God’s Home in a Walk-in Closet
by Ashlee Norene Andrews
Suparna greeted me with a hug and welcomed me into her suburban Chicago home on a hot June afternoon last summer. Almost immediately, she invited me upstairs to see the shrine she had created and daily maintains in her master bedroom closet.
Between shelves of folded saris and hanging clothes, Suparna has created an expansive and beautifully adorned shrine that houses the embodiments of divinity to whom she and her husband are devoted, flanked by an ancestral shelf containing photographs of deceased family members and their beloved gurus. Suparna’s husband also regularly worships deities and receives blessings from ancestors and gurus at their home shrine, but this is undoubtedly Suparna’s space. She was the shrine’s installer and remains the chief arranger, maintainer, and caretaker of the embodiments of divinity who live there.
Suparna grew up in a household that had a very simple and relaxed approach to shrine care and daily worship. For this reason, she feels comfortable saving more elaborate caretaking rituals like cooking for, feeding, and dressing home deities for special festival days. She limits her daily deity care to offering water, incense and sometimes fresh flowers, so that she can spend the majority of her time meditating upon the mantra her family guru had given her, and gazing upon and asking deities and ancestors to bestow blessings upon herself and her family.
Despite the intentional simplicity of Suparna’s daily caretaking rituals, through them she has transformed this closet into a temple. The space (and I suspect the clothes that hang within it) were filled with the smell of incense and the flowers she had offered earlier in the morning, and the expansive shrine image she has arranged, which takes up 2/3 of the room, produces the palpable feeling of a large presence; this room may store clothing, but it ultimately functions and feels like a temple. When she was first establishing her shrine, a friend had advised her against placing the shrine in her closet because it faced her bed, which meant that when she and her husband slept in bed their feet would face the deities, a widely recognized and abhorred sign of disrespect. In the end, Suparna decided to ignore the friend’s advice and establish the shrine in the closet, not only because it offered a quiet intimacy where she could focus during worship, but most importantly because she wanted the deities to be the first thing she saw when she woke up in the morning. In Suparna’s mind, the devotional intent of such a decision outweighed any long-standing socio-religious beliefs about proper ritual comportment. As I heard from many other women, Suparna told me that home shrine making and maintenance needed to be guided by ‘what felt right’, rather than strict ritual protocols if it was to express authentic devotion.
Since 2014, I have been interviewing Bengali American Hindu women living in the Chicagoland area about their home shrines and shrine care traditions in order to understand the functions these spaces and ritual labors have for them. In Bengali households, family matriarchs have historically served as the primary caretakers of the home shrine and its deities. Typically, Bengali women take over care for their in-laws’ already-established home shrine after marriage. This responsibility is assimilated with all of the domestic caretaking labors that have historically been regarded as the duties of a barir bau, the Bengali term for ‘daughter-in-law’ that significantly can also connote ‘housewife’. Because these are the same religious labors that only male, brahmin priests are authorized to perform in public Hindu temples, Bengali matriarchs have effectively served as the priests of the home.
Most of the Bengali American women I interviewed had watched their mothers or grandmothers prepare and offer cooked meals to their natal households’ shrine deities at morning and night; cleanse them with water and dress them in new clothing at the start of the day; and undress and put them to bed after evening worship. In contrast to their maternal predecessors, the women I worked with immigrated to the US without their in-laws and with only a few family deities packed into their suitcases. After immigrating to the United States, some of these women drastically limited or even rejected the home shrine traditions their in-laws might have expected them to maintain (a topic I explore more fully in my book). Yet, many others, like Suparna, developed elaborate deity collections and shrine care traditions since their immigration and in response to their lives in the US. They have arranged and maintain shrines in guest- and master- bedroom closets, in home office bookcases, on bedside tables, and in IKEA cabinets their husbands repurposed with extra shelving to hold multiple deities and ritual implements. At times, women would admit with embarrassment or regret that their shrines were not as extravagant, elaborate, or old as those they grew up with; or they would laugh at memories of their first attempt at shrine-making on moving boxes in the small apartments they first resided in after immigration. For the most part, however, women expressed pride in the unique and wholly personal nature of their shrines, and suggested that their American-made shrines reflected their ability to adapt and maintain their Bengali Hindu traditions in the United States.
The Bengali word most frequently used to refer to the home shrine is thakurghor, meaning ‘God’s room’ or ‘God’s home’, but many women chose the English words ‘home temple’ to refer to their domestic shrine space, a word choice that communicates both the function of the shrine and its importance as the preferred temple for Bengalis. Like the public temple, the ‘home temple’ houses the embodiments of divinity that demand care and provide foci for the expressions and experiences of devotion.
