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16 septembre 2022
- handle: 10670/1.drnucq
- isbn: 9781003229902
- hal: hal-04452515
- doi: 10.4324/9781003229902-7
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Borayin Larios, « “This Is My Shirdi” Wayside Shrines and Sai Baba's Popular Omnipresence », HAL-SHS : histoire des religions, ID : 10.4324/9781003229902-7
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Baba is popular not only in Maharashtra, where his pilgrimage town of Shirdi is located, but also in many other Indian cities where he can be spotted on vehicles' dashboards and bumper-stickers, and in home altars as well as in formal temples. This interleaf discusses how devotees produce sacred spaces amidst their daily lives in ways defying the contours of formal religion. Street shrines provide blessings and a safe haven for those living at societal margins, yet Baba's physical presence also indexes today's “syndicated Hinduism” that, for political ends, insists on conformity and the “othering” of those falling outside such reductionism. Wayside shrines are pluri-semantic places that convey a variety of meanings, practices, and motivations. Their shared practices, overlapping images, and entangled discourses point to the complexity of religious diversity in India. Micro-politics determines the growth, expansion, and shift of these religious places dependent upon their immediate surroundings, supportive neighbors, and/or the demographic dominance of a particular locality. Shirdi Sai Baba's street shrines evoke a paradoxical visuality that evokes Hindu majoritarianism even as it resists politicized communalism. His presence at these localized urban shrines presents alternative spaces of justice and proximity to the divine, thereby mobilizing affects that resist being subsumed by the current dominance of Hindu nationalism.