Religion, Science, and Empire: Classifying Hinduism and Islam in British India
... A manumissziós levélben Ferenc fia ugyan szerepel, de az armálisban lévő fiai között nem található, ezért a vármegye közgyűléséhez utasították. 14 A Deák család 1634-ben kelt armálisa nem került kihirdetésre, így őket elutasították. 15 Deák János, Gergely és István bemutatta a II. ...
... 27. 14 Az adóösszeírásokban külön feltüntették a perceptorokat. IV. A. 4/b. ...
... Gyula testvérei is építészettel foglalkoztak, így Ödön (aki nevéhez fűződik a Veszprémi Törvényszék épülete), 14 és János is építész volt, Ferenc pedig építési rajzoló. 15 György nevű testvérük tiszti főorvos volt Pesten. ...
Az iszlám-iszlámizmus problémájáról írni ma nagy felelősséggel jár. Az újságok tele vannak olyan kapkodva megírt cikkekkel, melyek inkább a szerző előítéleteit tükrözik, mint az objektív tényeket. Kezd tömeghisztériává válni az iszlámtól, mint fenyegető veszélytől való rettegés. Mindeközben folyamatosan jelennek meg érvek-kel alátámasztott tudományos munkák, melyek az iszlám, világot fenyegető problé-máját erősen kétségbe vonják. Ezek az írások azonban nem, vagy alig kapnak fi-gyelmet a széles olvasótáborral rendelkező napilapokban.
... 30-36). 7 See, for instance, Thapar (1989); Talbot (1995); Flood (2009) ;Gottschalk (2000Gottschalk ( , 2013; Dalmia and Faruqui (2014); Vose (forthcoming). DOI: 10.4324/9781003167600-10 ...
... 30-36). 7 See, for instance, Thapar (1989); Talbot (1995); Flood (2009) ;Gottschalk (2000Gottschalk ( , 2013; Dalmia and Faruqui (2014); Vose (forthcoming). DOI: 10.4324/9781003167600-10 ...
... With regard to Hinduism see, for example : Sweetman 2003;Balagangadhara 2005;Pennington 2005;Oddie 2006;Gottschalk 2013. Regarding Buddhism, see, for example : Almond 1988;Cohen 2006;App 2010;Lopez and Jinpa 2017. 10 Compare with Engelbert Kämpfer's mention and description of "Budsdoism" as early as 1690 (Kämpfer [1690(Kämpfer [ -1692(Kämpfer [ ] 1906 convey the meaning of the term "religion," neither actually denote this. ...
Drawing on Kuhn’s understanding of scientific paradigms as exemplary ways of problem solving, this article critically assesses the current status of the study of Javanese Islam, in particular the long-standing debate on its nature. Is it a syncretist, animist religion or is it essentially Islamic? An analysis from a Kuhnian perspective indicates that both stances are actually the outcome of the same standardized theoretical approach. Consequentially, certain phenomena that are usually considered part of the Javanese religious condition now appear as anomalies of a paradigm. They will remain unsolvable, unless different theoretical approaches are developed. Locating a central assumption in the research into non-Western cultures – the universality of religion – is a step in that direction. From there, generating new descriptions and new research questions becomes a possibility.
... 1200 BCE), but has no clear Indo-Aryan etymology (Witzel 1999: 54). The 4 Also, e.g., Allen 2016;Frykenberg 1989;Gottschalk 2013;Nicholson 2010, 196-201;Oddie 2010;Pennington 2005;Sweetman 2003a. 5 E.g., Doniger 1991Hatcher 2008;Hawley 1991;Llewellyn 2005;Malik 1989;Smith 1998;Stietencron 1989;Sweetman 2003b;Thapar 2019. ...
This article provides a textured history of the multivalent term “hindu” over 2,500 years, with the goal of productively unsettling what we think we know. “Hindu” is a ubiquitous word in modern times, used by scholars and practitioners in dozens of languages to denote members of a religious tradition. But the religious meaning of “hindu” and its common use are quite new. Here I trace the layered history of “hindu,” part of an array of shifting identities in early and medieval India. In so doing, I draw upon an archive of primary sources—in Old Persian, New Persian, Sanskrit, Prakrit, Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, and more—that offers the kind of multilingual story needed to understand a term that has long cut across languages in South Asia. Also, I do not treat premodernity as a prelude but rather recognize it as the heart of this tale. So much of South Asian history—including over two thousand years of using the term “hindu”—has been misconstrued by those who focus only on British colonialism and later. We need a deeper consideration of South Asian pasts if we are to think more fruitfully about the terms and concepts that order our knowledge. Here, I offer one such contribution that marshals historical material on the multiform and fluid word “hindu” that can help us think more critically and precisely about this discursive category.
