Religious Change and Public Ritual

Research record

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.

Section index

1. 137.1 From religious affiliation to lived public religion
2. 137.2 Why public ritual is a particularly sensitive indicator of social change
3. 137.3 The scale of public religion is not the same as the size of a religious population
4. 137.4 Chhath as a household vow transformed into shared public infrastructure
5. 137.5 Women’s labour, authority and visibility in Chhath and other vows
6. 137.6 Ritual ecology: rivers, ponds and the politics of clean water
7. 137.7 Vivah Panchami turns sacred narrative into a transborder public event
8. 137.8 Janakpur’s sacred ponds and temples are also an urban public-space system
9. 137.9 Pilgrimage and public ritual overlap but should not be collapsed
10. 137.10 Neighbourhood puja committees and the associational form of religion
11. 137.11 Ram Navami, Durga Puja and the changing visual grammar of the street
12. 137.12 Muslim public religious life extends beyond a single festival calendar
13. 137.13 Muharram and processional memory reveal the layered history of public space
14. 137.14 Shrines, urs and vernacular devotional networks complicate formal categories
15. 137.15 Buddhist and Jain ritual in Vaishali links local heritage to global religious publics
16. 137.16 Anga’s Ganga corridor links regional devotion to long-distance pilgrimage
17. 137.17 Cultural rites such as Sama-Chakeva show why “religious” needs careful definition
18. 137.18 Caste and status shape access to ritual resources without determining all participation
19. 137.19 Migration changes ritual finance, timing and expectations
20. 137.20 Digital media produces a second public around the ritual event
21. 137.21 Sound technology changes the radius of public religion
22. 137.22 Markets and sponsorship are embedded in ritual without exhausting its meaning
23. 137.23 Municipal government is now part of the ritual apparatus
24. 137.24 Route governance and security make public ritual a negotiated civic right
25. 137.25 Environmental regulation is changing materials as well as spaces
26. 137.26 COVID-19 exposed how much ritual depends on physical co-presence
27. 137.27 Public ritual can carry regional identity without being reducible to identity politics
28. 137.28 Religious change includes institutional revival, not only conversion or secularization
29. 137.29 Measurement requires layered evidence and explicit limits
30. 137.30 Conclusion: continuity is being reproduced through new public infrastructures

Cite this record

Gajendra Thakur. “Religious Change and Public Ritual.” Videha Digital Research Archive: Mithila–Vajji–Anga. Videha — https://www.videha.co.in/ · ISSN 2229-547X · GitHub mirror: https://videha-ejournal.github.io/videha/ · Digital Research Archives on GitHub: https://github.com/videha-ejournal. https://videha-ejournal.github.io/mithila-vajji-anga/records/history/social-137/