Paper short abstract:

Wayside shrines show an astonishing dynamic in the cities of Goa / India. They not only persist in a milieu of drastic modern change. Many of them even cut across the orthodox divisions of Hinduism and Catholicism and exceed temples and churches in popularity.

Paper long abstract:

Wayside shrines — representing Hindu and Catholic divinities and saints — show an astonishing dynamic in the cities of Goa / India. They not only persist in a milieu of drastic modern change that often seems to be at odds with their traditional locations, aesthetics and purposes. Some of them even flourish enormously and exceed temples, churches and mosques in popularity. In this paper I argue that this dynamic is owed to the fact that the shrines respond to three forms of mobility that are occurring in particular in modern urban environments: 1) cultural mobility, that is, the diversification and fluctuation of religious ideas and practices, 2) social mobility, that is, the diversification and fluctuation of people from different castes, social classes and geographical regions and 3) physical mobility, that is, the movement of and movement in an increasingly dense and complex motorized traffic. In doing so the shrines allow a culturally diversifying, socially changing and geographically fluctuating population to engage with a variety of personalized deities and saints whose charismatic authority is not only quite independent from formalized local social hierarchies, but often also cuts across the orthodox divisions between religious traditions.