Monks on the Margins: The Sacred–Moral Geography of Transoceanic Hinduism, 1882–1951

In 1905, a new Hindu community emerged from the century-old Hindu religious tradition, Swaminarayan Sampradaya, in Gujarat, western India. This new community, later known as BAPS, diverged from the broad trend of religious reform in British India and pan-Hindu alliances that privileged the nation. Instead of articulating a religious nationalism, it organized worship around a new transcendental deity, preached a distinct doctrine of salvation, built temples, and created new transnational networks of devotion reaching across the Indian Ocean to Gujarati speaking communities in East Africa. Using cultural geography and lived religion as theoretical frameworks, I 1) decenter the nation-state as the preeminent space for religious life in late colonial and post-colonial India and 2) show how this new Hindu community interpreted distant geographies religiously as part a collective imaginary.

The poster will map monastic movement and epistolary networks across western India and East Africa and argues that spiritual territorialization was a means of creating an expanding sacred-moral geography beyond and over political and territorial geographies that combined the earthly with the otherworldly. In doing so, the community projected and reimagined terrains through religious symbolism and physical structures. Sites were imbued with meaning, theologies were grounded in space, and movement and temple-construction tied to collective memories of revelation. Hindu monks and their lay disciples thus shaped a transoceanic religious geography through their movement, labor, relationships, and networks in the early twentieth century.

Alongside mapping movement and correspondence to outline geographical spread and spiritual territorialization, the poster will lay out a summary of my dissertation. My first chapter examines the institutional geography of the Swaminarayan Sampraday in the nineteenth century and how during moments of caste and authority disputes, disobedience was managed and order maintained through the banishment of the “heretic” across western and northern India. The second chapter explores how following a schism, the new sect led by the scholar-monk Shastriji Maharaj used a prophetic and revelatory past to construct temples, install deities and develop alliances. The third chapter challenges existing scholarship which argues that merchant patronage alone developed devotional religion in western India. Instead, it argues that the often-ignored monks and their disciples were an important part of the local devotion-economy matrix. My fourth chapter specifically focuses on monastic journeying and knowledge transmission networks, following the travels, preaching and letters of the monastic community to argue that movement and relationship formation were crucial to sect and self-cultivation. My final chapter explores religion in urban spaces such as Ahmedabad and Bombay, and argues that traditional religion of the experiential and miraculous, centered around Shastriji Maharaj, contended broader trajectories of religious reform and Godly absence.