Struggles for Hindu Sacred Space in the Netherlands

This book asks us to consider what is absent, rather than what is present, when studying religions. Priya Swamy argues that absent religious spaces are in themselves abstract locations that painfully memorialise feelings of shame, oppression and marginalisation. She shows that these ‘traumas of absence’—the complex, entwined and emotional responses to absent spaces—can be articulated through mob violence and destruction, but also anticolonial struggles or human rights issues.

This study focuses on the absence of temples across the global Hindu diaspora, taking the tumultuous narrative of the Devi Dhaam community in Amsterdam Southeast as a central location to detail the over thirty-year struggle to build a Hindu temple in a neighbourhood of vibrant mosques and churches. In 2010, their makeshift space was pulled away from them, provoking tears among elderly devotees, rage among board members and devastation in the wider community. Leaving their goddess with no place to live, some devotees feared for the dangerous repercussions that would follow from uprooting a divine presence from its home.

By exploring the ways in which the trauma of absent religious spaces has become a formative aspect of localised but also globalised Hindu identity, Struggles for Hindu Sacred Space in the Netherlands rethinks the way that empty lots, piles of rubble and abandoned buildings around the world are themselves powerful monuments to the trauma of absent temple spaces that mobilise campaigns for Hindu spaces.