God's Wealth, Legal Frames and the Question of Material and Immaterial Heritage

On Monday June 10th Professor Anindita Chakrabarti of IIT Kanpur will give a lecture titled "God's Wealth, Legal Frames and the Question of Material and Immaterial Heritage," an event cosponsored by the Center for Religion and Heritage and the Institute of Indian Studies. 

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Abstract

With a focus on the Sree Padmanabhaswamy temple in South India as a site of worship as well as a repository of enormous quantity of treasure, this lecture will demonstrate the deeply litigious journey of the concept of sacred possession and heritage. It also shows how the evolving and complex logic of secular governance in India provides the legal vocabulary for this contestation. While the enormous treasure trove housed in the six chambers of the temple’s basement ‘belongs’ to the idol, Lord Sree Padmanabhaswamy, the royal family of Travancore has held the right for over the last two hundred and seventy years to control the wealth as the Lord’s servants (dasa). Though the dispute over what is arguably the world’s largest temple gold and valuables collection began in 2007, it gained widespread media attention in 2009 through what is known in India as public interest litigation (PIL). Since then, the royal family, temple management, and other stakeholders have been embroiled in the struggle for possession and control of the temple wealth. The paper explores how legal frames (creations of Anglo-Hindu law and postcolonial legality), material patrimony (gold and land), and notions of immaterial heritage (shebaitship) animated and framed this contestation.

Information: crh rug.nl