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File Attachment2001a9a1coverv05b.jpg

Religion and Commodification

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Routledge Research in Religion, Media and Culture

1. Religion and Commodification: Merchandizing Diasporic Hinduism Vineeta Sinha

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Religion and CommodificationMerchandizing Diasporic Hinduism

Vineeta Sinha

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First published 2011by Routledge270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

Simultaneously published in the UKby Routledge2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2011 Taylor & Francis

The right of Vineeta Sinha to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication DataSinha, Vineeta.

Religion and commodification: merchandizing diasporic Hinduism / Vineeta Sinha.p. cm.(Routledge research in religion, media, and culture ; 1)Includes bibliographical references and index.1. HinduismSingapore. 2. Religious supplies industrySingapore. 3. HinduismMalaya. 4. Religious supplies industryMalaya. 5. HinduismIndiaTamil Nadu. 6. Religious supplies industryIndiaTamil Nadu. I. Title. BL1165.S553S56 2010305.6'9453dc222010011794

ISBN13: 9780415873635 (hbk)ISBN13: 9780203842799 (ebk)

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010.

To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledgescollection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.

ISBN 0-203-84279-0 Master e-book ISBN

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For Ravi

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Contents

List of Maps and Figures viii List of Plates ix List of Abbreviations xi Acknowledgments xii

1 Everyday Hindu Religiosity and Ritual Objects 1

2 Mapping Spaces and Objects: Diaspora Hinduism and Puja Items 24

3 Homes for Gods: Prayer Altars for Family Shrines 69

4 Visual Representations of Hindu Divinity: Disentangling Material from Deity from Commodity 109

5 Flowers for Worship, Flowers for Sale: Straddling the Sacred and the Secular 148

6 Religion and Commodification: What Are the Possibilities for Enchantment? 189

Glossary 206 Bibliography 211 Index 222D

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List of Maps and Figures

Map 1 Southeast Asia, South Asia and East Asia. 10Map 2 Singapore. 29Figure 2.1 A drawing of a spiked kavat.i with its component parts. 60Figure 2.2 A close-up of the intricate carvings and etchings on

the base plates of a kavat.i. 62

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List of Plates

Plate 1 A signboard of a shop which advertises itself as a dealer and exporter of thirukoil items in Nyniappa Naicken Street, Chennai. 4

Plate 2 The frontage of a prominent shop in Penang, Malaysia, selling various items for puja. 37

Plate 3 A view of the five-foot way along Buffalo Road in Singapore, with a flower shop in the forefront. 40

Plate 4 A banner advertising the sale of items required for the festivals of Ponkal and Tai Pucam at Sri Perumal Trading in Singapore. 42

Plate 5 Customers buying items at the Ponkal Festival in Little India in 2009. 44

Plate 6 The entrance to the tented area lined with stalls selling Deepavali-related items at the Deepavali Festival Village in Singapore. 46

Plate 7 Itinerant vendors displaying their wares: colored threads for puja, laminated pictures of Hindu divinity, vibhuti and kunkumam packets together with plastic bangles, costume jewellery and bindis, outside the Veerammakaliamman Temple in Singapore. 52

Plate 8 A close-up of the items for sale by itinerant vendors, spread out on a cloth on the floor. 52

Plate 9 An original painting of Munsvaran by a Singaporean Hindu devotee. 55

Plate 10 An original painting of Munsvaran by a Singaporean Hindu devotee. 56

Plate 11 A young girl carrying a home-made palkavat.i on her shoulders at karttikai tpam celebrations at the Tank Road Temple in Singapore, December 2009. 58

Plate 12 Ready-made wooden, prayer altars on sale at Gokulam in Singapore. The cost of these fairly small-sized altars begins from a couple of hundred Singapore dollars. 85

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x List of Plates

Plate 13 A custom-made prayer altar housed in the store-room of a 5-room HDB apartment of a Tamil Hindu household in Singapore. 86

Plate 14 A view of the entrance to the bomb shelter that has been converted to a puja room of a Tamil Hindu family in Singapore. 90

Plate 15 A craftsman with his tools, working on finishing a custom-made prayer altar at a prominent shop in Singapores Little India. 92

Plate 16 Different size statues of the Laughing Buddha, together with pictures of Lord Subramaniam and the Lakshmi, Saraswati and Ganesh at a shop in Mylapore, Chennai. 112

Plate 17 Made in China statues of Hindu deities on sale at the Deepavali Festival Village in Singapore. In the foreground, note the statue of Ganesh in a tub of water. 119

Plate 18 Flower vendors displaying their wares at the wholesale Kamraj Flower Market in Koyambedu, outside Chennai. 160

Plate 19 A typical flower shop set-up in Singapores Buffalo Road, with a freezer box for storing flowers and the Styrofoam boxes in which flowers are delivered by local suppliers. 163

Plate 20 A Styrofoam box with flowers that have been packed in ice and flown into Singapore from Bangkok on Thai Airways. 165

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List of Abbreviations

AVA Agro-food and Veterinary Authority of SingaporeCDC Central Singapore Community Development CouncilDVD Digital Video DiscEDL Everyday LifeGRC Group Representative ConstituencyHDB Housing and Development BoardHEB Hindu Endowments BoardIAEC Indian Activity Executive Committee ISKCON International Society for Krishna ConsciousnessLI Little IndiaLISHA Little India Shopkeepers and Heritage AssociationMOM Ministry of ManpowerMP Member of ParliamentROM Registry of MarriagesSEA Southeast AsiaSGD Singapore DollarSTB Singapore Tourism BoardVCD Video Cassette DiscWP Work Permit

A note on the use of non-English wordsFollowing the Tamil Lexicon, Tamil words appear in transliteration, while the Hindi and Sanskrit words have been italicised.

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Acknowledgments

I begin by acknowledging a huge intellectual debt to my teacher, Geoffrey Benjamin, who has inspired me towards the study of religion in Singapore. Amidst a chorus of discordant voices, he has always encouraged me to pursue an intellectual interest in the numerically small Singaporean Hindu community. His observation that the small scale of a socio-cultural phe-nomenon by no means suggests its sociological irrelevance is an insight that has taught me a great deal and one I have appreciated enormously.

The travels to Malaysia and Tamilnadu were facilitated by funding I received from the National University of Singapores Faculty of Arts and Social Science Research Staff Support Scheme. This book would certainly not have been possible without the support and co-operation of a large group of individuals I interacted with over a sustained period of field-work (in places like Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Penang and Chennai). I am thankful to the retailers, salespersons and wholesalers who took the time to talk to me and patiently answered my questions about their trade in puja items; I appreciate the opportunities that made possible my intru-sive presence in shops to observe traders interactions with customers and to document exchanges, negotiations and transactions between them. In particular, I am thankful to the scores of Hindus who not only shared details of their personal religious styles with me but also opened their homes, and their very private puja rooms and prayer altars to me. Special thanks are due to Joe and Kris who shared their personal kavat.i(s) with me and allowed me to photograph them for the book. I am grateful to have had in Ms. Chitra d/o Pubalan, an extremely efficient research assistant, whose contributions to this book are invaluable: she helped me to conduct interviews, did transcriptions and a physical mapping of Singapores Little India, all with great fervour and professionalism. My appreciations also go to Dr Subramanian Thinnappan of the South Asian Studies Programme, NUS, for help with the transliteration of Tamil words, Mrs Lee Li Kheng of GIS, NUS for constructing the two maps and Mr Ravinran Kumaran for his artistry in producing the two drawings for the book.

I would like to thank the two reviewers of the manuscript, together with Jolyon Mitchell, Stuart Hoover and David Morgan, the editors of the

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Media, Religion and Culture Book Series, who have provided important intellectual feedback and encouragement for this project. At Routledge, I would like to thank Erica Wetter for facilitating the review process and Laura Stearns, Elizabeth Levine and Stacy Noto for assisting me through the copyediting and production phases.

