Diasporic Belonging in Religious Spaces: Insights from Within the Sri Lankan Diaspora

ABSTRACT

The changing social, cultural and physical characteristics and uses of public spaces by migrants are of longstanding interest to social scientists. Often embedded in uses of public spaces are splinters, resonances and connections to home and migration. This paper examines the religious spaces that Sri Lankan migrants engage with in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia. To untangle the complexities associated with these spaces, we integrate a framework of belonging that encompasses rituals, relationships and restrictions. A multilayered dataset, which includes interviews with the Sri Lankan diaspora, (auto)ethnography, field observations and photography, revealed that within the Sri Lankan diaspora, individuals often used religious spaces to maintain rituals and identities. The data uncovered that some participants in the diaspora used religious spaces to gather and socialise with other diaspora members while others had dynamic relationships with these spaces – that is, the meanings attributed to religious spaces were at times fraught with tensions and hostilities towards religious practice and feelings of welcome. In this paper, we offer a snapshot of a growing diaspora in Australia and their negotiations to belong (or not).

KEYWORDS:

• Belonging
• Sri Lankan diaspora
• identity
• religious spaces
• diaspora space
• temples

Introduction

In this paper, we seek to unpack how Sri Lankan migrants – who identify as members of the Sri Lankan diaspora¹ – engage with religious places and spaces to cultivate their identities and navigate or establish a sense of belonging in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia. Our examination is largely attentive to the significance of Buddhist and Hindu temples² and how the maintenance of identities is couched within, and informed by, rituals, relationships and sometimes even restrictions (Selasi 2015). Buddhist and Hindu temples are unique spatial settings because they illustrate ways that place and identity intersect to define and preserve a sense of ‘Sri Lankaness’ within the broader and diverse Australian society, with the potential to nurture a sense of belonging.

There is a robust body of scholarship, including within this journal, that integrates and contests migrants’ belonging in/to places and spaces (Prazeres 2018, Strunk and Richardson 2019, Webb and Lahiri-Roy 2019, Liang and Le Billon 2020, Boussalem 2023). As an example, Finlay (2019: 787) interrogated the term ‘diaspora’ to explore how Moroccan migrants in Granada gained a ‘diasporic right to the city’. The research revealed that urban conditions and cultural capital gave Moroccan migrants visibility, chances to transform urban space and ‘a right to spatialise diverse identity’, which were fundamental place-making strategies required to form a central diaspora space within the city (Finlay 2019: 785, see also Brah 1996). Prazeres (2018) offered another argument by focussing on international exchange students and their everyday practices of engagement with local people and places that generated a sense of familiarity and ‘insider knowledges’, creating senses of home and belonging. Thus, belonging is constructed based on multiple experiences, identities and practices that can lead to new forms of belonging in new places and spaces.

The role of religion and religious sites to foster a sense of belonging for migrants and diasporas is of longstanding interest to researchers (Warner 1998, Tabar 2002, Ehrkamp 2005, Muñoz 2011, Lam 2019, Berriane 2020, Perera 2022). Building on seminal scholarship by Warner (1998) on the gatherings of diaspora in religious spaces, the concept of ‘religious place-making’ offers a vantage point to understand how religious practices and presence at religious sites can (re)produce diasporic identities (Goreau 2014, Vásquez and Knott 2014, Vásquez 2020, Gamage et al. 2022). Berriane (2020) examined religious place-making of Pentecostal communities in Morocco. Her research demonstrated how creating religious spaces in places of transit paralleled those in destination countries and proffered new meanings for ‘spiritually inspired migrants’ during their transit experience (Berriane 2020: 437). Becci et al. (2017) extended conceptualisations of religious place-making by arguing that memories are layered and shape the religious diversity of a city. In turn, they identified three types of spatial strategies – place keeping, making and seeking – that expressed the relationship between diverse communities and urban space. These strategies helped to untangle the complex processes that fuse historical paths and the visibility of religion in cities. Relatedly, Vasquez and Knott (2014) interrogated the visibility and invisibility of religious place-making practices among migrants in three different cities. They demonstrated how the embodied and performative aspects of religious practice, the socio-spatial influences on belonging and the various ways in which religion is infused within social networks impels migrant minorities to nurture familiar rhythms and create meaningful lifeworlds. Further, the affective significance of religious spaces, elaborated by Mazumdar and Mazumdar (2009), illuminated the nuanced and inextricable links between sacred place-making, community, identity and belonging.

There are even more specific theoretical threads that elevate the temple. Narayanan (2006) introduced the term ‘templeisation’ to distinguish the symbolic and actual movements of religious practice from within the home to the temple and the concurrent gendered shift of influence and authority from women and mothers to men and religious figures. In theorising templeisation, Narayanan (2006) contended that the temple is a multilayered space where rituals and festival celebrations take place, Hinduism as a tradition and religion is introduced and where one can learn to be a Hindu. Baumann (2009) further examined the process of templeisation by sketching what ritual spaces looked like for Hindus in Europe, specifically comparing domestic ritual spaces with public temples. In doing so, Baumann (2009: 174) determined that templeisation applied to Tamil Hindus from Sri Lanka in Europe because the temple is ‘a culturally and religiously defined space of their own in a foreign land’ which they ‘attribute new meanings and an enlarged significance to the diaspora’. Even more recently, scholars have added a digital dimension to their research; Gamage et al. (2022) demonstrated that older Sinhalese adults in Australia willingly and actively used digital media and technologies to achieve their (Buddhist) spiritual goals. Notwithstanding the widespread research on belonging, migrant experiences and religious spaces, limited scholarship specifically considers the Sri Lankan diaspora in Australia and the various push–pull factors and entanglements involved in belonging and not belonging (exceptions: Goreau 2014, Fibiger 2017, Kandasamy et al. 2020, Maunaguru 2021, Gamage et al. 2022, Perera 2022).

