Global Religious Projects with Local Reach: Glocal kavadi and Hinduism in La Réunion

Abstract

Global Hinduism involves a multi-faceted relation between religion and globalization. Different approaches to the Tamil ritual practice of carrying kavadi in the French overseas department in La Réunion illustrate how global Hinduism entails both standardizing processes and locally contextualized meaning-making. The orientation toward India and Hinduism as a world religion by some Reunionese descendants of Indian indentured laborers since the 1970s suggests religious aspirations as driving forces behind globalizing processes. At the same time, possibilities of belonging to India remain limited. For many Reunionese, their turn toward India in their religious practices and travels serves them above all for their origin-conscious self-positioning in the Reunionese society. This includes carrying kavadi without relating it to India and without creating a diasporic consciousness. The Reunionese case suggests global Hinduism as locally emerging, and it highlights the importance of emotional experience. The article is based on long-term anthropological fieldwork in La Réunion.

Introduction

Tears run down Lakshmi’s cheeks as she is deeply moved when receiving the benediction of her elders to join the procession that soon leaves the riverside in the forest. A few sunrays shine through the lush green of the trees on the glade covered with numerous individually crafted kavadis and devotees, most of them wearing rose-color clothes. Lakshmi, thirty-one years old, has covered her mouth with a rose-color cloth, which symbolizes her vow of silence for the god Mourouga (Tamil: Murukaṉ). The color of her tunic and trousers is rose as well—the color many Reunionese Hindus associate with Mourouga. When the procession starts, Lakshmi’s partner helps her to heave her kavadi (Tamil: kāvaṭi, see Figure 1) on her shoulders, a wooden structure that she has decorated together with several family members until yesterday. Among about 900 devotees, Lakshmi carries her kavadi barefoot from the river through the forest into town to the Siva Soupramanien temple. It is a Taï Pousam Kâvadi ¹ (Tamil: Taippūcam kāvaṭi) procession in La Réunion. Several weeks later, Lakshmi speaks with much passion about her experience of carrying kavadi for the first time. After having carried her kavadi the entire procession, she found it the hardest to queue in front of the temple under the hot sun for a long time. Once she could finally enter the temple, Lakshmi felt utter relief and joy and posed her kavadi and offered her thanks to the deity. She narrates her carrying kavadi as a highly emotional experience to me. When I ask her toward the end of our long conversation about her relation to India, she says rather hesitantly: “India, it’s the land of my ancestors, but at the same time it’s so far away, and for now, I do not feel like visiting India yet. . . . It’s not the curiosity that I lack, it’s the misery [poverty there] that I [would] have difficulty confronting.” ²

Figure 1.

Decorated kavadis before the procession starts.

Tears run down Bhavani’s cheeks when her tongue and cheeks are pierced with a small metal lance, a symbol associated with the god Mourouga. Several hundred devotees, most of them wearing rose-color clothes, prepare themselves and their ritual objects on the beach under a blazing sun. At the sea front, some bathers lie in their bikinis. Bhavani, twenty-three years old, keeps drying her nose and eyes with a tissue. A priest and six male assistants come by to conduct prayers in front of her milk pot and other ritual offerings placed on a banana leaf (e.g., see Figure 2). When the procession starts, Bhavani places the milk pot on a small round cushion on her head and walks barefoot on the hot asphalt road from the beach through the town to the Narasimhâ temple. It is a Sittiraï Kâvadi (Tamil: Cittirai kāvaṭi) procession in La Réunion. Later, Bhavani’s mother tells me that the particular Mourouga in today’s kavadi organizing temple is actually associated with yellow, and rose color is rather the color associated with the Taï Pousam month than with a god, but most people still wear rose color. Several weeks later, Bhavani tells me that kavadi for her is a beneficiary experience of overcoming the self, like passing a challenge. However, she has been disappointed by the lack of emotional experience during kavadi in this Reunionese temple in the previous years, and tells me how different and much more rewarding her experience was when she carried kavadi in Pajani Malai, ³ an important Mourouga temple in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu.

Figure 2.

Preparing milk pots and other offerings before the kavadi procession starts.

Lakshmi and Bhavani are two young Reunionese Hindu women who have carried kavadi for the god Mourouga. Kavadi is a popular festival in many parts of the Tamil diaspora, in particular the Taippūcam kāvaṭi, which is a large and well-known event in Malaysia, Singapore and other places. In La Réunion, kavadi is usually associated with a recent orientation toward India by Reunionese Hindus, in contrast to religious practices that have been performed continuously since colonial times by indentured laborers and their descendants, such as fire walking for the goddess Pandialé (associated with Draupadi, Tamil: Tiraupati) or festivals for the goddess Karly (Tamil: Kāḷi), which are considered as deeply embedded in the plantation context. The kavadi organizing temples are considered “big” temples in La Réunion, which are constructed or renovated in south Indian architecture in urban areas, and wherein Brahmin priests perform the rituals. The “big” temples are differentiated from “small” temples built in Reunionese creole architecture near the plantations, wherein Reunionese priests perform the rituals. In addition to performing Hindu ritual practices with institutional and symbolic connections with India, both Lakshmi and Bhavani have Indian names, ⁴ which reflect the importance that their parents attribute to India and Hinduism, in contrast to many other Reunionese Hindus who have names such as Marie or Jean that reflect the French national context with the historical importance of the Catholic Church. And yet, the young women reveal what appear as opposite stances toward India. While Lakshmi has never been to India and does not attribute any particular importance to it, Bhavani has carried kavadi in India and is proud of being able to compare both experiences.

The different ways in which Reunionese Hindus relate to India reveal what may seem at first glance as a paradoxical relation between religion, globalization, and diaspora. On the one side, rather than globalization merely impacting religion and leading to religious transformations, the Reunionese case shows that religious aspirations can work as driving forces behind globalizing processes. After sparse contact with India since the arrival of Indian indentured laborers in colonial La Réunion, some Reunionese Hindus have oriented themselves toward India since the 1970s. What had started with interest in religion as the key motor behind this recent orientation has eventually developed into broader relations with India and in the creation of a diasporic consciousness amongst some Reunionese.

