Struggles for Hindu Sacred Space in the Netherlands: Affect and Absence

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Priya Swamy (National Museum of World Cultures, the Netherlands) Paul-François Tremlett (The Open University UK)

Struggles for Hindu Sacred Space in the Netherlands

Name: Struggles for Hindu Sacred Space in the Netherlands
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ISBN: 9781350372566

Affect and Absence

Priya Swamy (National Museum of World Cultures, the Netherlands), Paul-François Tremlett (The Open University UK), John Eade

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English

Bloomsbury Academic
30 April 2026

Hindu life & practice

Series: Bloomsbury Studies in Religion, Space and Place

This book asks us to consider what is absent, rather than what is present, when studying religions. Priya Swamy argues that absent religious spaces are in themselves abstract locations that painfully memorialize feelings of shame, oppression and marginalization. She shows that these ‘traumas of absence’ – the complex, entwined and emotional responses to absent spaces – can be articulated through mob violence and destruction, but also anticolonial struggles or human rights issues.

This study focusses on the absence of temples across the global Hindu diaspora, taking the tumultuous narrative of the Devi Dhaam community in Amsterdam Southeast as a central location to detail the over thirty-year struggle to build a Hindu temple in a neighbourhood of vibrant mosques and churches. In 2010, their makeshift space was pulled away from them, provoking tears among elderly devotees, rage among board members and devastation in the wider community. Leaving their goddess with no place to live, some devotees feared for the dangerous repercussions that would follow from uprooting a divine presence from its home.

By exploring the ways in which the trauma of absent religious spaces has become a formative aspect of localized but also globalized Hindu identity, this book rethinks the way that empty lots, piles of rubble and abandoned buildings around the world are themselves powerful monuments to the trauma of absent temple spaces that mobilize campaigns for Hindu spaces.

By: Priya Swamy (National Museum of World Cultures the Netherlands)
Edited by: Paul-François Tremlett (The Open University UK), John Eade
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 232mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 14mm
Weight: 280g
ISBN: 9781350372566
ISBN 10: 1350372560
Series: Bloomsbury Studies in Religion, Space and Place
Pages: 192
Publication Date: 30 April 2026
Audience: College/higher education , Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

1. Introduction: Layers of Absence 2. Secular Worldviews and Hindu Religious Space 3. Makeshift Religious Spaces 4. Return as Reparation post -2010 5. Epilogue: Absence, Diaspora and Hindu 'Feelings' Bibliography Index

Priya Swamy is Curator of Globalisation and South Asia at the National Museum of World Cultures, the Netherlands.

Reviews for Struggles for Hindu Sacred Space in the Netherlands: Affect and Absence

""Priya Swamy brings us to a twice-displaced Hindu diaspora community in the Netherlands, whose history of indentured labour still resonates. By exploring ""absent"" Hindu temples in a neighbourhood in southeast Amsterdam, Swamy's theoretically sophisticated approach to today's post-colonial realities opens important new vistas for the study of Hindu diaspora."" --Corinne Dempsey, Professor of Religious Studies, Nazareth College, USA