From Mine to Mandir: Industrial Modernity in the Lives of Temple Builders of Western India
11 am, April 19, 2018, Ambaji, Banas Kantha district, Gujarat, on the borders with Rajasthan. I am standing on the edge of an open-cast marble mine, looking down 60 to 80 metres. The site invites my awe and shock in equal measure. I lean forward to catch a glimpse of the base, but I struggle to locate it.
While researching carved stone temple-building practices and living archives across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries from vantages of the Sompura temple-building community of western India, a stone magnate invited me to visit his quarry. He is a third generation descendent of a Sompura mistri (stone mason/temple builder) who led the renovation of the famous fifteenth-century Ranakpur Jain temple in Sadri, Rajasthan, in the 1930s. The family-run business is well versed with the technicalities of stone construction and is considered a leader in the mechanization of the mining industry in India.
I move closer to the edge while listening in to stories of technological triumph and ingenuity which began with his father’s trip to Verona in 1972 to an exhibition organized by the Confindustria Marmomacchine, an Italian association of mine owners, producers and processors of stone. The pioneering wire cutting machines on display were too expensive to import, so his father decided to design and make his own when back in Ambaji. Before leaving Italy, he bought a few metres of 3-5 mm helicoidal wire as a sample, and on return immediately went about manufacturing his own version in his workshop. The result? A wire cutting machine that could cut stone fifty times faster than manual splitting. “With wire in those days [1970s], we could cut 500 tons in one month; with the machines we have today we can cut 500 tons in two days,” quipped my host.
These are persuasive stories of technological innovation and jugaad—improvisation within limited means. I had heard and observed such stories of staying with and being innovative with technology throughout my fieldwork between 2012 and 2019 from a variety of protagonists engaged in temple production. These stories of technological triumph, however, often also had on their edges, stories of a crisis in production. In what follows I attempt to connect the extraction of stone from mines to the consumption of human bodies, in relation to the production of temple architecture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.
As I strain to register the barely perceptible laboring bodies near the bottom, the owner draws attention to a small marble temple across the pit. The deep pit has been cut around the orthogonal perimeter of the sacred spot forming a dramatic vertical extrusion, compared to the more amorphous cuts along the hillside. The temple is dedicated to Mahisasur Mardini, the goddess of this area and an incarnation of the goddess Durga, in the act of slaying the demon god Mahisasur. This modest temple without a shikhar (curved superstructure on top of the deity) has replaced an older shrine which housed an ancient stone image of Mahisasur Mardini (Figure 1). The older, somewhat eroded, deity has been placed in the rockface below the new temple. The new temple was built in the early 2000s under the direction of Amritlal Mulshankar Trivedi Sompura (1910-2005), a highly regarded temple practitioner and figurehead within the Sompura community. With an extraordinary portfolio of modest and monumental, sacred and secular architecture, he also designed with his son and grandson the gigantic temple in the Swaminarayan Akshardham complex in New Delhi for the BAPS Swaminarayan sect (completed 2005).[1]
Figure 1. Temple dedicated to the area goddess Mahisasur Mardini at a marble mine, Ambaji, Gujarat, India. Photograph by author.
Giving company to the older deity on the lower level are carefully arranged blocks of stone with traces of manual splitting using iron chisels and hammer on the surface (Figure 2). He tells me that the grooves are called jhariyan, which come about from gently tapping iron rods, while the bigger “V” shaped marks are from iron wedges placed strategically on the top surface to split the stone. These blocks were split manually in this very quarry before the advent of wire cutting technology in the 1970s. They have been arranged in an exhibition-like manner here as evidence of technological change. When Amritlal Mulshankar Trivedi Sompura was selected as head mason by the Anandji Kalyanji Trust to lead the delicate renovation work of the medieval Dilwara Jain temples on Mount Abu (1031 C.E.) between 1951 and 1963, a long search with local shepherds for the right marble ended in this forgotten quarry in 1948 (Figure 3).
Figure 2. Unfinished marble slabs with traces of manual splitting, Ambaji, Gujarat, India. Photograph by author.
Figure 3. The ceiling of the Vimal Vasahi temple (1031 C.E.) at the Dilwara temple complex in Mount Abu renovated by Amritlal M. Trivedi Sompura and team between 1951-63. Source: British Library Collection: Photo 1009/8, 1947. Copyright British Library Board.
