The Control of 'Sacred' Place: Conflicts Over the Mahabodhi Temple at Bodhgaya in Northern Bihar, India, from 1874 till 2012

Abstract

This study examined the historic and ethnographic accounts of the on-going religious contestations over the status of the Mahabodhi Temple complex in Bodhgaya and its surrounding sacred landscape to critically analyze the working and construction (and re-construction) of sacredness and also to illustrate the responsive processes for incorporation of the on-going contestations in Bodhgaya, which now finds itself as the focus of transnational political conflict. This endless contestation of sacredness and its meaning per se should not be seen as the `death? of the Mahabodhi Temple; on the contrary, it illustrated the vitality of the on-going debate on the meaning, understanding, and use of the sacred in Indian context. This study also attempted to make a ground up assessment of ways in which human participants in the past and present responded to and interacted with this sacred place.