“I Get Peace:” Gender and Religious Life in a Delhi Gurdwara

Religions

Kamal Arora¹ 

[1] Department of Social, Cultural and Media Studies, University of the Fraser Valley, Abbotsford, BC V2S 7M8, Canada;

关键词: counterpublic;    embodiment;    ethnography;    gender;    prayer;    sikhism;    violence;    widowhood;   

DOI  :  10.3390/rel11030135

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

In October and November of 1984, after the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards, approximately 3500 Sikh men were killed in Delhi, India. Many of the survivors—Sikh widows and their kin—were relocated thereafter to the “Widow Colony”, also known as Tilak Vihar, within the boundary of Tilak Nagar in West Delhi, as a means of rehabilitation and compensation. Within this colony lies the Shaheedganj Gurdwara, frequented by widows and their families. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, I explore the intersections between violence, widowhood, and gendered religious practice in this place of worship. Memories of violence and experiences of widowhood inform and intersect with embodied religious practices in this place. I argue that the gurdwara is primarily a female place; although male-administered, it is a place that, through women’s practices, becomes a gendered counterpublic, allowing women a place to socialize and heal in an area where there is little public space for women to gather. The gurdwara has been re-appropriated away from formal religious practice by these widows, functioning as a place that enables the subversive exchange of local knowledges and viewpoints and a repository of shared experiences that reifies and reclaims gendered loss.

【 授权许可】

Unknown