Spatiality, Memory and Street Shrines of Amritsar

Abstract

This paper explores semiotics at street shrines that foreground “popular” everyday faith and commemorative practices, like urs at Amritsar. These shrines are a blend of pre-partition and contemporary shrine practices, and hybridize identities in contemporary Punjab, imagined and negotiated through an ongoing process of visitation, veneration and memorialization. Street shrines are thus embedded in the “long history of space” of Amritsar which are neither subject nor object but rather a social reality. These shrines are, therefore, sites of living memory and rupture both communal and nationalist narratives of the city space. I argue that rather than following the “sedimentary” theories of religious change we need to consider “popular” religion as overlapping layers of religious practices that delineate the lived and the everyday and spatialize faith practices in modern South Asia. I explore the possibilities to go beyond the neat boundaries of identities that have become comfortable meta-frames of contemporary historiographies.