The contiguity of the divine, the human, and the object is routinely noted in scholarship on South Asia. In this article, I re-examine this model of contiguity by focusing on the vandalism of what I term a caste-iconic statue in 2008 in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, and track the effects of this incident in a village and on its caste groups until 2015. Beyond contiguity, I here offer a relational approach to studying space, caste, and statues.
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