While I am still looking down, an insight comes my way linking the deep hollow in the ground to the technological breakthrough of wire cutting, “You see the Mahisasur Mardini temple? The quarry was level with it in the 1980s. From where we stand today, in bygone days, we could walk to the temple. It is only after we introduced wire cutting technologies that the rapid transformation of the marble mine began.” To comprehend this unexpected insight, I make a mental list of the commodities appearing in the company’s brochure which might have begun life in this quarry. Some of these are kitchen and bathroom worktops, fireplaces, floor slabs, tiles, wall cladding, deities for temples, art objects for museums, giant statuary for public parks, sculpture, garden ornaments, home shrines and—at an architectural scale—load bearing temples or mandirs for both Indian and diasporic clients.
Describing temples as architectural commodities brings to the fore the role of labor in relation to the transformation of mines as well as that of pre-existing temple building practices. In the Bharatpur district of Rajasthan, are scores of silica-rich bansipahadpur which too have undergone a drastic transformation from the 1980s. This is owing to a “boom” in temple complexes primarily in India but also in the diaspora using this pink sandstone.[2] Arguably, the hollowed-out mines and the parallel emergent landscapes of stone-carving factories in Rajasthan, can also be seen as a measure of the “labor process” with the collective productive body “consumed” by both mining and carving stone.
A few minutes have passed since the viewing of the pit from the top and I have been driven halfway down into its belly. I have been asked by my host to sit in the car and not get out as it is dangerous outside. He has himself disappeared in another car to the bottom of the quarry that I never caught sight of on this visit. I look up “from below.” I see the temple boundary wall in the far distance above me at the edge of the quarry (Figure 4). Three quarry men in the distance are standing on top of a precariously supported slab. With little protective gear on their bodies, they are engrossed in splitting the slab with giant pneumatic drills. I look at the ground beneath my feet and see wire cuts in the marble slab, waiting to be wrenched away by a JCB digger (Figure 5).
Figure 4. The Mahisasur Mardini temple from the depths of the quarry. Photograph by author.
Figure 5. Wire cut marble ready to be lifted away. Photograph by author.
“One deeply troubling effect of the drive for efficiency, productivity, and innovation in temple production is the silicosis crisis that has disproportionately affected adivasi and dalit stone carvers.”
The production of carved stone temples in western India from the decade preceding the economic liberalization of India in 1991 has demanded a rapid increase in output from a pre-existing industry which was small, slow, primarily site-based and mainly, but not exclusively, comprising familial network of architects, supervisors, sculptors, artists, stone carvers and stone fitters from the Sompura community. The growth of commissions from transnational religious organizations as well as one-off communities in India and abroad has induced what might be called the “industrialization” of temple production.
The leitmotif of industrialization in the colonial context in India has been variously discussed through themes of rationalization, standardization, mechanization, and their relation to artisanal labor.[3] These themes are helpful for understanding industrialization in temple production in India since the 1980s with the critical distinction that there is no external colonial state in control. Instead, a web of local, regional, national and transnational relationships is in a dynamic play of capture. Older and highly particular genealogies of thought, aesthetics, methods and cultural practices co-exist with the relatively “new” paradigm of industrial modernity, the latter “capturing” and incorporating the former into new time-space efficiencies, values and social configurations not experienced before. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s invitation to recognize the “intimate and plural relationships to capital” ranging from opposition to neutrality, and interventions in anthropology that urge us to think beyond the limits of abstract economic perspectives are helpful here in framing these genealogies.
The temple building boom of the 1980s created a severe shortage of labor for stone carving. This was addressed by bringing large numbers of adivasi (indigenous, “tribal”) and dalit (ex-untouchable) people of Sirohi district of Rajasthan into the fold of temple carving in the closing years of the 1970s. Nearly half a century from the start of industrialization of temple production we might reflect on this phenomenon as a remarkable transmission of the material, mental, and cultural practice of stone carving from the hands of Sompura artisans to adivasi and dalit artisans. Today, stone carvers from the industrial areas of Pindwara, a sub district of Sirohi, are most sought after in the temple building industry. This is sometimes referred to in terms of “inclusion” and “participation” of other castes in the building practice of the brahmin Sompuras to cope with increasing demand. Such inclusion is predicated on a host of contradictory relations and tensions which has been detrimental to some and elevated others.[4] At the same time it has forged a shared understanding of artistic and architectural practice between Sompuras, adivasis and dalits.
