Local Diasporas / Global Trajectories: New aspects of religious ‘performance’ in British Tamil Hindu practice

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Initial research and fieldwork in Leicester and London were carried out with the support of a three-year grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Recent further research work has been funded by the Ford Foundation through the Social Science Research Council, USA(SSRC) and is part of a wider international and comparative research project on transnational religion. The author would also like to thank colleagues at the CORD (Congress for research on Dance) in New York, November 2007, for their comments on an earlier draft of part of this paper.

Notes

¹Initial fieldwork took place in Tamil temples and Tamil Saturday Schools in areas of Greater London, funded by the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council).

²This is an annual Tamil Hindu festival dedicated to Murugan, son of the deity Siva.

³I am aware of the contested nature of the term ‘community’ and make use of the term consciously, while fully acknowledging the cultural, historic, geographical and religious diversity of British Hindu groups.

⁴The London's borough of Newham in the east of the city is one of the most ethnically diverse boroughs hosting the highest proportion of non-white ethnic groups and the second highest groups of Asians in England and Wales (2001 census). 24.3 per cent of Newham's residents are Muslim, and 6.9 per cent Hindu. The Tamil population in the borough is estimated to be around 5–6,000. An even larger community of Tamils is resident in the London borough of Brent, located to the north-west of the city, with estimated numbers at around 12,000. Brent is one of London's most culturally diverse boroughs, where the non-white ethnic groups in the borough now form the majority of the population at 57 per cent; of the total, there is a Hindu population of 17 per cent (see Brent Council's website <www.brent.gov.uk> for further information). Tamils began to settle in the Borough of Brent in Willesden, Harlesden and Neasden in the 1970s, as many were students at Willesden College, and then began to move out to the areas of Kingsbury, Queensbury and Wembley. As the community grew more established, Brent became an attractive place for many more refugees, and now houses a vibrant Tamil community.

⁵The Tamil population is predominately Sri Lankan, although Singapore Tamils were the first to come to the area [personal communication with Newham councillor, Paul Sathianesan].

⁶Kaveri Harriss, in her breakdown of the largely working-class Muslim population of Newham (2006: 3), notes that the majority are Sunni Mulims, describing themselves broadly as Bareilvi or Deobandi. 85 per cent are of South Asian origin, and the remaining 15 per cent are from Africa, Europe and Britain.

⁷Worship, or worshipper of the Hindu deity Siva.

⁸Interview with the temple president Dr P. Alagrajah, at this temple. The two other temples are the London Sri Murugan Temple in East Ham and the Shri Venkateswara (Balaji) Temple of UK, both newly built according to south Indian architectural traditions.

⁹The conditions were that no weddings would take place in the temple; prior approval must be obtained for kitchen ventilation and extraction; prior approval of materials and of an environmental code; and that the main entrance would be sited away from the major traffic lights at the road junction (see notes of Newham Council meeting and public forum meeting July 2005 <www.newham.gov.uk>, accessed 12 March 2007).

¹⁰This is the Melmaruvathur Weekly Worshipping Centre in East Ham, east London and is part of an ongoing study examining the religious lives of migrant groups. See <www.surrey.ac.uk/Arts/CRONEM> and note 11 below.

¹¹Current research by the author examines the unorthodox practice of women conducting the temple rituals and acting as mediators between the deities and the devotees. One example is the Melmaruvathur Amman Temple, based in India but now with branches all over the world, which actively promotes women to take on key roles in ritual. A group in East Ham, set up in 2001, meets in a converted house three times a week for worship, and although men attend, the ritual is run by women and it attracts mainly women followers. From fifty to sixty attend each meeting and on special occasions 2–300 devotees may be present.

¹²This is performing astanga pranam. Men will lie so that their full body is face down on the ground, allowing eight significant points in the body to touch the floor. A woman's body has five such points, so she will kneel and allow her arms and head to touch. This also keeps the woman's pelvis from the point of contact on the ground, as this part touching the ground would be considered inauspicious.

¹³It is common to hear temple musicians playing the traditional instruments of nagaswaram, a double-reeded flute (like an oboe), the tavil, a large, outdoor drum beaten with a curved stick one side and the drummer's hand with metal covers on the fingers on the other, and the Indian cymbals (talam) at festival occasions. They play as an accompaniment to the deities, at times of ritual worship in the temple and at festival times, to initiate processions, and as a prelude to the deities’ arrival on the streets during processions. As their sound is so powerful, they are considered to be outdoor instruments.

¹⁴If we look to examples in the Roman Catholic Church, the original performance of the Mass privileged the priest and his relationship with God, rather than the congregation. The priest recited the Mass in Latin, in a low murmur hardly heard by the attendees, and faced the altar with his back to the congregation. The priest was communing with God, rather than with the audience of worshippers, and remained in the reserved sanctuary space (the sacred space around the altar). This changed radically in 1963 with the Second Vatican Directive, which brought a new theology of the Mass, offering a democratization of the procedures of worship. From then the priest faced his audience, spoke to them in English, and was allowed to move out of the sanctuary to give communion. [Personal communication from Brendan McCarthy].

¹⁵This two-year research project ran from 1999–2001 and was funded by the Leverhulme Trust. It was headed by Dr Andrée Grau and carried out under the auspices of the Centre for Dance Research at Roehampton University.

¹⁶Vrata is a voluntary religious vow, which forms an important part of popular Hinduism.

¹⁷The name of the wooden structure male devotees carry on their shoulders during festivities.

¹⁸Willford notes that more modern tunes, which have originated from Tamil films, are now being played for the dancing and have become accepted as devotional songs. He adds that ‘[t]o some extent, the Kavadi dance itself has evolved to now include steps and gyrations from the popular India-produced films’ (2002: 260).

¹⁹The Balinese language does not have simply one word for the widespread phenomenon known as ‘trance’. Several terms are used: karauhan kalinggihan, kalinggaan, kodal or tedun. These may be translated in different ways, such as ‘a (temporary) loss of the soul’ or ‘a state with another spirit other than your own’ – rauh being the Balinese word for spirit.