The Migrant Priests of the Tamil Diaspora Hindu Temples: Caste, Profiles, Circulations and Agency of Transnational Religious Actors

Abstract

Based on biographic interviews conducted in Mauritius and Toronto, this article proposes to shed light on the Hindu temple priests who migrate from South India and Northern Sri Lanka to meet the ritual needs of the overseas Tamil communities. It is argued that paying a specific interest in these “migrant priests” makes it possible not only to get to know these transnational ritual specialists better, but also to identify some important trends and concrete mechanisms of the transnationalization of Hinduism. Most of these migrant priests belong to the same Brahman subcaste (the Śivācāryas), which echoes the broader trends of Brahmanization of global Tamil Hinduism on the one hand, and of duplication of existing specific temples, on the other. Yet, all these priests have neither the same migration profile nor the same social status: they can either be economic migrants salaried by overseas temple committees, religious entrepreneurs managing their own temples, or political refugees. The migrations of the latter testify to the influence of Sri Lanka’s civil war on the transnationalization of Hinduism, whereas those of economic migrants reveal a major change in the representations of migrations from the perspective of Brahmans, who have long avoided travels outside India. Similarly, the upward social mobility of entrepreneur priests who preside over their own temple abroad confirms the opportunities for empowerment offered by transnational migration to this caste of priests. Finally, alongside the overseas temple committees, the gurus of (agamic) schools of priests, and the state of the host countries that regulates minority religions and the presence of foreign religious actors on their territory, these migrant priests actively take part to the structuring of diaspora temples’ life, but also, more broadly, to a large part of transnational Tamil Hinduism.