On the other side, such translocal interactions and global identificatory aspirations have very local outcomes. “Translocal” in this article refers to practices in and interactions between different places. It is distinct from “global,” which points toward some of my interlocutors’ aspiration to relate to Hinduism as a religion that originates in India and exists worldwide. Identification with global Hinduism and India is more important for people’s self-positioning in the local Reunionese society than it would actually allow them to interact with Indians and to live translocal lives that span across the Indian Ocean. This is also due to the fact that attempts to create a sense of belonging to India or other parts of the diaspora often entail obstacles and challenges. Those who develop profound skills for transcultural navigation are a minority.

The diverse ways of relating to India raise questions about diaspora and global Hinduism. ⁵ Rather than migration ultimately leading to diaspora, diaspora entails a politics of positioning (Hall 1994), a consciousness (Clifford 1994; Vertovec 2000, 146–53), a claim (Brubaker 2005). Diaspora is a subject position that one can adopt through ritual performances of memory (Johnson 2007), and it entails the creation of belonging, be it in forms of ideological discourses or emotional experiences (Eisenlohr 2016). I approach questions about diaspora in the sense of diasporic consciousness, which entails investigating about practices and discourses of relating to ancestral places and to what are perceived as ancestral religious practices and ideas. Scholarship on diaspora perceives collective memory as an important aspect of the Indian diaspora (Lal et al. 2006) and “sentimental respect if not spiritual reverence” for India as important throughout the “Hindu diaspora” (Vertovec 2000, 4). Recent writings refocus on diasporic experiences in relation to the Indian nation (Hegde and Sahoo 2018, 2). However, diasporic constellations are “complex” (Werbner 2010) in terms of heterogeneity and diverse ways of belonging, and relationships with India as a homeland are often ambivalent (Oonk 2007b). Not all Reunionese Hindus display sentimental respect or claims of belonging to India. While a visible, yet probably smaller, part of Reunionese of Indian origins who engage in similar or even the same religious practices seek contact with India, a probably larger part do not. The local Reunionese French society greatly informs my interlocutors’ self-making projects through Hindu identificatory practices.

The importance of the local has been observed in various post-indenture contexts (Reddy 2016; Younger 2010), also identified as the “old diaspora” (Bhat and Bhaskar 2007), and in other contexts where migration took place several generations ago (Oonk 2007a). The “hyphenation,” for instance of Indo-Caribbeans, illustrates multiple and contested belonging as well as differentiation from more recently migrated overseas Indians (Persaud 2015). More recent contexts of South Asian migration often result in more direct ways of creating “diaspora consciousness” (Hausner 2018).

Diaspora as a lens of study has received much critics. Claveyrolas (2023) warns that a focus on the Indian diaspora in Mauritius bears the risk of essentializing identities and overemphasizing relationships with India. Calls for new perspectives on Hinduism that overcome diaspora also address the more recently created Hindu temple space in the United States. Pintchman’s (2024) research on a goddess temple in Michigan emphasizes the interactive and creative dimensions of the translocal religious practices. Michael Baltutis favors the term “global Hinduism” over “diaspora” in his review of six books on global Hindu communities to shift the focus from relocation from India to Hindus practicing and negotiating Hinduism in different places around the world (Baltutis 2020). Yet, the idea of diaspora continues to inspire scholarship on Hindu practices. Because of the diversity in terms of both origins and places of residence, Jacobsen (2023) prefers to write about Hindus diasporas in the plural. Trouillet (2023) suggests that it makes sense to speak of a “global Hindu Tamil diaspora” with Tamil Shaivism as a shared commonality of many Tamils in different parts of the world, which reveals increasing transnational interconnections. I have argued that religious aspirations can produce different senses of diaspora and different ways of relating to India, if at all (Lang 2021), and I have emphasized the role of the ritual body in creating diasporic consciousness for those who do so (Lang 2024).

In this article, I ask what the practice of kavadi as a translocally performed Tamil religious practice with local differences in ritual, interpretation, and experience can tell us about global Hinduism and the relation between the making of world religions through global orientation projects, travelling religious practices, and locally contextualized collective and individual appropriations and forms of meaning making. Global Hinduism is not something preexisting that is then locally appropriated. Ideas and practices associated with Hinduism are created and continuously negotiated in local contexts and their translocal connections. As such, the discursive and performative making of Hinduism in colonial Trinidad included a range of actors and was closely related to the making of race (Rocklin 2019). In Guyana, ethno-religious othering includes assertions of cultural continuity (and Hindu traditions) by Guyanese Indians in distinction from Guyanese of African origins whom they attribute loss of culture (Kloß 2016, 7). In Suriname, the connection between the making of Hinduism and race is revealed in complex webs of mutual suspicion of the ethno-religious other (Strange 2021). In Mauritius, the creole context favored aspirations to identify with world religions as key aspects of ancestral cultures to escape race as the most important identifier (Eisenlohr 2022). This complex shift from race to religion is also visible in La Réunion, for instance, in a shifting terminology from Malbar to Tamoul and, to a lesser extent, Hindou. The processes of increasingly understanding Hinduism as a “world religion” in La Réunion took place in direct connection with Christianity (cf. Masuzawa 2005), as different from magic (Nicaise 2010), and as an ancestral religion that one can be proud of. It is anchored in the local Reunionese context with colonial and postcolonial accusations of sorcery and French administrational (mis)recognition of religions and ancestral cultures (Lang 2021).

