India Dance Studios as Religious Spaces in Barcelona

This proposal is meant to be a contribution to the Religion in Europe Unit's June Roundtable discussion, which has posed the following question: “What is religion in Europe”? My contribution, in response to this question, suggests that religion in Europe is always marked by how religious people navigate the "local" and the "transnational" and  by how religious communities are recognized publicly (and legally) within and beyond Europe. These claims arise from my ongoing ethnographic research on how South Asian owned "Indian dance" studios in Barcelona (which also exist through Spain and other parts of Europe) function as distinct spaces for community building and the observance of religious holidays for Hindus, especially women and girls. Studios offer both group and one-on-one dance classes, open to the paying public, as well as special event days (sometimes by invitation only), including World Yoga Day. Studios also host celebrations during more explicitly religious holidays, such as Diwali and Holi, which are celebrated by South Asian communities from various religious traditions, but are predominantly Hindu in orientation. Though Indian dance studios commonly function as religious and cultural spaces across the South Asian diaspora (e.g., dances teachers may be explicitly understood their role to include educating their students on Hindu rituals and texts), here they serve a minoritized and minority religious community in Spain in unique ways. There are virtually no “Hindu temples” in the Barcelona metropolitan area, in part because Spanish Hindus lack “notorio arraigo” status (one form of state religious recognition) and do not have the type of social and financial capital that Hindus, and South Asians more broadly, bring with them to other parts of Europe and North America. It is also notable that South Asian owned Indian dance studios are often directly supported by Hindu nationalist entities (including the Indian Government's Ministry of Cultural Affairs). As Art Historian, Kajri Jain’s Gods in the Time of Democracy (2021) exhibits, Hindu Nationalist forms of governmentality explicitly emphasize the fuzzy boundaries between “secular” and “religious” spaces transnationally. Drawing on interviews with dance studio owners and students, as well as representatives from local NGOs that help the Hindu community navigate their minoritized and minority status, I will think through the methodological challenges of an ethnographic project that considers how commercial sites marketed as places of cultural and artistic education function as religious sites for a distinct urban diaspora community. I will also consider how the dance studio might be added to a vocabulary of transnational political and social power for Hindu Nationalists. The photograph I plan to anchor my discussion to displays a South Asian woman dancing on a public outdoor stage, with banners advertising both her dance studio and also its various funding partners, during a World Yoga Day celebration in Barcelona.