Neighborhood Associations in Urban India: Intersection of Religion and Space in Civic Participation
Recent perspectives on religious practice in South Asia critique the assumed dichotomy between religion and modernity, which characterizes earlier research on urban forms of religiosity in South Asia. Following on these lines through an ethnographic analy
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Neighborhood Associations in Urban India: Intersection of Religion and Space in Civic Participation Madhura Lohokare
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Editor’s Preface
Although not a megapolis, the agent at a telemarketing call center is as likely to be sitting in Pune as in Bangalore. Like Bangalore, rapidly expanding Pune has its nonplaces, the malls, multiplexes, and new residential communities in the suburbs that surround the old urban core. Yet like Gwalior in the next chapter, Pune retains a strong precolonial past as an erstwhile capital of the great Maratha Empire, which left Hindu reigning families as far south as Tanjore. Here in Pune, Lohokare introduces the poor working class, not overrun by the galloping middle-class enterprises as in Bangalore but left spatially isolated in bounded neighborhoods that were once the heart of the old city. In this case, the inhabitants of these “slums” refuse to be sidelined and demand a voice in the public life of the city not through the oftcriticized medium of “politics” in India, but through creating concrete places for themselves on the streets of central Pune called Mitra Mandals, “associations for young men.” Whittled from the sidewalks of crowded streets, which often skirt the line between public and private ownership, these associations become places where concern for social and civic duty expressed in a religious idiom echo Gandhi’s movement. With their disavowal of party politics and their devotion to service, these mandals seem a textbook case of “civil society” organizations—but unlike Europe, these collectives remain “woven inextricably with religious practice.” Tightly bounded by and bonded to neighborhood, religion, and caste communities in Pune, the mandals share similar goals and a common operating style. Intensely patriotic, deeply religious, and intent on educational and moral development and community service, these Muslim/Hindu/Dalit collectives fight to better their standing amid intense middle-class accusations of their neighborhoods’ decadence and depravity.
M. Lohokare (*) Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2016 J.P. Waghorne (ed.), Place/No-Place in Urban Asian Religiosity, ARI – Springer Asia Series, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-0385-1_9
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What sets these mandals apart from their equally marginalized urban comrades in Seoul or in Bangalore? Their associations remain thoroughly grassroot enterprises. In Seoul, more educated members of Christian church groups lead the struggle for education and social uplift, and in Bangalore no one seemed ready to protest their own displacement. But in Pune these mandals—with their message boards, their signs and slogans, and their street festivals—imprint their presence into the urban regime through their own initiative. They develop via older traditional identities but form now within the broader categories of Hindu/Muslim/Dalit and remain as much class specific as caste based. Although located in and named after very specific neighborhoo
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