In this article, I engage with questions about global Hinduism by taking a biographical and embodied approach to examining the ritual practice of carrying kavadi in La Réunion. I trace how three Reunionese took the decision to carry kavadi, how this ritual practice is embedded in their and their families’ other religious practices, their upbringing, and their personal and professional biographies. In many Reunionese embodied experiences of carrying kavadi, strong devotional relationships with the god Mourouga intersect with wishes for “advancing” in one’s (professional) life and the importance of having, displaying, and talking about intensive emotional experiences. The local or translocal practice of kavadi exemplifies how ritual practices are negotiated between standardizing processes on the organizational and mythological meaning level on the one side, and individual appropriations and locally contextualized experiences and meaning-making on the other side. Waghorne (2004, 171–230) has observed the importance of locality in the creation of temple spaces for Murukaṉ and Tamil goddesses worldwide, which she termed globalized localism. Pintchman (2024) favors translocal over local or transnational to understand the Hindu goddess and temple space in her research in Michigan. Glocal, in this article, hints at the importance to consider both the local and translocal dimensions of kavadi and the global (Tamil-specific) Hindu identificatory prospects it offers. The Reunionese case shows global Hinduism as locally emerging.

The article is based on twelve months of anthropological fieldwork in La Réunion in 2014/15 with a five-week follow-up research in 2017. The missing interest in India among many, which I remarked during the first weeks of my fieldwork, had methodological implications on how I approached people when following them in their daily lives conducting participant observation, and on how I conducted narrative, biographical interviews. Asking my interlocutors to narrate their religious lives to me resulted in life stories that often started with Catholic upbringing and which reveal that Hindu religiosity outside of India does not need to be linked to India.

In the following first two sections, I contextualize “Reunionese Hindus” and glocal kavadi. The subsequent sections analyze kavadi as illustrating religiously driven globalization, experience of India for local self-positioning, and the importance of aesthetic experiences of the practice and its embeddedness in people’s life stories. In the conclusion, I emphasize the multifaceted relationship between global projects and local outcomes.

Reunionese Hindus

Similar to other post-indenture contexts, the situation of Hindus in La Réunion differs from Hindu diasporic contexts with more recent emigration histories from India in several respects, including that most Reunionese Hindus’ preceding generations could not maintain regular contact with India and their descendants now establish a relationship with what they imagine their ancestral religion. The Reunionese case shares characteristics with many other post-indenture contexts, such as adaptations of religious practices in the colonial plantation context, the declining importance of caste, and the adoption of locally spoken languages, whereas Indian languages are almost only used in the ritual context. However, as a French overseas department since 1946, La Réunion also differs from the situation of Hindus in neighboring Mauritius and South Africa in how Reunionese Hindus negotiate religion in the French laicist state, and in that they speak French and Creole, which renders communication with Hindus in India and other English-speaking contexts more difficult. Furthermore, in contrast to more North-Indian dominated migration histories like in Mauritius, Fiji, and the Caribbean, the majority of Reunionese Hindus has South Indian origins. Next to these contextual and demographic differences, religious organization and community formation started later than in Trinidad, Surinam, and Guyana, where larger Hindu structures with ties to India were created in the first half of the twentieth century. Institutionalization of Hinduism in La Réunion still seems to be less overarching today. The French overseas departments of Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Caribbean feature structural similarities and also received more South- than North-Indian immigrants. However, they received lesser people of Indian descent in total (Singaravélou 1990), and Hinduism is more visible in La Réunion.

While religious census is not allowed in France, my interlocutors usually estimated the number of Hindous/Malbars/Tamouls at around 30% of the more than 850,000 inhabitants of the island. This estimation may entail an affirmative self-assessment. It is also problematic because the local terms Malbar and Tamoul denote Indian origins and/or Hindu religious affiliation, depending on context, and neither Hindu religion nor Indian origins are given categories in Reunionese society with people’s diverse religious orientations and ethnic origins. Reunionese society emerged from multiple forms of migration to a previously uninhabited island. In addition to the arrival of French immigrants, African, Madagascan, and Indian slaves were brought to La Réunion since the seventeenth and primarily in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They were followed by predominantly South Indian indentured laborers since the early nineteenth century, and North Indian and Chinese traders since the end of the nineteenth century. Many indentured laborers of South Indian origins worked on sugar cane plantations in the French colony. Personal and family contacts with India were sparse. Small numbers of Indian women resulted in ethnic mixing (métissage) of Indian immigrants with African, Madagascan, French, or Chinese immigrants (Benoist 1988; Marimoutou-Oberlé 2008). In the context of métissage, caste is practically absent amongst Reunionese Hindus. Only Reunionese of Gujarati origins, and Reunionese from Pondicherry who chose French citizenship when French-Indian Pondicherry became part of India in 1962, maintain connections with India through language, transnational family links, and arranged marriage. Most Reunionese do not have such concrete ancestral ties. Instead, they have ancestors from different parts of the world, which means that they may and need to choose one, or often several of the religious options that their different ancestral backgrounds allow them to pursue. Many Reunionese Hindus are at the same time Catholic—a product of the dominant role of the Catholic Church, which was closely tied with strict French colonial assimilationist politics. In addition, many Reunionese Hindus perform Madagascan or Chinese religious practices next to their Hindu practices. This also means that religion is not necessarily linked to ethnicity in La Réunion. If at all, a Tamil-Hindu ethno-religious community is in the making amongst some, but many others proudly emphasize their rich métissage and their openness toward diverse religious practices. Whatever the percentage, the diverse origins, and the multiple religiosities, Hindu religious activities are very visible in public.

The social position of Reunionese Hindus cannot be described in terms of numbers and hierarchies, as the relational field of religious, ethnic, and social identities is complex. Ethno-social hierarchies are not as clearly pronounced as between white ruling and black subordinate classes in the Caribbean (cf. Mills 2010). Ethnic differentiations and conflicts are little self-evident in the context of rich métissage, and Reunionese Hindus can be found across all of La Réunion’s social classes. Thanks to their presence in prestigious professions, including the transport business, in the town hall administration, and as teachers, lawyers or medical doctors, Reunionese Hindus are often associated with social mobility. This reputation should, however, not overshadow the difficult economic situation of many other Reunionese Hindus. La Réunion is a peculiar construct, where a high population density coincides with high numbers of unemployment and simultaneously with high living costs. The island’s economy is strongly subsidized by the French state and by the European Union. Some of my interlocutors call the department’s strong dependency of France “neo-colonial.” At the time of my fieldwork in 2015, unemployment stood at 52.4% for young people aged fifteen to twenty-four, and 24.6% for the total population. ⁶ Many young Reunionese are confronted with a combination of unemployment and extremely high living costs, with prices 7.1% higher than in Metropolitan France in 2015. ⁷

