{"title":"On the Cusp of Colonial Modernity","authors":"B. Metcalf","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780198081685.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780198081685.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"The chapter discusses the exceptional case of the mid–19th-century Muslim woman ruler Sikandar Begum in the princely state of Bhopal in central India, whose mother had also been the regent of Bhopal state and whose daughter followed her as ruler. The author depicts this as transition from an earlier local form of Islamic statecraft that did not shy away from the use of force and relied on a decentralized structure, to a new mode of more centralized administration following the British model. Instead of engaging in Sufism or in reformist Islam, Sikandar Begum personally practised what the author calls a protestant-style Islam, without, however, attempting to curb other denominational observances. There was no idea yet of a distinct ‘Muslim world’, rather a fusion of traditional and what was considered modern (administrative) practices from the top down, appropriating Mughal paraphernalia, without raising the issue of religious identity in any emphatic sense.","PeriodicalId":277707,"journal":{"name":"Religious Interactions in Modern India","volume":"68 1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128707845","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Educating the Monkhood","authors":"M. Horstmann","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780198081685.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780198081685.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"The chapter examines the stages of self-reform of the Dādūpanthi sant sampradaya between the 1890s and the present day. Originally a sect dominated by sadhus, the reform process meant a shift from monastic to lay ideals and to governance by householders, many of whom, however, were ex-sadhus. The process created deep rifts between sadhus and householders. The backbone of the story is the stepwise dismantling and, in 1938, final disbandment of the military Nāgā wing of the Dādūpanthis. Aside from the search for new occupational activities, the main focus in this process lay on education. Targeting primarily their own as well as other monastic orders and Brahmin candidates, and connecting partly with Gandhian patriotism, the prime idea became to develop models of a Hindu way of life impermeable to Westernization, and produce educated spiritual and social leaders for independent India and engage in social and political activities.","PeriodicalId":277707,"journal":{"name":"Religious Interactions in Modern India","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131379057","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dalit Liberative Identity as Amalgam","authors":"G. Oommen","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780198081685.003.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780198081685.003.0012","url":null,"abstract":"The chapter discusses post-conversion experiences and struggles of Dalits who had opted for Christianity, taking the case of Pulayas in Kerala, who had become members of the Anglican Church during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The change of religion led to new self-assessment and identity-seeking. Pulayas had major conflicts with Syrian Christians, including Christian landlords. Many Pulayas had then still the status of bonded labourers or even slaves (adiyan). After covering the early twentieth-century agitations to overcome their social degradation and exclusion from public spaces, the author focuses on the later involvement of Christian Pulayas with the Communist mobilization. Communist activists accepted water and food from the Pulayas. Finally, the chapter discusses the push of Pulaya Christians for a distinctive depressed-class administration within the Anglican Church, ending with the break-away of a large section of Dalit Christians from the Anglican Church and the start of a new church, the CMS Church, in 1968.","PeriodicalId":277707,"journal":{"name":"Religious Interactions in Modern India","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115073619","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Logics of Multiple Belonging","authors":"K. Sangari","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780198081685.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780198081685.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"The chapter discusses Gandhi moving from a synthetic Hinduism in the 1910s/20s to a discourse of multiple belonging in the 1940s, however permeated by tensions. The chapter takes Gandhi as standing in a line with earlier thinkers such as Ibn al-‘Arabi and Bulhe Shah. Gandhi attempted to formulate a set of ethical and metaphysical universals that were common to all religions. In Gandhi’s view, none had the right to condemn or reform the elements of any religion but his/her own. The author sees Gandhi attempting to devise a non-sectarian Hinduism that was inclusive of all that was exemplary in other religions. In the 1940s, Gandhi’s earlier intuition of simultaneously belonging to all religions grew into greater prominence and he denied the view that religions were the exclusive property of those born into them. However, when Gandhi tried claiming a special universalizeability for Hinduism, he too fell victim to the idea of Hindu exceptionalism.","PeriodicalId":277707,"journal":{"name":"Religious Interactions in Modern India","volume":"88 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128629739","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Jain Identity and the Public Sphere in Nineteenth-Century India","authors":"J. Cort","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780198081685.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780198081685.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"The author focuses on the creation of a new sense of religious identity across Indian religions over the nineteenth century, analysing in particular the process in which a pan-Indian concept of being ‘Jain’ developed. The chapter discusses two conflictual cases that turned around whether or not it is proper for Jains to worship icons of the Jinas. The cases involved Ḍhuṇḍhiyā or Sthānakvāsī and Mūrtipūjak Jains, critiques and proponents of icon worship, and, in the case of the second dispute, also the founder of the Arya Samaj, Dayanand Saraswati. Whereas in the 1820s, identity was primarily defined by caste, sixty years later the common identity was that of shared religious belonging. Demonstrating the role of the new public sphere, the author argues that two colonialism-driven projects came together here, the introduction of the British legal system, and the introduction of new technologies of travel, communication, and dissemination of information.","PeriodicalId":277707,"journal":{"name":"Religious Interactions in Modern India","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117225286","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Between Complicit Entanglement and Creative Dissonance","authors":"Gita Dharampal-Frick, Milinda Banerjee","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780198081685.003.