Religious practice and the phenomenology of everyday violence in contemporary India

Abstract

This article focuses on 'dread' in religious practice in contemporary India. It argues that the dread of everyday existence, which is as salient in a biographical temporality as it pervades the phenomenal environment, connects and transfers between religious practices and everyday life in India for the marginalized masses. For such dread, dominant liberal discourses, such as those of the nation, economy, or ego-centric performance, have neither the patience nor the forms to represent, perform, and abreact. Formulated in dialogue with critical theory, phenomenology, and psychoanalytic theory, this article conceives of religious practices in continuum with the economic, social, ethical, and political realms, and the repressions thereof. Focused on a rapidly expanding religious movement in India, it challenges normative discourses of religious practitioners as fundamentalists or reactionaries, and strives to extend the imperatives of recent critical urban ethnography into the domain of religious practice.

Work, Performance, and the Social Ethic of Global Capitalism: Understanding Religious Practice in Contemporary India

“…During his 1990 fieldwork in Hardwar, Lochtefeld () reports estimates of a quarter million pilgrims, a number that had tripled by his second visit in 1996 (p. 193). In 2002, the number of pilgrims was estimated at four million ( Hindustan Times ), growing to six million in 2004 (Tripathi ), seven million in 2009 (Statesman ), and above 12 million in 2010 and 2011 ( Hindustan Times ).…”