Reconceptualizing the Archive: Religious Buildings as Transcultural (Counter)Archives

Abstract

This paper conceptualizes religious buildings as (counter)archives that encapsulate the socio-cultural and political dynamics of their time and place. Archives—whether understood as collections of texts or material objects—serve as repositories of social memory, preserving interactions between communities, artifacts, and their environments. Extending this concept to built structures raises critical questions about accessing information from these archives, particularly concerning categorization, framing, interpretation, agency, and power. By positioning religious buildings as (counter)archives, this paper challenges the rigid sectarian divides and binaries, such as ‘Indic’ versus ‘non-Indic,’ that have historically shaped their classification in postcolonial India. It foregrounds the ‘living’ aspects and collective memories embedded in these spaces, emphasizing their dynamic role as arenas where transcultural negotiations, shared practices, and exchanges unfolded. These counter-archives resist hegemonic nation-state narratives, offering insights into relationality and the collective foundations of knowledge and traditions—an approach hitherto underexplored in the Indian context. The study proposes a methodological framework rooted in transcultural, decolonial, and interdisciplinary approaches, illustrated through select case studies from the western coast of India.