The task of writing (while teaching full-time) was only possible because of the much-needed moral support from good friends like Medha and Suriani over half-cups-of-tea in the canteen. My very transnational family, especially my parents and siblings, have, as always, sustained me emotionally across long distances. Saying thank you to family and friends seems grossly inadequate as a returning gesture on my part. This book is dedicated to my husband, Ravi, in whom I have found both an enthusiastic champion and a stringent critic of the work that I do and who continues to anchor me in all my endeavours. Ashish and Akashthe next one will be for you both!

Vineeta SinhaJuly 2010

Acknowledgments xiii

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1 Everyday Hindu Religiosity and Ritual Objects

Everyday Hinduism in Diasporic Locations: Securing and Using Ritual Objects

Sustaining a Hindu universe at an everyday life level requires an extraor-dinary range of ritual apparatus and religious specialists. At the level of practice, everyday Hinduism is an embodied religion and grounded in a materiality that makes the presence of specific material objects and imple-ments an indispensable part of its religious practices. The catalogue of items that one encounters in expressions of theistic and devotional Hinduism in homes and temples is indeed long and impressive; it is also one that can only be partially articulated in any rendition. My survey of the field gener-ated this following broad inventory of religious imagery and symbolism associated with day to day Hindu practices: sculpted and painted stat-utes of Hindu gods and goddesses, framed prints of divinity, deity-specific yantras, brass and gold-plated oil-lamps, rudraksha beads, bells, incense sticks, oil and ghee, prayer altars, musical instruments, recorded devo-tional music,1 devotional stories in the form of VCDs and DVDs, religious literature and more transient objects such as fresh fruits (lime, coconut, sugarcane), dried fruits (raisins, almond, cashew), flowers (jasmine, hibis-cus, roses) and leaves (margosa, mango, banana) for making garlands and decorations, all used by practitioners in a variety of ritualistic modes.

This project then begins with recognition of the profound importance of ritual paraphernalia in the enactment of everyday Hindu religiosity. Hindu weddings, funerals and any number of daily and calendrical rituals, festivals as well as birthdays and anniversary celebrations are crowded with things and marked by the colourful and lively presence of an appar-ently random combination of objects and materials which in fact do con-note order. In fact, every item no matter how ordinary or small has a place and a value in Hindu ceremonial life. Starting with these observa-tions, my aim is to document how material objects are used by Hindus in their everyday religious practices. Traditionally, in the Indian context, both services and objects required for the performance of rituals were provided and produced by jati(s), occupational groups, charged with these

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2 Everyday Hindu Religiosity and Ritual Objects

responsibilities, the entire endeavour being ideally imbued with spiritual overtones and not approached merely as work. The almost sacred con-nection between occupational groups such as garland makers, temple musicians and craftsmen, artisans and sculptors has been clearly severed in many diasporic locations, but also importantly in India itselfthis being evident especially in urban spaces. As such, skills and expertise required for creating and making available an array of objects to support Hindu practices have gradually been taken over by clusters of individuals with no traditional, historical connection to caste-related knowledge, such pro-ficiency having been relocated to the hands of entrepreneurs. Both the transference and disconnect just noted have been crucial for the ultimate commodification of objects that are required to sustain theistic Hinduism, leading to the emergence of a commercial industry that rests on the mass production of goods. The effortless and straightforward access to ritual objects is even more tenuous for Hindu communities in the diaspora as the resources and skills which are needed to produce them are not necessarily present in these locales. These rich and nuanced processes merit further sociological scrutiny in and of themselves but are further exciting in carry-ing enormous potential for theoretical reflections in a number of key fields of study, including the realm of everyday religiosity, the consumption of religious objects and material religion.

The practice of Hinduism in a global, capitalist and diasporic context has created the need for a continuous flow and movement of religious commodities, and given rise to a group of entrepreneurs who have obliged, leading to what I am calling here a merchandising of Hinduism. I do not use this word negatively here; neither do I use this to suggest the selling of Hindu religion or spirituality. Rather, I mean by this the trading of a set of material objects as commodities, which are ultimately consumed as ritual objects by individual Hindus. It is further intriguing to ask if, and how, this complex process of commodification impacts the modes in which these goods are used in the ritual domain. The variety of objects required in the practice of Hinduism, and the fact of their incorporation into the global capitalist system of markets and commodities does mean their necessary commercialisation, but this by no means leads to a desecration of the reli-gious realm. For overseas Hindu communities, their easy availability as commodities, which circulate and can be exchanged across transnational boundaries, is not only enabling but often vital for sustaining everyday religiosity. In this project my aim is to explore if, and how, the unavoidable and inevitable commodification of puja items impacts their ritual con-sumption by practising Hindus. While I document practitioners attitudes to this category of objects, I also give voice to the numerous retailers and merchants who trade in these goods and unpack the nature of entrepre-neurial transactions they are routinely engaged in.

The book is grounded in primary ethnographic material drawn from Hindu domains on the island nation-state of Singapore, parts of West

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Everyday Hindu Religiosity and Ritual Objects 3

Malaysia and Chennai in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Theoretically, the project is contextualised in a broader awareness of Diaspora Hinduism, a complex global phenomenon, which provides an important ground-ing for this research. My work rests on the premise that the analysis of Hinduism amongst overseas communities is a viable and dynamic field of study and carries tremendous insight for theorising how a religion is practiced and sustained in locales far removed from its place of origin. Hindu communities the world over have constituted themselves in ways that have allowed them to sustain vibrant and energetic manifestations of devotional Hinduism, both in the public and private domains. Specifically, my intention is to engage with the issue of how one can meaningfully theo-rise the consumption of material objects within a Hindu sphere. But given my interest in diasporic Hindu communities, a prior question about access to ritual objects needs to be addressed; given the need for ritual equipment and expertise, how is it possible for overseas Hindu communities to con-tinue to practice their religion at an everyday life level? Admittedly, the story of each of the items in the aforementioned list is unique and merits independent narration in itself. Nonetheless, it is possible to make generic observations about the processes and mechanisms that render them acces-sible to Hindus in the diaspora and to further document their ritualistic and symbolic utilisation. In the interest of specificity, I register the modes in which Hindus in Singapore approach material things that are commodi-ties as well as ritual objects through a selection of three items that are central to sustaining domestic Hinduismprayer altars (which house reli-gious icons and insignia), visual representations of Hindu divinity (such as statues and framed pictures) and fresh flowers.

These empirical foci allow me to engage conceptually with the overlap-ping fields of everyday religion and material religion. In my emphasis on the consumption of religious objects amongst Hindus, I have found the notion of the everyday life (EDL) an important one to work with. I approach the EDL as a collection of seemingly unimportant and ordi-nary activities, a body of culturally prescribed and routinized experiences and practices that reveal the ebb and flow of daily mundane existence. The religious domain, like other societal domains, is structurally defined by these features. My attention to the everyday life of Hindus signals a commitment to detailing the ways in which Hindus go about the routine business of being Hindu, engaging in specific ritual practices within the domestic realm.2 The actualisation of Hindu religiosity requires a range of physical objects, tools, implements and paraphernalia which are now largely secured as commodities from the marketplace, a dependence which by definition draws Hindus as devotees/consumers into the dynam-ics of capitalist relations. Historically, the grounding of Hindu practices in material culture has especially been a challenge for Hindu communi-ties located outside India, which continues to be viewed not only as the sacred centre for Hinduism but, more importantly, also for securing and

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4 Everyday Hindu Religiosity and Ritual Objects

validating all things Hindu. But this is not to say that without the importa-tion of religious objects the practice of Hinduism in the diaspora would be jeopardised. Indeed, this reliance on the homeland viewed as the source of all things Hindu is not unmitigated and absolute. Diasporic Hindu communities have sourced alternative resources and produced a variety of local responses in fashioning products and services to cater to their religious needs, leading in fact to the promising augmentation of home grown industries. Thus the acquisition of skills and expertise required to reproduce materials and objects needed for sustaining everyday Hindu religiosity are discernible amongst segments of overseas Hindu communi-ties, both on the part of entrepreneurs and laypersons. For Singapore, it is critical to note that not all of the previously listed items are necessarily imported; some things are not only conceptualised but also manufactured locally, through the effort of individuals who operate alone or in small groups linked through kinship alliances and friendship networks, resulting in small-scale production units. These data allow me to highlight diasporic locations as sites of production of puja items and add to the broader discussions about their circulation and consumption. Additionally, I chart the status and value of a puja item through to the end of its cycle of use and talk about its post-consumption phase, especially in relation to establishing its sacrality. Admittedly, my emphasis is on the use of objects

Plate 1 A signboard of a shop which advertises itself as a dealer and exporter of thirukoil items in Nyniappa Naicken Street, Chennai.