... Hinduism is Indianism. Originally, the term was employed by the British to distinguish an indigenous Indian religion from Islam (Gottschalk 2012). In other words, South Asians did not think of themselves as Hindu prior to British colonialism, and any "indigenous" religious identity in South Asia is an invention of and device of Western colonialism. ...
As known from the academic literature on Hinduism, the foreign, Persian word, “Hindu” (meaning “Indian”), was used by the British to name everything indigenously South Asian, which was not Islam, as a religion. If we adopt explication as our research methodology, which consists in the application of the criterion of logical validity to organize various propositions of perspectives we encounter in research in terms of a disagreement, we discover: (a) what the British identified as “Hinduism” was not characterizable by a shared set of beliefs or shared outlook, but a disagreement or debate about basic topics of philosophy with a discourse on tenets of moral philosophy anchoring the debate; and (b), the Western tradition’s historical commitment to language as the vehicle of thought not only leads to the conflation of propositions with beliefs, but to interpreting (explaining by way of belief) on the basis of the Eurocentric tradition rooted exclusively in ancient Greek philosophy. Interpretation on the basis of the Western tradition leads to the Western tradition vindicating itself as the non-traditional, non-religious, rational platform—the secular—for explaining everything—the residua are what get called religions on a global scale. This serves the political function of insulating Western colonialism from indigenous moral and political criticism. Given that Western colonialism is the pivotal event, before which South Asians just had philosophy, and after which they had religion (the explanatory residua of Eurocentric interpretation), we can ask about Hindu religious belief. This only pertains to the period after colonialism, when Hindus adopted a Westcentric frame for understanding their tradition as religious because of colonization. Prior to this, the tradition the British identified as “Hindu” had a wide variety of philosophical approaches to justification, which often criticized propositional attitudes, like belief, as irrational.
... 19 Cited by Henry (2013: 26, 38). 20 I am inspired here by authors who have responded to J. Z. Smith's declaration that "religion" itself is a category for scholars to define however they may choose: no, in fact, "natives" have appropriated it too, and mean specific things by it [Gottschalk (2013); Rocklin (2019), pp. 11-12). ...
Whatever happened to “Engaged Buddhism”? Twenty years after a flurry of publication placing this global movement firmly on the map, enthusiasm for the term itself appears to have evaporated. I attempt to reconstruct what happened: scholars turned away from the concept for its reproducing colonialist understandings of traditional Buddhism as essentially world-rejecting, and they developed alternate discourses for describing Buddhist actors’ multifarious social and political engagements, especially in contemporary Asia. I describe the specific rise and fall of the term in Anglophone scholarship, in order for scholars to better grasp the evolution of contemporary Western, Anglophone Buddhisms, to better understand what Buddhists in Asia are in fact doing with the term, and to better think through what it might mean politically for us as scholars to deploy the term at all. In particular, I identify “Academic Engaged Buddhism” (1988–2009) as one hegemonic form of Engaged Buddhism, a Western Buddhist practitioner-facing anthological project of Euro-American scholars with potentially powerful but unevenly distributed effects on Buddhist thought and practice around the world.
... einer hinduistischen Religion voraus, die selbst ein Produkt des 19. Jahrhunderts darstellt (Gottschalk 2013;King 1999: 98ff.). Auch wenn für Spivak die Kategorie der Religion nicht prominent ist, beschreibt sie doch die Proliferation der Kategorie von Religion allgemein wie auch den gewaltvollen Prozess der religiösen Subjektwerdung der hinduistischen Frau im Besonderen, die sich zwischen den Optionen des Patriarchats einerseits und imperialer Subjektkonstitution andererseits wiederfindet. ...
... Religions in the non-West were exoticized and orientalized both in the German and in the British imagination (King 1999, Park 2014, Gandhi 2006. Further, Peter van der Veer has shown how in the colonial period Islam and Hinduism were remade in the image of the successful and muscular imperial Protestantism of the colonial overlord with the assumption about one God, one scripture, and one source of authority-but also that the colonial experience had a blowback on conceptualization in imperial Britain van der Veer 2001, Gottschalk 2012, Cohn 1997, Mehta 1999. This is of course not to argue that Islam and Hinduism were invented in the colonial epistemology but rather that the categories were made and refashioned in that context (Nicholson 2013). ...
Taking as the starting point, Majid Daneshgar’s Studying the Qurʾan in the Muslim Academy , I argue that the political and intellectual contexts for the study of Islam and indeed the Qur’an cannot be ignored whether the study is conducted in the “Western” or the “Muslim” academy. The construction of the categories of religion and scripture arise out of practices of colonialist knowledge; positionality of the author cannot be eliminated from the interrogative gaze. Beginning with that critique, I suggest some possible ways in which we can decolonize the study of the Muslim scripture and its experience for Muslims.
