Walk down almost any street in an Indian city and you will pass one within minutes: a small shrine painted in bright reds and yellows, tucked under a peepal tree or wedged onto a pavement corner, with a diya flickering next to a scatter of marigolds. No compound wall, no fixed timings, no priest on payroll. It just sits there, right in the middle of the traffic, the hawkers, and the daily commute. For over a century, sociologists have argued that sacred spaces are supposed to stand apart from ordinary life. Roadside shrines quietly refuse to follow that rule, and that refusal tells us a great deal about how religion actually works in Indian cities.
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Rethinking the sacred-profane divide
The classical starting point for thinking about sacredness comes from Émile Durkheim, who argued that religion is built around a strict separation between the sacred and the profane. In his account, sacred things are set apart and forbidden, protected from the mundane world by taboos, rituals, and physical boundaries. A temple, in this reading, is meaningful precisely because it is enclosed, bounded, and different from the street outside it.
Roadside shrines do not fit this picture at all. They are not set apart from anything. They share the same pavement as vegetable carts, parked scooters, and queues outside an ATM. There is no gate to pass through, no threshold that marks a shift from ordinary to extraordinary space. Yet these shrines are not treated as any less sacred by the people who visit them. Devotees still fold their hands while walking past, leave flowers on their way to work, and light lamps in the evening, all without breaking stride.
Sacred right where the profane happens
This is what makes urban roadside shrines such an interesting case for anthropologists. Recent scholarship on wayside shrines in India has pointed out that these structures sit outside the neat categories scholars usually reach for, refusing to be classified as purely sacred or profane, folk or institutional. A shrine at a busy junction can be an object of daily devotion and, at the very same moment, a landmark that autorickshaw drivers use to give directions. The sacred here is not separated from everyday life; it is woven into it. This does not weaken the sense of sanctity attached to these spaces. If anything, it shows that sacredness can be sustained through repetition and familiarity rather than through distance and restriction.
Markers of community and political identity
Roadside shrines rarely appear out of nowhere. Many are built by migrants who arrive in a city for work and have little formal claim to the neighbourhood they now live in. Setting up a small shrine, even an informal one made of a stone, an image, and a few bricks, becomes a way of putting down roots. It marks a bit of pavement or an empty plot as belonging to a particular community, and it gives that community a shared point of gathering in an otherwise anonymous urban landscape. Research on informal religious sites in cities such as Bhopal has described how these shrines arise spontaneously as believers begin worshipping at a spot and others follow, gradually thickening the site’s sacred reputation through repeated ritual visits.
Over time, a shrine can become the anchor for a whole set of social relationships: neighbours who take turns lighting the lamp, shopkeepers who fund a fresh coat of paint every year, and residents who organise a small festival around it. In this sense, the shrine is not just a religious object. It is also a piece of urban infrastructure that produces belonging, especially for people who moved to the city with very little else to hold onto.
When the state tries to remove them
Because roadside shrines occupy public land, often without any legal sanction, they regularly come into conflict with municipal authorities trying to clear pavements and roads. Mumbai offers one of the clearest examples of how this plays out. Acting on a Bombay High Court order following a public interest litigation, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation launched a demolition drive targeting unauthorised religious structures across the city. Within a couple of weeks, more than 525 shrines had been demolished, and the backlash was immediate. Political parties, most vocally the Shiv Sena, took up the cause on behalf of affected residents, and in one instance thousands of people gathered at Saat Rasta in central Mumbai to block traffic in protest against the drive.
What is striking about episodes like this is how quickly a small, informal structure can pull in local politicians, residents’ associations, and city officials all at once. A shrine that looks like an unplanned addition to the streetscape often turns out to be deeply embedded in local patronage networks and electoral politics. Its removal is rarely treated as a routine civic matter. It becomes a contest over whose claims to the city, and whose version of faith, get to be recognised by the state. This is precisely why these small structures sit at the intersection of religion and urban governance rather than being a purely spiritual matter.
Countering the secularisation thesis: the multiple modernities argument
Much of twentieth-century social theory assumed that modernisation and secularisation move together, that as cities grow, industrialise, and modernise, religion gradually retreats from public life and becomes a private matter. Indian cities, with their expanding IT corridors, flyovers, and gated townships, would seem like a natural test case for this theory. Instead, roadside shrines have multiplied alongside urban growth rather than disappearing because of it.
The sociologist U Kalpagam examined this pattern closely in her study of Chennai’s roadside temples, published in the Economic and Political Weekly in 2006. She argues that the standard secularisation thesis does not travel well outside the European context it was built on, and proposes instead a framework of multiple modernities, where different societies modernise along different paths and religion does not need to be pushed out of public life for a society to be modern. In the South Asian case, she suggests, tradition and faith are not obstacles to modernity but active ingredients in how modernity takes shape locally.
Anthropologists working on wayside shrines elsewhere in India have made a similar point, describing how these small structures act as portals connecting the everyday churn of the street to a wider sense of the sacred, even as roads, flyovers, and urban expansion transform the spaces around them. A shrine under a flyover or beside a metro pillar is not a leftover from a pre-modern past. It is a product of the same urban present that produced the flyover and the metro line, built by people who see no contradiction between living in a modern city and keeping faith close to where they walk, work, and wait for a bus.
Taken together, these three threads, the blurring of sacred and profane, the role of shrines in community and political life, and their place within a distinctly South Asian modernity, suggest that the roadside temple is not a quaint relic. It is a working part of how Indian cities organise space, belonging, and belief all at once.
What do you think? Have you noticed roadside shrines shaping how a street or neighbourhood feels, even if you don’t personally worship there? And what do you make of the idea that a modern city and deep religiosity are not opposites but can grow together?
References
- https://durkheim.uchicago.edu/Summaries/forms.html
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326575716_Introduction_Wayside_Shrines_in_India_An_Everyday_Defiant_Religiosity
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292562573_Diaspora_of_the_Gods_Modern_Hindu_Temples_in_an_Urban_Middle-Class_World
- https://gulfnews.com/amp/story/uae%2Fover-525-illegal-mumbai-shrines-razed-1.369602
- https://www.epw.in/journal/2006/43-44/special-articles/secularism-religiosity-and-popular-culture.html
- https://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/passengers-to-pilgrims-micro-cartographies-of-sacredness-in-the-indian-himalayas
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