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Displacement of over 300,000 Hindu Kashmiri Pandits from the Kashmir Valley in late 1989 and early 1990 under conditions of political unrest and resettlement (largely in Jammu city) offer an opportunity to deepen our understanding of processes shaping the sacred geography of a displaced community. It reveals how collective memories of a community (re)create multiple social, religious and cultural organizations and how such spaces perpetuate identity and continuity of life through embodied practices. I examine the processes through which an ethnic group rediscovers its religious world and creates religious landscapes to (re)produce religious rituals in a quest to perpetuate distinct identity and continuity of spiritual life. It illustrates how religious worlds exhibiting continuities, discontinuities and innovations in beliefs, rituals and traditions trigger divergent meanings in the making of community formation. It also demonstrates the way (re)produced religious life implicates space, place and religious landscape in the new milieu. The research gives special attention to the role of replicas in the spiritual life of a displaced community and offers empirical insights into the dialectical conflict which can arise in a community due to divergent intergenerational geographical imaginations of the homeland's sacred space. The discussion is structured in four sections; the belief systems and religious spaces of Kashmiri Pandits in their original homeland; the political circumstances in which they migrated from the Kashmir Valley; the role of collective memories in the production of new sacred geographies; and the dialectics of the new produced religious landscape.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-9376-6_20

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