How do people continue to share sacred spaces when religious identities are becoming increasingly politicised?

Shared Sacred Sites in South Asia: Negotiating Coexistence and Belonging explores the shrines, temples, churches, pilgrimage sites and other sacred spaces where communities of different religious backgrounds meet, worship and negotiate their relationships with one another.

Edited by Laurent Gayer, Christophe Jaffrelot, Aminah Mohammad-Arif and Grégoire Schlemmer, the volume moves across India, Pakistan, Nepal and Mauritius to examine what these shared spaces can tell us about coexistence, religious boundaries and belonging in contemporary South Asia. Rather than treating religious sharing simply as evidence of harmony, the contributors examine the tensions, negotiations and inequalities that accompany it—showing shared sacred sites as spaces where pluralism is continually practised, challenged and remade.

At a moment when religious and cultural identities are increasingly mobilised politically, the book asks whether such spaces can transcend social and religious divisions, and how caste, class, language and gender shape encounters that do not fit neatly within conventional religious boundaries.

Join us for the launch of Shared Sacred Sites in South Asia, with Christophe Jaffrelot and Laurent Gayer followed by questions from the audience.

To attend in person, register on Ticket Tailor.

Speakers

Professor Christophe Jaffrelot

Christophe Jaffrelot is Avantha Chair and Professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at the King’s India Institute, and Research Lead for the Global Institutes at King’s College London. He also teaches South Asian politics and history at Sciences Po in Paris and is an Overseas Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. From 2000 to 2008, he served as Director of the Centre for International Studies (CERI) at Sciences Po. His extensive scholarship on South Asian politics has examined Indian democracy, Hindu nationalism, caste, political mobilisation and India–Pakistan relations. His books include Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy and Gujarat Under Modi: Laboratory of Today’s India. He is also the founder and senior editor of Hurst’s Comparative Politics and International Studies series.

Professor Laurent Gayer

Laurent Gayer is a CNRS Research Professor at the Centre for International Studies (CERI), Sciences Po, specialising in political sociology and comparative politics in South Asia. He received his PhD in Political Science from Sciences Po in 2004 and his Habilitation from Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in 2020. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in India, Nepal and Pakistan, his research explores political and social violence, vigilantism, policing, capitalism and the production of order, with a particular focus on Karachi. He is the author of Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City and Gunpoint Capitalism: Enforcing Industrial Order in Karachi, and co-author with Gilles Favarel-Garrigues of Proud to Punish: The Global Landscapes of Rough Justice. He also teaches in Sciences Po’s Master’s programme in Political Science and serves on the editorial boards of several academic journals, including Contemporary South Asia.