Stone carving is but one element of a bigger production process, which includes mining. When seen as a whole, the turn to industrial rationalization and efficiency is discernible initially though new labor regimes brought by large transnational religious sects with their own in-house carving factories in Sirohi district. These reconfigurations then became routine practice for smaller stone carving factories. Off-site manufacture became a necessary and a new way to think about production, where drawings and models became more central to communicative practice, as opposed to an ethos of working things on site with substantially fewer tools such as these.
Whereas stone carvers were exclusively located on the building site prior to the technological shift, in the reconfiguration new off-site locations gained salience: mines; state-subsidized industrial zones of southern Rajasthan; and free trade zones in shipping ports of Gujarat. With compression in time scales accompanying increased monumentality, stone carving became disaggregated into numerous sites so that more work could be done in the same unit of time. Heavy machinery for cutting quarried stone and handheld power tools for more delicate carving came in routine use around the same time to further increase bodily productivity of carvers and efficiency of temple projects (Figure 6). Pre-existing proto-management systems devised by ancestors of contemporary Sompuras as a teaching tool to aid younger practitioners were formalized and merged with digital drawing techniques in the mid-1990s such that each stone was accounted for digitally, spatially, dimensionally, economically, materially (by quantity, weight and volume). Along with stones, labor could be organized through these centralized management systems despite being dispersed among various building sites.
Figure 6. A combination of hammer, chisels and power tools used for carving bansipahadpur stone at a temple-building site in Gujarat, 2018. Photograph by author.
Dimensional co-ordination on paper and site is a paramount concern in this new configuration of production, for stones must precisely fit when they arrive at their destination. Once machine and hand carved in the carving factories, the numbered stones are first “dry assembled” into part-buildings to ensure best fit. They are then dis-assembled, packed, transported and re-assembled on building sites with travelling artisans. The philosophy and practice for offsite factory production is centred on achieving “maximum precision” when inside the offsite carving factory, and “minimum improvisation” when on the building site.
These innovations have delivered a bewildering array and number of monumental temples in record breaking times, drastically reconfiguring adivasi, dalit and Sompura life worlds. The temples’ inauguration brochures, websites, and newspaper coverage are instructive. They boast monumental quantities of stone carved across several factories. Many emphasize efficiency through “saving,” “compressing,” and achieving “record” time through novel management techniques and attention to logistics. As an example, one brochure informs us that the 300,000 stones of Akshardham New Delhi that should have taken fifty years to carve—on the advice of Sompura temple architects involved—were carved in four years in over twenty-four factories in Pindwara and Sikandra, in the Sirohi district of Rajasthan.[5]
One deeply troubling effect of the drive for efficiency, productivity, and innovation in temple production is the silicosis crisis that has disproportionately affected adivasi and dalit stone carvers. Silicosis is an incurable, fatal, occupational lung disease that is brought about by inhaling fine silica dust, generated by cutting into silica-rich sandstone with electric drills, cutters and grinders over long periods of time, without adequate protection. The first official detection of silicosis in the mines of Rajasthan took place in 2009 by the National Human Rights Commission as a result of a complaint filed by the Mine Labour Protection Campaign. This was followed by a special report on silicosis in 2014 by the Rajasthan State Human Rights Commission. In 2022, following extensive fieldwork in Pindwara, a report specifically focusing on stone carvers in the temple building industry was produced by the Sirohi District Administration of Rajasthan. It states that of the over 8000 stone carvers screened in the Pindwara block of Sirohi District alone, 3500 were certified as silicosis victims.[6] My own interactions with some of the affected and bereaved in June 2019 confirmed that the new production system had rendered disabled and ultimately disposable the bodies and lives of the adivasi and dalit stone carvers. Innovative and efficient productive mechanisms had reinforced the marginal status of already marginalized communities.
How do we make sense of this systemic crisis in production?