Our paper draws from pilot research that examined the public and everyday spaces the Sri Lankan diaspora used to generate a sense of home and belonging in Australia. In thinking through the focus of this paper, we were inspired to adopt a framework of belonging that resonated with Sri Lankan participants’ positionalities and lived experiences, as well as our own. While writing, we were fixated on unpacking what belonging in different places and spaces meant, yet our critical reflections around this subject sometimes departed from established academic scholarship. Thus, we decided to look beyond conventionally accepted theoretical frameworks and epistemologies and proactively apply a lens that we believe illuminates interdisciplinarity, accessibility and diversity to academic scholarship and thought (Castro et al. 2023). Our contribution fuses works by novelists, writers, artists, playwrights and other creatives – including Oma Musa, S Shakthidaran, Pallavi Narayan, Shankari Chandran, Ranjitha Krishna and Taiye Selasi³ – with those of academics who have flirted with, and challenged, the concepts central to our research and this paper. Herein, and in the spirit of extending conventional thinking and reaching beyond disciplinary boundaries of knowledge (Castro et al. 2023), we attempt to bridge the hierarchical divisions created (even if unintentionally) between creative thinkers and academic scholars.

We introduce a conceptual framework of belonging initiated by a creative writer, thinker and photographer, Taiye Selasi (2015). We chose to integrate Selasi’s framework of belonging, which comprises rituals, relationships and restrictions, introduced during a TED Talk, as it helped to disentangle how we thought about belonging from our own positionalities. In the TED Talk, Selasi shared her multiple identities, informed by embodied practices, affective ties and the navigation of structural and symbolic limitations, interweaving her own life experiences in localised places that inspired a reframed conceptualisation of her identity and sense of belonging. Selasi compelled us to innovate and consider new optics on belonging that reached beyond established thinking and drew us to other practitioners who explored belonging, identity and place in creative and meaningful ways. While we are inspired by an unconventional lens to position how we define and understand belonging, we recognise that this concept has a protracted history in the social sciences and humanities. In what follows, we discuss the intersection between migration and belonging, and review the diasporic, spatial and temporal foundations of belonging. We then elaborate on Selasi’s conceptual framework before outlining the context and methods for the research, followed by our results and discussion.

The Space-time Nexus of Diasporic Belonging

For several decades, there has been an emphasis on the notion of belonging in migration scholarship (Brah 1996, Boccagni 2017, Albert and Barros 2021). Such emphasis illuminates the significance and subjectivity of migration, (re)settlement and integration (Anthias 2002). It has increasingly amplified the experiential and heuristic dimensions of connection, relatedness and identification to a community or society linked to the notion of a collective identity (Brah 1996). Youkhana (2015: 10) contended that migration studies scholars tend to link belonging to ‘territoriality, memorisations of landscapes, lifestyles, and cultural imprints’, thus oversimplifying imagined narratives of the collective based on condensed origin stories. Despite a protracted focus in migration studies, the subjective and discursive nature of belonging amplifies its complexity and theoretical entanglements. As such, concepts linked to distinct categories of national, ethnic, cultural, political or social belongings continue to limit understandings (Youkhana 2015). Belonging is not a straightforward, easily dissectible notion that can be classified neatly into geo-deterministic categories because there are no universal, immutable analytical classifications for what it constitutes. Rather, multiple experiences construct belonging, revealing ‘manifold practices that produce new forms of belonging’ (Youkhana 2015: 11).

The multiple experiences that enable one to belong extend across borders and continents to new, unfamiliar and sometimes even precarious places. While we acknowledge the drawback of categorising belonging, the very process of belonging today still comprises the formation of some kind of collective. Brah’s (1996: 243) seminal scholarship on diaspora space is an access point to understanding ways that ‘new forms of belonging and otherness are appropriated and contested’. The notion of diasporic belonging suggests that in order to belong, one is enabled to action and ‘do’ belonging to feel a sense of support and part of a specific community/group (i.e. the diaspora). In that sense, it is also agentive and inextricably linked to power dynamics that exist concurrently within a diaspora and the dynamically evolving wider society. In an increasingly globalised world, belonging is a process that involves constant negotiations, contestations and intimate connections to symbols and intersectionalities of race, class, religious affiliation and places of import (Brah 1996, Anthias 2012). Embedded in this process, however, are intrinsic challenges. For example, when belonging becomes politicised, encounters and interactions within a diaspora can become discordant. This discordance is particularly relevant to the Sri Lankan diaspora, which is laden with a complex history of civil war provoked by ethnic incongruities. Regardless of the circumstances relating to the movement across borders, migrants’ senses of belonging can become fractured as they adapt to a new country (Boccagni 2017). Migration scholars have asserted that the process of belonging is intricate and convoluted which we mindfully foreground as we unpack what everyday life looks like for migrants navigating new people, practices and places (Webb and Lahiri-Roy 2019). Youkhana (2015) reinforces this argument by contending that we must go beyond the idea that collective identities are linked to national borders and recognise that ‘people increasingly live in complex, multi-nodal social worlds that span multiple locales and milieus’ (Mijić 2022: 4). In this context, belonging actively moves away from the implication that a sense of belonging is linked to specific conditions that are enduring, linear and stable and highlights everyday performativity and ‘creative poetic act[s]’ (Youkhana 2015: 11).

