn money. This is not the right type of\ntemple [...] 99% of the temples are constructed illegally [...]. The people\ndon’t build houses but temples because they know that in this case no one\ncan do anything against it and they can simultaneously earn money with\nit. Behind the shrine they can build their house in peace. All this happens\nbecause peopleThis statement by a top bureaucrat in the Bhopal administration\nsummarises a widely felt sentiment among urban planners in India. For\nmany bureaucrats, temples are nuisances, traffic obstructions, acts of landgrabbing, or means of political assertion that contribute to inter-religious\ntensions. By contrast, builders, trustees or worshippers defend temples\nas spaces of divine manifestation, as responding to religious needs and\nproviding space for religious festivals and community activity. In this\narticle, I use the case study of the establishment of a controversial goddess\ntemple in Bhopal to shed light on a fundamental rift between two ideal-type\napproaches to the city – as a secular place and as religious territory. This is\nan abiding theme of my research on urban temples, which was undertaken\nin Bhopal, the capital city of the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, over a\ntotal of twenty months between 1995 and 2001. are uneducated.:Introduction ......................................................................................................\nMultiple Secularities and Religious Space ..................................................... 8\nNegotiating Sacred Space ............................................................................... 13\nEnshrining the Divine in the City ................................................................. 17\nConclusion ...................................................................................................... 24\nBibliography .................................................................................................... 26