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Everyday Hindu Religiosity and Ritual Objects 5

and thus I pay greater attention to the demand side of market relations, i.e., the consumers, as opposed to the supply side of the equation.

Some examples of how these objects are approached conceptually are available to us from the existing literature: Haley, White & Cunningham (2001) use the label Christian products to denote objects such as books, music, giftware, jewellery and clothing associated with Christianity, while DAlisera (2001) finds the term religious commodities appropriate for referring to bumper stickers, decals, informational pamphlets, kosher hot dogs and restricting the phrases Islamic merchandise and Islamic com-modities for specifically Muslim items. Starrett (1995) uses the generic category religious commodities and adds the suffix Islamic to speak to objects associated specifically with Islam. Speaking more generally, Zaidman (2003) invokes descriptions like religious goods and religious objects in a comparison of traditional and new age religions in Israel, while Geary (1986) uses the phrase sacred commodities to refer to medieval rel-ics in European Catholicism. Some examples of objects that can be collec-tively encapsulated in these listed categories include the following: rosary or prayer beads, Tibetan singing bowls and prayer wheels, conch shell, bells, statues of deities, flowers, scared relicslike the Buddhas tooth, medieval saints relics, printed pictorial images of deities, prayer rugs, etc. While there may be contextual merit in this set of labels, I have opted to use a description that has emerged from my field. My survey of the market in Singapore, Malaysia, Chennai, London as well as the Internet gener-ated the following generic descriptions: puja items, puja articles, worship accessories, temple accessories, temple items, thirukoil items, religious artefacts, puja accessories, Hindu prayer items, religious items, etc. Of this list, the expressions puja items, puja accessories, puja things and reli-gious items are used most extensively and universally. In Singapore and Malaysia, my conversations with retailers and consumers alike revealed the routinized use of the phrase prayer things3 and puja items to refer to a large collection of objects used in/for worship. My invocation of these two phrases is grounded in recognising its status first and foremost as ethnographic categories. There are obvious problems with essentialising and homogenising them, something I avoid in my usage. Furthermore, I am aware that these descriptors encapsulate a wide spectrum of objects and materials, which are defined by important distinctions, each with a specific biography and story. Yet, I argue that is it possible to make some general observations about the buying, selling and using of puja items; my specific intention here is to narrate the stories of a subset of three very different articles from the larger pool of ritual implements, i.e., fresh flow-ers, visual depictions of divinity and prayer altars.

Even though objects used in religious ritual are produced as commodi-ties once they enter the sphere of worship they acquire specific sets of meanings that only make sense within the given worldview of a particular religious tradition. They come to signify symbolism and evoke religious

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6 Everyday Hindu Religiosity and Ritual Objects

significance within the context of the ritual in question. Even though they can be secured for a sum of money, and are transacted in the market-place, they potentially embody a non-monetary value, often expressed by devotees as spiritual power and efficacy, which can be animated through usage. Yet, what are consumed and appropriated as ritual objects by devo-tees in their religious lives, at one point in time also existed as commodities and goods with a price tag and are by-products of cycles of production and distribution in a capitalist marketplace. There is a clear awareness amongst the relevant parties that these articles are first and foremost commodi-ties, with a price tag and often mass-produced. However, the insertion of the pre-fix religious, Christian, sacred, Islamic to these descriptors appears to mark their uniqueness from other categories of commodities. In contrast, it is not without significance that we do not encounter the expression profane commodities either in everyday discourse or in the scholarship on the subject. It is further critical to ask how retailers and distributors of these items denote these articleshow are they described and talked about in the marketplace? These descriptions will expectedly be governed by cultural, religious and linguistic specificities of particular ethnographic contexts.

Fieldwork Routes and Pathways

My current interest in exploring the intersections of religion and the mar-ketplace and its relationship to material dimensions of Hinduism has a history that needs to be articulated. I became especially aware of these thematics in the course of my earlier work on the contemporary worship of Munsvaran, (the male guardian deity from Tamil Nadu) who has been firmly placed on Singaporean and Malaysian Hindu landscapes (Sinha 2005). In the process of documenting visual manifestations of the deity and paraphernalia associated with his veneration, I encountered an astound-ing range of products in markets across Singapore, parts of Malaysia and Tamil Nadu. As I spoke to retailers who traded in these goods, I repeatedly encountered the expression that Munsvaran is good for business, some-thing which triggered a deeper interest in scrutinising how the religious and commercial spheres were constituted and responded to each others existence. It was apparent that the market was driven by the rising popu-larity of the deity and a particular style of approaching him ritually; retail-ers supplied products demanded by devotees and this trade was seen to be commercially viable and profitable. From these beginnings, my subsequent research was framed in the attention to a broader field of local retail busi-nesses that dealt with puja items, and to seek answers about where these came from and how they were made available to devotees in Singapore. In addition to the focus on the commercialisation of puja items, I was also inspired to explore more fully the materiality of devotional Hinduism and establish the status and value of things in the enactment of everyday Hindu

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Everyday Hindu Religiosity and Ritual Objects 7

religiosity. This has required me to deconstruct the category puja items and demonstrate the entanglement of physicality, materiality and sacral-ity as well as the commodity features within this category of objects, in an effort to further problematise discussions about the sacredness of physical articles.

In this book, I document how the Hindu community on the island nation-state of Singapore strives to sustain everyday Hindu religiosity, itself grounded in the need for material objects. The ethnographic material for this project was generated via fieldwork primarily in Singapore, parts of Malaysia and in small measure in Tamil Nadu, undertaken between 2003 and August 2007. This extended period has allowed me to gener-ate rich ethnographic data, which reveal that the merchandising of puja items together with the complex modes in which they are inserted into religious practices are exciting fields for scholarly reflection. Although I started this project with an empirical focus on Singaporean and Malaysian Hindu domains, even my earliest research inquiries strongly indicated that it would be impossible and unproductive to restrict my field to these two geographic locales. Given the notice of the dispersed and wide-spread networks which connect producers, retailers and consumers in this trade, confining my inquiries to Singapore would have allowed me to only narrate part of the story of the production, circulation, distribution and consump-tion of puja items. The inquiries and logic of my research have meant that I had to track the noted links and networks across transnational boundar-iesboth analytically and to some extent empirically, and to reflect on the consequences that follow from the notice of such linkages. Thus, I have found that it would be both limiting and inaccurate for me to frame my research exclusively in terms of a focus on Hinduism in Singapore. Rather my ethnographic engagement with the latter has required me to make field trips to parts of West Malaysia (Penang, Malacca and Kuala Lumpur) and the state of Tamil Nadu (Chennai, Mahabalipuram, Rameswaram and Trichy) in India. The nature of emerging data have demanded that these trips be made to follow through the various kinds of liaisons, connections and relationships I was learning about while being located in Singaporean Hindu domainsties that connect devotees, ritual objects, religious spe-cialists, temples (and thus spaces) and businesses into a complex network of exchanges, reliance and support. All of this serves to complicate the traditional ethnographic notion of a spatially bounded, self-contained, physically distinct field site. As such, for me the field was neither a given nor a disconnected entity, but instead constructed out of the confluences and convergences I noticed as I traced the mobility and circulation of puja items across transnational territories and the commercial and cultural transactions that connect various clusters of individuals who straddle them. The ideas of multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 1995) and global ethnography (Burawoy 2000; Gille & O Riain 2002), resonate with my approach to fieldwork as these have offered meaningful analytical and

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8 Everyday Hindu Religiosity and Ritual Objects

methodological frames for my work. Michael Burawoy argues that in an increasingly globalised, transnational context it is no longer possible to approach ethnography in classical modes which has made a fetish out of the confinement of fieldwork, the enclosure of a village, the isolation of the tribe (Burawoy 2000: 1). George Marcus recounts this methodological shift in ethnographic research thus:

Ethnography moves from its conventional single-site location, contex-tualised by macro-constructions of a larger social order, such as the capitalist world system, to multiple sites of observation and participa-tion that cross-cut dichotomies such as the local and the global, the life-world and the system. Resulting ethnographies are thus both in and out of the world system.

