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Paper short abstract:

This paper traces the modern history of statutes governing oversight of Hindu pilgrimage temples in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, India. It identifies continuities between the period of British rule and contemporary Uttarakhand and analyzes intractable contradictions in Indian secularism.

Paper long abstract:

In November 2021, the state government of Uttarakhand, India withdrew the Chār Dhām Devasthānam Management Board Act, a law passed only two years prior to bring fifty-three temples in Garhwal, a linguistic/cultural region in the Indian Himalayas, under state government authority. Supporters of this bill had sought to ensure transparency in the management of these major pilgrimage temples. Temple officiants and others with established financial and political interests in these sites vehemently contested the law’s efforts to expand India’s “state-temple-corporate nexus” (Nanda 2011) into the pilgrimage zones of the Himalayas, formerly administered according to diverse local traditions. From 1817, when the British assumed authority over the small Tehri Garhwal kingdom in which the temples lay, until 1939, when an act similar to the 2019 law established oversight of the Badrinath and Kedarnath temples, a series of contradictory agreements involving the Badrinath rawal (high priest), the Raja of the “native state” of Tehri Garhwal, and British officials charged with administering the kingdom’s affairs reveal the incongruities at the core of the notion of a modern Hindu state. Just as British officials were caught between the imperative to avoid involvement in the religious affairs of their Hindu subjects and the moral demands to provide good governance to those it ruled, partisans in the 2019-2021 debate differed on whether to privilege the “traditional” rights of those attached to the temples or the transparent and ethical accounting of their finances. Drawing on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reports deposited in the India Office Collection at the British Library, theories of Indian secularism (Dressler and Mandair 2011), and economic theorization of South Asian religion (Birla 2009; Iyer 2018; Nanda 2011), this paper argues that the debates over the 2021 Chār Dhām Devasthānam Management Board Act rehearse the tortured Indian secularism and reveal again its intractable contradictions.