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theses

This dissertation is about a popular religious movement in north India – the Kanwar, an annual phenomenon that has grown explosively over the last two decades and now involves more than 12 million people every year. Participants carry water from the river Ganga for libations in Śiva temples in the vicinity of their homes. A majority are young adult males and teenagers of poor and lower middle-class backgrounds, who walk over a hundred miles carrying the sacred water, following varying degrees of ritual obligations, exhibiting their pain, suffering, and fortitude. What brings these millions of young poor men to such a demanding religious practice year after year? Notwithstanding the differences, a wide, cross-disciplinary scholarly consensus regards religious movements as reactionary expressions of collective solidarity in the time of globalization. Scholars reason that globalization causes social anomie, pushing people to embrace traditional affinities such as ethnicity, nationality, or religion. Instead of a “fundamentalist reaction” to social and economic changes, however, my research shows that these practices afford participants opportunities to perform, practice, and prepare for a new configuration of social and economic obligations. They evidence anxious social and psychological preparation for the norms, scarcity, and unpredictable outcomes of poor, informal economic conditions at the critical point of transition into adulthood. These were young adults and teenagers preparing to deliver on their social expectations and obligations to loved ones in social conditions that were often as precarious as they were hierarchical and humiliating. In conditions where the overwhelming majority of workers are informally employed, have few employment, social, and health safeguards, and very limited prospects for stable and respectable employment or life course, these often first steps into adulthood are daunting. At the margins of the economy, the religious phenomenon provided an open and freely accessible, yet challenging, stage – a definite and alternate field – for participants to practice and prove their talents, resolve, and moral sincerity. At the same time, it is also a means to contest the symbolic violence and social inequities of a hierarchical society now dominated by a neo-liberal social ethic, which is both imposing and exclusive.

ETD_5378

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Vikash Singh

doi:10.7282/T31R6NTW

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.