Religious Interactions in Modern India

Description

Religions in South Asia have tended to be studied in blocks, whether in the various monolithic traditions in which they are now regarded—Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, and Christian—or indeed in temporal blocks—ancient, medieval, and modern. Analysing Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh, Islamic, and Christian traditions, this volume seeks to look at relationships both within and between religions focusing on the 19th and 20th centuries.

The chapters explore not only the diversity and the multiplicity within each block, but also the specific forms of their coexistence with each other, whether in accord or in antagonism. The volume also views the interaction between ‘reformed’ and non-reformed branches within each of these purported monoliths. In going beyond existing debates on religious reform movements, the authors highlight the new forms acquired by religions and the ways in which they relate to each other, society, and politics.

About the Editors:

Martin Fuchs is trained in both anthropology and sociology. He holds the professorship for Indian religious history at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, University of Erfurt, Germany.

Vasudha Dalmia is professor emerita of Hindi and modern South Asian studies at the University of California at Berkeley, USA.

Contributors:

Milinda Banerjee

Anne Bigelow

Catherine Clémentin-Ojha

John E. Cort

Gita Dharampal-Frick

David Gilmartin

Monika Horstmann

Barbara D. Metcalf

Anne Murphy

George Oommen

Srilata Raman

Kumkum Sangari

Table of contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Between Complicit Entanglement and Creative Dissonance: William Wilberforce, Rammohun Roy, and Public Sphere Debates in the Early Nineteenth-Century Nexus between India and Britain

Gita Dharampal-Frick and Milinda Banerjee

2. On the Cusp of Colonial Modernity: Administration, Women, and Islam in Princely Bhopal

Barbara D. Metcalf

3. The Evasive Guru and the Errant Wife: Anti-hagiography, Śaivism, and Anxiety in Colonial South India

Srilata Raman

4. Jain Identity and the Public Sphere in Nineteenth-Century India

John E. Cort

5. Whither Pluralities and Differences? ‘Arya Dharma’ and Hinduism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Vasudha Dalmia

6. Configuring Community in Colonial and Precolonial Imaginaries: Insights from the Khalsa Darbar Records

Anne Murphy

7. Educating the Monkhood: Dādūpanthī Reforms in the Twentieth Century

Monika Horstmann

8. Secularizing Renunciation? Swami Shraddhananda’s Welcome Address at the Congress Session of Amritsar in 1919

Catherine Clémentin-Ojha

9. The Logics of Multiple Belonging: Gandhi, His Precursors, and Contemporaries

Kumkum Sangari

10. The Crucible of Peace: Pluralism and Community in Muslim Punjab

Anna Bigelow

11. Voting, Religion, and the People’s Sovereignty in Late Colonial India

David Gilmartin

12. Dalit Liberative Identity as Amalgam: Kerala’s Pulaya Christians and Communist Movement in the Mid-Twentieth Century

George Oommen

13. Dhamma and the Common Good: Religion as Problem and Answer—Ambedkar’s Critical Theory of Social Relationality

Martin Fuchs

About the Editors and Contributors

Index