The Temples of the Demon

This is a travel memoir, with some illustrations through photo collages and drawings. The content is based on the author’s fleeting encounters with the rural cultures of indigenous (adivasi) Santal communities in a settlement called Para, located on the Chotanagpur Plateau in eastern India while working for a school run by a nonprofit organization. Honing in on displays of regional folk art on adivasi mud huts, the essay goes on to map a folktale orally passed down and subsequently written by the schoolchildren ascribing the building of two local temples to a mysterious demon or rakshasa. These temples turned out to be from the Mughal era and are currently being restored by the Archaeological Survey of India. These narrative tensions are poised further between the frugal yet ecologically sustainable lifestyles of indigenous communities of the Chotanagpur Plateau and the material prosperity embedded within the so-called steel cities and towns dotting the industrial belt on the plateau. Drawing from the author’s later residence in the urban cosmopolis of Frankfurt, Germany, the author reflects on the schoolchildren’s recording of the folktale as a descendant of practices of folklore collection pioneered within German Romanticism, and suggests further prospects of dialogic engagement with indigenous and rural communities.