The everydayness of belonging embeds spatial interactions and mobilities motivated by migration and processes of creating a new home. Anthias (2016) introduced the term ‘translocational positionalities’ and argued that a migrant’s sense of belonging unintentionally operates at the intersection of the local and the global, which is inherently spatialised. This argument is reinforced by Antonsich (2010: 650) who underscored the significance of the geographical dimension of belonging. Spatial understandings encompass material and symbolic places and spaces, often described as a feeling or sense of home, which is particularly relevant for those who use and engage with religious sites for familiarity and comfort (Blunt 2005). Antonsich (2010) illustrated that belonging and a sense of self are enmeshed in intimate and everyday rhythms. However, belonging simultaneously assembles collective identities that discursively (and explicitly) infuse social, cultural and geographical boundaries. For migrants in a new ‘national’ space, belonging requires mundane, everyday acts or performances of commitment to collective identities and social imaginaries that merit a person’s inclusion (Hage 1998, Pfaff-Czarnacka 2011).

Temporality adds another layer to analyses and experiences of belonging. After all, an individual’s sense of belonging is rarely static. It is linked to multiple temporalities. Former, well-known spaces of belonging are (re)constructed to amplify familiarity in the search for belonging. The connection between time, memory and belonging is evident in an excerpt from Omar Musa’s (2014) poem, The Great Displaced:

Villages and family ties disappear

then re-appear freshborn and shining in our myths,

daubed on the doorways to ourselves.

The countrysides

become plots for our nostalgia,

sown from afar,

flourishing with orchards of memory.

Each tree laden with fruit,

each fruit a repository of dreams

where real orchards no longer exist.

They are unmapped places

dedicated to everything we miss.

The memories associated with a former home, transposed and reappropriated in one’s new locale to cultivate a sense of tangible familiarity is also explored through the reflexive writing of playwright Shakthidaran (2020) who considered the role that materialities play in connecting migrants to past homelands. He discussed how his late grandmother’s material objects at home featured in his Hindu wedding; ‘her spirit was still there, in every brick, every bit of furniture, every step of that grand old staircase’ (Shakthidaran 2020: 157). Time reinforces the multiple layers of ‘doing’ belonging and compounds the tensions of lived experiences of ‘belonging with’ and ‘belonging to’. In other words, belonging can be expressed in more collective ways, where national or diasporic experiences of time influence how migrants position themselves within groups where there is a communal narrative of an imagined ancestral or memorial link. However, the active process of migrant belonging can also be enacted in much more intimate and personal ways that comprise individual memories of the past that inform hope for a particular kind of imagined, subjective future. Pallavi Narayan, in Castro et al. (2023), reflected on spatial and temporal intersections by exploring memory and place-making through expressions of art. ‘Making art’ ebbs and flows across time and space; it was informed by Narayan’s experiences of living in different terrains and informed their writing practice. Narayan engaged with work by poet Jonathan Urqueta Briones which spurred memories of the landscapes of Valle del Elqui in Chile, which they painted. As metallic paints were translated into watercolours, ‘the words flow[ed] more easily’, enabling Narayan ‘to get inside the skin of a place’ (Castro et al. 2023: 18–19). These expressions of memory not only echo experiences of the past but inform the present-day and anticipations of the future.

To Belong: Rituals, Relationships and Restrictions

We recognise that the concept of belonging has a protracted history in academic scholarship. Our intention here is to contribute an emerging case study to this debate by taking a fresh angle. Selasi’s (2015) framework of belonging consists of three concepts: rituals, relationships and restrictions. Rituals refer to the practices or routines that enable one to feel connected to specific localities. These rituals provide comfort and have propensity to cultivate a sense of connectedness (to people, places, emotions, materialities). Some rituals are carried across passages of time, etched in memories and enabled through acts of ‘doing’ through prayer or the lighting of candles for example. Relationships refer to interactions that help to ‘shape your days’ (Selasi 2015: n.p.). These are relationships with people you might speak to regularly and they inform one’s sense of self and belonging, influencing the way a person navigates spaces. For Sri Lankans who frequent religious spaces, relationships can enhance their sense of attachment to the space itself, familiarity and rapport with visitors and an intimate knowing of oneself. Restrictions are the dynamic nature with which we navigate spaces. They are conditions that constrain or bound one’s ability to feel entirely oneself. Restrictions – through markers of identity including race, age, citizenship, gender and sexuality for example – change in the way they are socially and culturally constructed and conceptualised, and how they impact positionality and social connectedness. Migrants may feel restricted to either continue or discontinue certain social and cultural practices, even religious ones, in new countries but then adapt over time and reintegrate them into their everyday lives in new and different ways.

‘Pulling apart’ belonging into three components may push us to think about how it is constructed and what each concept entails. We certainly do not contend that belonging only comprises these three concepts, nor that the concepts should be siloed in broader discussions of belonging. Rather, we adopt this framework to think through/about/with, in ways that reach across disciplines within the social sciences and humanities, while concurrently picking up on the subtleties of belonging as an experience. This framework is not readily applied in academic scholarship, yet we argue that it certainly could be. We hope that teasing apart some facets of belonging and how it is ‘done’ (and sometimes avoided) may offer nuanced understandings about the engagements Sri Lankans have with religious spaces told through their seldom-heard experiences.

