SOAS Research Online

Abstract

In this paper we look at how some big ideas to do with nationalism and religion have been translated into the everyday spaces of a village in Central India over the last sixty years. This particular village was studied by Adrian Mayer in the 1950s and, more recently, by Tommaso Sbriccoli, which gives our ethnographic approach a strong and original diachronic dimension. We suggest that religion has replaced caste hierarchy as the principle mode in which social differentiation is discussed, and that anti-Muslim discourse permits high caste Hindus to de-politicise and thus conceal structured relations of inequality with low caste Hindus. We examine the ways in which competitive building projects, ritualised processions and sounds are used to contest meaning at the village level. Instead of seeing public spaces as conservative arenas intended to check exuberance and excess, we see them as places for experimentation and social change, and as the spaces in which Indian post-colonial history is being staged.