Archaeological discussions of ancient cities and the material analysis of modern cities focus on obvious physical ‘facts’ such as buildings, streets and open spaces. Buildings and their surrounding streetscapes are mutually influenced: what happens inside structures is conditioned and counterbalanced by areas outside of them. Open spaces such as streets are differentiated by the presence of nearby establishments: a street around a courthouse or a school has a different energy than a street of storefronts. People create and negotiate these urban settings as they make choices about practical activities such as shopping, eating, conversing, working and seeking shade from the sun or shelter from the rain. They move into and out of spaces and buildings for a variety of purposes at a variety of periodicities, from once-in-a-lifetime ceremonies to acts of routine purchasing, visiting, education and entertainment. In doing so, they select from a range of duplicate entities, given that cities are places with multiple venues for nearly every type of activity.

Jacques Lévy (Lévy 2021: 1) has discussed the concept of co-spatiality as one in which the inevitable overlapping demands of space in daily life has both practical and philosophical outcomes, in which co-spatiality results from simultaneous, yet different social realities under the conditions marked by ‘neither distance, nor inclusion.’ Co-spatiality is the result of multiple physical entities existing together in the crowded visual field of a city, but co-spatiality is also the result of co-existence through spatiality. Of all of the spaces in a city, the ones that are the most dramatic, the most publicly visible and yet the most restricted, are religious spaces. These restrictions are almost always entirely voluntary; in other words, many individuals who could enter those spaces elect not to do so within the cosmopolitan milieu in which the architecture and spaces of others’ religious traditions are part of the streetscape. What is the value of seeing or not seeing in the religious sense? How did the built environments of cities create opportunities not only for people to see things, but also to avoid seeing things?

The cognitive efficiency of ‘un-seeing’ that which is of little direct relevance is especially germane to ritual practices and religious affiliation. Compared to social and economic activities, a person’s ritual activities incur the least day-to-day choice-making, and individuals within any religious tradition adhere to temporal and spatial patterns associated with already-established spaces and timings of activity. Although urban centres have multiple religious buildings (and often, multiple religious traditions), this duplication does not result in a constant negotiation of selectivity in the same way as a person addresses regular needs for food, clothing, or repair services. A historical and archaeological perspective on urban religious place-making shows that religious diversity has always been part of urban life, and may well have been foundational to the urban experience (summarised in Urciuoli 2020). How do people learn to ‘un-see’ the religious elements of the urban sphere that are therefore not relevant to them? And how does the process of ‘un-seeing’ become increasingly prevalent in non-religious domains as a result of the experiences incurred through religious activities? This article discusses the historical traditions of the mid-first millennium BCE in the Indian subcontinent, when numerous ritual traditions including Buddhist, Jain, Ajivika, Vedic, and other traditions were developed and manifested in architecture and ritual practice in and around urban areas.