Hindu Wayside Shrines

India itself is regarded as sacred. India’s sacredness is indicated by four sites at the cardinal points of the subcontinent – Badrinath in the North, Puri in the East, Rameswaram in the South and Dwarka in the West. Furthermore, India is crisscrossed with a network of sacred places, that constitute a sacred geography, associated with the rich mythological narratives of the Hindu traditions.

Natural phenomena, such as mountains and rivers, are also regarded as sacred. Perhaps the most well-known is the River Ganges, which is regarded by Hindus as a living goddess Ma Gaṇgā. Every day along Gaṇgā’s banks, from its source in the Himalaya to where it enters the Bay of Bengal, Hindus perform various religious rituals.

Certain regions are regarded as sacred. For example, the mountainous area above Rishikesh in north India is regarded as especially sacred and is frequently called Dev Bhoomi – The Land of the Gods. A guidebook to the region suggests it is:

The sacred land, where every speck of dust, every pebble, every bush and plant, why everything around is endowed with sanctity (cited in Jacobs 2021, p.49).

The city of Banāras (also known as Kāshī and Vārānasī) is considered particularly sacred because it is associated with many of the narratives of the deity Śiva and is located on the banks of Gaṇgā. Banāras is an important pilgrimage place, and is considered to be a tirtha, which literally means ‘a ford’ and therefore suggests this is a place where one can cross from a mundane reality to the sacred.

Temples are frequently built on sites that are regarded as sacred. Sometimes, these temples can be vast and ornate edifices, such as the temple in Madurai dedicated to the Goddess Meenakshi (which means ‘Fish-Eyed) who a form of Parvātī, the consort of the Śiva.

These imposing edifices are frequently as much a statement of power as they are sacred sites and pilgrimage destinations. However, other temples, even if they mark an important sacred site associated with a Hindu mythic narrative, are much more modest. Nonetheless, temples are often contrasted with wayside shrines.

These wayside shrines are difficult to define and can overlap with other religious sites. For example, some smaller temples might be classified as shrines, and some of the larger wayside shrines can seem like small temples.

These shrines have been called a number of different terms, for example Priya Mookerjee calls these ‘Pathway Icons’. Other terms include street shrines, pavement shrines and mini temples (Larios and Voix 2018: 3). However, wayside shrines has become the most widely used term to identify these sacred sites. We have to question what is meant by a shrine in the Hindu context and also what is meant by the term wayside.

Most Hindus have a shrine in the corner of their house, normally in the kitchen. More wealthy Hindus may have a whole room dedicated to religious rituals. These domestic shrines are an important part of Hindus religious life and are often eclectic, reflecting a family’s inclinations, travels to pilgrimage sites and experiences.

Many cafes, shops and places of business also have small shrines, or at least a framed picture of a deity on the wall. At the very least some incense will be offered to the deity every morning at the start of business.

Indian villages also have shrines. These shrines are dedicated to deities (grāmadevatās – literally ‘village deities) who are often specific to that particular village. These deities are regarded as protecting the village from natural disasters and therefore tend to be located at the edges of the village. Increasingly these parochial deities have become associated with the gods and goddesses, such as Śiva or Devi, of the wider Hindu traditions.

Many Hindu temples are dedicated to a single deity. In traditional temple architecture the image (mūrti) of this deity is installed in a central chamber often referred to as the garbha gṛha (womb chamber). However, most of the large temples also have a number of separate shrines dedicated to gods, goddesses and companions that are associated with the central deity. For example, you will often find separate shrines to Pārvatī (Śiva’s consort) and Ganeśa (Śiva’s son) in most temples dedicated to Śiva.

There are shrines to gurus who are thought to have escaped the wheel of transmigration It is believed that the guru who has escaped the wheel of transmigration does not die as such but achieves a transcendental state of being known as samādhi. These gurus, when they leave their physical bodies, are buried, rather than the usual Hindu practice of cremation. A shrine is often built over the place of burial.

For example, Swami Sivananda was buried at his ashram² in Rishikesh. The building where his tomb is located is known as the Samādhi Hall. The shrine marking the spot in the centre of the Samādhi Hall has a life-size realistic statue of Swami Sivananda in meditation, a visual reminder indicating that Sivananda is spiritually present. The Samādhi Hall is the spiritual heart of the ashram.

Robert Redfield, in his important book Peasant Society and Culture, uses the terms ‘great’ and ‘little’ traditions to distinguish two styles of religiousness. However, because ‘great’ and ‘little’ are evaluative terms, I prefer to use ‘formal’ and ‘informal’. It could be argued that temples might be considered as the sacred places of the formal traditions, whereas wayside shrines are places of worship of the informal traditions. I argue that a clear dichotomy between these styles of religiosity is difficult to maintain, especially in the Hindu context.

Informal and formal modes of religiousness interact in complex ways. Informal traditions impact the more formal manifestations of religion, and the formal can influence the informal.

Great and little tradition can be thought of as two currents of thought and action, distinguishable, yet ever flowing into and out of each other.
Redfield 1956: p.72.

For example, the iconography founds in the temples of the formal traditions is often similar.

Images installed in temples tend to be made according to strict conventions that detail number of arms, objects held and proportions, whilst many of the images in wayside shrines tend to be less well defined. Nonetheless, this is not always the case, and you can find roughly carved images in temples and more sophisticated images in shrines.

Temples located in sacred places, such as Banāras are not only associated with India’s formal sacred geography but also can be identified in a number of Hindu texts known as the Purāṇas. On the other hand, Ursula Rao suggests that these wayside shrines ‘contribute to crafting an informal religious geography’ (Rao 2023: 192). She suggests that the religion of wayside shrines:

Is the religion in the “minor”, not just because the shrines are mostly small, or started small, but because they are architectonically unspectacular and not part of any narratives of “great religion”. (Rao 2023: 193)

Whilst all temples have officiating priests, this is not necessarily true for wayside shrines. However, some wayside shrines do have an officiating priest/priestess. For example, this female ascetic (Sādhvī) always conducts the rituals in this small Kālī shrine in Banāras. (Also see the image above of the Ganeśa shrine in Rishikesh).

Rituals in the temples can be long and complex, and the rituals performed at shrines can seem quite perfunctory. C.J Fuller describes a very formulaic ritual performed by brahmin priests in the magnificent Minakshi Temple in the southern Indian city of Madurai This ritual known as pūjā involves 16 different stages (Fuller 1992: 64–66). However, pūjās can often be truncated without being perceived as lacking in anyway. The integral core of a pūjā is making an offering to an image in which the deity is believed to reside. It might be as simple as waving some insence or presenting some flowers. Pūjā is also the main ritual that is performed at shrines.