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Paper short abstract

This paper examines pilgrimage in India as an urban process, showing how ritual movement and everyday encounters shape belonging, conflict, and coexistence across religious cities.

Paper long abstract

Pilgrimage is often understood as a bounded religious act or an episodic ritual event. This paper instead approaches pilgrimage as an urban process that unfolds through movement, sensory engagement, and everyday negotiation within the city. Drawing on ethnographic research in Puri and situating it within broader Indian pilgrimage traditions, the paper examines how pilgrimage operates across everyday urban life rather than outside it. The primary research question guiding is: How does pilgrimage, as an urban and social process, influence the dynamics of conflict and coexistence in cities experiencing religious and political polarization?

Situated within current debates on pilgrimage and conflict, the paper explores how pilgrimage can simultaneously reinforce polarisation and open lateral, ambiguous spaces of encounter. In Puri, ritual routes become stages where devotion intersects with tourism, governance, gendered safety, nationalism, and everyday urban life. Through practices of walking, listening, waiting, observing, and sheltering, pilgrims and residents inhabit what Coleman (2021) describes as the penumbral zone of pilgrimage, spaces occupied not only by devotees but also by caretakers, women, bystanders, vendors, and local communities.

The paper pays particular attention to how reading the city, especially its sounds, movement, and collective rhythm, guides bodies through it, shaping feelings of belonging and sacred presence while also exposing tensions around control, infrastructure, and exclusion. By framing pilgrimage as a lived, urban phenomenon rather than a singular religious act, the study argues for a more inclusive understanding of pilgrimage as a site of negotiation between faith, conflict, care, and coexistence in contemporary cities.