Abstract

 It was in 1936 that the first Bharat Mata temple was established. Bharat Mata literally meaning Mother India came into the fold of religious veneration through this construction. Years later, in post-colonial India, two more Bharat Mata temples sprung up one in 1983 and the other in 2018. These temples located in the Hindu holy pilgrimage sites of Banaras, Haridwar, and Ujjain, symbolises the nation by anthropomorphising the territory. The paper analyses how it is not just enough to ‘imagine the nation’ but that one needs to ‘darshan’ it as well. The relationship between the nation-divine and its citizen-devotee has been established through ‘darshan’ which refers to a two-way process of seeing that stimulates a strong connection between the two and thus the latter is imbued with feelings of patriotism. Drawing from the field study, the paper will discuss how Bharat Mata temples construct a space for themselves in the plethora of invented traditions that one sees in popular Hindu religious spaces. The paper looks into the varied representation of Bharat Mata, the map of Akhand Bharat, the rituals and practices, the Bharat Mata ‘aarti’, colours that are used, flags, statues of other gods, goddesses, and nationalist icons, temple structures, the management organisation of the temple, etc.  The narratives derived from the ‘temple publics’ help in explaining the question of how nationalism has been constructed into a new kind of religion.