Reconfiguring Secularity in Public Life: Popular Religiosity, Secularism and the Changing Dynamics of an Islamic Shrine Festival in Kerala, South India
Reconfiguring Secularity in Public Life: Popular Religiosity, Secularism and the Changing Dynamics of an Islamic Shrine Festival in Kerala, South India
Friday, 11 July 2025: 15:30
Location: ASJE018 (Annex of the Faculty of Legal, Economic, and Social Sciences)
Oral Presentation
In South Asia, popular religiosity is deeply embedded in ordinary life and plays a significant role in shaping secular practices and conceptions of public life. These practices and conceptions, emerging within and in response to the discourses and practices of popular religiosity, are predicated on a specific (vernacularized) understanding of secularism that carries deeper normative commitments and expectations beyond the formal separation of religion and politics. This paper, anchored in the study of Veliyancode Chandanakkudam Nercha – a carnivalesque Islamic shrine festival in Kerala, South India – examines its changing dynamics and the shifting modalities of religious and non-religious engagement with it.
Having emerged as a communal ritual-practice in the early 20th century, this nercha has evolved into a mass carnivalesque festival of the region, attracting thousands of participants, irrespective of religious and caste affiliations. Over time, forms of participation in and responses to the nercha have also undergone significant transformations. Through a meticulous ethnography of discourses and practices associated with this nercha, the paper focuses on two important aspects: First, it traces the evolution of the nercha from a ritual-practice to a mass carnivalesque festival and critically examines the varied conceptualizations of nercha by different actors in the field. Second, it investigates how traditionalist Sunni Muslims in the locality delineate acceptable and unacceptable forms of religiosity and how their position on such popular religious festivals has shifted in recent times. In doing so, the paper aims to explicate the ways in which the actor constellations – religious and non-religious – negotiate the boundaries between the religious and the secular – thereby redefining the ‘legitimate space’ of religion in public life – and to offer a nuanced conceptualization of postcolonial secularity in terms of the cultural meanings underlying this process.
Having emerged as a communal ritual-practice in the early 20th century, this nercha has evolved into a mass carnivalesque festival of the region, attracting thousands of participants, irrespective of religious and caste affiliations. Over time, forms of participation in and responses to the nercha have also undergone significant transformations. Through a meticulous ethnography of discourses and practices associated with this nercha, the paper focuses on two important aspects: First, it traces the evolution of the nercha from a ritual-practice to a mass carnivalesque festival and critically examines the varied conceptualizations of nercha by different actors in the field. Second, it investigates how traditionalist Sunni Muslims in the locality delineate acceptable and unacceptable forms of religiosity and how their position on such popular religious festivals has shifted in recent times. In doing so, the paper aims to explicate the ways in which the actor constellations – religious and non-religious – negotiate the boundaries between the religious and the secular – thereby redefining the ‘legitimate space’ of religion in public life – and to offer a nuanced conceptualization of postcolonial secularity in terms of the cultural meanings underlying this process.