Abstract
Through an ethnographic study of Kanwar Yatra
celebrations in a north Indian city, this article seeks to highlight
the changing notions of public religiosity and mass celebrations in
contemporary India. This article will first show how the festival of Kanwar Yatra
is invested with diverse forms of religious performance and
carnivalesque celebrations. In itself, these celebrations especially
provide young people with avenues for fun and entertainment that combine
ideas of lower middle-class consumerism with religious fervour in a
public space. However, the evolving spaces that are built, even in the
momentary conclusion of such a festival, are based on wider strategies
of belonging and identity, often complicated further with the
involvement of the state. Influenced by the projects of socio-cultural
actors and political institutions, this article ultimately argues that Kanwar Yatra
celebrations reproduce ideas of spatial domination, exclusion and
surveillance of communities, with severe implications for minorities,
especially Muslims.
Introduction
The recent and growing significance of the Kanwar Yatra
celebrations in north India each year demands serious attention. Over
the last few years, the scale of this festival has reached newer heights
in terms of intensity, societal participation and state support (Kumar, 2018a; Panwar, 2019). This article will show how the Kanwar Yatra
celebrations are invested with varied forms of religious performance,
devotion and spectacle. It entails community mobilization and activation
of social networks within the majority community and the subsuming of
caste identities into the wider ambit of Hindu identity. Marked by acts
of public religiosity, this festival is an apt example to understand the
growing intertwining of religious and national identity, state-led
patronage of religious interests and the changing notion of religion as a
‘competing ideology’ in contemporary India (Ahmed, 2023). Moreover, the growing youth participation in the Kanwar Yatra
celebrations is reflective not only of the rising trends of a ‘new
consumptive religiosity’ among young people in western Uttar Pradesh but
also an expression of ideas of fun and entertainment that combine ideas
of lower-middle class consumerism with religious fervour (Gopinath, 2019; Jodhka, 2017; Kumar, 2018a).
However,
this article will also show how the evolving spaces that are built,
even in the temporary conclusion of a festival, are based on strategies
of social otherization and exclusion. With the involvement of the state
and the consistent efforts of a host of socio-political actors, this
festival ultimately acts as a tool for political mobilization and
majoritarian aggrandizement in Uttar Pradesh. Through diverse
initiatives, the use of language that emphasizes the differences in
communities and their rights on the city, acts of regulation and blatant
discrimination, the festival reproduces spatially influenced ideas of
domination, demarcation and surveillance vis-à-vis diverse communities.
These developments ultimately create severe anxieties in the everyday
lives of minorities, especially Muslims.
Through an ethnographic study of the celebration of Kanwar Yatra
in the North Indian city of Meerut in western Uttar Pradesh in July
2022, this article argues that the notions of public religiosity and
mass celebrations are undergoing vital changes in contemporary India.
With a thick description of the festival, the article will look at the
multiple elements, practices and actors that constitute the Kanwar Yatra
celebrations and its far-reaching consequences for notions of
religiosity, space-making and exclusion in the following sections.
Celebrating Kanwar Yatra
Primarily practised in the Gangetic plains, the festival of Kanwar Yatra is age-old and celebrated by millions of people across different parts of north, central and eastern India (Sati, 2021).
While generally observed by a small number of people over the years,
several journalistic and scholarly works show that the festival became
widely popular in the late 1990s, especially following the first wave of
the Ram Janmabhoomi movement and the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Uttar Pradesh (Kumar, 2018a).1 However, there has been a massive rise in its popularity especially in the last decade. Kumar (2018a,
pp. 115–119) has documented the rise in participation of Hindus,
especially young people in Meerut and western Uttar Pradesh, in the Kanwar Yatra
celebrations as recently as 2016. In his field site of Khanpur, a
village in Meerut district, he notes that the number of people
participating in the yatra increased from a paltry one or two to more than 30 each year (Kumar, 2018a, p. 115). This is an example of just one village in Meerut district.
Majority
of the devotees, predominantly young men, participate in an arduous
journey carrying the holy Ganges water from designated pilgrimage spots
to prominent Shiva temples in the Gangetic belt or local shrines in
their villages or towns during the Hindu month of Sawan/Shravana.2
Especially, during July–August every year, millions of devotees walk
barefoot with containers carrying the holy Ganges water over their
shoulders with the help of a sling, called kanwar.
Meerut
is one of the key cities on the pilgrimage journey for millions of
devotees travelling or walking across western Uttar Pradesh from the
holy sites in Uttarakhand. The former National Highway 58 that passes
through Meerut, now broken into several segments between the city and
the temple towns of Haridwar and Badrinath on the Himalayas, is packed
with devotees. Moreover, Meerut is also significant as one of the
prominent religious sites for several pilgrims in western Uttar Pradesh.
The city is known for its famous Aughudhnath Temple, which is home to one of the oldest shrines dedicated to Lord Shiva.3
Several devotees travelling through Meerut offer their prayers and
perform rituals at the temple before walking towards Delhi or Hapur in
west Uttar Pradesh.