In this context of diverse social class backgrounds, especially aspiring middle-class Reunionese Hindus often pronounced the desire to “advance in life,” to which religious learning projects presented a popular tool. Distinction through knowledge about an ancestral religion, which was often accused of sorcery in colonial and postcolonial La Réunion (Ghasarian 1997; Marimoutou-Oberlé 1999, 99; Prudhomme 1984, 318) and nowadays becomes increasingly associated with a “world religion,” highlights the importance of recognition in the local context—both in terms of recognition as a religious minority in the French laicist state and in terms of social status (Lang 2021). The 1970s and 1980s presented a period of profound societal changes in La Réunion, with French socialist governments pursuing a decentralizing politics and allowing for more valorization of both local Creole culture and ancestral cultures on the island. The recent orientation toward India of some socially aspiring Reunionese Hindus has contributed to the visibility and social status of Hindu religion in La Réunion. Most works on Hinduism on the island (Barat 1989; Benoist 1998; Callandre 2009; Franchina 2018; Ghasarian 2021; Lang 2021) stress the importance of the local socio-historical context, with creolization, métissage, and other related factors on the one side, and an orientation toward India on the other.

Glocal kavadi

Kavadi can be seen as a Tamil Hindu votive practice par excellence that went global. While spread across the world, the practices of kavadi vary. In La Réunion, they include carrying a decorated wooden arch, but also milk pots and other burdens, usually on the culminating day of a ten-day temple festival during which devotees prepare themselves through fasting and praying. Often, the act of carrying kavadi includes piercing the cheeks and tongue with a metal lance, in association with Mourouga’s spear (his weapon), as well as small lances pierced through the skin on the front and arms, and sometimes the piercing of small lances and hooks with limes through the skin of the devotee’s upper body. In other places, forms of kavadi include spike kavadi (Tamil: alaku kāvaṭi), which is popular in Singapore and Malaysia, and hanging or flying kavadi, as conducted in South India and Sri Lanka.

Scholars have analyzed the practice of kavadi in diasporic contexts as an important display of Indian minority presence to claim recognition and at the same time as revealing social conflicts about class- or caste-specific perceptions of ritual practices (Clothey 2006, 176; Willford 2006, 53–83). In Malaysia, attempts at banning practices like kavadi while they gain increasing popularity reflect the desire of religious leaders to present an image of a reformed Hinduism as a minority religion in a majority Muslim country (Fuller Collins and Ramanathan 2014). In addition to these public dimensions of the kavadi festivals, interpretations of what kavadi means or does to those who carry it include dealing with fear and preventing negative happenings in Mauritius (Fibiger 2018) and mastering the self for transformation in terms of health and professional well-being and affirming social networks of support in Malaysia (Clothey 2006, 181–93). Personal histories and situations are key in experiencing kavadi (Clothey 2006, 181–93). In many cases, the more public and more private dimensions of experiencing the act of carrying kavadi seem closely intertwined and reflect the local context.

Derges (2013) argues that the rise in people performing kavadi in Sri Lanka in the 1990s, including hanging kavadi (Tamil: tūkkukkāvaṭi), is deeply embedded in the shared experiences of war, loss, and suffering. Many devotees perceive their practice of kavadi as challenging the self, and Derges notes the transformative potential of kavadi, enabling devotees to reclaim agency of their bodies and lives. More importantly, however, the shared experiences of war and suffering, which include the loss of family members, torture, rape, and injuries through bombings, turn the act of performing kavadi into a collective experience. The close connection between the rising popularity of hanging kavadi and the increased violence confirms the importance of the local context wherein specific meanings attributed to ritual practices are embedded.

While most of Derges’ interlocutors hesitate talking about their kavadi experiences on a personal level, many of my interlocutors were ready to share in great detail about their highly emotional experiences of carrying kavadi. In addition to acknowledging the affective power of carrying kavadi, the discursive dimension of openly talking about and claiming intensive positive emotions is something I observed as part of claiming pride in Hinduism in La Réunion and as part of the multiple benefits Reunionese devotees gain, and expect, and sometimes feel expected to have from these ritual practices.

In La Réunion, most devotees who carry kavadi do so in veneration of the god Mourouga, who is thought to help young people in particular. The kavadi-organizing temples in La Réunion are considered “big” vegetarian temples. The kavadi processions contribute to the sacred geography in La Réunion. They usually start from a place near water, thus a river or the sea, and end at one of the urban “big” temples.

While ten-day festivals for Mourouga in urban temples constructed by merchants are documented since the end of the nineteenth century (Benoist 1998, 60–70), the practice of carrying kavadi seems more recent in La Réunion. Frequent exchange with the neighboring island Mauritius might have influenced the arrival and increasing popularity of kavadi in La Réunion. The oldest testimony I collected is from Joseph, a retired teacher, who carried his first kavadi in 1959 and thinks to remember having seen two people carry kavadi about three years or at least one year before that.

Most kavadi carriers in La Réunion prepare themselves through ten days of fasting (Creole: karèm) and decorating their kavadi up to the day when they carry it in a procession. The decorative process is crucial in the experience of kavadi in La Réunion. Innovative designs, including meter-high peacocks (Murukaṉ’s mount) or temple-like installations on the wooden structures decorated with peacock feathers and flower petals in bright colors, require much preparation and devotion, and much room for self-expression and self-making. In some cases, the preparations start months in advance with ordering and buying the wooden arches, peacock feathers, other decorative elements, and small lances and pins for piercing in La Réunion’s “Indian shops” or with private sellers on weekly markets, which advertise via Facebook. Some also buy these materials during their trips to India or ask a family member to do so. In Singapore, I observed how one of my spike kavadi carrying interlocutors, Madhavan, carefully chose all details months in advance and assembled them after work at night in his apartment. ⁸ He tried different colors until he knew how he would paint the metal plates featuring Iṭumpaṉ, ⁹ peacocks, spears, and aum signs to be attached at the sides of the spike kavadi construction and to his body. Sinha documents such elaborate processes of crafting the kavadi in Singapore as making selves (2017). The importance of crafting the kavadi and the self stands in contrast to the use of ready-made kavadis during the Ganesh festival in Paris without the possibility to decorate the kavadis at their personal preference (Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Uniform kavadis standing in a tent overnight before being carried through the streets of Paris, 2022.