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780198081685.003.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Focusing on the nexus between Rammohun Roy’s religious deliberations and William Wilberforce’s religious policies, the chapter emphasizes the interconnections between the developments of the nineteenth-century public spheres in Britain and India. Wilberforce’s intervention involved constructing a new model of Hinduism and the Hindu ‘other’ from the perspective of Anglo-Protestant Christianity. Rammohun Roy set a trajectory of transnational ethical–religious debate followed subsequently by other Indian public intellectuals. However, the meaning both gave to the term ‘religion’ differed. While Wilberforce regarded only one religion as authentic and true, Roy looked for the truth shared by all (elite) forms of religion. Starting with a comparative evaluation of different theological–religious traditions, he later integrated this with Enlightenment as well as Christian reformist and anti-Trinitarian vocabularies. At the same time, Roy shared the anti-idolatry penchant of Christian missionaries, while he undertook what the authors call a de-provincialization of Christian theology.","PeriodicalId":277707,"journal":{"name":"Religious Interactions in Modern India","volume":"115 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116301273","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Crucible of Peace","authors":"A. Bigelow","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780198081685.003.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780198081685.003.0010","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter presents an example of successful religious coexistence, the case of the Punjabi princely state of Malerkotla, which between 1923 and 1940 encountered a series of disputes concerning the audibility of Hindu and Muslim rituals: the arati–katha–namaz disputes. It seems that no one died in Partition-related violence in Malerkotla, and a large majority of the local Muslim population remained there rather than migrate to Pakistan. The chapter discusses Malerkotla’s complex history of conflict, going back to the state’s foundation in the mid-fifteenth century. The agreement in 1940 between local Hindu and Muslim leaders that resolved the arati–katha–namaz conflict was not to interfere in future in the practices of the other community. In the aftermath, even while Malerkotla too experienced several cases of communal stress, a mode of disciplining dissent seems to have been in place that helped to avert major clashes between Hindus and Muslims.","PeriodicalId":277707,"journal":{"name":"Religious Interactions in Modern India","volume":"49 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125400028","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Evasive Guru and the Errant Wife","authors":"S. Raman","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780198081685.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780198081685.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"The chapter discusses a conflict within the Śaiva Siddhānta tradition in what is present-day Tamil Nadu. The conflict concerned was started in the 1860s by an attack of Arumuga Navalar, a Śaivite scholar, who represented a form of religious neo-traditionalism, on Ramalinga Swamigal, a modern Śaiva poet and self-styled siddha. The struggle revolved around the definition of the Śaivite canon. Navalar was upset by Ramalinga’s success with the songs he had composed, a collection of which was published in 1867 under the name Tiruvaruṭpā. Navalar, highly critical of extant practices, especially of those of lower-caste people, opposed the acceptance of Ramalinga and his songs as being on par with those of the earlier poet-saints. The author places this conflict in the context of changes of earlier polemical literary traditions regarding the attitude to the past. The author sees Navalar as pursuing a deliberate ‘Protestantization’ of Śaivism, laying down new lines of exclusion and inclusion.","PeriodicalId":277707,"journal":{"name":"Religious Interactions in Modern India","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127268643","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Voting, Religion, and the People’s Sovereignty in Late Colonial India","authors":"D. Gilmartin","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780198081685.003.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780198081685.003.0011","url":null,"abstract":"The chapter discusses the connections between religion and popular sovereignty during the late colonial period in relation to voting. The author explores two key aspects of the legal contradictions embedded in elections, the legal concept of ‘undue influence’ and the relationship between conscience, community, and free choice. The paradoxes of sovereignty were increasingly transposed into the self, conceived as an inner struggle between conscience and free choice, on one side, and the coercive pressures of society, on the other. The chapter also discusses several election cases in India and Burma starting in the 1920s, in which issues of ‘undue influence’ were raised, and explicates the difficulties of distinguishing religion as a form of external power exerted by religious authorities, from free devotional commitment to a religious community. Emphasizing the Protestant missionary background of the ideas of a moral self, conscience, and free choice, the author asserts that such ideas resonated with many Indian Protestant missionary.","PeriodicalId":277707,"journal":{"name":"Religious Interactions in Modern India","volume":"22 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123389122","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Whither Pluralities and Differences?","authors":"Vasudha Dalmia","doi":"10.1093/OSO/9780198081685.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OSO/9780198081685.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"The chapter explores the turn to the twentieth century as a watershed in the formation of modern Hinduism. It compares two core texts, Dayanand’s Satyarth Prakash (1875) and the catechism Sanatana Dharma: An Elementary Textbook of Hindu Religion and Ethics of Annie Besant and Bhagawan Das (1903). The significant point of difference lies in how the two texts deal with religious difference and pluralities. While in the earlier mode of reformulation of Hinduism, other Hinduistic belief systems and practices were dealt with by denying their validity, but engaging with them, the new mode was one of claiming overarching validity for a singular belief system by subsuming difference, without engaging with the other forms. The other, non-Hinduistic religions were now put strictly outside the Hindu fold. Differences between Hindu traditions were glossed over and the attempt was made to close ranks between even radically different Hindu formations. At the same time, varnashramadharma was confirmed.","PeriodicalId":277707,"journal":{"name":"Religious Interactions in Modern India","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131024541","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}