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Inspired by recent debates in material religion, and using the example of the central Indian city of Bhopal, this article characterizes an informal Hindu religious geography that flourishes in the interstices of India's planned urbanity. The small wayside shrines that dot Indian cities usually arise spontaneously, created by believers who discern divine manifestations and begin to worship these. Traces of ritual activities animate others to follow suit and express their devotion, thus reinforcing the sites' sacredness. The daily repetition of myriad minor ritual gestures maintains a dynamic religious geography, which in a recursive mode ties together devotees in an anonymous ritual community, whose members share a visual language and are inclined to take seriously the desire of deities to live among humans. With a focus on minor religion, and by concentrating on the social life of a cosmos of informal shrines, the text highlights a less-studied dimension of urban religion. It draws attention to the cumulative effect of lived practices and human–material entanglements, and complements discussions that frequently engage with omnipresent politics of formalization as well as competition of communities for attention and recognition in multireligious spaces.

This [Temple] is an illegal construction, a typical case of land-grabbing. People do this to get power and earn money. This is not the right type of temple [.] 99% of the temples are constructed illegally [.]. The people don't build houses but temples because they know that in this case no one can do anything against it and they can simultaneously earn money with it. Behind the shrine they can build their house in peace. All this happens because people are uneducated.'1 This statement by a top bureaucrat in the Bhopal administration summarises a widely felt sentiment among urban planners in India. For many bureaucrats, temples are nuisances, traffic obstructions, acts of landgrabbing, or means of political assertion that contribute to inter-religious tensions. By contrast, builders, trustees or worshippers defend temples as spaces of divine manifestation, as responding to religious needs and providing space for religious festivals and community activity. In this article, I use the case study of the establishment of a controversial goddess temple in Bhopal to shed light on a fundamental rift between two ideal-type approaches to the city – as a secular place and as religious territory. This is an abiding theme of my research on urban temples, which was undertaken in Bhopal, the capital city of the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, over a total of twenty months between 1995 and 2001.2

At this historical juncture, when digital governance is fundamentally re-forming social relations, we need critical knowledge about the emerging texture of society. This text responds to Reetika Khera's important intervention about the need for more timely studies of Aadhaar. Building on Angelia Chamuah's and Lawrence Cohen's comments, I argue for the need to ask broader questions about the changing character of the political as it emerges in the Aadhaar arena. Today, states respond to the world's dizzying complexity by inventing new experimental solutions, many of which utilise digital technologies, and often rather than deliver solutions, create new pathways for learning through critical engagement. Aadhaar is a case in point. In their studies, scholars should remain attuned to the open-endedness of the Aadhaar infrastructure and understand its experimental ethos. This would generate knowledge about processes of iterative learning and lead to conclusions about the role of feedback-loops for the evolution of digital governance. From there one can conclude about systems of value, social hierarchy, or justice and fairness that organise the processes of adapting a new infrastructure to multiple social contexts.

The rapid spread of electronic fingerprinting not only creates new regimes of surveillance but compels users to adopt novel ways of performing their bodies to suit the new technology. This ethnography uses two Indian case studies – of a welfare office and a workplace – to unpack the processes by which biometric devices become effective tools for determining identity. While in the popular imaginary biometric technology is often associated with providing disinterested and thus objective evaluation of identity, in practice 'failures to enrol' and 'false rejects' frequently cause crises of representation. People address these by tinkering with their bodies and changing the rules, and in the process craft biometric bodies. These are assembled bodies that link people and objects in ways considered advantageous for specific identity regimes. By using assemblage theory, the article proposes an alternative interpretation of new surveillance regimes as fluid practices that solidify through the agency of multiple actors who naturalize particular power/knowledge arrangements.

Mass media have always played a crucial role for negotiating the image of the nation. This holds true also for India. My article reflects changes in the Indian media market and examines how reshaped media outlets contribute towards generating fresh images of the nation for public consumption. The focus is on English language newspapers which are consumed by the growing Indian middle classes. How do newspapers influence the relation between commerce and politics and shape its public images? The case study elaborates the role journalists play towards shaping a public culture that devalues politics and hails consumerism. I argue that in a high pressure corporate environment reporters find a new voice as political commentators while accommodating within a discursive formation that promotes positive thinking about corporations, markets and commodities. News articles are an uneasy compromise that implement companies' directives, realise a critical political ethos and expresse a longing for a new India.

Mass media have always played a crucial role for negotiating the image of the nation. This holds true also for India. My article reflects changes in the Indian media market and examines how reshaped media outlets contribute towards generating fresh images of the nation for public consumption. The focus is on English language newspapers which are consumed by the growing Indian middle classes. How do newspapers influence the relation between commerce and politics and shape its public images? The case study elaborates the role journalists play towards shaping a public culture that devalues politics and hails consumerism. I argue that in a high pressure corporate environment reporters find a new voice as political commentators while accommodating within a discursive formation that promotes positive thinking about corporations, markets and commodities. News articles are an uneasy compromise that implement companies' directives, realise a critical political ethos and expresse a longing for a new India.