Sri Lankans in Australia

The pilot data that this paper draws from is based on fieldwork with and about Sri Lankan migrants living in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia. These migrants form part of the growing Sri Lankan diaspora in Australia. Goreau (2014) has contended that religion is particularly important for Sri Lankans to maintain connections with the homeland and orient their lives within the diaspora of a host country. Current migration from Sri Lanka to Australia is driven by multiple factors, including the economic crisis and subsequent protests taking place in Sri Lanka at the time of writing. There is, however, a strong history of migration from Sri Lanka to Australia that has resulted in a steadily growing diaspora. In the 1970s, Sri Lankans began migrating to Australia due to escalating political tensions that led to significant upheaval (Kandasamy et al. 2020). The first set of Sri Lankans arrived in Australia largely to pursue professional employment and tertiary education. A second wave of Sri Lankans arrived in the 1980s, propelled by the commencement of a civil war between the majority Sinhalese government and a separatist Tamil group known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The civil war stemmed from the Tamils seeking independence in the northern and eastern parts of Sri Lanka, which resulted in a 26-year long conflict (1983–2009) (Perera 2016). During the civil war, many Sri Lankans began (re)settling in white-majority countries; several also sought asylum at first in India and then continued journeys to places of (re)settlement like the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia (Kandasamy et al. 2020). In Australia, we have seen Sri Lankans arrive through skilled and education migration pathways or via humanitarian schemes.

A significant proportion of the Sri Lankan diaspora reside in Australia’s major and most diverse cities and urban centres, Sydney and Melbourne. This research is situated in the suburbs of these cities due to the emergence of the Sri Lankan diaspora. We were also motivated to situate our research in Sydney and Melbourne because of our multi-faceted and complex positionalities; while we both live in Melbourne (at the time of writing), Charishma identifies as a first-generation migrant from Sri Lanka – whose mother is Sinhalese and father a Tamil – but has spent most of her life in Australia while Nadeeka adopts a more hyphenated identity as a Sri Lankan-Australian. Our positionalities provide important context but identifying with bounded national categories is only one small part of our broader life stories, histories and experiences. In this paper, we are more concerned with the fluidity of belonging for participants whose positionalities, subjectivities, relationalities and experiences form an integral part of the Sri Lankan diaspora.

The Research Site(s)

The spatial locales we draw upon are predominantly Hindu and Buddhist temples used by the Sri Lankan diaspora, with only a couple of participants discussing churches they attend. Here, we set the scene for our readers who may not be familiar with these sites and draw on the autoethnographic component of the data collection to paint a picture of what some of the temple sites we refer to in this paper look like, feel like and comprise. Sinhalese Buddhist temples and Hindu temples are vastly different physical places but they offer similar (and familiar) points of connection for the diaspora either to each other or to religion, identity and/or culture. These temples have long histories and humble beginnings with many of them resulting from ‘a protracted effort by members of the Sri Lankan community’ (Perera 2022: 11). These humble beginnings are reinforced by Goreau (2014) who highlighted the efforts of Tamil Hindus in creating spaces and, thus, opportunities to practice their faith outside of the home by setting up prayer halls and temples in converted basements and new buildings. The temples discussed herein are not singular buildings in urban centres or fringe suburbs; they are an assemblage of buildings with various purposes. For example, a Hindu temple in Sydney has the temple building, an extensive car park, courtyard, hall, canteen, library, office and rehearsal rooms for musicians and dancers.

Another Sinhalese Buddhist temple is situated on acreage with ample green space and classrooms in outer Sydney (50 km north-west of the CBD). In Melbourne’s south-east, there is a well-known temple that hosts a Sunday School for children to learn Sinhala language and/or Buddhism in addition to other facilities like a library and prayer space. These are just some examples of prominent sites that have substantial funding and resources allocated from various stakeholders. Similar to the example of London by Vasquez and Knott (2014: 331), the scarcity of land and space activates smaller temple-like spaces – converted houses or temporary community halls, for example – across Sydney and Melbourne that are more affordable and used for ‘collective religious activities’. During our data collection, it was sometimes difficult to discern specific religious sites participants discussed unless they explicitly referred to a name or suburb. In what follows, we group their musings into the type of temple they told us about rather than naming specific sites.

Methods and Analysis

For the wider pilot project that this paper stems from, we integrated multiple methods to better understand the Sri Lankan diaspora’s use and engagement with public and everyday spaces. We employed in-depth interviews, (auto)ethnography, photography and field observations (some of which included sound recordings). The data collection took place between 2020 and 2021 and on and off due to COVID-19 lockdowns, which posed some challenges as it related to participant recruitment and the ability to conduct the (auto)ethnography. We conducted 11 interviews with Sri Lankan migrants living in Sydney and Melbourne.⁴ The participants were recruited via a snowball sampling technique. Participants were from Tamil and Sinhalese backgrounds with various socio-demographic qualities (e.g. migration pathways, age, geographic location, gender). The remote interviews lasted between 30 and 90 minutes and covered themes including participants’ migration stories, aspirations and motivations, their settlement experience in Australia, everyday movements and uses of different spaces in the city they lived in. It was during the interviews that religious spaces were identified as those of familiarity as well as spaces for rituals, which we probed further as the interviews progressed. Given the repetition of topics, we completed data analysis of the 11 interviews which confirmed that we had reached sample sufficiency.

Interviews were critical to the research, but we still wanted to capture the multiple layers of public spaces and experience these spaces. We wanted a full(er) picture. Charishma conducted an (auto)ethnography, which included observations of public spaces, journaling and written field notes, photography and sound recordings taken in religious spaces (October 2020–February 2021) (for a detailed discussion on autoethnography, see Phan 2022). The (auto)ethnography was conducted in public spaces across Sydney’s western suburbs and south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne; Charishma spent between one and three hours in a public space at a time and chose to conduct observations in and around religious spaces during the opening hours of those sites – these observations often occurred during evenings on weekdays and during the daytime on weekends. While no specific schedule was followed (due to uncertainty stemming from the pandemic and ensuing lockdowns), Charishma visited religious spaces on days where the Sri Lankan diaspora would observe religion and carry out rituals; the schedule was determined by discussions in interviews, and through both of our cultural and spatial knowledges.

