Encrypted spaces and JUGAAD: Street Shrine culture in urban India.

Space, Place, and Religion Unit

In this paper, I examine a street shrine in Ahmedabad, India, dedicated to local deities that migrant marginalized castes have brought from rural areas to the city. Like many such shrines in Ahmedabad, this shrine has emerged alongside highways and road crossings. The shrine’s deities hold regional and rural significance and are closely associated with the subaltern status of the community members who serve as its caretakers. The caretakers claim that these gods have played a crucial role in the upliftment and well-being of marginalized castes in India. While this paper does not focus primarily on the nature or significance of the gods worshipped at these shrines, I connect these narratives, rituals and modes of worship as activities of Jugaad- a makeshift culture based on innovative hacks, temporary solutions, and inexpensive alternatives because of unaffordability for new products or services, in this case unaffordability of a new, designated public place.(Prakash et el. 2020).

 I draw parallels between these jugaad-based activities and Michel de Certeau’s concept of tactics, wherein people engage and create something new within the dominant system rather than outside it. These activities, like Certeau's conception on walking, are so spontaneous and opportunistic, that they are hard to be tracked or traced down by any given system at hand. In this paper, I argue that, rather than looking into street- shrines as presumably religious, there is a need to understand the everyday activities that formulate micro-culture in these public places, one that is encrypted (Elison, 2018) due to the spontaneous and opportunistic activities occurring at the shrine. My argument is twofold, One is to show that it is this encrypted, unregulated, and open-ended spatiality of the shrine that makes it possible to study the subaltern caretakers' ability to reclaim their absence from public life in the city of Ahmedabad. Secondly, that the subaltern populations do remain outside of the purview of urban developments; their shrines are public spaces integrated within urban infrastructures by running on Jugaad or a temporary, spontaneous, and affordable claims to public spaces.  

During my fieldwork in Ahmedabad, I noted that the shrine, in comparison to the temple,  lacks an enclosed structure, doors, or a raised platform, giving the impression that it seamlessly extends onto the road without clear physical boundaries. Anthropologist Smriti Srinivas (2001), for example, in her work on street shrines in Bangalore, argues that due to their small and unregulated nature, shrines blend easily into their surroundings—especially in cities, where their visibility along busy routes makes them an integral part of the urban landscape. During my findings, I additionally noted that the activities that take place at such shrines are possible due to their unregulated nature and their ability to blend well in the neighborhood. For instance, during larger religious gatherings, crowds spill onto the road, merging effortlessly with the flow of traffic, as the shrine is situated along one of the city’s busiest and most popular routes and is not located on a raised platform like temples. While people, irrespective of social backgrounds visit shrines for various reasons, the caretakers live at the shrine temporarily, some use it for entirely non-religious purposes, such as ambulance and cab drivers or firefighters who stop by between work shifts to sit, sip chai or water, change clothes, or park their vehicles nearby. Unlike temples, which prohibit food, beverages, and photography, the shrine permits more flexible social interactions. Smoking cigarettes inside the shrine is common, and visitors frequently bring in tea or coffee from outside. 

These micro-level interactions, I argue, exemplify what I refer to as jugaad culture at the shrine. While scholars such as  Kathinka Froystad (2020) and Ghassem Fachandi (2001) working on shrines in Gujarat have framed shrine culture as a direct challenge to states' dominant structures of Hindutva-isation or right wing Hindu ideology,  in this paper, I argue that such interpretations risk overlooking the everyday activities at these shrines—practices that do not openly or explicitly challenge caste,  class or religious orthodoxies but nonetheless persist within the marginalized worldview of Ahmedabad’s laboring classes. Since many of these groups can no longer work as street vendors or food delivery workers due to Ahmedabad’s upper-caste-dominated public sphere, their interactions and gatherings at and around the shrine form a creative resistance against their erasure from public spaces.

Michel de Certeau describes everyday activities—such as walking in the city—as practices that create their own rules. While urban spaces offer designated paths, the act of walking itself cannot be predetermined.  Walking, for Certeau, is, therefore, a micro-activity of resistance that operates within dominant structures rather than outside them. In my work, I  similarly view the activities at street shrines not simply as religious practices but as creative and tactical engagements, shaped by the interpretations of the caretakers themselves. Whether religious or otherwise, these everyday activities, in this paper, associated with jugaad culture, can allow us to see the shrine as an ever-emerging encrypted space—one produced through creative, low-cost, and counter-hegemonic elements, and these activities by their nature of being spontaneous, opportunistic and gestural, cannot be easily traced or tracked down by anyone who remains outside of the nitty-gritty of the daily life at the shrine itself.