Being Tamil, being Hindu: Tamil migrants’ negotiations of the absence of Tamil Hindu spaces in the West Midlands and South West of England

Demelza Jones

doi:10.1080/0048721X.2015.1027968

Being Tamil, being Hindu: Tamil migrants’ negotiations of the absence of Tamil Hindu spaces in the West Midlands and South West of England

Demelza Jones^*

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

This paper considers the religious practices of Tamil Hindus who have settled in the West Midlands and South West of England in order to explore how devotees of a specific ethno-regional Hindu tradition with a well-established UK infrastructure in the site of its adherents’ population density adapt their religious practices in settlement areas which lack this infrastructure. Unlike the majority of the UK Tamil population who live in the London area, the participants in this study did not have ready access to an ethno-religious infrastructure of Tamil-orientated temples and public rituals. The paper examines two means by which this absence was addressed as well as the intersections and negotiations of religion and ethnicity these entailed: firstly, Tamil Hindus’ attendance of temples in their local area which are orientated towards a broadly imagined Hindu constituency or which cater to a non-Tamil ethno-linguistic or sectarian community; and, secondly, through the ‘DIY’ performance of ethnicised Hindu ritual in non-institutional settings.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	53-74
Number of pages	22
Journal	Religion
Volume	46
Issue number	1
Early online date	15 Jun 2015
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2015.1027968
Publication status	Published - 2016

Bibliographical note

© 2015 The Author(s). Published by Taylor & Francis.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Permission is granted subject to the terms of the License under which the work was published. Please check the License conditions for the work which you wish to reuse. Full and appropriate attribution must be given. This permission does not cover any third party copyrighted material which may appear in the work requested.

funding: This work was supported by the ESRC under Grant ES/G016666/1

Keywords

Tamils
Hinduism
migration
ethnicity
religion
ritual

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10.1080/0048721X.2015.1027968

Being Tamil, being Hindu
© 2015 The Author(s). Published by Taylor & Francis. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Permission is granted subject to the terms of the License under which the work was published. Please check the License conditions for the work which you wish to reuse. Full and appropriate attribution must be given. This permission does not cover any third party copyrighted material which may appear in the work requested.
Final published version, 426 KBLicence: CC BY 3.0

Cite this

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abstract = "This paper considers the religious practices of Tamil Hindus who have settled in the West Midlands and South West of England in order to explore how devotees of a specific ethno-regional Hindu tradition with a well-established UK infrastructure in the site of its adherents{\textquoteright} population density adapt their religious practices in settlement areas which lack this infrastructure. Unlike the majority of the UK Tamil population who live in the London area, the participants in this study did not have ready access to an ethno-religious infrastructure of Tamil-orientated temples and public rituals. The paper examines two means by which this absence was addressed as well as the intersections and negotiations of religion and ethnicity these entailed: firstly, Tamil Hindus{\textquoteright} attendance of temples in their local area which are orientated towards a broadly imagined Hindu constituency or which cater to a non-Tamil ethno-linguistic or sectarian community; and, secondly, through the {\textquoteleft}DIY{\textquoteright} performance of ethnicised Hindu ritual in non-institutional settings.",

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Being Tamil, being Hindu: Tamil migrants’ negotiations of the absence of Tamil Hindu spaces in the West Midlands and South West of England

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

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