“Vineeta Sinha’s book is a truly original and compelling study which combines railway studies, labour history and Hindu diaspora studies to tell a fascinating story about colonial railway building, Indian labour migration and Hindu religion-making in Malaysia and Singapore.” • Knut A. Jacobsen, University of Bergen
“Vineeta Sinha pioneers an inspiring new direction in the anthropology of diaspora. In this ethnographically rich, consistently insightful book, Sinha shows that the sacred landscapes forged by Indian migrant railway workers in Malaysia and Singapore have in many cases outlasted the colonial infrastructures that the labourers went to build.” • Sunil Amrith, Yale University
The notions of labour, mobility and piety have a complex and intertwined relationship. Using ethnographic methods and a historical perspective, Temple Tracks critically outlines the interlink of railway construction in colonial and post-colonial Asia, as well as the anthropology of infrastructure and transnational mobilities with religion. In Malaysia and Singapore, evidence of religion-making and railway-building from a colonial past is visible in multiple modes and media as memories, recollections and ‘traces’.
Vineeta Sinha is Professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. Her publications include A New God in the Diaspora? Muneeswaran Worship in Contemporary Singapore (2005) and Sociological Theory Beyond the Canon (with S.F. Alatas, 2017).
LC: HE3325 .S56 2023
BISAC: SOC007000 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Emigration & Immigration; SOC002010 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Anthropology/Cultural & Social; TRA004010 TRANSPORTATION/Railroads/History
available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) with support from Berghahn Open Migration and Development Studies initiative.
