Abstract

Based on extensive fieldwork carried out in Medan and its region in the early 1990s, this chapter considers Hinduism as practiced by the descendants of the Tamils who migrated to North Sumatra in the late nineteenth to twentieth century and illuminates some aspects of the relationship between migration, ethnicity, and religion. I start from the assumption that when divinity is relational, embodied, and immanent (therefore localized), and when its importance and permanence depend on rituality (like in Hinduism) rather than on abstract and personalized constructs such as faith, its migration necessarily rethinks bodies, materials, landscapes, and notions of the self. I first describe how early ritual experiences contribute to the creation of a visual and sensorial universe which links embodied feelings and self-perception to a larger horizon of supernatural power or powers, and turns them into a religious experience. I then pay attention to how rituality enabled the Tamils to think their migratory trajectory before “the migrant” became a trope and a major figure of the modern world and before “diaspora” became an acknowledged civil and political construction. I interrogate sensorial memory and its constitution.

Keywords: Hinduism, migration, embodied religion, Indonesia, diaspora, sensorial memory