My fieldwork on Srilankan Tamils in Germany was conducted in yearly visits of a few months at a time, from 2009 to 2013. The annual temple festival at Hamm was one of its highlights. This diaspora’s identity was being shaped by traditional Tamil devotionalism interacting with issues of survival in Germany as well as the politics of militant Tamil nationalism in Srilanka. The vigorous temple building activity exemplifies this. The Kamakshi Ambal temple in Hamm, inaugurated in 2003, is the largest Hindu temple in Europe, built in the classical Dravida style. Its everyday activities, annual festivals and processions embody spectacularly, the interlacing of religion, culture and politics. It is a fascinating story. From a humble and tentative start, the refugee community grew and established itself through passion and perseverance. Facing hostility from and later winning the confidence of the locals; its charismatic chief priest’s struggle to get permissions for holding processions in public space and it eventually became a prominent as a pilgrimage and tourist destination for Tamils from all over Europe. The temples in Germany, except the Ganesha temple in Berlin, are built and are managed by Srilankan Hindu Tamil communities. The temples have not merely channelized devotion through community worship, but also acted as centres for disseminating culture and psychological anchoring. They have helped in defining a diasporic identity of self-respect and militance in the face of the violent politics of Srilanka and its echoes in the diaspora.
A Visual Diary
The celebrations of the annual chariot festival at the Kamakshi temple in 2013 were conducted with ritual and ceremony similar to the traditional Amman (devi) temple traditions in Tamilnadu and Srilanka. Invocations in Sanskrit and Tamil. Nadaswaram music with its striking thavil percussion. The beautiful utsava icon of Kamakshi ambal being carried in procession with reverence, the magnificent chariot rolling out and around the temple.
Chief priest leads procession
The temple chariot about to roll out
Chariot rolls on
Curious locals
The honour of being in the first batch to pull the chariot is for the Mayor of Hamm who is suffused with the infectious emotion of the crowd. Hundreds of devotees throng around the chariot, enacting rituals of penance and piety. Some carry kavadis on their shoulders, some with cheek and back pierced, women walk with pots of milk on their heads. Rows of men, bare chested, in a single waist cloth doing angapradakshinam by rolling on the ground and circumambulating the temple.
Shops spring up around the temple
A ready market for ethnic produce
Patient devotees
Phalanx of Kavadi bearers
Images © Kamala Ganesh
The extraordinary fanfare, suffused with passion and nostalgia, is simultaneously making a loud and colourful assertion about the Tamils’ right as ‘good’ immigrants to enact their traditions in German public space.
2020a “Complicating ‘Victimhood’ in Diaspora Studies: The Saga of Tamils in Exile.” Sociological Bulletin 69(3): 313-330. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038022920963328
2018a “The Call of Home and Violence of Belonging: Diasporic Hinduism and Tamils in Exile,” in Elfriede Hermann and Antonie Fuhse (eds.) India Beyond India: Dilemmas of Belonging, Volume 12, Göttingen Series in Social and Cultural Anthropology, Göttingen University Press, 195-210.
2015 “Beyond Diasporic Boundaries: New Masculinities in Global Bollywood” (jointly with Kanchana Mahadevan), in Rajinder Dudrah, Elke Mader and Bernard Fuchs (eds.) SRK and Global Bollywood, Oxford University Press: New Delhi, 98-121.
2014 “From Sanskritic Classicism to Tamil Devotion: Shifting Images of Hinduism in Germany,” in Ester Gallo (ed.) Migration and Religion in Europe: Comparative Perspectives on South Asian Experiences, Ashgate: Burlington USA, 233-248.
2013 “Switzerland” (jointly with Christopher McDowell), in Peter Reeves, Rajesh Rai and Hema Kiruppalini (eds.) Encyclopedia of the Sri Lankan Diaspora, National University Singapore: Editions Didier Millet, 137-144.
2013b “No Shri Ram in Lanka: Hinduism, Hindutva and Diasporic Tamils in Exile,” 21st Smt. Nabadurga Banerji Endowment Lecture, The Asiatic Society of Mumbai, March 3, 2011; published in Arvind Jamkhedkar, N.B. Patil and K. Sankaranarayanan (eds.) Journal of the Asiatic Society of Mumbai, Vol. 85, 13-18.
2011 “Diaspora, a Mirror to Indian Diversity? Caste, Brahmanism and the New Diaspora,” in N. Jayaram (ed.) Diversities in the Indian Diaspora: Nature, Implications and Responses, Oxford University Press: Delhi, 173-190.
2008b “Intra-community Dissent and Dialogue: Bombay Parsis and the Zoroastrian Diaspora,” Sociological Bulletin, Journal of the Indian Sociological Society, 57(3), Sept–Dec 2008, 315-336.