Observations were recorded in a journal, which allowed for the autoethnographic component of the research to take place where further reflections accompanied the emplaced accounts. Sometimes observations were voice recorded depending on the circumstances. Charishma also took audio recordings when in public spaces to capture sounds pertaining to particular practices. For example, in the Hindu temples on Friday nights there was song, dance, chants and singing (David 2012). Being in these religious spaces highlighted the importance of centring ‘the corporeal body as an affective vehicle through which we sense place and movement, and construct emotional geographies’ (Hannam et al. 2006: 14). Senses of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch – Charishma's and those who were observed – were significant in these observations and amplified the interplay between people, memories, senses and practices. Non-verbal observations complemented the verbal discussions with participants, while simultaneously adding sensory and material layers to the data set.

We input data – the interview transcripts, journal and field notes, photographs and sound recordings – into NVivo 12 for analysis. We decided to start by analysing the interview transcripts first. We adopted a hybrid approach of inductive and deductive coding. First, we created a set of deductive codes that covered broader themes of the research and included themes like ‘green spaces’, ‘everyday spaces’, ‘halls’, ‘routines’. Then we analysed text data (transcripts, field notes and journal entries) based on the predetermined codes (Xu and Zammit 2020). As we read and re-read the transcripts, we created new codes as themes emerged and completed the inductive analysis. Once we had a rigorous coding strategy that exemplified the text data, we introduced the audio and visual components into our analyses. We continuously refined our coding strategy and updated codes as per the inductive analysis. It was through the hybrid analysis that religious spaces came to the fore as a distinct and multilayered type of ‘public space’.

Unpacking Belonging

In this section, we unpack and tease apart belonging by examining what it meant to participants, how they practiced it and the ways we observed it taking place in religious spaces. Religious spaces formed the focus of many interviews, but not always positively. There were sensitive touch points and emotional discords shared by participants, which is what propelled the (auto)ethnographic component of the research. For us, navigating religious spaces was also sensitive; these spaces were sacrosanct and we knew we needed to be respectful during field visits and discussions. While we approached the field contexts with sensitivity, we found that participants were willing to have important discussions, even if sometimes uncomfortable. We reflected on interview content in field notes:

There has been a strong focus on temples – some participants are quite religious/spiritual; others have spoken of temples as a space that older generations visit, and sometimes even spaces they avoid. It’s interesting to hear different perspectives. I guess I am more neutral because dad is pretty much atheist and mum is Buddhist but doesn’t practice much … so we only go to these spaces for weddings, funerals, almsgivings, etc (Charishma's field notes, 14 September 2020).

As authors with multiple and intersectional identities, being neutral about some topics and more passionate about others often stemmed from our positionalities, subjectivities and relationalities. Our own senses of belonging came into question as we wrote this paper, and our motivation to pull apart what we, and participants, meant by belonging and felt by it, was of interest. We present this section in three discrete sub-sections – rituals, relationships and restrictions – and will bring this discussion together in concluding reflections to provide more holistic insights about the Sri Lankan diaspora.

Rituals as Markers of Visibly Belonging

Practising religion can encompass a spectrum of visible actions and embodied performative acts that start with showing up to the space where religion happens. Selasi (2015) refers to rituals as akin to a set of practices or routines that make up one’s day. We extrapolate that to religious spaces that people visit in line with Narayanan’s (2006) and Baumann’s (2009) assertions that templeisation points to the shift of religious practice by the diaspora from the home space to the temple. The predictability and structure of rituals in forging a sense of belonging, particularly during times of upheaval, is reinforced in by Xygalatas (2020) who states that ‘by aligning behaviour and creating shared experiences, rituals forge a sense of belonging and common identity which transforms individuals into cohesive communities.’ Attending a religious site could be regular practice or for a specific occasion. As such, there is temporality embedded when one chooses to go to the temple which forms part of a ritual. Xygalatas (2020: n.p.) argues that this ritual of going to the temple, for whichever purpose, signals that ‘past knowledge [can make] sense of current situations’ (Xygalatas 2020: n.p.). The past, present and future become entwined as migrants navigate rituals in new settings and enacting belonging (Baumann 2009). Krishna’s (2021) excerpt from her poem Boiling Waves of Migrant Shores illustrates this process of straddling and attempting to reconcile past and future belonging:

… her life like a flow of water

dividing dry and solid ground

creating two banks

one of which was her past-

familiar and predictable

the other her future-

a grey blank, an overcast sea scope

on which rain was falling

and no boats were in sight

The practices of the past and future resonate as migrants forge new rituals. Indeed, sometimes patterns and behaviours change; some participants signalled that they did not attend religious spaces: ‘I don’t go to temples unless there’s some event of significance to my family and my mum and dad’ (Nilani). A few commented on their parents’ rituals; Nilani spent time mapping out a number of temples and monasteries in Melbourne that her mother visits, which included those she went to as a child. Her mapping of such spaces was based on her own shifting religious identity and her mother’s identity as a Sinhalese-Buddhist:

So Buddhist temples – I am not a big temple goer, myself … but my mother goes a lot. She goes to Keysborough temple and then she goes to something called Mahamevnawa which is in Mount Evelyn … then there are temples in Berwick [and] Malvern; the Malvern one was the first, I think, Sinhalese-Buddhist temple, and I remember going to Sunday School classes there (Nilani).