Rituals are powerful means to transform selves, which are conceptualized in culturally specific ways. Rituals can act against or separate people from their selves (Nabokov 2000), or they can help people acquire knowledge about their selves in contexts of uncertainties and mutual suspicion (Strange 2021). Questions about how people construct their selves through their practices and narrations while they search for existing selves, for instance, through roots-tourism journeys (Basu 2004), also arise in the Reunionese kavadi practices. While opting to perform what some perceive as an ancestral practice, my interlocutors’ kavadi practices are also very much oriented toward the future. Their practices remind neoliberal understandings of selves that people invest in and seek to improve (Gershon 2011). Similar to approaches on pilgrimage that emphasize different dimensions of movement (Coleman and Eade 2004), the act of moving is an important part of the kavadi practice in terms of the moving objects offered to the divinity, the moving bodies that carry them, and the devotees’ aspired lives aspired to move on.

In Vikash Singh’s (2017) participatory study of the Kanwar Yatra in northern India—where pilgrims carry decorated burdens, including pots filled with water from holy sources in honor of the god Śiva, who is related to Murukaṉ—, devotees’ wishes for recognition of the self are closely linked to economic and social exclusion and personal circumstances. At the same time, selves are set in close relation to family members. Similarly, in La Réunion, kavadi is appropriated for very personal projects, which can include wishes for health, educational and economic success, and social status for oneself or one’s family, and overcoming one’s body and experiencing one’s body and one’s relationship with the divine. Rather than being associated with low class or caste background, many aspiring middle-class devotees perform kavadi in La Réunion. With high fruit and flower prices in La Réunion and ritual objects imported from India, Reunionese kavadis are a rather costly affair. The spike kavadis in Singapore can be even costlier. Furthermore, in contrast to locations where only men carry kavadi while women carry milk pots, many Reunionese women carry kavadi. Votive rituals by women are practices of transformative power, not only in that the women receive the deity’s favor, but through the women’s bodily acts themselves, through which the women and their bodies actively create a relationship with the deity (Pintchman 2016, 316–17). In the following sections, the cases of Joseph, Bhavani, and Lakshmi reveal diverse locally embedded ways of practicing and perceiving global Hinduism.

Religiously Driven Globalization

For Joseph, who had carried his first kavadi in La Réunion in 1959, the practice of carrying kavadi had the aim of self-perfection, to advance in his self-making: “I had to refine myself to give me a shape, a stature, a rank, etc., and the kavadi was the tool, one of the first tools that allowed me to start sculpting myself.” Joseph also fire-walked for many years, but his experiences of carrying kavadi take much more room in his narration. Even though Joseph carried kavadi on a regular basis for many years, and he acknowledges that it importantly helped him “sculpting” himself, it also served him as a transitional tool to turn to what he perceives as more refined approaches to the self and to religion. Today, his week is structured by several fasting regulations, and he attributes importance to being mindful about others and himself.

Joseph says that his trips to India have influenced his approach to Hinduism, during which he mainly visited temples. We sit in the living room of his house, which displays numerous souvenir articles from different places around the world. Joseph first traveled to India in 1980. “Because it was the land (earth) of my ancestors. . . . I have kissed the earth of India.” He was happy to see that the religious practices he knew from La Réunion were the same. This made him realize that he really is of Indian origins. At the same time, his first experience of India made him like La Réunion even more. Similar to many narrations by Reunionese about their travels to India, seeing numerous beggars made a lasting impression on him. Upon his return to La Réunion, he felt rich, clean, and grateful to have enough food. Also similar to other travel accounts I recorded, he told me about the uncomfortable experience of needing to explain to Indians why he did not know Tamil. He traveled with a family member who had been staying in Pondicherry for a while and therefore could translate some conversations between Creole and Tamil. This incited him to learn Tamil later in La Réunion, but he always found other things more urgent and therefore never learned it to the extent that he could understand and speak Tamil.

Four years after his first trip to India, Joseph took his parents with him, who liked it. His father, whose father was a Hindu priest and had traveled to Mauritius, did not know how to read (in any language) and benefited from Joseph organizing the journey. His mother, who had always wanted a Catholic funeral, wanted Tamil funerary rites after their trip. Joseph also fulfilled his late great-grandfather’s wish that if someone from the family made it to India one day to bring some earth from India for his grave. The travel history of Joseph’s family, with him travelling to India first in 1980 and his parents even later, several generations after their ancestors’ migration from India, highlights the religious importance of the travels when finally made.

Although the historical labor migration and the subsequent religious adaptations to the new place demonstrate effects that globalization can have on religious experiences, Reunionese Hindus’ accounts about their travels to India, often only since the 1980s, reveal how their interest in Hindu religion led to the establishment of translocal connections with India. Consequently, this interest in religious knowledge spread to other aspects of Indian life in general. In addition to bringing out priests and temple sculptors from India, cultural items like Indian films and fashion started to be imported. Since the 2000s onward in particular, Indian consumer goods, media, and travel have increasingly become part of Reunionese Hindus’ lifestyles. While Joseph still had to stay overnight in Bombay before flying to Madras, a direct flight from La Réunion to Chennai, started in 2013, has made travel to India significantly easier and cheaper. The airline’s flyer (Figure 4) advertising the flight connection to Chennai depicts temple sculptures to symbolize India. Visiting South Indian temples is indeed the main purpose of many Reunionese Hindus’ trips to India. What had started with the establishment of religious connections has thus developed into broader economic and social connections. The image of India as it is informed by mythological accounts, emotional relationship with divinities, and the desire for religious knowledge and concomitant social status, illustrates how religious aspirations can work as a driving force behind translocal interactions. The Reunionese case shows how images of and relationships with India can change, undergoing moments of alienation and rapprochement, going beyond interest in religion, while interest in learning about divinities, mythological figures, and ritual practices often remains the key anchor of the relationship. Acknowledging religion as being about movement and place-making (Tweed 2006), and perceiving the relationships between diasporic contexts and homelands as relationships of dialogue, yet between unequal interlocutors (Matory 2006), points toward the multifaceted processes of the production of global Hinduism, Reunionese Hinduism, and ideas of India.

