ABOUT THIS BOOK
There are many holy cities in India, but Mumbai is not usually considered one of them. More popular images of the city capture the world’s collective imagination—as a Bollywood fantasia or a slumland dystopia. Yet for many, if not most, people who live in the city, the neighborhood streets are indeed shared with local gods and guardian spirits. In The Neighborhood of Gods, William Elison examines the link between territory and divinity in India’s most self-consciously modern city. In this densely settled environment, space is scarce, and anxiety about housing is pervasive. Consecrating space—first with impromptu displays and then, eventually, with full-blown temples and official recognition—is one way of staking a claim. But how can a marginalized community make its gods visible, and therefore powerful, in the eyes of others?
The Neighborhood of Gods explores this question, bringing an ethnographic lens to a range of visual and spatial practices: from the shrine construction that encroaches on downtown streets, to the “tribal art” practices of an indigenous group facing displacement, to the work of image production at two Bollywood film studios. A pioneering ethnography, this book offers a creative intervention in debates on postcolonial citizenship, urban geography, and visuality in the religions of India.
REVIEWS
“The Neighborhood of Gods is an ambitious, deeply erudite, and well-written book that moves across diverse ethnographic sites—from Hindu religious ritual to tribal practice, to Bollywood and urban politics in Mumbai—with an engaging style and innovative research.”
— Arvind Rajagopal, New York University
“Elison offers a remarkable, persuasive, and—notwithstanding its theoretical and ethnographic rigor and ambition—accessible argument. The Neighborhood of Gods extends the emerging anthropology of the image, working across generic and disciplinary conventions to assess the visual practices by which space is made sacred and the precariousness of marginal labor and habitation is negotiated in urban India. It is a resonant portrait of a city that integrates the best of recent writing on religion and secularism, on Bollywood film, on slums and work, and on dreams, spirits, and the uncanny—and rethinks it mightily.”
— Lawrence Cohen, University of California, Berkeley
"The Neighborhood of Gods will be useful to anthropologists of media, visual culture, and religion as well as those focused on South Asia."
— American Ethnologist
"For religionists, Elison effectively puts together some time-honored truths about Hinduism and its strong visuality, with original ideas about the uses, meanings, and powers of space and place. From the challenging particularities of Mumbai—huge, diverse, riven by inequalities, ethnic rivalries, political and theological animosities and alliances—Elison’s book makes far-reaching contributions. It should have an enduring impact on the ways we think about urban spaces and their human and divine inhabitants."
— History of Religions
"This study will be a provocative introduction to the field of South Asian religions for upper level undergraduates and graduate students interested in visual culture, anthropology, and performance studies and the arts in South Asia."
— Reading Religion
"One might expect a study of religion in urban India to focus on Hindu and Muslim forms. The Neighborhood of Gods does not, and the results are both fresh and thought-provoking."
— International Journal of Hindu Studies
"The Neighborhood of Gods by William Elison is probably one of the best scholarly books ever written on Indian urban spaces. . . . The depth, originality, sensibility, and rich- ness of Elison’s study make this volume a must- read for a wide range of public and scholarly disciplines."
— Religion and Society
"The Neighborhood of Gods is a welcome addition to the scholarship on religion and film and makes a crucial contribution to South Asian Studies, Anthropology of Religion, Visual Culture, Film and Religion and Urban Studies."
