[Reader-list] Chennai's Roadside Temples

[rakesh kumar singh]

Hi kalpagam

I am euqally interested in your project. In fact it is my one of the 
most interesting subject on which I wanted to work. Although I have 
worked a little bit on the mushrooming of such road side temples in 
Delhi. What I able to find behind the uninterrupted growth of such 
temples is the organised nexus of local level right wing politicians, 
pujaris and some times local level municipal staff. In Delhi there are 
two varieties of temples one is "Prachin Hanuman Mandir" and another is 
"Shiv Mandir". And the process of these mandirs strats with the 
'sthapana' of some stone, some photoraphs of kali, ganesh, hanuman and 
others (and in most of the cases rejected by households) and suddenly 
some pujari type of charater appears with a small donation box at the 
sites and after few days  a  signboard comes out with  graphitee like 
"Prachin hanuman mandir, Manokamna mandir, Shiv mandir etc."

Anyway I will follow your postings carefully. Its interesting, go ahead.


rakesh




kalpagam - umamaheswaran wrote:

>Hi Everybody,
>I am an anthropologist and a Chenaiite, though I live and work in Allahabad. For the last decade or more I have seen the mushrooming of roadside temples in Chennai. I decided to write about this socio-cultural phenomenon based on an ethnographic study interviewing a wide cross section of persons that includes the temple authorities and management, the faithful, the citizens and the people at large to understand this emerging cultural phenomenon as a feature of urban mentalities that determines in diverse ways the texture of the place for different persons. On account of certain uncertainty, my abstract was not posted in January. So I am doing so now and will also share with you all what I have encountered in a pilot fieldwork of a little over a fortnight.
>Understanding mentalities is essential to draw the connections between place and culture. In this research we will concentrate on studying just one mentality that we have identified namely "the temple complex" of Chennai. Our sociological study of Chennai's roadside temples will seek to engage with the following questions. Who are the people involved in building, managing and patronizing these temples? Are such activities more in the spirit of fostering a sense of community among them and is essentially a community activity? Is this a distinctive feature of urban cultural practice? And what does this cultural practice imply for urban religious identities? How are these related to other forms of expressing religiosity in urban public spaces like shop-keepers breaking pumpkins to ward off the evil eye and expressions of Hindu religiosity over the media? To what extent are these the minor nerve activities set off by the larger Ayodhya politics that has plagued the country for more than a decade? How do Chennaiites reconcile this public display of religiosity with their rationalist Dravidian politics that has given Tamilnadu's regional politics its distinctiveness? Or is temple-building just deeply entrenched in the Tamil cultural self? The final product will be an essay in cultural anthropology and I will also be submitting a video of roadside temples and their activities and some photographs.
>>From Feb 27th till March 13th I was on the field and gathered a number of useful leads for the more intensive fieldwork in June-July. Most people to whom I said I was going to study and write about roadside temples thought it was a good idea and that it does need to be written up and then went into conversations of how a particular temple sprang up and so on. First I was able to identify at least 25 temples in a single neighborhood of Chennai- that is the Mandaveli and Mylapore area.  While there are temples for various deities, the majority of temples are either Ganesh temples or Mariamman temples and the reasons for the preference for either of the two and indeed why these predominate need to be explored. I was also fortunate to have two rounds of group discussion with women drawn largely from slums and other low- income localities, who are members of a Women's organization. The women were indeed very articulate on the topic and had lots of interesting stories to tell. I was also able to interview the pujaris of two temples- an Ayappan temple in Mandaveli that has been around for nearly twenty years though only in the recent past they performed the Kumbhabhishekam. Interestingly the temple is constructed on the sidewalk of the road abutting the compound wall of ground belonging to the Chennai Corporation, the Municipal body of the city that runs a library and a secondary school there. The temple was started as the third Ayappan temple in the city though now many have come up.  The second temple, and very close to the first one, is the Renukambal Mariamma Temple that claims to have been in existence since 1913. In my next month's posting I will share with you all the stories and insights that women have given me so far and also what the temple pujaris whom I interviewed had to say.
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>U.Kalpagam
>Allahabad
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