Social Science Research Council

"Performing 'Hinduism' in the 20th Century: Temple Architecture and Pilgrimage in Braj Bhumi"

Art historians tend to look at monuments apart from a living context, as if their dissociation from people makes them historical artifacts appropriate for study. My dissertation, however, focuses on twentieth-century temples in Braj Bhumi, the region around Vrindavan and Mathura in north India, where the god Krishna is supposed to have spent his youth, to understand how religion, temple-building and pilgrimage have constituted "mythological geographies" and "imagined communities" over the last hundred years.

Although I This project examines various processes of national appropriation in the region of Upper Silesia between 1919 and 1950. The division of this region of mixed ethnic and spatial identities among Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1919 was its inauguration into a century of heated and bloody contests over the meaning of its architectural and natural landscape and the ethnic membership of its fluctuating population. These conflicts were significant not only for the history of the region itself, but also in the context of greater efforts to build nations after the fall of the monarchical empires in central Europe. The most radical of these efforts were coordinated by the Nazi and postwar communist regimes.

This project is concerned with the cultural politics of national appropriation in Upper Silesia, particularly how the collective memory of post-1919 political events was represented in mass rallies, how the meaning of the landscape was promoted through tourism, and how efforts to socialize “new” populations were carried out by activist groups and through education. Ultimately, my project aims to shed light on how the region and its post-1919 experiences became used as symbols of the larger nation-building projects of which it was a part, and on how the mixed local population reacted to state-coordinated acculturation efforts. An important part of this project is also the role of conflict among nations over the imposition of identity on Upper Silesia, and the discursive similarities among projects of national appropriation. My primary research draws on archival material, newspapers, travel guides, school books, academic and popular scholarship, as well as oral interviews. will begin my research with a study of the temples themselves in order to understand how architecture was employed by patrons and donors to construct a modern "Hindu" community, I will then try to contextualize the cultural relevance of these temples within the actual functioning of sacred spaces. I will thus attempt to go beyond the study of form and structure to understand how architecture was used, viewed and circumscribed by "everyday users" through ritual practices and performative ceremonies. By studying the heterogeneities of early twentieth-century experiences of pilgrims at Braj-for example, the role of Islam in shaping "Hindu" histories of the region-I aim to understand as well as critique the processes through which popular religion in India has been essentialized and appropriated by contemporary Hindu nationalism while simultaneously being marked as "exotic and timeless" by neo-Orientalist gazes.