Struggles for Hindu Sacred Space in the Netherlands - (Bloomsbury Studies in Religion, Space and Place) by Priya Swamy (Hardcover)

About the Book

"This book asks us to consider what is absent, rather than what is present, when studying religions. Priya Swamy argues that absent religious spaces are in themselves abstract locations that painfully memorialize feelings of shame, oppression and marginalisation. She shows that these 'traumas of absence' - the complex, entwined and emotional responses to absent spaces - can be articulated through mob violence and destruction, but also anticolonial struggles or human rights issues. This study focusses on the absence of temples across the global Hindu diaspora, taking the tumultuous narrative of the Devi Dhaam community in Amsterdam Southeast as an ethnographic case study to detail the over thirty year struggle to build a Hindu temple in a neighbourhood of vibrant mosques and churches. In 2010, their makeshift space was pulled away from them, provoking tears among elderly devotees, rage among board members and utter devastation in the wider community. Leaving their goddess with no place to live, devotees feared for the dangerous repercussions that would follow from uprooting a divine presence from its home. By exploring the ways in which the trauma of absent religious spaces has become a formative aspect of localised but also globalised Hindu identity, this book rethinks the way that empty lots, piles of rubble and abandoned buildings around the world are themselves powerful monuments to the trauma of absent temple spaces that mobilise campaigns for Hindu spaces."--

Book Synopsis

This book asks us to consider what is absent, rather than what is present, when studying religions. Priya Swamy argues that absent religious spaces are in themselves abstract locations that painfully memorialize feelings of shame, oppression and marginalization. She shows that these 'traumas of absence' - the complex, entwined and emotional responses to absent spaces - can be articulated through mob violence and destruction, but also anticolonial struggles or human rights issues.

This study focusses on the absence of temples across the global Hindu diaspora, taking the tumultuous narrative of the Devi Dhaam community in Amsterdam Southeast as a central location to detail the over thirty-year struggle to build a Hindu temple in a neighbourhood of vibrant mosques and churches. In 2010, their makeshift space was pulled away from them, provoking tears among elderly devotees, rage among board members and devastation in the wider community. Leaving their goddess with no place to live, some devotees feared for the dangerous repercussions that would follow from uprooting a divine presence from its home.

By exploring the ways in which the trauma of absent religious spaces has become a formative aspect of localized but also globalized Hindu identity, this book rethinks the way that empty lots, piles of rubble and abandoned buildings around the world are themselves powerful monuments to the trauma of absent temple spaces that mobilize campaigns for Hindu spaces.

Review Quotes

Priya Swamy brings us to a twice-displaced Hindu diaspora community in the Netherlands, whose history of indentured labour still resonates. By exploring "absent" Hindu temples in a neighbourhood in southeast Amsterdam, Swamy's theoretically sophisticated approach to today's post-colonial realities opens important new vistas for the study of Hindu diaspora.
Corinne Dempsey, Professor of Religious Studies, Nazareth College, USA

About the Author

Priya Swamy is Curator of Globalisation and South Asia at the National Museum of World Cultures, the Netherlands.