(Marcus 1995: 95)

This idea of mobile ethnography (ibid. 96) in allowing ones research to be led by the unexpected trajectories in tracing a cultural formation across and within multiple sites of activity (ibid. 96) is intellectually appealing, although a tremendous challenge in practical terms. Additionally, while the comparative value of actually doing of fieldwork in many places is obvious, as I see it, the larger message here lies in approaching the notion of multi-sited ethnography conceptually, such that even if fieldwork in these multiple places is not possible, ones research has to be attentive to diverse, cross-cultural, comparative locales relevant to the research at hand. Thus, given the questions I was asking, my research did take me to specific locales, including the city of Chennai, Kumbakonam, Mahabalipuram, in the Southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu and to the Malaysian cities of Penang, Malacca and Kuala Lumpur, where I conducted in-depth inter-views with wholesalers, retailers, artisans, assemblers as well as consum-ers of specific religious items. However, I also had to be attentive to, and pursue the significance of, relevant processes and events in places that I did not and could not visit, for theorising the phenomenon under question in Singapore. In this research, following Marcus argumentation, my posi-tion is that my research objectives could not have been accomplished by remaining focussed on a single site of intensive investigation (ibid. 96). However, I do retain the notion of a primary ethnographic site, which in the present context is, Singapore, where I spent considerable amount of time hanging out in retail shops in Little India (LI) and in the Housing and Development Board (HDB) neighbourhoods, and had opportunities for participant observation, particularly watching the interactions between traders and customers and documenting the conversations, negotiations that ensued and transactions that were accomplished. The focus on the consumption and post-consumption phases of the life-trajectory of puja items necessitated in-depth, repeated conversations with lay Hindus, who were both customers and consumers simultaneously. I was fortunate to

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Everyday Hindu Religiosity and Ritual Objects 9

be granted access into the domestic spaces and to spend time in the even more private and intimate prayer rooms, which I was allowed to survey, ask questions about and photograph.4 These interactions generated cru-cial information about prayer altars, statues and other visual depictions of divinity as well as ritual accessories and how they were approached and related to, and the connotations the materials carried through various moments of use and at the end of a cycle of utilisation. I was also able to ask about and observe religious practices in the private domain and thus detail how sacred spaces within homes were understood and approached on a daily basis.

Following the self-reflexive turn in anthropological research (beginning in the 1970s and lasting through to the 1990s) and the theoretical debates and controversies (Asad 1973; Ellis & Flaherty 1992; Hymes 1972; Ruby 1982) this has engendered, some discussion of a researchers positional-ity and perspective has become the norm in contemporary ethnographic accounts, with the rightful caveat against self-indulgence. Like other researchers, I too have often been asked (by colleagues and students) how, and if, my biography has affected the research choices I have made. In my book on Munsvaran worship in Singapore (Sinha 2005), I had felt it necessary to address the complexities of my status as a researcher given my identity as a Hindu and yet the experientially unfamiliar spheres of Tamil, Hindu folk religiosity I was researching. Within the context of this research, the Hinduness of my identity was again an issue in the field, especially in my conversations with Hindusas buyers and sellers of puja items. Many of my questions about everyday puja items and their uses, were met with a presumption that, I should know the answers given that I too was a Hindu. Sometimes responses were brief and truncated for the same reason, which meant that narratives were not always forthcom-ing spontaneously. Beyond probing, interviews were really long sessions involving back and forth exchanges about our experiences as Hindus and the kind of normative practices and views we collectively held about the use and value of puja items for example. Consequently, I ended up sharing fragments of my experiences growing up in a Hindu household and the knowledge I carried in my head about Hindu norms and prac-tices, as much as my respondents imparted similar information to me. Not unexpectedly, we often struggled to articulate the taken-for-granted, nor-matively-given Hindu beliefs and practices about the topic in question; not surprisingly, we certainly did not agree on everything, often falling back on our familial and biographical experiences to account for the variations.

The broader lens of Diaspora5 Hinduism serves to contextualise my cho-sen primary ethnographic focus in this study, the almost 100,0006 strong Hindu community located within the modern nation-state of Singapore. Given the logic of my research inquiries, the patterns and processes I have observed in my focus on Singapore have required me to be conscious of similar phenomena and developments in other Hindu diasporic spaces by

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10 Everyday Hindu Religiosity and Ritual Objects

way of attention to existing secondary material. The Hindu community in Singapore is not an isolated entity but a subset of a larger global Hindu Diaspora. Not surprisingly, the total size of this bigger cluster is impos-sible to determine categorically. We do have access to a number of esti-mates and approximations, which are, however, not entirely conclusive as the various figures on offer are often inconsistent. According to the data provided by the US State Departments International Religious Freedom Report 2006, the number of Hindus outside India is approximately 69 million as compared to the 886 million within India. Globally, Hinduism is billed as the religion of roughly one-sixth of the worlds population. Whether we are looking at the 3,100 Hindus in Sweden or half a million strong Hindu community in South Africa, the point to note is that these clusters self-define themselves as Hindus in adherence to a religious tradi-tion named Hinduism. This forms a huge market for trading in religious items and sees the participation of a number of players, from producers, manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, wholesalers, retailers to consum-ers, scattered in widely dispersed spaces but who interact in complex ways through the flow of objects and personnel. There are common and unify-ing forces acting on this market and its various participants, including con-sumers. Theoretically, it is important to ask how the commercialisation of prayer items connects individuals and groups (Hindu and non-Hindu) across these widely divergent spaces and communities and the kinds of interactions and encounters these produce.

Map 1 Southeast Asia, South Asia and East Asia.

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Everyday Hindu Religiosity and Ritual Objects 11

Interestingly, retailers, suppliers and distributors of puja items who are physically located in Singapore do not see their market as being confined to the needs of the Hindu community on the island. Rather they cast their net much wider, conceptualising a much bigger, global market and in fact export merchandise to Hindu communities in parts of Malaysia, USA, South Africa and Europe. Many of the retail businesses in Singapore list and count customers (both individual and institutional)7 from such places as Germany and the USA, playing the role of middlemen importing goods from India or Malaysia and then exporting them to the northern hemi-sphere. During my trip to Chennai in February 2006, in my visit to retail stores8 located in its Mylapore district, I learnt that many of them carried ritual goods that were popular with Singaporean and Malaysian visitors, especially paraphernalia and equipment associated with Tai Pucam and Aiyappaan puja. There is overwhelming evidence that India continues to be symbolically real and vital for overseas Hindu communities; but my data also strongly point to the fact that Singapore, Malaysia, other Southeast Asian countries and China (see Map 1) are increasingly becoming impor-tant players in providing and manufacturing materials used in worship and thus sustaining specific kinds of Hindu religiosity in the Diaspora. The choice of my methodological routes reflect my anthropological leanings but also serve a further purposeI view such ethnographic grounding as providing a crucial context and framework for enabling me to articulate the core substantive concerns of this book upon which rest my theoretical reflections.

