Embodied Pilgrimage and the Social Life of Ritual: A Study of the Balaji Dhwaj Yatra

Abstract

This study reconceptualises Hindu pilgrimage through an ethnographic study of the Balaji Dhwaj Yatra. A village-based journey from Mandothi (Haryana) to Mehndipur Balaji (Rajasthan), this work challenges dominant discourses around pilgrimage as primarily concerned with the experience of liminality, communitas and symbolic transformation. It proposes an analytic framework centred upon lived religion, the body and affect. Based on qualitative fieldwork the study examines how ritual practice is constituted through the interplay of discipline, performativity, and social negotiation. The yatra operates by a twofold logic. On the one hand, there are strict regulatory norms governing the continuous movement of the sacred flag. simultaneously, there are carnivalesque forms of excess that suspend everyday constraints (Bakhtin 1984). This sets up a conditional social space in which normative expectations, especially those around masculinity are reworked (Chowdhry 2005). The pilgrimage is an opportunity for intergenerational convergence for men who live socio-economically marginal lives and allows them to express vulnerability and reconstitute their sense of self. Further, “shram” (toil) serves as a ritualized act of purification and a mode of affective release, linking bodily exertion with processes of psychological and social reconstitution. Overall, by placing the emphasis upon the bodily/affective aspects of ritual, this work will contribute to the development of pilgrimage studies and broader sociological debates surrounding gender, rural transition and religiosity. It argues that localized pilgrimages represent critical spaces where social anxieties, identities, and forms of agency are actively negotiated.