Figure 4.

Air Austral flyer advertising the flight connection to Chennai.

Images and Experiences of India

In the hour before the piercing at the beach, Bhavani retrieves some energy by eating a banana under the shade of a tree. An elderly tourist couple from Metropolitan France pass by and compliment her and other devotees on the beautiful clothes, asking whether it is a Tamil New Year celebration. Bhavani happily answers that this is a kavadi procession. She explains that the procession starts at a place with water, in some cases at a river, in this case at the beach. She also explains that the color rose that they are wearing is associated with the god Mourouga.

Several weeks later, Bhavani tells me with much passion about her religious practices since childhood and about her emotional experiences during her devotional practices. She narrates her life to me as we sit in her family’s house with yellow painted indoor walls, thoughtfully furnished with kitchen towels from the Provence region of Metropolitan France and statues of elephants and divinities from India. Bhavani is preparing for her entrance exam into French civil service, which will require her to work in Metropolitan France for a period of several years.

Having attended a Catholic private school, where she was told that she could not pray to her deceased father who had had a Catholic funeral, if she was not Catholic, she decided to get baptized at the age of 10. Many Reunionese Hindus have a Catholic funeral, with or without Hindu funerary rites (Lang 2020), which reflects the continuous importance of Catholic life cycle rituals, which also include baptism, first communion, and marriage. However, Bhavani always felt more comfortable in Hindu temples than in Catholic churches and her “search for God,” as she terms it, led her to carrying milk for the goddesses Marliemmen/Marliémèn (Tamil: Māriyammaṉ) and Karly (Tamil: Kāḷi) and the god Mourouga, and to receiving a mantra from Amma (Mata Amritanandamayi) in La Réunion’s Amma ashram where she went to sing bhajans (devotional songs) with her family. Later, she started fire-walking in a Marliemmen temple. Today, she combines all these practices, while fire-walking provides her with the most intensive devotional and emotional experiences.

Above all a passionate fire-walker, her narration about the fire-walking takes three times longer than her preceding narration about her kavadi experiences, with much more excitement in her voice and gestures. Her kavadi experience of carrying a milk pot for Mourouga annually includes feeling a heavy burden on her shoulders, the weight of the god, the weight of life, the weight of herself, and of her problems. The practice allows her “communication with god that is not the same as usual.” It also allows her to “overcome” herself, and passing this ordeal gives her the ability to pass other challenges in her life. Yet, she was disappointed about this year’s kavadi experience due to the little emotional benefits she gained.

Bhavani often compares Reunionese temple life to what she thinks to know about Indian temple life. For instance, complaining that in Reunionese temples money is much more important, with the rich leading the way, while suggesting that in India this happens more discretely with everyone contributing financially as much as one can. Bhavani’s positive perspective on India also includes that she never became sick in India and links this to the “pure hearts” and the “generosity” of the Indian people who, despite being poor, invited her to eat in their homes. At the same time, she often returns to the theme of poverty, and she states that it is good to remind herself that her ancestors have fled this poverty, that this is where she comes from. She adds that the indenture period is not that long ago, and that her grandmother told her that her grandmother, thus four generations before Bhavani, had still spoken Tamil. She also adds that she would like that her grandmother went to see India once “because it’s after all the country of her religion.”

During her first trip at the age of 10, when her Bharatnatyam dance teacher in La Réunion invited some of her students to a dance workshop in the south Indian state of Karnataka, Bhavani was scared because she had learned at school that it was a poor country, like China and Brazil. She indeed memorizes her first trip as “traumatizing” because of the number of beggars. When she traveled to India again ten years later, at the age of 20, she thought that it was evolving into a global economic power. With a group of young Reunionese, she visited many temples and calls it “religious tourism.” Again, one year later, she spent two months in India to do an internship with a French non-government organization. When visiting households of slum dwellers with the organization, she was impressed by the efforts that she thought the Indian government was investing in helping the poor. As we speak in 2015, she is impressed to see in the news that India will sell its petrol to La Réunion and that India buys Rafale aircrafts from France.

In addition to “religious tourism,” she also took her trips to India as opportunities to buy clothes and cosmetic products. While many of my other interlocutors’ India shopping mostly includes punjabis and saris that they would wear in the Reunionese temples, Bhavani also bought jeans, shampoo, and kayal. While she had used the English term “shopping” in our French conversation in a positive, excited way the first time she told me about her trip to India months before our interview, she later distinguished herself from those who only do “shopping” in India, using the English term in line with other English terms used by Reunionese Hindus in a derogatory way to distinguish oneself from others, like “business” when distinguishing oneself from others who link direct outcomes to their religious practices or when talking about priests who take too much money from their devotees, or “buzz” when distinguishing oneself from those who post sensational pictures of Hindu festivals on Facebook (Lang 2022).

The trip Bhavani called religious tourism included visiting Vishnu in Tirupati, Hanuman in Hampi, and Meenakshi in Madurai. She found that “magical,” especially seeing ruins of temples and realizing how old they are. Compared to many other travel narrations, Bhavani is among those whose religious tourism actually involved deeper insights. For instance, she also saw animal sacrifices in Madurai and compares it to La Réunion as using smaller goats and smaller knives. She even carried kavadi at an important Mourouga temple, in Pajani Malai.