The Book Taking Shape: Theoretical and Ethnographic Turns

In this project, my interest lies precisely in exploring the intersection of materiality and ritual practice in the domain of everyday Hindu reli-giosity with a view to articulating the meanings connoted by ritual use of objects. Using the lens of materiality, I offer insights into the every-day religious lives of Hindus as they strive to sustain theistic, devotional Hinduism in diasporic locations. I concur with Keenan and Arweck (2006: 17) that:

. . . social scientists have something to say . . . in the unfinished quest to reveal the mysterious yet ubiquitous connections between the material and the spiritual, the profane and sacred.

Further, I am led by the premise that the exploration of religions location at the interstices of capitalism and globalisation offers exciting opportuni-ties for creative research. I am inspired to contribute to on-going scholarly discussions about the materiality of Hindu ritual domains and to bridge this intention with my interest in narrating the stories of objects used in the act of worship. The present work complements the rich body of

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12 Everyday Hindu Religiosity and Ritual Objects

literature on theistic and devotional Hinduism in the Diaspora, evident in the focus on the founding and functioning of Hindu temples (Vertovec 1992; Waghorne 2006), the observance of festivals (Younger 2002), the performance of daily rituals in sustaining domestic Hinduism (Mazumdar & Mazumdar 1994, 1999; Michaelson 1987) and the enactment of pub-lic processions (Jacobsen 2008) in diasporic spaces. However, despite the tremendous activity and energy within this field and the burgeoning litera-ture9 it has produced, it is my observation that the intersection of everyday religious life with processes of commodification and commercialisation has yet to be explored overtly and comprehensively. My search for con-temporary academic works that deal systematically with these issues sug-gests strongly that this is an under-researched field with great potential for novel contributions. It is notable that analyses of visual Hindu culture and material religion that are available for India, including the incorpora-tion of Hindu symbols and artefacts into the world of global capitalism and consumer culture, are not as readily available in studies of Diaspora Hinduism. Similarly, while the study of religion in Southeast Asian soci-eties has received sustained scholarly attention, the interplay of religion and commerce and material religion, including accounts of Hinduism, have remained marginal concerns in this body of work. This lacuna in the scholarship is not peculiar to Asia or Southeast Asia. The editors of Materialising Religion: Expression, Performance and Ritual (2006) note the same problem with the subfield of sociology of religion. They argue that the study of materialised spiritualitiesand spiritualised materi-alities has not been seriously pursued. Through the 1970s and 1980s, there was considerable academic interest in applying and testing Webers Protestant Ethic thesis (1947) in Southeast Asia (Alatas 1972; Buss 1984) producing provocative and controversial discussions about the sightings of the Protestant ethic in Asia and in non-Protestant religious traditions. Secularisation theorists have also turned to Asia in their effort to docu-ment god free zones but have found little evidence for their claims in Asian societies, where different forms of religiosity show a vibrant and tenacious presence. However, the emphases on exploring material dimen-sions of religion, the symbolism carried in its artefacts and their multiple but simultaneous location in several societal domains (phenomena whose impact has been felt forcefully over the last two decades) are more recent developments occupying the energies of a small cluster of social scientists working on Asia. Some important contributions are carried in a recent vol-ume, Religious Commodifications in Asia: Marketing Gods (2007), edited by Pattana Kitiarsa. In this collection, the location of religion in the inter-stices of capitalism and globalisation and its attendant consequences are explored in diverse religious traditions in places like Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia and Singapore. Here it is not only material objects that are discussed but also how blessings, merit religion itself is subjected to commodifying tactics. Earlier notable works and commentaries on the

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Everyday Hindu Religiosity and Ritual Objects 13

subject include Lees (1993) work on the globalisation of religious markets in Malaysia, Yees account of the trade in Buddhist talismans in Thailand, who notes rightly that more attention must be paid to material objects in religious practices (1996: 1) and most recently Yeohs (2006) analysis of material religion at a pilgrimage shrine in Malaysia. Another inspiration for this work comes from Robert Hefners observations that the culture of consumption has yet to become an important field of research in East and Southeast Asia (1998: 25).10 Given the gaps I have noted in these various bodies of scholarship, this project aims to contribute to studies of material religion and commodification of religion in Southeast Asia and the Hindu Diaspora with a primary focus on the consumption of puja items beyond the question of utility and functionality. Through primary ethnographic material this book engages key thematics in the fields of material religion, religion and consumption and visual Hindu culture, all of which intersect in important ways. I engage conceptual questions in these named fields via attention to these three following themes, an approach that allows me to present relevant slices of ethnographic data.

Mapping Objects in Spaces: Ethnographic Grounding

My interest in mapping spaces and objects that inhabit them extends from what may be labelled local spaces to global sites and moves from real locales to virtual settings. In real space, marking spaces where religious objects are traded implies attending to the highly localised retail sites, for example, in sundry, grocery and provision shops as well as specialist shops that carry religious paraphernalia in enclaves known as Mini India or Little India (in such cities as Chicago, Toronto, London, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore). It is noteworthy that these local businesses are plugged into a complex global network of commercial linkages, often relying on the same wholesalers, suppliers, manufacturers and distributors of reli-gious items from India or are indeed linked with each other in exporting or importing select items across transnational boundaries. This makes it possible to conceptualise a larger transnational space of the global mar-ketplace, one that deals with Hindu religious objects and sees the par-ticipation of retailers and businesses located in various Hindu diasporic spaces. Given that a primary objective in the book is to narrate the stories of objects that are used in devotional Hindu practices, a good starting point is to begin with the mapping of spaces across the island of Singapore where puja items are concentrated, bought and sold. A primary site where these articles are marketed and traded is in the formally organised world of retail and wholesale businesses located in the Little India (LI) district of Singapore, defined as an Indian community space. The emergence of this space as a hub of commercial activity designed to cater to the needs of the Indian and Hindu community have been conditioned by a combination of historical factors. Today, LI is unequivocally identified as an Indian area

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14 Everyday Hindu Religiosity and Ritual Objects

and in offering specific goods and services continues to draw Indians from all over the island. However, there are other secondary locations dispersed across the island where a network of individuals trade in merchandise specific to the needs of the Indian community, together with puja items, making them available to consumers, including members of non-Indian and non-Hindu communities. Examples of the latter include the precincts of Hindu temples and shrines as well as retail businesses (such as groceries shops and flower shops) in residential enclaves known as HDB estates which house up to 80 per cent of Singapores largely urban population.

The prevalence of the Internet in the realm of religion is now largely taken-for-granted (Cobb 1998; Waters 1997; Zaleski 1997), and has been documented across diverse religious traditions. Much has been written about the role of the Internet in the creation and sustenance of a diasporic Hindu identity (Lal 1999; Rai 1995). In addition to surveying real places, my research highlights the centrality of the infinitely vast stretch of the Internet for the trade in puja items. Not surprisingly, as a twenty-first century phenomenon, the Internet surfaced in the course of my research as a critical space that has been colonised by manufacturers and distributors of religious objects and, crucially, by lay practitioners themselves. This has been approached as a medium for disseminating information, advertising and publicity for products, in addition to being a market space where products are bought and sold. Entering relevant phrases like puja articles and puja accessories into Internet search engines of Google and Yahoo generates literally hundreds of websites11 and web portals, carrying details of manufacturers, suppliers, importers, exporters and distributors of this merchandise, based in Bangalore, New Delhi, Singapore, New York or London. In addition to entrepreneurs, one also stumbles into blogs, dis-cussion groups and forums with individual posts about how to build your own altar, to how to decorate a puja thali, where various puja accessories can be purchased and even the list of items required for the performance of puja(s) and festivals. Judging by the kind of activity that occurs routinely in this setting, the Internet has clearly surfaced as a powerful new mar-ketplace not only in the trade of puja items but also as a critical teaching and learning platform. The latter is intended to impart information about essential items required for conducting different types of puja(s) and about the proper methods of performing them. This is hardly surprising given the ubiquity of computers, the modes of technological possibilities they enable and their impact on so many facets of contemporary existence. This is indeed a well-narrated tale by now, even as the reach of the Internet continues to awe and overwhelm. Expectedly, the Internet emerged in the course of my research, both as a source of data and as an important meth-odological tool, both of which need to be theorised. With this realisation, in mapping the locales where prayer items are bought and sold, I had to move beyond these physical spaces and consider the value of the Internet as a new marketplace for these items. I encountered the presence of the