Importantly, women consistently told me that they prefer worshipping at home over worshipping at one of the multiple Hindu temples in Chicagoland. In these temples, as in most temples in South Asia, public ritual is mediated by trained, usually male, brahmin priests, and the massive deity forms are to be approached carefully and with awe. Women feel they better express and experience devotion to divinity at their own home shrines not only because they have built up intimate, familial relationships with their shrines’ particular divine embodiments, but also because they can be the primary ritualists. These are also the reasons why the home shrines and home shrine traditions that immigrant Hindu women create in the US are sources worthy of scholarly attention. These woman-created spaces and traditions illuminate both women’s devotional labors and their domestic religious authority, and the complexly interwoven nature of the two. Relatedly, they are sources that build upon and necessarily diversify scholarly conversations sustained by scholars like Ann Braude, Marie Griffith and Judith Casselberry that critically assess the interplay between men’s public religious authority and the devotional labors that women perform at home and in congregations.
There is one more very important reason that women prefer their home shrines to the public temple: their home shrine has personal and familial history that the temple lacks. Women tend to immigrate with few deities and collect new deities with each trip back to India and from the friends they have made in the US. Their shrines are material reminders of their ongoing connections to India, and archives that tell the story of the long and often difficult work each woman has done to make a life and set roots in the US. One woman told me that part of the pleasure of sitting in front of her shrine was that it reminded her of her strength and of all she and her husband had accomplished since immigrating. The materiality and the visuality of the home shrine enables women to both immediately catalogue and affectively experience their personal histories every day. For researchers like myself, the depth and poignancy of these archives’ histories is only fully appreciated when paired with women’s oral histories of their lives; I spent as much time asking women about their lives and family histories, as I did asking explicit questions about or viewing their shrines and shrine care traditions, understanding them as innately interconnected.
Because shrine care traditions have been a part of most women’s natal household habitus, home shrines and shrine care rituals also allow them to connect to their family and natal ethno-religious identity. Most of the women I worked with will occasionally visit the public temple, particularly on birthdays to express gratitude, or during acute life crises to communicate need to the awe-inspiring temple deities. They had seen their mothers do the same. Yet, women told me that only the home shrine provided connection to their families and particular Bengali identities. After all, there is nothing particularly Bengali, let alone familial, about most of these temple spaces. The temples in Chicagoland were built by South Indian communities and cater more to South Indian audiences in terms of the deity forms these temples house, and the aesthetics and ritual traditions the temples favor. In contrast, at home, women can perform the uniquely Bengali traditions they saw their maternal predecessors perform, worship the gurus and deities significant to their families, and memorialize their deceased loved ones. This capacity of the home shrine to connect women to family and Bengali identity was central to many women’s desire to create and maintain a shrine in the United States at all. In fact, a few women confessed that the devotional capacity of their shrine was secondary to its functions as a means of familial connection and identity expression.
Suparna’s shrine provides potent object lessons in all of these functions. In the center of her shrine, the area given the most significance, she has placed the framed deity images that her mother gave to her when she immigrated to the United States; her mother had told her that she needed the images because she was ‘going far away’. Suparna told me that beyond reminding her of the experience of immigration and everything she had overcome since, these images powerfully connected her to her family and her family’s histories and identity. In her words:
“Because my home deities have been passed on by my mom I can connect more (than at the temple). And that’s why, when I am worshipping at home, be it ten minutes, I think I am connecting more to my past. You understand? It’s like, oh my God, like I grew up sitting next to my mom when she used to worship the same picture of Kali. And she gave it to me. She passed it on to me. So it’s that connection.”
When Suparna worships at or cares for the shrine she created in her suburban Chicago home, she connects both to the family members thousands of miles away who had worshipped at the same images, as well as her family’s Bengali Hindu identity embodied in the practices of shrine care. In his study of images of Jesus in Protestant US households, David Morgan suggests that devotional images that are handed down through generations embody the collective memory and religious identity of a family; when the image is displayed in a home—the epitome of everyday identity inculturation—that family memory and religious identity are remembered and imbibed. My own research has revealed how important this kind of cultural reproduction becomes in immigrant households who may feel, as one woman put it to me, anxious that their ‘truest self’ will easily be lost while living as ethnic and religious minorities in the US. Relatedly it teaches the importance of immigrant home traditions as sources in American Religion for understanding the impacts of immigration and cultural and religious marginalization on immigrant religiosity.
For all of these reasons, Hindu women’s home shrines and shrine care traditions provoke expansions to scholarly imaginaries of ‘American Religion’ beyond the religio-national boundaries that have long dominated the field, and illuminations of immigrant and Hindu women’s oft-ignored religious expertise and labors.
Ashlee Norene Andrews is Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She is a scholar of contemporary Hindu traditions with expertise in Bengali Hindu devotional traditions as they are practiced in the geographic regions of West Bengal, India and the Midwestern United States. Her current book project, tentatively titled The Home Shrine and the Transnational World: Duty, Labor and Identity in Bengali American Hindu Home Shrine Care, explores how Bengali American Hindu women interpret and perform the feminine duty of domestic shrine care to negotiate normative womanhood, domestic labor divisions, and their Bengali American identities.