— Journal of Religion & Film
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226495064.003.0001
[Kala Ghoda;Kolatkar;darshan;political society;Peirce;recognition;public culture]
The introduction consists of three sections. The first section begins by discussing the English and Marathi writings--and the bicultural sensibility--of the modernist poet Arun Kolatkar. Kolatkar is situated as an exemplary resident and observer of Mumbai/Bombay, capable of perceiving and inhabiting its discrete sites (for example, the downtown neighborhood of Kala Ghoda) in multiple ways. Three modes of organizing urban space are proposed: rationalized space; spectacular space; and sacred space, understood as sites that invoke affective responses from religious subjects of diverse traditions. The second section problematizes this threefold scheme, emphasizing the visual mediation of the organization of space. The lynchpin of the argument is the theorization of darshan, or visual worship, around the psychoanalytic concept of recognition. Other components of the analytic framework laid out here include theoretical debates around publics and public culture; Partha Chatterjee's concept of "political society"; and some basic propositions of Peircean semiotics. The third section presents an overview of the chapters to follow.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter One - Potemkin Village: Spaces and Surfaces at a Film Studio
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226495064.003.0002
[Bollywood;Filmistan;public;subaltern;light boy;political society]
Chapter 1 introduces a multilayered and quintessentially Mumbai sort of space, a Bollywood studio. One of the leading production houses of the Hindi cinema’s Golden Age, Filmistan in the present is a facility consisting of sound stages and lots that are rented out on a shoot-by-shoot basis. The chapter begins by tracking the author's own encounter with this space through successive layers. The first layer is an official, rationalized space of work. Second, Filmistan is also a community, or “urban village,” whose human members organize themselves in relation to the exercise of power by parahuman agents such as local gods and ghosts. And there is, of course, a third layer: the dimension of cinematic spectacle. The studio is traversed by multiple constituencies, including film producers and talent, production crew workers, or "light boys," and a small community that actually lives on the grounds. Building primarily on ethnographic observations about the light boys and their negotiation of distinct spatial layers, the chapter advances some theoretical propositions about publics, political society, and subalterns.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter Two - Concrete Spirits: Religious Structures on the Public Streets
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226495064.003.0003
[pakka;Peirce;shrine;illegal religious structure;BMC;Shiv Sena;darshan;Bombay High Court]
In 2003, as the result of a lawsuit filed in the Bombay High Court by a public-interest group, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) moved to demolish the shrines that had been erected on streets throughout the city, primarily by subaltern residents. This chapter opens with an ethnographic walking tour through South Mumbai. The sites described represent a typology of the “illegal religious structures” condemned by the High Court ruling. This chapter fills in much of the groundwork for the book’s argument by laying out two sets of categories. The first, which anchors each end of an axis on which to plot a given site’s visibility—or semiotic legibility—is a versatile pair of Hindi words: the oppositional terms kaccha and pakka. More technical is the second set of categories, Charles Peirce’s taxonomy of sign-object relations: the triad of icon, index, and symbol. The shrines and their displays are analyzed as artifacts of visual culture that project an ideological address before the public gaze. The normative scenario in which this "hailing" takes effect is the ritual of darshan, visual worship. Important contextual information is provided in a discussion of Mumbai's political culture and its domination by the Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena Party.
This chapter is available at:
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Chapter Three - Secular Saint: Sai Baba of Shirdi and Darshan in the City
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226495064.003.0004
[Sai Baba;photograph;pakka;darshan;recognition;Lacan;Hinduism;Islam;icon]
Chapter 3 builds on the previous chapter's typology of street shrines to examine the predominance of a single figure as their divine occupant: Sai Baba of Shirdi. This historical holy man’s appeal has come to transcend his affiliations with Hindu and Islamic traditions to endow the spaces he marks with a sort of generically sacred quality. An investigation of the Baba icon’s history in Mumbai, which originates with a photograph—a pakka visual form—introduces several points for complicating the study of darshan, or visual worship. Drawing on some insights from Lacan and his interlocutors, I move on to theorize the darshan encounter in terms of reciprocal recognition. I examine the sacred image’s legibility, or pakka quality, as one important factor in the recognition relation. The saint’s early twentieth-century teachings—enjoining iconic representation as an efficacious conduit of darshan—are related to the contemporary context, in which urban public space has become saturated with copies of his portrait.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Chapter Four - Urban Tribal: At Home in Filmistan
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226495064.003.0005
[adivasi;Warli;Filmistan;possession;Bollywood;postcolonial;conversion]
This chapter returns to Filmistan. Ethnographic fieldwork with Vikas, who lives in a part of the grounds known as "the Village," reveals that the whole studio was built on top of a hamlet settled by members of an adivasi community, the Warlis. In its excavation of Filmistan’s tribal history, the chapter focuses on the old village temples, one of which has undergone a conversion from a site dedicated to a tribal goddess to an outpost of modern Brahminical Hinduism. Vikas himself contends that he has an ancestral claim to Filmistan. He cites not only questions of legal right but also his status as the village medium who communes with territorial deities through possession. But what would it take for the powerful interests that control the space to recognize Vikas in his patrimony? The question frames his reflections on a number of themes: on the Indian legal system as a colonial inheritance; on contact with locally emplaced deities as a source of power and affective transport in his life; and on cinema as a modern, “scientific” innovation with the capacity to produce similar effects.
