One of the most profound effects of India's shift since the 1980s from a developmentalist state to a neoliberalising one has been to fundamentally transform the role and the form of its cities. If, following in the footsteps of Gandhi, India's villages were long thought to hold the key to the country's identity, values and future, today India's cities are not only growing phenomenally – fed by migrants and commuters from rural hinterlands across India – but have become sites for cutting-edge global innovation in urban capital extraction, deregulated planning, informal living, insurgent and gated citizenship and fierce contests between an emergent middle class with world-class aspirations and the poor whom many would like to expel in the name of the city beautiful (Roy 2009; Roy 2011b; Benjamin 2008; Weinstein 2008; Holston 2007). Highly dynamic, creative, productive and conflicted, these are cities, as Ananya Roy (2011a) remarks so incisively, in which neither neoliberalism nor justice are guaranteed to be the outcome.

Ostensibly, these processes would appear to have little to do with religion. And yet, quite strikingly, in the same period that India has been neoliberalising, there has also been a distinct intensification of communal identity politics. This has not only nurtured the well-known rise of a highly chauvinistic Hindu nationalism, but has also led more generally to an increased visibility of religious difference in Indian cities through divergences in forms of dress and bodily aesthetics, spectacular public manifestations, increasing residential segregation and architectural differentiation. Despite the fact that the dramatic transformations of India's cities have been receiving extensive attention, this particular element of India's changing urban fabric has been much less studied. This is in large part because those most interested in neoliberalisation and global cities – geographers, urbanists and sociologists – have historically had little interest in religion, even as those who have been most interested in religion as it is lived in cities – notably, though not exclusively, anthropologists – have until recently had little interest in theorising the (global) city and (neoliberal) urbanity as such.