ABSTRACT
The children's recurring representations of the Temple in their scrapbooks and the stories and explanations they elicited after their completion are evidence of its centrality in their everyday lives. The scrapbook entries attested to the role of the Temple as a powerful symbol for what it means to belong to the Hindu/Saiva faith community. Combining theoretical insights from syncretic literacies, multimodality and artefactual literacies, for instance, Thiani and Tianan learned to read the peacock feather found in the Temple court as a manifestation of Lord Murugan. This chapter demonstrates how the children come to associate the Temple with a holy place, a place for worship, where they are taught to cultivate age-appropriate embodied and emotional stances. It explains how children's membership in the Hindu/Saiva faith community was intertwined with their Tamil linguistic, cultural and ethnic heritage, creating ties of memory across continents and providing threads of continuity in the children's religious socialisation across the home.