Going to the temple involves much more than just getting in the car or commuting there. Participants alluded to the sequences of plans, thoughts and preparations that might take place before even arriving at the temple, often referencing the temporal cadence of these activities, which included: knowledge of when to attend, who might be there, collective activities such as prayers, Sunday school, meditation, or almsgivings and what offerings should be taken (food, flowers, donations). Only a few participants limited their attendance at the temple: ‘We're not huge temple goers, we don't go all the time’ (Roshani). Yet, after walking around the premises of a Buddhist temple in Sydney, Charishma noted:

It is hard to discern whether people plan to meet at the temple at this time or if they just randomly show up and then see familiar faces, but as an outsider to this practice of attending the temple I like that there seem to be ‘regulars’ here – they seem to have some kind of routine (whatever that is … I would only know if I asked) (16 December 2020, Charishma's field notes).

If rituals inform a sense of belonging, then it is imperative to consider ‘going’ to a place or space as part of it. While going to, or attending, the temple becomes a ritual of travel and preparation, it simultaneously highlights the mundane practices embedded in familiar spaces which in turn demonstrates a level of comfort felt in the diaspora space for such practices to take place (Brah 1996). As such, we return to Datta’s (2011) call for more attentiveness to mundane practices embedded in everyday life. The minutiae of preparing and going to the temple highlights religious practices that take place in the host country, beyond the domestic, private space, aligning with conceptualisations of templeisation (Narayanan 2006, Baumann 2009). Selasi’s (2015) conceptualisation of rituals drew us to different ways that rituals may play out, sometimes even as performative acts. Mundane practices may take shape in mundane spaces – that is, rituals are not necessarily bounded within formal religious spaces. ‘Everyday, seemingly secular spaces such as the home, can be sacralised’ and encourage spiritual practice (Mehyar 2015: 2). The mundanity of going somewhere for worship then can prompt distinct feelings in a space and prompt unique rituals and practices or different communal narratives along that nurture new belongings.

A conventional understanding of the term ‘ritual’ is a series of actions or practices carried out in a prescribed order. At religious sites, rituals might be associated with worship, such as prayers, sermons and hymns. These accurately depict what we saw during observations – we regularly observed the puja, which is a worship ceremony in Hindu and Buddhist temples and includes ‘an offering of flowers, food, and/or drink to a deity or spirit, and also includes lighting incense, chanting, reciting prayers, and lighting fires’ (Jacob and Thakur 2000: 232) alongside dance and instrumental performances and almsgivings. Some participants discussed these rituals in detail while others focussed on temple offerings such as Sunday schools, language school and meditation classes:

In temples they have their meditation sessions basically once a month. They’re quite good because they explain a bit about the religion and most of the time it's [about] how you use different meditation techniques and how you can use it for your day-to-day life (Roshani).

Places of worship I guess featured quite strongly for us growing up. And I know a lot of my friends have their kids attending the equivalent of Sunday school or language school. We went to language classes in Oakleigh (Melbourne) growing up as well. So, again … it's certainly a place where people gather and socialise pre and post the classes, or [for] the worship or rituals (Priya).

Religious spaces were the provider of collective and regular activities. Perera (2022: 12) defined a Saiva Temple in Australia as a ‘complex’ encompassing several ‘structures and spaces’ in addition to the temple, such as cultural halls, canteens, libraries, offices and rooms for tea-making. Put simply, the temple complex enabled rituals. Sunday/language schools and meditation classes are also rituals carried out alongside puja. Participants had other reasons to visit the temple that sat separately from regular worship. These activities conducted in that space, or adjoining spaces in the complex, spatially ‘placed’ the rituals. The space itself was critical for rituals, similar to Vasquez and Knott’s argument of religious place-making in Kuala Lumpur (2014: 336), because ‘religious performances are themselves emplaced [and] take place in and creatively respond to the spatial configurations in which they are embedded’. Spatiality is an important characteristic of belonging because it positions the rituals somewhere – in the diaspora spaces – but we must also consider the intertwined temporal, emotional and relational aspects of belonging too.

Relationships with People and Religious Spaces

Selasi (2015) refers to relationships as the meaningful connections we develop across our life courses. These relationships are person-to-person and often involve social aspects; some participants reinforced sociality at religious sites, asserting that ‘we gather mostly in temples every Friday’ (Pranav) and that ‘the temple is a big social gathering area’ (Anoma). Eranga mentioned that some of their friends got together to attend a Catholic church in Sydney: ‘we go to the St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney … with our friends to the Christmas mass’. Going to a religious space was in part a social activity, sometimes marked by a special holiday. Strunk and Richardson (2019: 833) argued that ‘social relationships and cultural practices … can promote inclusive spaces’ and our findings similarly suggest that the bonds between members of the diaspora strengthened when some participants went to a religious space to gather or practice worship with others.

Another participant mentioned that before a formal temple was constructed in her local area in Sydney, the diaspora came together in a makeshift temple to facilitate social and religious practices.

I recall going to the temple, which … was first established in the hall of my high school, Strathfield Girls [High School] … [A Tamil] uncle had started it because he thought there should be a space for Hindus to come together basically, [a space for those] who lived in that local area, and he got together with some other uncles and families and they would bring pictures of the gods into the school hall. They hired it on a Friday evening and we'd have prayer sessions on Fridays. So I recall going there as a little girl to the temple, and we would sit down and learn songs, Hindu hymns, and then have a prayer session and then leave. So those spaces became social spaces, as well as cultural and religious sites (Thushari).

