Archaeological landscapes and textual images: A study of the sacred geography of late medieval Ballabgarh

This study explores the disjunction between notions of religious space in the textual tradition and the construction of sacred geography on the ground. It does this by examining some elements that make up the sacred geography of medieval Ballabgarh, the northern segment of Faridabad which shares its northern border with Delhi. The paper argues that religious structures like temples and mosques which are generally regarded as constituent components of Hindu and Muslim sacred geography were not an integral part of village geography. Where they were present, the components of commemoration could be varied, animated by elements of local and clan history, rather than scriptural notions of cosmic space. Moreover, much of what was central to folk worship - open air village shrines, anonymous graves of pirs, 'miraculous' trees, a local goddess of the floods - is not textually imaged. Consequently, Ballabgarh's religious geography can be constituted only through the microcosm of archaeology and oral history.