While Bhavani’s engagement with India exceeds many Reunionese who travel to India, Bhavani also remarked that Indians “can already tell from the way we move and what we wear that we are not from India.” She mentions in particular that she did not wear flowers in her hair, and the t-shirts and shoes she wore were different from those Indian women wore. Although Reunionese Hindus try to keep up with the fashion in India, inspired by Bollywood films and French-dubbed Indian television serials screened in La Réunion, most wear Western clothes in their daily lives and only wear Indian clothes when going to the temple or to India-related events in La Réunion. In addition to these cultural differences, with little English language skills and almost no knowledge of Indian languages, most Reunionese Hindus have difficulties when communicating with Indians. Diasporic belonging is a project with many obstacles and moments of alienation, including when participating in the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas or when applying for a PIO or OCI status (Lang 2021, 102–9). Some Reunionese Hindus lament the missing interest in their island from the side of the Indian state. The challenge then becomes how to be a diasporic subject that feels expected to know about one’s origins without being recognized by the place of origin that one is associated with, without family or territorial attachment to this place.

The strategies that Reunionese Hindus develop take the form of local pride politics that concentrate around religion and that seek recognition from Reunionese society and the French state (Lang 2021, 57–86). Reunionese Hindus claim recognition as a religious minority and in terms of social status. Against assumptions that identification is separate from religion in the French laicist Republic, religion indeed offers a powerful tool for self-making, on personal, communal, and state levels. Most Reunionese conduct religious practices, such as Catholic, Hindu, Chinese, and/or other, while few declare themselves not religious. Reunionese have recently gained the possibility to live their ancestral cultures more openly, or even feel expected to know about their origins and about forms of knowledge they first need to acquire, forms of belonging they now try to create. The fact that Hinduism is not only perceived as the religion of Reunionese’ ancestors from India, but also as one of several globally existing (world) religions, is mobilized as a source of pride when claiming recognition in the local society. Despite Reunionese Hindus’ translocal interactions, which go beyond religious pilgrimages today, their India-related projects pursue very local aims. From Bhavani’s and others’ life stories, it becomes evident that their newly established connections to India contribute both to their possibility of social distinction amongst Hindus in La Réunion, and to an increased self-confidence and pride in being Hindu in Reunionese society. Religious knowledge is important in promoting the positive image of Hinduism as a world religion, which can be mobilized to claim social status. Kavadi processions are nowadays admired for their elaborate aesthetics by many Reunionese. The visibility of Hindu religion in Reunionese society also shows, for instance, in the public celebration of Tamil New Year and Deepavali festivals by Reunionese municipalities, and in debates about the allocation of public holidays. The “global” in what I call “global projects with local reach” thus refers to some Reunionese Hindus’ desire to belong to a world religion, which serves them for an origin-conscious self-positioning in the Reunionese society.

Aesthetic Experiences and Life Stories

Every time I think that Lakshmi’s kavadi is now completely decorated and I take its picture, a next decorative step follows. Her godfather ¹⁰ helped Lakshmi to cover the wooden arch with rose-color cloth. We then attached two garlands of rose color and white rosebuds we had thread in the morning to the arch. With the help of her mother, Lakshmi attaches a bouquet of peacock feathers and coconut tree leaves on each side, and three limes on the top. Later, a male cousin joins and attaches further green plants to the cover of the kavadi. When I leave in the evening after having spent an entire day with Lakshmi preparing her kavadi, she still needs to buy honey and lemons for tomorrow when she will carry the kavadi.

Lakshmi, who had said about India that “it’s so far away,” is the first of her family to have carry kavadi. Her father left the family, and she only has little contact with his new family. She grew up with her grandmother and mother. While her mother had traveled to India once, Lakshmi does not show any interest in doing so and would also not be able to afford it. At the age of thirty-one, she is the mother of a toddler, has left university without a degree and struggles to find employment, as does her partner. She had grown up with both Hindu and Catholic practices, and feels close to both today, after some tumultuous years in terms of her religious orientations. Lakshmi told me about one moment in her life when she wanted to end her Hindu religiosity before going to Metropolitan France for her studies. She performed a ritual to “return” her religion to Mourouga, Karly, and Marliemmen, offering them enormous flower bouquets and telling them that she was ending her devotional relationship with them. With her Catholic partner of Malgache (Madagascan) origins, she had her son baptized Catholic.

As part of her return to Hindu practices, Lakshmi attended rituals in Marliemmen and Karly temples. However, she fell in trance several times at one Karly temple to the dismay of her mother. Criticized by her mother, and without anyone helping Lakshmi by finding out who possesses her, which would turn this trance experience into the gift of ritual possession, a gift that brings others esteem and social status, she stopped going to Karly temples altogether. Her turn to carrying kavadi seems to cater to her search for intensive bodily devotional experiences that are acceptable to her mother. As we speak, we sit in Lakshmi’s messy subsidized flat with piles of clothes, unwashed dishes and other stuff. Two plates on pedestals with flowers, a prayer lamp, incense, rose water, and sesame oil standing in a corner that she offered as part of her preparations for carrying kavadi are the only materials in Lakshmi’s room that attest her religiosity. Her flat’s interior stands in contrast to her mother’s and her grandmother’s houses, where we had decorated her kavadi, with carefully selected interior and remarkable attention to cleanliness and tidiness, and featuring multiple material objects reflecting their Hindu religiosity, such as a calendar with all the Thaipusam festival participants listed. While her mother’s and grandmother’s houses reveal their middle-class status, Lakshmi’s and her partner’s current financial and professional uncertainties impact their everyday life.

Both Lakshmi and Bhavani have grown up in families who frequent both “big” temples, where they now carry kavadi, and “small” temples, where Bhavani fire-walks and Lakshmi used to go into trance. For both young women, who grew up without their fathers, the opinions of their mothers and grandmothers count a lot in their decision makings. It seems that Lakshmi in particular is at a point where she needs to find paths how to decide for herself what directions she wants to take in the diverse options that Hindu practices offer. Both the young women’s and their parents’ generations are concerned with the image of Hinduism that they participate in. However, the generation of their mothers seems to have been more concerned with turning toward a more vegetarian Hinduism without trance and animal sacrifices, whereas the generation of Bhavani and Lakshmi at least tries to engage in more diverse practices and tries to claim pride in them. Combining different practices, such as kavadi, fire-walking, ritual possession, animal sacrifices, and singing bhajans in one of La Réunion’s ashrams, is something that many Reunionese successfully do.