On the one hand we are witness to a complex, embodied, “living” artistic and architectural practice that cannot be classed as productive labor in the economic sense. This is instead a product of deep engagement between the stone carvers and the sculpted works they produce. It takes them an average ten years of training to attain superior skills. This includes bringing out “bhav”: expressions of moods, emotions and life force. This process of skill-building is also a product of engagement between the carvers and the ancestors of present-day Sompuras working across caste and religious categories. When adivasi and dalit farmers were brought into the fold of temple carving in the 1980s, it was Sompura artisans, trained under Amritlal Trivedi Sompura at the Dilwara temple renovation at Mount Abu, who taught them the practice of stone carving.[7]
On the other hand, there has been a lack of care and violence exercised toward the very constituency whose labor has been central in temple building at the interface of local genealogies and neoliberal capitalism. The adivasis and dalits have organized as a union since 2016 demanding safer places to work with better prospects. From their accounts, they will continue this work as it is not only a key source of livelihood, but a skill—“hunar”—they have painstakingly acquired over four decades.
It is then pertinent to ask what is to be made of the cultures of belonging, affect, intersectional engagement and intelligence in production—“the intimate and plural relationships to capital”—which co-exist with the devastation? Are those to be rendered invisible in emancipatory accounts of production?
I do not underplay the profound structural imbalance here, the consequences of which have been borne by the adivasis and dalits through their silicosis-ridden bodies and ultimately their lives. At the same time, the shared socio-cultural practices and habits geared toward a collective understanding of artisanal techniques and building know-how point to a mode of belonging which has not been entirely subsumed into capital, while being nestled in capital’s extractive and accumulative processes.
Collective practices of temple building and renovation have been in operation since well before the technological turn that this article is about. They did not entail deaths at this scale, or at any scale, as remarked by Sompura temple architects and stone carvers who have witnessed the change in their lives. It must be asked who or what is driving this systemic oversight and why? The system is larger than Sompura temple architects, stone contractors and carvers. It comprises the state, large transnational patrons, diasporic and Indian worshippers, who visit and fund the temples; and imagination itself. In this technological shift of the 1980s which can be traced across the mine to the mandir, routed through carving factories, are nestled both “life worlds” and “death worlds.”[8] It is imperative to recognize both as distinct but entangled entities to construct a future politics of ethics and belonging in production.
Citation
Megha Chand Inglis, “From Mine to Mandir: Industrial Modernity in the Lives of Temple Builders of Western India,” PLATFORM, August 4, 2025.
Notes
[1] Kavita Singh’s granular study of this complex demonstrates how the family of temple architects was positioned between familial, hybrid notions of the temple, and fixed, singular notions of the BAPS transnational sect working within the frame and scale of the nation and nationalism.
[2] One of the earliest temples in this “boom” is the Swaminarayan Akshardham complex in Gandhinagar completed in 1985, the stones for which were mined in Bharatpur district and carved offsite in Sirohi district over six years. Of the more recent examples using this stone technology is the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, inaugurated in 2024, book-ending the transformation that this article describes.
[3] See especially contributions by Peter Scriver, Vikramaditya Prakash, and Arindam Dutta in Peter Scriver and Vikramaditya Prakash (eds), Colonial Modernities: Building, Dwelling, and Architecture in British India and Ceylon (London: Routledge, 2007).
[4] Megha Chand Inglis, "Life-worlds / Death-worlds in the Temple Building Industry of Western India" in Building Sites: Architecture, Labour and the Field of Production Studies, ed. Matt Davies, Will Thomson, Katie Lloyd Thomas, and Joao Marcos de Almeida Lopes (London: Routledge, 2025), forthcoming.
[5] Sadhu Vivekjivandas et al., Swaminarayan Akshardham: Making and Experience (Ahmedabad: Swaminarayan Aksharpith, 2006), 27-31. See also Chand Inglis, "Life-worlds / Death-worlds in the Temple Building Industry of Western India" (forthcoming) for a broader discussion.
[6] Sirohi District Administration, Reality Check Survey Report: Stone Carving Industry, Pindwara Block (Sirohi: Sirohi District Administration, 2022), 12. I am grateful to Priyanka Jain of Aajeevika Bureau for sharing this report with me. Aajeevika Bureau, a labor rights organization based in Udaipur, Rajasthan, has been key in engaging with the state government on this crisis.
[7] Megha Chand Inglis, "Factory Processes and Relations in Indian Temple Production," in Industries of Architecture, ed. Nick Beech, Katie Lloyd Thomas, Tilo Amhoff (London: Routledge, 2015), 114-24.
[8] Chand Inglis, "Life-worlds / Death-worlds in the Temple Building Industry of Western India" (forthcoming).