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Internet in this domain in several modes: one, and the most obvious in which local and international retailers and suppliers of prayer items regis-tered their existence to consumers by setting up websites and displayed their wares, including through visuals; two, was the presence of lay individuals who used the medium to publicise knowledge they possessed about where, how and for how much prayer items could be secured, to advertise for sale specific items they had picked up in the course of their travels to India or Malaysia or to seek relevant items for worship. The former strategy reveals a fairly conventional usage which serves to supplement and consolidate a business that also exists in the real world and by now is perfunctory as a survival strategy for reaching out to consumers and in being visible. Many of the big Singapore-based retail and wholesale businesses that trade in puja items also have a virtual presence and market themselves quite suc-cessfully to a global customer base. However, there is at least one establish-ment in Singapore that is interactive in the sense that it operates with the concept of online shopping but most others have not moved beyond using the Internet to disseminate information, advertise goods and to communi-cate with potential customers. The latter approach inspires more curiosity as it signals several important shifts and developments. As a medium, the Internet facilitates such interaction and encounters and serves as a platform where these prayer items can be advertised, deals negotiated and secured. The emergence of the Internet as a new bazaar, enhanced by the circulation and dissemination of different kinds of knowledge, stands to transform the traditional dichotomous relationship between seller and buyer. This new mode of forging ties has also led to the creation of new networks of reliance and business which are temporary and transient in the sense that they come into existence as and when necessary. This trend is further sustained and supported by other factors, including the ease with which people are con-nected and embedded in networks where they have access to information and resources. Numerous discussion groups relating to Hinduism have appeared on the Internet in the last decade or so. Many of these are initi-ated and operated by Hindus located in Malaysia and Singapore, groups to which I belong, my research being made known to the groups in question by virtue of my earlier research on Hinduism. In this domain I have noted the overwhelming use of e-mail messages and posts on the discussion group to circulate information about prayer items that are sought, advertised and offered for sale not by retailers but by lay Hindus themselves, which is an important shift in theorising market relations. This development repre-sents another mode of securing required items and sees individuals who are otherwise laypersons temporarily slipping into the role of sellers and in fact bypassing retailers completely. Significantly, it adds a variation to the buyer-seller dualism and reduces exclusive dependence on traders and entrepreneurs. It is also notable that the messages about products and ser-vices are directed at a concentrated audienceHindu devotees all of whom are potential customers.

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16 Everyday Hindu Religiosity and Ritual Objects

Highlighting Circulation and Distribution Processes

Following from the fore-mentioned a core interest in the book is to liter-ally go behind the articles on the shelves and ask questions relating to their origins and then move forwards to their cycle of usage, drawing on the notion that objects have a biography and a social history. While the use of religious objects in worship is a fascinating phenomenon (and a critical component of the book), it is equally, if not more intriguing to try and make visible their distribution and circulation mechanisms and mark the routes they travel before they become available to devotees/consumers. Thus I not only itemise objects that are available but also uncover their networks of distribution with a view to demonstrating where these items are produced, how they are marketed and disseminated glob-ally as commodities. Essentially, I am inspired to narrate the story/sto-ries of these articles prior to the act of consumption. Important related questions then surface: Where do they come from? Who is responsible for producing them? How are these objects secured? Who brings them to Singapore? Who are the importers and suppliers? Who distributes them in the market? The actual practices on the ground demand an avoid-ance of simplistic and quick answers. The staggering variety of different routes, strategies and mechanisms through which these objects find their way into diasporic locations like Singapore is striking. Puja items as commodities are procured and appear in the local market through both formal and informal mechanisms. The former typifies the modus ope-randi of larger, established businesses that have access to resources for establishing contacts with suppliers and manufacturers of products, the wherewithal in other countries and can mobilise an extensive network of package, storage and transportation nodes which deliver goods to the doorstep of retail outlets in Singapore. These businesses have the capital and other resources to place large orders, to pay for container space for shipments and air flown goods and to facilitate port and custom clear-ances, etc. This also means that the expenditure of all these processes is factored into the final cost of the product by the time it appears on the shelves in the local market.

In addition, to these big entrepreneurs who rely on standard, formal mechanisms for trading in prayer items, are the medium and small-scale entrepreneurs who seem to be able to secure the products they want with-out ever leaving the country. They function through more informal chan-nels, where it is imperative to be plugged into the right networks. The latter means knowing the market, being aware of the products that are desirable and knowing how to secure them without having to go to India or other places, thus reducing overhead costs of travel, shipping, transportation and port clearances, etc. Additionally, a group of couriers travel between Singapore and India carrying suitcases laden with puja items that have been requested by local retailers and thus also serve as distributors of

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these goods. Sometimes they bring merchandise without prior orders and literally go from door to door introducing their goods, securing orders and making a sale. These couriers may make as many as four to five trips in a year, sometimes more, entering the country on a social visit pass; their pas-sage and lodging is paid for in return for carrying goods and taking back more orders and cash from sales. My focus on production and distribution mechanisms serves to address these following questions: Do consumers know where the goods whose presence they take for granted and use at an everyday life level come from? Does such knowledge or lack thereof, make a difference to the act of utilising these objects?

Connecting to Patterns of Consumption

As important as it is to highlight the production and distribution processes, it is also critical to ask if it is necessary for consumers to have knowledge about these for the various modes in which they are used by Singaporean Hindus. The focus on consumption is thus a necessary component of the larger story I am trying to narrate. This is not least because knowledge of consumption patterns can be a critical factor that stimulates the very production of commodities and their subsequent treatment and handling by distributors and retailers. Therefore, I offer important data about con-sumption patterns of religious objects amongst Hindus. From the vast assortment of items available in the market locally, I have chosen to focus in detail on the consumption of a select few, namely, visual representa-tions of divinitystructures which house them and fresh flowers required for sustaining devotional Hinduism in the home. This selection is guided by the logic that these articles are associated specifically with domestic Hinduism, where everyday devotional Hindu religiosity finds expression. In trying to make sense of everyday patterns of consumption of religious objects, it is clearly not feasible to work with the assumption that indi-viduals are driven by the satisfaction of temporary, superficial, restless and worldly appetites. Neither is it sufficient to jump to the obvious but equally simplistic and rather vague conclusion that this sort of consump-tion leads to spiritual fulfilment. It is far more challenging to conceptu-alise consumption in this domain and ask what its effects are on forms of religiosity and religious consciousness. What does the consumption of religious articles signify, what function does it serve and what are its con-sequences? Is there a qualitative, substantive difference between consump-tion of material objects as commodities and as religious objects?

My data suggest that everyday consumption of religious objects is a com-plex phenomenon, despite the recognition of existent normative notions about the treatment of religious objects within Hinduism. To some extent the manner of approaching pictures and statues of gods and flowers in worship is also inscribed and sometimes even prescribed by custom and tradition. But one of my interests is to query precisely what happens to

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religious objects at the sites of reception and what do individuals actually do with them as they are used in the ritual domain. In particular I explore how once upon a time commodities enter the religious domain as ritual objects (and are thus doubly consumed) and what sorts of concomitant meanings they carry along their journey. My interest in the use of objects for religious purposes is less from a ritualistic and theological perspective, but more an attempt to uncover how and if an awareness of production and distribution mechanisms and details are integral to the act of con-sumption. I am specifically interested to generate discussions about the kind of symbolism objects are seen to embody before use in worship, dur-ing the act itself and in particular what happens to them once they are seen to have served their purpose.

