Religious Change and Public Ritual

Detailed chapter description

Chapter 137 examines religious change through public ritual: the recurrent acts by which households, neighbourhoods, congregations, pilgrims, associations and public authorities occupy time and space together. It does not assume that religious change can be read directly from census percentages. Affiliation, belief, observance, institutional membership and participation in a festival are different variables. A person can join a public procession without changing formal religious identity; a ritual can expand in scale because roads and media improve even when the proportion of adherents is stable; and a shrine can become more visible through tourism without becoming more central to everyday household practice. The chapter therefore treats public ritual as a social institution whose form changes through mobility, technology, markets, law, ecology and political life. The evidentiary chronology is uneven across the India–Nepal border. India’s latest completed census religion tables remain those of Census 2011, including the Bihar C-01 and religion Primary Census Abstract datasets at state, district, sub-district and town levels. Nepal’s National Population and Housing Census 2021 provides a more recent religious profile: Madhesh Province reported 84.24 percent Hindu, 13.28 percent Islam, 2.21 percent Buddhist and 0.18 percent Christian, with smaller reported religions making up the remainder. These figures establish affiliation at the census date, not the intensity of ritual life. Contemporary public ritual must therefore be reconstructed from census data together with institutional records, festival calendars, municipal arrangements, tourism documentation, observation, media and historical comparison.