The divine in the secular

Abstract

This essay explores how individuals and communities ‘bring forth’ new spaces for distinguishing and realizing justice. It is about the idea, or more precisely, the ideas of justice and their meanings not conceived as a priori ideals or unyielding normative models, but as a malleable conversation that emerges continuously through practices and discourses human beings create in their everyday lives and situations. Specifically, it attempts to understand the idea of justice from the perspective of the ‘everyday’ by exploring the the aspirations represented by innumerable written petitions (manauti) that devotees hang around the temple walls of Goludev, the ‘God of Justice’ in the Central Himalayan province of Kumaon. Several questions present themselves: What does justice mean in this context? Why do devotees seek out Goludev for the resolution of matters of justice instead of using the secular courts in the region? How does Goludev provide justice and what kind of justice is it that he makes available? What are the sociological and political consequences of situating divine justice, whose instrumentation is achieved not only through written petitions handed to the deity but also through practices of ritual embodiment or spirit possession, within a secular democratic context?