My engagement with consumption of everyday objects in Hindu religiosity has highlighted two central thematics that I attend to here: first, the question of what makes objects used in Hindu worship sacred and second, what are the prospects of disentangling the convoluted modes in which materiality, sacrality and commodity are simultaneously mixed up and implicated in a category of objects, known in the field, as prayer things? These reflections are grounded in the awareness that the con-sumption of ritual objects reveals a trajectory, a life cycle, including its pre-consumption and post-consumption moments. Extending this research inquiry beyond the consumption of religious objects adds a novel dimension to studies of material culture; I see this as highly significant theoretically in addressing questions about the status of objects (especially their sacredness) during the cycle of usage, from beginning to end. Such ethnographic foci allow me to revisit conceptual deliberations about the life history of objects and the relationship of humans to objects at various points in the trajectory of their use.

A meaningful way to analyze the process of consumption in the religious domain is to ask how human beings relate to thingsas commodities or ritual objectsand to articulate the relationship between the two. The field of material culture is embedded in a long historical anthropological tradition but one that Buchli (2002) argues has suffered from scholarly neglect in recent years. It explores human relationships to things-in-use (Lury 1996) and how specific modes of utilising objects facilitate the cre-ation and perpetuation of individual identities as well as social relation-ships. This line of thinking can be extended to the everyday consumption of religious objects, in the attempt to establish their meanings and symbol-ism and ask how this facilitates the enactment of worship and the actu-alisation of religious experiences. According to Lury, The consumption that is referenced via consumer culture can, through the lens of material culture, be seen as conversion, or, more precisely, the manner in which people convert things to ends of their own (Strathern 1994: x, cited in Lury 1996: 3). In this context it is not meaningful to speak of the idea of fetish in relation to consumption of religious objects, in the same way

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that Marx talks about commodities. Yet, for religious practitioners, religious objects do encompass a sense of power and efficacy, but this is not derived from their exchange value in the marketplace, but rather from the sacrality and efficacy they are seen to embody. I have found it insightful to turn to Arjun Appadurais work, The Social Life of Things (1986) and the important notice therein that all objects have a life cycle, a life history and a specific cultural biography (cited in Lury 1996: 19). Appadurai and others have noted that meanings of objects are not static but change over time, through different contexts and patterns of use. This mutability of meanings is conditioned partly by human rela-tionships to objects which also undergo transformations in the process of being used. More recently, this thematic has received enhanced scholarly interest and has been explored further through a focus on how individ-uals relate to objects, particularly in the course of performing routine, mundane, everyday activities. Alan Costall and Ole Dreiers recent edited volume, Doing Things with Things: The Design and Use of Everyday Objects (2006), Susan Pearces edited volume Interpreting Objects and Collections (1994) and Patricia Spyers Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces (1998) are good exemplars of such a trend. In the introduction to their edited volume, Costall and Dreier make a case for focussing on:

. . . how things are incorporated into our activities over the course of time, and, how, in that process, they come into new relations with other things and other people, and thus take on new significance.

(2006: 5)

This perspective finds favour with Spyers collection where a call is made to place things, as fetishes or otherwise, at the centre of human, social experi-ence. My own approach in this book lies in exploring how specific objects move in and out of the religious lives of Hindus as they are used or not, no doubt with altered meanings and connotations. I further agree with Costall and Dreier that objects should not be considered in isolation but through their incorporation, integration or participation into a set of practices. I am further persuaded that situating things within practices (Costall & Dreier 2006: 7) is a valuable move and attempt this in subsequent chap-ters as I contextualise the value of a set of objectsprayer altars, fresh flowers and visual representations of Hindu divinityin the everyday life of Hindus through detailing their actual use and consumption. Another significant recent work that extends this very useful perspective in the field of material culture is, Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically (2007), a compilation edited by Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad and Sari Wastell. Here the editors propose the germ of a new methodology i.e., to think through the things and produce an ethnogra-phy of things, articulated thus:

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With purposeful naivet, the aim of this method is to take things encountered in the field as they present themselves, rather than imme-diately assuming that they signify, represent, or stand for something else.

(2007: 2)

There is a call in this position against approaching a thing as if it could be unproblematically pre-assigned a set of meanings. Rather what it means can be arrived at only through understanding its specific use in a set of practices. I am also led by Alex Predas critique of sociological theory in treating things as marginal, irrelevant or passive with respect to the pro-duction of social order (1999: 347). Above all, this project seeks to nar-rate the stories of a cluster of objects used by Hindus in actual fields of religious activity; such a slant rests on the premise that things are neither blank nor vacuous, but can be read and interpreted variously and indeed have tales to tell, ideas also formulated simply but elegantly by Lynn Festa in a piece entitled Tales told by Things (2006: 111, 118):

The fact that things stir to life and begin to speak during this period reminds us of the intricate, intimate connections between subjects and objects, of the world of persons and the world of things are recipro-cally made. Things are no more fixed in their meanings than persons; they too have stories, and these stories are inseparably bound up with stories of people.

Abstracting from Festas approach, and concurring with her, in this book I try to tell the stories of flowers, altars, statues and pictures of divinity by asking where these objects have come from, how they have been secured, how they are used and by whom and what happens to them thereafter. In addressing these queries which connect with the processes of produc-tion, distribution and consumption, I am guided by the recognition that these narratives about things must necessarily take into account the vari-ous social actors whose hands they pass through and ultimately come to rest in.

Collectively, these theoretical problematics and ethnographic observa-tions have provided the enthusiasm and stimulus for the ultimate rationale and form of this book. I have constructed this as a six-chapter book which is organised as follows. Chapter 1 details the methodological, ethno-graphic and theoretical foundations which anchor the research problem-atic conceptualised in this book. Chapter 2 turns to a mapping of spaces and religious objects found therein. This interest straddles specific local spaces and global sites and moves from real locales to virtual spaces. Here, I elaborate on the notion of Diaspora Hinduism, which enables me to argue that Hindu communities in Singapore, Malaysia and Tamil

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Everyday Hindu Religiosity and Ritual Objects 21

Nadu are linked in key ways. With this contextual grounding the chapter then moves to detail the ethnography of Little India/Serangoon Road district of Singaporean Indian community space. Trading practices and commercial mechanisms demonstrate that it is possible to speak of processes through which a range of items are marketed as commodities. This includes God pictures, prayer altars, and organic substances like fresh fruits, flowers and leaves. Although Serangoon Road is strongly associated with things Indian and Hindu, this chapter also points to spaces across the island where prayer items can be secured by devotees. This chapter also allows me to highlight Singapore as a space where production and making of puja items occurs, which is an important segment of the story I am relating.

Chapter 3 considers how Hindus conceptualise and construct sacred space in the domestic realm. Within Hindu homes, an area is typically demarcated from secular, profane spaces as sacred space and a place where divinity resides. Hindu gods and goddesses are housed in Hindu homes in family shrines and prayer altars. My data detail the material conditions which enable the practice of providing homes for gods in the domestic arena. I survey the range of options that exist in the local retail market for satisfying this ritual need, including enhanced demand for custom-made prayer altars. In Chapter 4, I focus on the range of religious imagery that is important for sustaining the realm Hindu worship and ritual both in domestic and temple worship. This chapter documents the trade in a range of visual representations of Hindu divinity within the multi-facetted realm of Hinduism in Singapore, including its folk and Agamic variants. The local retail market is flooded with an astonishing array of divine visual represen-tations, many of which continue to be secured from outside of Singapore. In a similar vein, the creative impulse in the Diaspora is demonstrable in the growth of a local, Made in Singapore industrywhich adds newer ritual products and commodities for consumption in a Hindu market. The centrality of fresh flowers in Hindu worship is explored in Chapter 5. Here, I narrate the story of flowers and their consumption in Singapore Hindu domains. Working backwards from the realm of consumption, I ask where flowers used in ritual events come from, tracking the key mechanisms and processes through which they are secured and distributed. Furthermore, I use these slices of data to reflect on the category sacred by raising ques-tions about the meanings of flowers in Hindu discourse.

