When India achieved Independence in 1947, the Western Himalayas
were politically, theologically and linguistically divided
into more than thirty independent areas. The next two decades
witnessed a powerful effort to unify the region and erode
local control, which culminated politically in the grant of
full statehood in 1971. This political consolidation was in
turn accompanied by a massive cultural transformation. My
dissertation examines the cultural consolidation of the Western
Himalayas through the creation of new institutions, practices
and fields of knowledge. Using sixteen months of ethnographic
fieldwork in conjunction with colonial records, archival documents
from government ministries and a wide array of Hindi texts
from the early nineteen fifties onward, I examine what happens
to local deity traditions once they are included within the
armature of the state. The argument of the dissertation is
thus two-fold. On the one hand, I examine how the discourses
and interdictions of the state have transformed local religious
practice, reshaping ritual and decreasing dependence on local
deity institutions. On the other, I examine how the very constitution
of the state is itself tied to a particular theologically
grounded narrative about the religious history of the region.
In the colonial and precolonial periods, deities were the
largest land owners and centers of social organization; they
stored grain for future shortages, regulated the year via
festivals, provided health care and gave the ruler his legitimacy.
The integration of local deities into the emerging state began
with the disempowerment of localities. In 1954 and again in
1972, the Legislative Assembly limited the amount of land
that could be held by a single individual, including deities.
By arresting control from divinities in local spaces, the
state effectively replaced the intricate systems of material
interdependence between deities and villagers. This process
was compounded by the creation and expansion of specific fields
of knowledge about the ‘traditions’ of the state.
Through the reorientation of festivals and an enormous range
of publications that reached even the most remote villages,
they articulated a unified image of the state’s cultural
traditions. This image was then further propagated by governmental
ministries such as the departments of tourism and public relations.
What emerged was a particular version of religion that was
abstract, private, and peaceful.
My dissertation tells the story of the establishment of state
control and the definition of religion as one particular aspect
of life distinct from others. I argue thus that the definition
of “religion” is inextricably tied to the formation
of the modern state in the Western Himalayas, that this redefinition
has profoundly reshaped local deity traditions, and that this
transformation forms the boundaries of contemporary Himachali
subjection. In so doing, I contribute to the growing body
of scholarship working to historicize the category of religion
in relation to its colonial and governmental histories. Further,
I offer a detailed critique of theories of popular Hinduism
which assume it is largely unchanged for the past four millennia.
Finally, the dissertation offers a contribution to contemporary
discussions of secularism by shifting the problem away from
fundamentalism to the very construction of the subject.
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