Thushari highlights the importance of creating a space ‘of religious transmission and of socialising’ where Hindu Tamils can gather and form important diasporic relationships and networks (Baumann 2009: 166). Some scholars have commented on the value of these spaces in host communities for the continuity of identities and practices (Baumann 2009, Vasquez and Knott 2014, Kandasamy et al. 2020, Perera 2022). In turn, the space can be where members of the diaspora can negotiate their identities; the way we use spaces and encounter people within them are ‘specific repetitive practices, relating to specific social and cultural spaces which link individual and collective behaviour [which] are crucial for the construction and reproduction of identity narratives and constructions of attachment’ (Yuval-Davis 2006: 203). In our case, constructions of identity narratives and attachment can be experienced through relationships with people and with spaces and places.

Relationships with, and to, a space have merit in our focus. A space can facilitate connection – either to the space itself or to other users of the space – and this idea provided much food for thought as we analysed our data. Aitkin (1998: 85) cautioned that a ‘sacred place is no longer a fixed place of pilgrimage, but a worldwide network in which we move as tourists and as pilgrims … one [has a] subjective relationship to these sites’. One participant discussed the ‘subjective relationship’ one might have to the temple as a ‘third space’:

When I was doing my Masters, I learned about ‘third space’ – first space, second space, third space. I think when it comes to ethnicity, race, or migrant identity, you always need that third space where you can release the stress that you are experiencing. I think for most of the Sri Lankans, these spiritual, religious spaces are where they are actually doing that. That's one thing that I have observed (Irene).

While home and work exist as two distinct spaces, the temple is appropriate for spiritual connection that the diaspora relies on. Relationships integrate spatialities but, at the same time, ‘sacred places must be portable and can be made anew … It is often said that the sacred place has the power to render us humble or egoless, a romantic merging of Self and Place’ (Aitkin 1998: 85). So far we have positioned religious spaces as those that enable diasporic belonging and connection through rituals and relationships. However, these spaces are more dynamic than we realised, creating tensions and strains for those in the diaspora.

Restrictions to Belonging

Restrictions, tensions, constraints and splinters all form part of how migrants navigate new spaces. Selasi (2015) argued that certain aspects of being in a new space can strain one’s ability to feel like themselves or feel welcomed. This feeling is perhaps part of being excluded or not belonging. We approach this notion of ‘restrictions’ as an important part of navigating a sense of belonging. Shankari Chandran’s novel Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens (2022) pushed us to think about restrictions beyond religious spaces that are both personal and political, infusing and punctuating everyday life. Set in a nursing home in Sydney owned by a Sri Lankan Tamil migrant and her daughter, Chandran traces the limitations of belonging based on unaddressed past traumas that travel with migrants across their lifecourse to new places of (re)settlement. The personal and political become enmeshed in processes and places of feeling a sense of belonging and doing belonging which sometimes restricts ‘how much’ one can belong. We draw upon participants’ dynamic relationships with religious spaces to present our final findings. During Nilani’s interview, she mentioned tensions she felt with Sinhalese Buddhism and acceptance she wanted for her son when she took part in a religious ritual:

I don't believe in the way that Sinhalese Buddhism is practiced. I don't like the way we valorise monks. But having said that, when my son was born, we took him to the temple so he can look at the Bo-tree, it was very important for my husband to do that, and I thought it was really important too, so we took him there (Nilani).

The Bo-tree is a religious symbol that has prominence in the story of Buddha’s discovery of enlightenment. To ‘look at the Bo-tree’ is a ritual many Sinhalese Buddhists practice as it is one performative activity where ‘merits are accumulated’ (Gamage et al. 2022: 650), yet for Nilani this practice occasioned her own tensions with religion. The temple was not a space that cultivated a sense of belonging for her, but visiting the Bo-tree with her son and husband was a moment of personal significance for Nilani. It demonstrated a ritual – a particular kind of diasporic, performative act – that nurtured both symbolic and actual notions of family and home. As we grappled with the idea of restrictions in the framework of belonging, we discussed the linguistic nuances that restrict temple goers/visitors, like ourselves:

I know that in my own recollection of my interaction with religious spaces, I would always prefer going to the Malvern temple because rituals were conducted in English and therefore had greater accessibility for my kids and my partner (Nadeeka, authors in conversation, 12 October 2022).

I remember going to so many almsgivings at people’s houses, when the monks attend, and found it really hard to follow because they would deliver their sermon in really formal Sinhala and I couldn’t understand (Charishma, authors in conversation, 12 October 2022).

The temple or Sinhalese-Buddhist rituals can either enable or restrict participation. There are instances where the translocational positionalities of migrants permeate from their multiple border crossings into the most local of experiences, providing connection points to past places and experiences through language, rituals, performances and other activities (Anthias 2016). Yet, it sometimes becomes challenging to ‘do’ belonging or even feel a sense of belonging in a space like a temple if particular activities, languages, or rituals are not well understood in new contexts.

The restrictions felt in/by religious spaces were reiterated by Anusha, who explained that Hindu temples were a spiritual space and not necessarily one of belonging for forced migrants. A similar point about a lack of welcome was written in field notes by Charishma.

I know there were tensions when we had an influx of refugees and I think just even creating spaces where they felt as welcome in [is important]. I think the churches did far more and this is feedback that I’ve had from my clients as well. Some of them actually even converted to Christianity because they felt that was the space they were welcomed in … whereas I found that the [Hindu] temple was quite antipolitical and decided to keep that space just purely religious which I think may have limited how people viewed that as a welcoming public space (Anusha).

