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Hindu Street Shrines: Borayin Larios
If you’ve ever walked along city streets in India, chances are you’ve noticed Hindu street shrines. These are public spaces where people worship deities, saints, and spirits. Wayside shrines come in all shapes and sizes, from humble altars to full-on temples. You could think of them as crowd-sourced devotion: they seem to arise organically in response to the urban environment—at the base of a tree or near a busy intersection. The shrines usually house a sacred object, some incarnation of spiritual presence: a statue, an image, a stone. Going about their days, Hindus pause here to pray, reflect, and leave offerings of incense, flowers, money. But street shrines go beyond the religious: they’re also foundations for community building, political activism, and informal economies. Indeed, according to Borayin Larios, Hindu street shrines express an “everyday defiant religiosity.” Borayin is assistant professor of modern South Asian studies in the Department of South Asian, Tibetan, and Buddhist Studies at the University of Vienna. He’s been doing ethnography for more than a decade in and around the state of Maharashtra. His research interests include popular devotion, material religion, and priestly education.
Show Notes
Find out more about this podcast and the Center for Contemporary South Asia at our show page. Make sure to check out other podcasts from the Watson Institute here. We’re eager for your feedback and support: please subscribe and then rate the show on your favorite platforms so that others can find us. You can email us at [email protected].
Much of the material discussed in this episode comes from a special journal issue on street shrines edited by Borayin Larios and Raphaël Voix.
Larios, Borayin, and Voix, Raphaël. "Introduction. Wayside Shrines in India: An Everyday Defiant Religiosity." South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal 18, no. 18 (2018): South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal.
Larios, Borayin. "From the Heavens to the Streets: Pune’s Wayside Shrines.” South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal 18, no. 18 (2018): South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal.
To learn more about Borayin’s work on Vedic schools:
Larios, Borayin. Embodying the Vedas: Traditional Vedic Schools of Contemporary Maharashtra. Warsaw ; Berlin: De Gruyter Open Poland, 2017.
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By FINNIAN M MOORE GERETY
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If you’ve ever walked along city streets in India, chances are you’ve noticed Hindu street shrines. These are public spaces where people worship deities, saints, and spirits. Wayside shrines come in all shapes and sizes, from humble altars to full-on temples. You could think of them as crowd-sourced devotion: they seem to arise organically in response to the urban environment—at the base of a tree or near a busy intersection. The shrines usually house a sacred object, some incarnation of spiritual presence: a statue, an image, a stone. Going about their days, Hindus pause here to pray, reflect, and leave offerings of incense, flowers, money. But street shrines go beyond the religious: they’re also foundations for community building, political activism, and informal economies. Indeed, according to Borayin Larios, Hindu street shrines express an “everyday defiant religiosity.” Borayin is assistant professor of modern South Asian studies in the Department of South Asian, Tibetan, and Buddhist Studies at the University of Vienna. He’s been doing ethnography for more than a decade in and around the state of Maharashtra. His research interests include popular devotion, material religion, and priestly education.
Show Notes
Find out more about this podcast and the Center for Contemporary South Asia at our show page. Make sure to check out other podcasts from the Watson Institute here. We’re eager for your feedback and support: please subscribe and then rate the show on your favorite platforms so that others can find us. You can email us at [email protected].
Much of the material discussed in this episode comes from a special journal issue on street shrines edited by Borayin Larios and Raphaël Voix.
Larios, Borayin, and Voix, Raphaël. "Introduction. Wayside Shrines in India: An Everyday Defiant Religiosity." South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal 18, no. 18 (2018): South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal.
Larios, Borayin. "From the Heavens to the Streets: Pune’s Wayside Shrines.” South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal 18, no. 18 (2018): South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal.
To learn more about Borayin’s work on Vedic schools:
Larios, Borayin. Embodying the Vedas: Traditional Vedic Schools of Contemporary Maharashtra. Warsaw ; Berlin: De Gruyter Open Poland, 2017.