This chapter is available at:
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Chapter Five - Expanding Contract: Tribal Space and Official Knowledge
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226495064.003.0006
[Warli;adivasi;Oxhide Tale;Hinduism;paperwork;state anthropology;postcolonial]
This chapter takes up the history of the Warlis, a tribal (adivasi) community that stakes a claim of autochthony to parts of Maharashtra, including parts of the Mumbai (Suburban) District. Central to the exposition is a mythohistorical narrative, the “Oxhide Tale.” The tale explains the Warlis’ lot as "wild" people, jungle dwellers, as the result of a crooked legal contract that banished them, in historical times, beyond the realm of polity. The distinction between spaces of culture and of nature is a trope with a long history in India. Here, it is taken up as an organizing principle by which the state and affiliated elites have constructed tribals as people defined by a naturalized bond with the raw, kaccha space of the forest. A corollary is the visualization of this bond in terms of religious beliefs and practices that differ from those professed by caste Hindus. The chapter’s last section will take up the Maharashtra government’s reliance on state anthropology: specifically, the contribution of anthropologists to the state's generation of paperwork, and the generation by that paperwork of power effects over the tribal populations that anthropologists study.
This chapter is available at:
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Chapter Six - Immanent Domains: Exhibits and Evidence in the Forest
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226495064.003.0007
[Sanjay Gandhi National Park;Film City;Warli;adivasi;Warli art;Bollywood;pakka;Bombay High Court;slums]
Chapter 6 is about the tribal inhabitants of wooded areas to the west of Filmistan, including the Sanjay Gandhi National Park and the Film City production facility. A series of legal arguments presented before the Bombay High Court from 1995–2003 record the state's efforts to remove adivasis from this area, a struggle in which environmentalist interests clashed with tribal-rights advocates. In the ruling handed down in 2003, the right to remain in the forest was reserved to residents who could demonstrate before the authorities that they were “bona fide tribals.” This chapter develops some propositions about the visual mediation of space. If one index of tribal authenticity is a spiritual connection to natural space, that standard has been proving hard to imagine in a pakka form that others can recognize. As an alternative, some activists have begun looking to symbols of tribal culture already in public circulation as vehicles of empowerment. One site of intervention considered here is “Warli art,” a visual idiom that has moved from ritual contexts into metropolitan and even transnational art markets. Another source of current visual tropes defining the “tribal,” to uncanny effect, is the very film industry whose facilities have overrun Warli villages.
This chapter is available at:
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Conclusion
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226495064.003.0008
[spectacularization;Hinduism;Hindu nationalism;slums;subaltern;India Shining;public;Bollywood]
The major events described in this ethnography happened over a decade ago. Since then, one trend that has only become exacerbated is the spectacularization of the city: its iconic reproduction in its more camera-ready angles, to the further marginalization of the ragged edges. Several factors have contributed to the ascendancy of this meta-Mumbai. Notable among them is a governing ideology that has two evident priorities: sponsorship of hegemonic Hinduism in the public sphere and a national development policy premised on massive corporate investment. The conclusion offers some vignettes from the present day to reflect on the conditions presented in the preceding chapters. The occultation of slum communities from the market-friendly vision of progress in no wise reflects the actual distribution of the city’s population. Yet to assume that participation in the fantasy is confined to a middle-class public would be to miss something vital about the way ideological spectacles work. This book began with a discussion of sacred space in Mumbai. It revisits the concept at the end, concluding with some thoughts about Mayapuri—the dazzling, elusive City of Illusion—and about the predicament of those on the spectacle’s margins who want to recognize themselves in it.
This chapter is available at:
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