Both Lakshmi and Bhavani link their religious practices to the in La Réunion often expressed aspiration to “advance in one’s life.” In the case of Lakshmi, this expression reflects a desire for more economic success and social status. In a slightly more privileged economic position, and also eight years younger, Bhavani is concerned about pursuing her education. To both Bhavani and Lakshmi, advancing includes working toward health, well-being, and self-construction. I could observe how both Lakshmi and Bhavani retrieve well-being through the highly emotional experiences of their bodily practices of carrying kavadi.

Crafting the individual kavadi and experiencing carrying kavadi is a very emotional experience to many kavadi carriers. Talking about the emotions while carrying kavadi are important discursive elements. Lakshmi is proud to have carried her kavadi on her own the entire procession, even though her family members had helped her with the preparations at different instances in the preceding days. Lakshmi insists that her kavadi is a simple kavadi, distinguishing herself from others who carry enormous and elaborate kavadis, such as meter-high peacock-shaped flower constructions. While the makers’ and carriers’ devotion materialize in such elaborate kavadis, they are also criticized by some as showing off. Bhavani, in turn, distinguishes herself from those who only have Reunionese kavadi experiences by rating her emotional experiences of kavadi in La Réunion lower than in India. While Joseph has moved to other Hindu practices after having carried kavadi for many years and Lakshmi has not (yet) carried kavadi a second time as I meet her again two years after her first time, Bhavani has carried kavadi for many years and seems inclined to continue despite her frustration about being less emotionally rewarding than her experience of carrying kavadi in India. Her narration highlights religion as emotional experience. She receives intensive emotional experiences from carrying kavadi and also expects these from her religious practices in the first place. While Lakshmi’s kavadi experience embedded in her life story shows that global Hinduism does not require a relation with India, Bhavani’s case attests kavadi as a translocal practice that can be compared, including in terms of different emotional outcomes.

Global Hinduism

As a translocal ritual practice emblematic of global Tamil Hinduism, kavadi allows for locally-specific meaning-making in La Réunion, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, Paris, and other places. As this article shows, even within the Reunionese context, kavadi-related meaning-making takes different forms. In La Réunion, kavadi stands at the interface between multiple claims of identity and authority over religious knowledge. Considered as related to the recent orientation toward India by some Reunionese, especially when compared to practices performed since the indenture period like fire-walking, kavadi allows Reunionese devotees to experience global Hinduism and to relate their practices not only to India but also to images, for instance, of Thaipussam kavadi in Malaysia available on social media. The performance of global Hinduism through the presence of Indian Brahmin priests conducting the rituals in the “big” temples renovated according to Agamic principles also results in voices criticizing a suppression of practices as they were conducted by the Reunionese ancestors.

In La Réunion, Hinduism is an ancestral religion and at the same time a world religion. Hinduism seems particularly apt for self-making projects in this French Creole society. Hinduism facilitates a way of life that is deeply embedded in the local context while allowing for translocal identification with an elsewhere. Some Reunionese Hindus attribute importance to establishing contact with India, despite the lack of reciprocal interest from the Indian side, and although they do not intend to ever live there and often lack the language and transcultural skills to communicate effectively with Indians. Their interest in religion works as the driving force behind translocal interactions and global aspirational identificatory practices, while it primarily serves as a means for self-positioning in their own society. Such turns toward ancestral cultures, with a view to acquiring religious knowledge and prestige, emerged in many places around the world since the 1960s and 1970s—a time of important identity negotiations and emerging multicultural politics partly favored by the decline of colonial hegemonic power. The case of the Tamil Hindu practice of carrying kavadi in La Réunion demonstrates how religious practitioners can relate to and thereby create a global religion by reaching out across translocal borders and by creating translocal connections to then forge very locally embedded ways of ritual self-making.

Among those who carry kavadi, some consciously partake in the performance of global Hinduism, whereas others engage in the same practices without drawing these connections. The case of Lakshmi demonstrates that global Hinduism does not require belonging to India. In both cases, and the many nuanced positions in between, the emotional experiences of carrying kavadi stand at the forefront of Reunionese lived experiences and narrations. What served Joseph as a transitional tool for self-perfection presented a way of returning to religion after having given it up for Lakshmi and provides Bhavani with repeated experiences of overcoming the self. In all three cases, the practice of carrying kavadi allows the devotees for self-transformation.

The biographical and embodied approach taken in this article highlights the importance of felt and displayed emotions during and after carrying kavadi. Different atmospheres in specific societies facilitate different emotional experiences during kavadi. In contrast to dealing with suffering in Sri Lanka without much talking about it, as analyzed by Derges, the Reunionese society engenders a situation wherein wishes to have intensive experiences and to overcome the self or/and unemployment (Mourouga is considered to help young people in their professional careers) fall together with the possibility to claim pride in Hinduism as a justified emotion after having endured sorcery accusations and unequal power relations in the past. In addition to the affective dimensions of these emotions, their discursive importance shows in the ways people talk about emotional experiences. Religious aesthetic and emotional experiences are standardized to a certain extent. For instance, claiming to carry a small, modest kavadi instead of a big kavadi, which is deemed as showing off, is part of a discourse I heard multiple times. The sequence of different emotions during the act of carrying kavadi, emphasizing the hardship of carrying it and the relief after having succeeded, is also recurrent. At the same time, experiences and narratives thereof are deeply embedded in the practitioners’ personal life stories. Global Hinduism in La Réunion offers a tool for self-making that pays attention to the bodily and emotional dimensions of aspired selves. Kavadi caters to the desire for such emotional experiences that are grounded in personal, local societal, or global aspirations. Being documented in numerous parts of the world, yet performed as part of different meaning-making processes, kavadi creates global Hinduism translocally.