The Urban Divine in Flux: How Religion Matters in Mumbai and Amsterdam

19 November 2009
15:00 – 17:00 hrs
Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Lecture by Dr Markha Valenta. Discussant Dr O.G.A Verkaaik

Venue: zaal F211.B (Bushuis), Kloveniersburgwal 48, Amsterdam

Globalization has been as good to religion as it has to urbanity. But what is the relation between these, the religious and the urban, in a world where space and time are fast collapsing in spectral fashion? Especially when we redefine the religious as not (urban) secularism’s opposite, but rather one formation among many of the modern politics of desire? This allows us to consider how the religious is entangled with the political, the financial and the sexual in our world cities, from East to West and North to South.

This lecture is about the ethno-religious politics of two world cities through each other, Mumbai and Amsterdam. The one is a Southern (mega) world city and the other a Northern (mini) world city. The explicit intent here is to disrupt the continued segregation of analyses of East and West, North and South, rich and poor in our scholarship on cities, religion, and democracy in the interests of developing globalized tools for thinking globally.

Both cities are post-colonial harbor cities living at water’s edge, prime destinations for migrants and immigrants, the financial and cultural capitals of their democratic countries. Both cities have long histories of semi-tolerant pluralism, and of the violence, blasphemy and creativity that accompany it. In Amsterdam, the base of analysis will be contests over (Turkish-European) mosque-building and over the Red Light District, as these entangle local and international struggles over property, bodies, money and governance. This dynamic will be counterpoised to a reading of Mumbai’s Siddhivanayak Temple – the nodal intersection of powerful streams of financial, political and filmic desire – relative to the city’s invisible spiritual specialists of (Afro-Muslim) Sidis.

In this way, we can begin to sketch the outlines of an emergent logic of urban longing under conversion by the globalization all about us.