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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how temples reproduce and reconstruct the sacred/secular dichotomies without subverting its religious essence and how these sacred elements -reproduced through everyday performativity of temple -contested across different social or religious communities amongst South Asians in UK

Paper long abstract:

Temple as an organizing principle play an important role in everyday socio-cultural and political activities amongst South Asian communities in Britain. Besides regular sermons and rituals, the temples also exercise political activities of campaigning and social awareness; performances of art and exhibition expressing the history and culture of a community; the voluntary activities like language and training classes as well as paid activities of renting temple halls and its premises to other religious groups. This phenomenon of everyday temple performativity is maintained by imitative and metamorphic feature of sacred elements generated through a peculiar process of (re)production of the sacred. This scenario of reproduction reconstructs and redefines the sacred/secular dichotomies without however compromising with the essence of 'sacred' inherent in the doctrinal basis of particular religion (i.e. Hinduism, Sikhism or Islam). Temple, thus, serves as a microcosm of everyday social world while expressing the modern feature of inclusiveness. These expressions however represent rather a singularity of narratives which either exclude or undermine the marginalized narratives of the diaspora experiences. This "selective enchantment" of exercising the 'secular' through everyday temple activity significantly shadows the internal social complexities driven by the sense of caste hierarchy. Based on my recent ethnographic field work among South Asian communities in the UK, this paper examines the way in which the sacred/secular dichotomies are contested in temple premises and the way within which the alternative temple spaces are created as an outcome of these contestation between different socio-religious communities in the diaspora.