I felt so out of place at the Hindu temple because I couldn’t really grasp what was happening and the significance of the songs and dances. The performances were so sensory – I could feel the rhythm of the drums and hear it reverberating even when I was walking in the carpark; there were other musical instruments that added texture and these echoed through the temple and courtyard. I think maybe it’s part of the Friday night practice. The temple doesn’t feel welcoming for everyone, even the wider diaspora – it’s only welcoming to those who want to and will practice religion, and those who can follow what’s going on (Charishma's field notes, 19 January 2021).

Some religious spaces may restrict who can use the space; some feel like it is only open to those who practice religion and are very much involved. While feeling restricted by what a religious space offers is of import to our paper, we caution that spaces of belonging may be prominent for the diaspora outside of the religious setting. For example, Ehrkamp (2005) examined practices of Turkish migrants in Germany, revealing that certain food shops and tea rooms were important local markers of attachment and belonging alongside participation in religious practice. The religious spaces we visited and discussed with participants are just one spatial exemplar of how senses of belonging thrive (or not). As with any space, there are often tensions and restrictions alongside resonances and connections. We reinforce Selasi’s point here that we cannot focus on belonging as a warm and fuzzy feeling but one that is complex, multilayered and entangled across spatial, temporal and emotional experiences.

Conclusion

To understand and unpack the ‘doing’ and ‘feeling’ of belonging, we often create categories related to belonging in the context of national, cultural, religious, political and/or social groups (Youkhana 2015). This academic practice has received critique from scholars who argue that such bounded categorisations are too simplistic, clinical and misrepresentative and that given its socio-spatial and temporal subjectivity, understanding belonging is much more complex and multilayered (Mee and Wright 2009, Youkhana 2015). While we concur with many of these sentiments, we also believe that we need to tease apart different aspects of belonging to truly understand experiences. As such, our paper centred on religious spaces and integrated a framework of belonging encompassing rituals, relationships and restrictions (Selasi 2015). These three concepts gave us deeper insight into the multiplicity of experiences, feelings and perspectives of belonging participants (and we) had in/with/about religious spaces. Through Selasi’s (2015) framework of belonging, we sought to unsettle – even if only a little – mainstream scholarly discourses and debates (Antonsich 2010, Yuval-Davis 2011, Vasquez and Knott 2014, Finlay 2019, Marshall 2023). We appreciate that extending creative works (such as essays, artworks and poems) into the academic sphere is not necessarily a new practice in academic scholarship, but it disrupts the status quo and brings two worlds together in a way that creates new perspectives and understandings about a particular subject matter (Castro et al. 2023). We hope that our paper pushes academics to consider more readily integrating creative works into their scholarly writing.

Our focus on the Sri Lankan diaspora is integral to this paper and our own academic practices. While we have drawn from a small sample of migrants, analyses of other data – (auto)ethnography, field observations, photography, sound recordings and our conversations – captured what going to, and using, religious spaces is like and has provided insights that can be extended. Our paper has explored our participants’ senses of belonging and attachments (or not) to religious spaces within the context of Selasi’s framework, however, we take pause here to reflect on how rituals, relationships and restrictions coalesce. In Nilani’s case, for example, these three concepts were deeply intertwined in her experiences in religious spaces and perspectives of the Buddhist religion. While she did not go to temples or practice Buddhism due to the way monks were ‘valorised’, she mapped her mother’s rituals of attending different temples around Melbourne. The tensions she felt dissipated, however, when she took her son to the Bo-tree at the temple, a ritual that held personal significance and nurtured a sense of belonging to her family. Here we understand that restrictions may shape beliefs but then evolve over time and, after certain life experiences, rituals can be re-integrated, potentially transforming fractured relationships. Understanding the full(er) experience requires deeper engagement with the diaspora. Accompanying participants on their visits to religious spaces would have provided more holistic access to their experiences – their movements, rituals, social encounters, sensory interactions – that were not just verbally articulated, but embodied and felt. There is scope to consider the role of religious leaders in future research too, including the ways that they bring the diaspora together and the type of space they try to create that enables connection and belonging. These are important learnings that require more research to advance understandings about the Sri Lankan diaspora and their socio-spatial and temporal experiences in new places and spaces.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the participants involved in this project for openly sharing their experiences of migration and (re)settlement, and for discussing details about their uses of public and religious spaces. We also thank the reviewers for their constructive and valuable feedback that significantly improved this paper.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We acknowledge that the terms ‘migrants’ and ‘diaspora’ are different and using these terms can be complex. Throughout this paper, we refer to Sri Lankan migrants as members of the Sri Lankan diaspora. The diaspora is a collective term, here, used to describe Sri Lankan migrants. These terms were used interchangeably by the participants we engaged with for this project and we remain cognisant of their choice of terminologies.

2 While our paper predominantly focusses on Buddhist and Hindu temples – given that the vast majority of the Sri Lankan population either practices Buddhism (approximately 70 per cent) or Hindu (roughly 14 per cent) – we acknowledge the multiplicity of religions and religious factions that exist within the country. Sri Lankans also practice Islam, Christianity and Catholicism and our paper includes examples of some of these mentioned by participants.

3 Our integration of ‘creatives’ and ‘creative works’ in this paper aligns with Castro et al.’s (2023) use of the term ‘art’. Art and creative practices take ‘multiple forms and functions’ where ‘artistic engagement cumulates through textual, visual and historical … moves beyond representation … while attending to other senses’ (Castro et al. 2023: 14).

4 Our data collection plan included walking interviews with each participant through public/religious spaces they frequented. However, we were unable to complete these due to the local government and university mandated regulations at the time of data collection.