The Algebra of Place: Replication of North Indian Religious Geography in Maharashtra

Abstract

Up to this point, we have been examining Maharashtrians’ religious-geographical imagination primarily in terms of their articulations and conceptualizations of regions within which they themselves live and move. This accords with the understanding of a region as an area throughout which people are aware that they (or their gods or ritual objects) either actually move or can move. The present chapter and part of chapter 6 draw attention to another kind of religious-geographical phenomenon and point to another element of a definition of a region. In order to have a sense of a particular region in which one lives and throughout which one moves, one must also have a sense of some other region from which one’s own region differs. The other element of a sense of region, then, besides the awareness of one’s ability to move around in it, is an awareness that the region one finds oneself in contrasts with another, similar region over against which it stands. In the words of Edward Casey (1993:53), the philosopher I have quoted in the introduction and in chapter 1, experiencing oneself as being in a particular region requires that one be “convinced that … some other more or less comparably extensive region stands opposed to my current here-region: another neighborhood, another state, over there and in relation to which I am now truly here, on this side (diesseits) of whatever boundary or difference demarcates the two regions in question.”