On the basis of the presented ethnography, the concluding Chapter 6 not only raises the larger theoretical questions about the complex relations between religion and the process of commodification, but also carries my formulated responses to them. I ask if the shift towards mass production of puja items by non-believers is an issue for Hindus who use them in rituals. How does one approach the need for material objects in religious practices and their inevitable entry as commodities into the capitalist sys-tem of social relations? This chapter attempts to resolve the problematic

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22 Everyday Hindu Religiosity and Ritual Objects

vis-a-vis the entanglements of commodity and puja items in order to reconceptualise what is meant by consumption itself, especially in view of the ways in which individuals relate to specific ritual objects at the level of practice.

Notes 1 Local stores report a brisk business in the sale of audio cassettes and CDs of

recorded religious music in a range of Indian languages, including especially Tamil, Hindi and Sanskrit. Religious music is a crucial component of the story about the merchandising of goods associated with religion and worship and has been the focus of much scholarly work (See Manuel 1993). Unfortunately, this is not something that I can undertake here with respect to the Singapore scene.

2 Given the logic of my research inquiries, here I focus on the practice of Hinduism within the home, with the awareness that a comprehensive approach should pay equal attention to the phenomena of temple Hinduism and festival Hinduism, in addition to domestic Hinduism.

3 In the field I also heard Hindi expressions like, puja ka saaman and puja saamagriliterally things required for puja. In the Malaysian context, the Malay expression barang barang sembahayang found on sign boards of shops that trade in these items carries the same translation.

4 I am grateful to my research assistant, Ms Chitra d/o Pubalan for helping me with interviews with traders of puja items in Singapores LI.

5 Following Parekh (1994) and others (Baumann 1995; Vertovec 2000), I assume the viability of invoking the notion of a Hindu Diaspora, while being aware of the debates and controversies entailed in extending the term Diaspora beyond its original reference to the Jewish community (Baumann 1995; Clifford 1994; Hinnells 1997; Safran 1991).

6 The Indian community in Singapore in June 2009 is reported to be 9.2 per cent, up from 7.1 per cent in 1990 of a total resident population of 4,987,600 (Population Trends 2009, 4). The document released by the Department of Statistics does not carry data about religious affiliation of the population. For the Hindu community there are clear signs that its numbers have registered an upward move in recent years. An article in the local daily, Hindu temples seeing more worshippers; Growth in numbers due to influx of India-born workers (The Straits Times Friday, 16 October 2009, p. A16), notes that the larger crowds of devotees at local temples both during festivals and quieter months. The greater demand for ritual services at temples is attributed both to the increased numbers of immigrant white-collar executives and short-term labourers in Singapore.

7 Some of these are tourists who have traveled to Singapore while others have encountered websites and placed online orders for such items as temple doors and pillars, brass lamps as gift items and statues.

8 The entrepreneurs admitted that although the business from Singaporean and Malaysian tourists was a small percentage of its total commercial volume, they nonetheless found it worthwhile to cater to this group and stocked the items that had been requested and in demand.

9 For a selection of works on religions in diasporic locations, with specific ref-erence to Hinduism, see Coward et al. (2000), Diesel (1990, 1998), Fenton (1988), Ghasarian (1997), Gupta (2003), Jacobsen & Kumar (2004), Jayawardena (1996), Jha (1989), Kelly (1995,), Khan (1994), Kurien (1997), Rukmani (2001), Waghorne (2006) and Younger (2002).

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Everyday Hindu Religiosity and Ritual Objects 23

10 Some fields have however been scrutinised for the consumption practices embedded within, for example shopping (Chua 2003) and food (Wu & Tan 2001).

11 The following very select sample of a list generated from entering puja items in Google search engine (accessed on 19 February 2010) is illustrative. All the websites I visited offer online facilities for making inquiries about avail-able products, purchasing them and having them delivered to ones doorstep. The sites carry information about the history, mythology and symbolism of spiritual accessories and are accompanied by colourful visual images. In many instances, the Hindus abroad are targeted overtly (but not exclusively) as a potential customer base:

a) http://www.garamchai.com/puja.htmwhich features Puja, Puja vidhi or the method of worship, Puja items, samagri, altar, rudraksha, punchang, Indian festival, slokas and related links for Indian Americans and those interested in Hindu mode of worship and is directed at Hindus in North America;

b) http://www.godandguru.com/which introduces itself as an Online Hindu Puja Portal, We are feeling great to introduce godandguru.com as an online website which offer complete Online Puja Services and puja items including various Hindu puja rituals;

c) http://uttamhandloom.com/Our company is trying to give all aspects of Hindu culture and mythology in brief, on[sic] this site, to enable Hindu worshippers, particularly those staying abroad, to fulfil their cultural and mythological desires and dreams. Our catalogue[sic] is perhaps one of the most comprehensive spiritual catalogue on the internet, fulfilling the needs of customers across the globe with over 500 products. We have full range of religious, Hinduism[sic] books, idols of Indian gods, torans, puja items, etc. we are constantly increasing our products range. This website has been amply enriched with informative articles about Indian religions and culture. Our items are appreciated in the countries like USA, Canada, Mauritius, South Africa and other places. Our quality always stands exclusive at most reasonable price. If you[sic] are a wholesaler, retailer or home-based small entrepreneur, uttamhandloom.com is the right place where u can find a complete range of puja[sic] and wedding items.

d) http://handicraft.indiamart.com/products/religiousproducts/-devotes con-siderable space to a comprehensive section on religious products, includ-ing holy powders and pastes, religious idols, incense sticks, rosary beads, rudraksha, religious threads, yantras, cow dung, Ganga water, etc.,

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2 Mapping Spaces and Objects

Diaspora Hinduism andPuja Items

Preamble

Attempts to situate puja items in spaces where they are marketed alerts us to a variety of active sites, framed by dualisms of local/global and real/virtual. Regardless of their actual physical location, devotees as customers are not restricted in terms of the access they enjoy to mar-ketplaces where a range of spiritual merchandise is traded. With due acknowledgment of the emerging role of Internet sites which advertise, publicise and sell puja accessories, retail stores in real bazaars do offer a directness and immediacy to consumers that reaffirms their value and function even in this age of cyber-everything. Nonetheless, these two trad-ing domains are not isolated and separate but interact in interesting ways. With this grounding this chapter details the ethnography of Singapores LI in Serangoon Road, which is associated historically with all things Indian. Given the research focus here, I map the formally organised world of retail and wholesale businesses that deal with puja items and which are located in the region. I detail the inventory of goods in the market that are asso-ciated with Hindu ritual domains and specify the routes through which how they arrive here. However, it is important to reiterate that the Hindu community in Singapore is a subset of a bigger global Hindu Diaspora (in India and beyond) and interacts with this broader population in a number of different contexts. I offer some brief remarks about the wider Hindu diasporic community by way of offering context for the specific discussion at hand.

Diaspora Hinduism

Unquestioning invocations of the terms Hinduism and Hindu as self-evident and convenient descriptions of complex religious scenarios in practice are no longer possible in scholarly discourses. The intellectual critique that the designation of a religious identity in the label Hindu and the use of Hinduism to denote a single, unified, coherent religious tradition are alien impositions and distort forms of religiosity practised

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Mapping Spaces and Objects 25

in the Indian subcontinent, constitutes the starting point for students of Hinduism today. However, the latter also have to contend with the easy adoption and acceptance of these terms by practitioners themselves who have legitimised and normalised them as valid and meaningful categories. On the basis of such self-identification, individuals mark their religious identity as Hindu. This applies to Hindus in India as much as those who live beyond Indian territories, both those whose ancestors left India several generations ago as well as more recent departures. It is striking that the latter continue to engage in forms of Hindu religiosity in new locations, and in so doing reveal an attachment to tradition while at the same time, display an openness to introducing changes in order to function meaning-fully in new socio-political and religious terrains. The allusion to the idea of Diaspora Hinduism is a problematic one for a variety of reasons but has nonetheless been used to register t