Gauri Bharat2025-02-202025-02-20FP-063-JPhttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12725/27184This paper explores the phenomenon of roadside shrines in urban India as a process of appropriation of public place legitimized in the past few decades by the rise of Hindutva politics. Roadside shrines, as the name suggests, are reli- gious structures built on paved areas, in the middle of roads, and even on unoccupied public or private land. Various, often extremely tenuous reasons lie behind their construc- tion (such as the death of a monkey, resulting in a shrine Hanuman - the monkey god). But, over time, small or large, such shrines may become firmly established within the ur- ban landscape. They gain legitimacy as sacred spaces in spite of being illegal (in that they often obstruct roads and violate urban building regulations). Yet urban authorities rarely find it in their power to dismantle them.Articlehttp://iaste.org/working-paper-series-2016/