Christianity and Belonging in Shimla, North India: Sacred Entanglements of a Himalayan Landscape

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This book explores the material religion of contemporary Shimla, a vibrant postcolonial city, famed for its colonial heritage, set against the backdrop of the North-Western Himalayas. Jonathan Miles-Watson demonstrates that this landscape is able to peacefully reconcile the apparent tensions of faith, heritage and identity in a way that unseats traditional theories of religion, politics and heritage. It presents a mystery that is written in space through time; the key to unlocking this mystery lies in clear view, at the citys heart, in the contemporary material religion that surrounds nominally Christian sacred sites. Although the material religion centres on landscapes that are identifiable as Christian, the book demonstrates that Hindus, atheists and Sikhs all have a role to play in the mutually constitutive relations that lie at the centre of these knots of sacred entanglement. This book builds upon over a decade of research to present an ethnographic account of devotional practices that speaks to contemporary developments in both the anthropology of Christianity and material religion. Through this exploration the book answers the mystery of Shimlas postcolonial harmony, while complicating established theories in the anthropology of religion, postcolonial studies, mythography, heritage studies and material culture.

Reviews

A wonderfully engaging, restless book. As he reflects on Christianity, landscape and belonging in postcolonial Shimla, Jonathan Miles-Watson constantly provokes the reader into reassessing what they think they know about the Himalayas, Christianity and anthropology. This is an important contribution to the study of material religion. * SIMON COLEMAN, Chancellor Jackman Professor, University of Toronto, Canada *
A beautifully written, original, compelling ethnography that promises to advance multiple subfields, some perhaps significantly. * MARK CALDER, a Regional Manager at Embrace the Middle East, UK, author of Bethlehems Syriac Christians (2018) *
In lilting prose, and through the lens of a minority religion, Jonathan Miles-Watson argues that the Himalayan landscape mediates between the regions past and present. Part ethnographic story about the modern residents of a Himalayan town and part colonial history about a famous hill station, Christianity and Belonging in Shimla, North India argues that material religion is best understood through the vital relationships inherent in everyday life. * Sondra Hausner, Oxford University, UK *

Author Bio

Jonathan Miles-Watson is Associate Professor of the Anthropology of Religion at Durham University, UK. He has carried out extensive fieldwork in both North India and the UK. He is co-editor of The Bloomsbury Reader in the Study of Myth (Bloomsbury, 2019).