ABSTRACT
This introduction sets out the scholarly questions and debates behind the study of religion and the Indian city and briefly summarizes the volume’s range and subject matter. It notes the contemporary turn towards studies of urban religion, prompted by the demise of the ‘secularization thesis’ that had earlier dominated interpretations of urban modernity. Globally, sociologists, cultural historians, and urban studies scholars have commenced new enquiries into the religious practices, habits, and spatial dispensations visible in urban settings. Much scholarship is driven by the western notion of the contemporary ‘postsecular’ city, while historians and archaeologists re-examine religion’s role in founding cities and maintaining political power. But despite some exceptional individual studies, there is as yet no book on the multiplicity of religious behaviours and urban settings in India. This interdisciplinary, wide-ranging volume of specially commissioned chapters seeks to fill that gap, examining history, literature, architecture, material culture, caste, everyday life, space, heritage, and politics to show how religion shapes and is shaped by the physical and material settings and the social densities of Indian cities.
