Description
In 2021, a lawsuit was filed against the transnational Hindu sect, BAPS, for the exploitation of Dalit and ‘low-caste’ Indian migrant workers involved in temple construction in the United States, marking one of the recent attempts to legislate caste outside of India. For BAPS, which has denied these accusations, the construction of elaborate temple complexes according to traditional Vedic architectural principles has been a vehicle for its effective diasporic outreach, initially in East Africa and Britain, and more recently across the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East. Taking these contestations as a starting point, this paper unsettles a dominant reading of the Hindu temple in the Indian diaspora as merely a cultural institution enmeshed within domestic politics of multiculturalism. Homing in on the international politics of temple construction, with a particular focus on BAPS temples in Britain, this paper instead approaches the temple as a global assemblage to make two main interventions. First, by revealing processes transcending scales and sites involved with temple construction, this paper brings into view often-obscured international dynamics of caste-based labour. Second, by approaching the temple as an assemblage through which the cultural, material, and political converge, this paper complicates the ‘culturalist’ key with which diaspora has often been apprehended. Together, this contributes to discussions around the entanglements between racial and caste capitalism and the international politics of the Indian diaspora.
