Religion and the City in India

Supriya Chaudhuri

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000429015
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book offers fresh theoretical, methodological and empirical analyses of the relation between religion and the city in the South Asian context.

Uniting the historical with the contemporary by looking at the medieval and early modern links between religious faith and urban settlement, the book brings together a series of focused studies of the mixed and multiple practices and spatial negotiations of religion in the South Asian city. It looks at the various ways in which contemporary religious practice affects urban everyday life, commerce, craft, infrastructure, cultural forms, art, music and architecture. Chapters draw upon original empirical study and research to analyze the foundational, structural, material and cultural connections between religious practice and urban formations or flows. The book argues that Indian cities are not 'postsecular' in the sense that the term is currently used in the modern West, but that there has been, rather, a deep, even foundational link between religion and urbanism, producing different versions of urban modernity. Questions of caste, gender, community, intersectional entanglements, physical proximity, private or public ritual, processions and prayer, economic and political factors, material objects, and changes in the built environment, are all taken into consideration, and the book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of different historical periods, different cities, and different types of religious practice.

Filling a gap in the literature by discussing a diversity of settings and faiths, the book will be of interest to scholars to South Asian history, sociology, literary analysis, urban studies and cultural studies.

1 The making of a city

Religion and society in the Caṇḍī-maṅgala of early modern Bengal

Supriya Chaudhuri

Introduction

In the Ākheṭika-khaṇḍa (Book of the Hunter) of the Caṇḍī-maṅgala composed by Kavikaṅkaṇa Mukundarāma Cakravarti during the second half of the sixteenth century in Bengal, there is a detailed and scrupulous account of the building of a city, in consequence of a gift from the goddess Caṇḍī and in order to establish her worship on earth. This episode, and its place in the poem as a whole, has drawn comment from historians as well as literary scholars, particularly in the context of the religious and political changes taking place in Bengal between the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, from its conquest by the Turkish general Muhammad Bakhtiyar Khalji (1204–1205 CE) to its annexation (March 3, 1575) by the Mughal Emperor Akbar. During this period, the region witnessed sustained agrarian expansion, accompanied by Islamicization of the population, as well as growing economic prosperity owing to thriving commercial networks in the Bay of Bengal. While the earliest texts claimed for a specifically Bengali literary history are the Buddhist caryāpadas, discovered by the nineteenth-century scholar Haraprasad Shastri and dating from around the tenth century, Bengali literature witnessed a notable efflorescence from the fourteenth century onwards under the sultanate, especially the ‘golden’ period of the Hussain Shahi dynasty (1494–1538). Both the sultans of Bengal and independent Hindu dignitaries extended patronage, in a multilingual setting, to Hindu and Muslim poets writing in Bengali; scholarship in Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit; advances in philosophy and logic; and Bengali works on Islamic themes, such as Shah Muhammad Saghir’s adaptation of the Yusuf-Zulaikha (dedicated to Sultan Ghiyathuddin Azam Shah, r. 1389–1409) or Syed Sultan’s syncretic chronicle of the lives of the prophets, the Nabi-baṃśa, written in Chittagong near the end of the sixteenth century.

Up to the time of the Vaiṣṇava saint Caitanyadeva (c. 1486–1534), Bengali literature is roughly divisible into three main strands: translations and imitations of Sanskrit texts, including the epics; Vaiṣṇava lyric and devotional poetry (padāvalī); and the maṅgalakāvyas, narrative poems celebrating the auspicious aspects (Sanskrit maṅgala, ‘auspicious, beneficent’; subst. ‘well-being’) of local gods, goddesses, and saints venerated in folk religion by non-Brāhmaṇical, ‘subaltern’ social orders or ‘lower castes’ (antyaja) in eastern India (see Bandyopadhyay 1951; Sen 1960). This last genre, to which the Caṇḍī-maṅgala belongs, is seen by Sukumar Sen as a subdivision of the class of performative narrative poetry known as pañcālikā, having a visual accompaniment and including recitative or sung forms, such as vrata-kathā and renditions of the Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata, though the maṅgalakāvyas are distinct in form and content (Sen 2013: 17). These date, according to some scholars, from the thirteenth century onwards (Bhattacharya 2000: 8), while others place the earliest exemplars in the fifteenth century when they were written down (Mukhopadhyay 1993: 1; Curley 2011: 184). They draw on much older goddess cults and folk religious practices at the popular or subaltern level that were gradually being assimilated, through the Bengal Purāṇas, into hegemonic Brāhmaṇism and Vaiṣṇavism, following the decline of Buddhism after the tenth century (Bhattacharya 2000: 55–69; Chakrabarti 2018: 165–233, 300–303; Chatterjee 2009: 90-95). Scholarship on the maṅgalakāvyas, where it is not primarily philological, has explored this history, and the Caṇḍī-maṅgala, in particular, has been mined for ideas of sovereignty, war, patronage, royal and mercantile exchange, caste, religious community, kinship and marriage (Bhattacharya 1981; Chatterjee 2013; Curley 2008; Eaton 2011: 108–109). Less directly examined is the foundational relation between religion and the city that is presented in the poem, though it has been linked to perceptions of the city in pre-British – a period also tending to be described as pre-modern – Bengal (Dimock and Inden 1989: 113–129; Chatterjee 1992: 188–189; Inden 1967: 21–46; Ray 1992b: 158). This is important, because the maṅgalakāvyas have otherwise been read as representative of a predominantly non-urban and agrarian literary culture (Bhattacharya 2000: 1–8).

The Caṇḍī-maṅgala

The Caṇḍī-maṅgala of Mukundarāma Cakravarti was composed, according to Ashutosh Bhattacharya, in the last decade of the sixteenth century, though Sukuma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Religion and the city in India
• Chapter 1: The making of a city: Religion and society in the Caṇḍī-maṅgala of early modern Bengal
• Chapter 2: Temple, urban landscape, and production of space: Śrirangam in the early modern Tamil region
• Chapter 3: Hazrat-i-Dehli: Chishti Sufism and the making of the cosmopolitan character of the city of Delhi
• Chapter 4: The East India Company, English Protestants, and the wider Christian community in seventeenth-century Surat, Bombay, and Madras
• Chapter 5: Reconfiguring a lost trace: The Buddhist ‘revival’ movement in late-nineteenth-century Calcutta and the Bengal Buddhist Association
• Chapter 6: From Faridpur to Calcutta: The journey of the Matua faith
• Chapter 7: On residues and reuse: A festival and its afterlife in an Indian metropolis
• Chapter 8: The leftover untouch: Sensing caste in the modern urban lives of a devotional instrument
• Chapter 9: Mourning in the city: Imambaras as sites of urban contestation in Kolkata
• Chapter 10: Performing processions: Claiming the city1
• Chapter 11: Memory and space: Street shrines and popular devotion in Amritsar
• Chapter 12: Convivial spaces: The art of being together and separate in the multi-religious city of Ahmedabad
• Chapter 13: Religion, heritage, and identity: The contested heritage-scape of Varanasi1
• Index