[INDOLOGY] April 24th GCSAS Lecture Series: Shared and Contested Sacred Spaces in South Asian Colonial Spaces: European Presences and the Architecture of Religious Encounter

[Akshara Ravishankar]

Dear colleagues,



We are excited to announce the fourth lecture of the series
“More-than-Human South Asia: Ecologies, Knowledge, Bodies, and
Senses,” organized
by the Ghent Centre for South Asian Studies.



The lecture will take place entirely online *at 4:00 pm CET this Friday,
April 24th, 2026.*



More information can be found below and in the attached document, and you
can register here
<https://events.teams.microsoft.com/event/6b5d5838-5e1c-4271-99d2-2a08993aa19e@d7811cde-ecef-496c-8f91-a1786241b99c>
for
online participation.


Hope to see you there!

Title: Shared and Contested Sacred Spaces in South Asian Colonial Spaces:
European Presences and the Architecture of Religious Encounter


Speaker: Nuno Grancho

DINÂMIA’CET-Iscte, University Institute of Lisbon, Portugal

University of Copenhagen, Denmark

The Royal Danish Academy, Denmark

Indian Ocean World Centre (IOWC) at McGill University, Montreal, Canada



Abstract: This lecture examines how the built environments of South Asian
colonial cities, constructed, modified, and contested over five centuries
of European presence, produced an extraordinary laboratory of shared and
contested sacred space. Through four distinct colonial formations such as
Portuguese Goa, Danish Tranquebar, French Pondicherry, and British
Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay, it traces how the spatial logics of churches,
temples, mosques, and hybrid wayside shrines were simultaneously imposed,
resisted, appropriated, and reinvented. Drawing methodologically on the
intersection of architectural history, urban morphology, and the
anthropology of religion, the lecture argues that colonial urbanism in
South Asia did not produce simple hierarchies of dominant Christian space
over subjugated indigenous space. Instead, it generated a far more complex
and dynamic landscape in which sacred spaces became sites of negotiation,
mimicry, tactical occupancy, and creative hybridisation. Each European
colonial power carried its own theological geography — its own instinct for
where the sacred should reside in the city, how it should be demarcated,
monumentalized, and insulated from competing claims. Yet in every case, the
Indian city proved recalcitrant: older spatial logics of the Hindu
grāmadevatā system, Muslim dargah networks, and Tamil temple urbanism
persisted beneath, beside, and within the colonial overlay. The result,
across the entire subcontinent, was a proliferation of liminal sacred
architectures — shrines at crossroads, chapels at highway margins, mosques
embedded in colonial quarters, Hindu temples inserted into European street
grids — that neither colonial nor nationalist historiography has adequately
theorised. This lecture proposes that these liminal, hybrid, and often
contested architectures constitute the most honest record we possess of how
ordinary South Asians experienced the colonial city and negotiated its
spiritual geography.
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