Religious Processions and Urban Publics in Postcolonial Western India

How did Ahmedabad, the city in which Mohandas Gandhi’s celebrated non-violent movement was based, become one of India’s most violent urban centers? As a means to address this question, this paper examines the Jagannath Rath Yatra procession and its antecedent, annual Muharram processions which commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Hussein and the companions of Prophet Muhammad, in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. This essay employs interdisciplinary approaches including archival research, ethnography and non-participant observation and interprets a diverse range of textual, visual, and oral sources, in addition to ethnographic observations of processions held between 1999 and 2007. Analysis of the case of public processions in Ahmedabad reveals how it evolved as meaningful public fora in which heterogeneous communities and actors engaged with each other, by deploying relatively peaceful means, to being an arena in which novel communitarian claims were aggressively articulated by increasingly polarized communities of Hindus and Muslims (particularly since the 1980s). The process by which organized episodes of violence became a regular feature in religious processions that had largely been peaceful is historiographically significant for South Asian history. This is the case because these shifts in public expressions of commemorative religiosity highlight the manner in which political violence became commonplace in the city Ahmedabad where, ironically, the public ethos and institutions of Mohandas Gandhi’s popular non-violent movement were also based. Study of the evolution of these forms of collective commemoration also contributes to comparative discussions of publics among historians, anthropologists and political scientists. Unlike the dominant characterization of secular, individuated and deliberative public conduct, this investigation underscores the manner in which public participation may also include practices of performative speech and spectacular enactments of violence by entire communities that are defined by religion or caste.