Understanding Mumbai’s Sacred Sites as Palimpsests
As part of the Global Past Student exchange program, I attended IIT Bombay. I had the opportunity to closely work with Professor Smriti Haricharan, whose research interests overlap with mine on the themes of material culture and placemaking. During the first phase of my visit (August 2025), we discussed scholarly works on material culture, particularly from an archaeological perspective. These conversations were intellectually stimulating as they helped me think of material culture beyond the study of objects, but as a process of memory, temporality, absence, and archaeological perspective. In the second half of my visit (January-Feb 2026), I had the opportunity to audit Prof Haricharan’s course on ‘Humans and Landscapes across Deep Time.’ The course discussions centred around human interactions with landscape, map-making, and colonial cartographies and their limits, and the relationship between temporality and landscape. My time in Bombay during the fieldwork year was intellectually generative as it provided a theoretical scaffolding through which I could read diverse scholarly work and think alongside my ethnographic material. I also gained familiarity with perspectives of palimpsests and layering of sacred sites as I am working on mapping sacred sites through material remains in Bengal.
The fieldwork year can often be isolating as one is removed from the intellectual community and discussions that sustain academic life. My time at IITB provided me with a scope to engage with scholars, discuss our research, and organize reading groups around shared themes of interest. These experiences made the exchange enjoyable and intellectually stimulating, allowing us to learn about region-specific sites, share fieldwork experience, and gain diverse perspectives on related questions and methodologies.
Haji Ali Shrine | Landscapes that trace the presence in absence
The precinct of the entombed saint, a place where the invisible insists in being sensed. Photographs by Poulami Das, January 2026.
Bombay, as a city, is culturally diverse and historically rich, which has also allowed me to have immersive experiences beyond the formal academic setting. One of the most memorable experiences was listening to qawwali at the Haji Ali shrine overlooking the Arabian Sea and experiencing the shrine’s devotional life, which aligns with my research interest in shrine-based practices and ritual life. In addition, the Elephanta caves, a rock-cut architecture site dating back to the 5th – 6th centuries, are an exciting space to think about pre-modern art, architectural construction, and material expression of religious ideas. As I was reading extensively about space, these visits were definitely beneficial, particularly for understanding both pre-modern sites and the forms of engagement with sacred and historical landscapes in the present.
Elephanta Caves | An expansive landscape of pre-modern art, architecture, and religious imagination carved into stone
Photographs by Poulami Das, January 2026.
I genuinely believe that such exchanges make research on the Global South more encompassing through intellectual engagement across regional contexts and disciplinary methodologies and provide the possibility of situating work within broader conversations that transcend national and institutional boundaries.
Poulami Das is a PhD Candidate at the Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto. Her PhD dissertation focuses on ghāzī saints in Bengal, often translated as ‘warrior,’ while remembered as a Sufi pīr (saint) and local protector. Focusing on the built space of the shrine, material culture, and ritual practices, Poulami examines how these ghāzī shrines serve as sites of cultural and religious memory for the communities of practice in contemporary times.