... einer hinduistischen Religion voraus, die selbst ein Produkt des 19. Jahrhunderts darstellt (Gottschalk 2013;King 1999: 98ff.). Auch wenn für Spivak die Kategorie der Religion nicht prominent ist, beschreibt sie doch die Proliferation der Kategorie von Religion allgemein wie auch den gewaltvollen Prozess der religiösen Subjektwerdung der hinduistischen Frau im Besonderen, die sich zwischen den Optionen des Patriarchats einerseits und imperialer Subjektkonstitution andererseits wiederfindet. ...
... einer hinduistischen Religion voraus, die selbst ein Produkt des 19. Jahrhunderts darstellt (Gottschalk 2013;King 1999: 98ff.). Auch wenn für Spivak die Kategorie der Religion nicht prominent ist, beschreibt sie doch die Proliferation der Kategorie von Religion allgemein wie auch den gewaltvollen Prozess der religiösen Subjektwerdung der hinduistischen Frau im Besonderen, die sich zwischen den Optionen des Patriarchats einerseits und imperialer Subjektkonstitution andererseits wiederfindet. ...
Wie können wir intersektionale Biopolitiken der Biomedizin beschreiben? Inwiefern spielten intersektionale Macht- und Wissensordnungen bei der "Geburt" und "Produktion" der HeLa-Zelle eine Rolle? Und welcher Bedeutung kommen Repräsentationstechniken bei dem Design klinischer Studien zu?
... As we know, categorization and taxonomy have always haunted the academic study of religion; the specter of F. Max Müller, religio-and linguo-racialized definitions of religion loom large (Masuzawa 2005;Gottschalk 2012;Chidester 2013;Vial 2016;Weisenfeld 2016;Morgenstein Fuerst 2017). Categories are hard, limited, and always imperfect. ...
Job advertisements for Islamic studies faculty positions provide material and significant insight into the construction and reification of a normative Islam. These ads serve to further entrench inaccurate notions of “authentic” Islam. Quantitative and qualitative data demonstrate how religious studies colleagues craft job calls that replicate stereotypes about Islam and Muslims, how the study of Islam functions, and an Arab and Arabic-centric emphasis. Such ads prefer specific regions (the Middle East), languages (Arabic), and subjects (texts). Ironically, this archive shows that ads for jobs in the field of Islamic studies frequently instantiate biases and stereotypes that Islamic studies scholars dedicate their careers to dismantling. Stated hiring preferences, including teaching obligations, entrench an “essence” of Islam or Islamic studies at odds with scholarly discourse about Islam, Islamic studies, and religious studies that may be summarized as a simple, troubling equation: Islam = Middle East + Arabic + texts.
... Despite myriad changes in British Indian rule, these sentiments endured throughout most of its nearly two centuries. Only at its end, when the furies of communalism threatened to consume South Asia, did the government desist in emphasizing religious differ ence, even as their censuses and other empirical studies continued to collect data on religious demographics (see Gottschalk 2012). Meanwhile, Western-educated Indian elites considered European models of democracy and secularism as they slowly attained more opportunities for self-rule and gathered increasing support for self-determination. ...
... This understanding is not true even in the Western context as many historians of science have noted. Scholars suggested that before the nineteenth century, the science-religion conflict did not exist in the Western tradition, and it was an ideological construct of the latter age (Fuller, 2008;Gottschalk, 2013;Harrison, 2015;Krishna, 2014;Taylor, 2007). However, the recurring debates between the creationists and the evolutionists in the USA, the debate between atheists such as Richard Dawkins and theologians, scientists and philosophers on the conflictual relationship between science and religion testify to its continued relevance. ...
This article attempts to discuss through detailed ethnographic description, the manner in which scientists in a leading Indian scientific research institute defined and practiced religion. Instead of posing science and religion as dichotomous categories, this article demonstrates its easy coexistence within the everyday lives and practices of Indian scientists. The ‘religious’ scientists did not perceive their religiosity in opposition to science, nor did they accept the complementary view of science and religion. Likewise, the ‘atheistic’ scientists did not find any contradiction in following a ‘religious’ lifestyle and simultaneously identified themselves as atheists or non-believers. This article questions the tacit acceptance of the distinctions between science and religion and seeks to evolve new vocabularies to talk about these categories. It attempts to look at science and religion from a non-dualistic perspective. It argues that a productive way of understanding science and religion is to go beyond the conflict and complementarity models.
This essay interacts with the call for papers for the “Magic and Mischief: Text and Practices in Philosophy, Theology, and the Sciences” conference. It is a self-reflection on the theoretical frameworks and definitions guiding projects of reflection and theorising. Breaking the discourse of religion, theology, and science, as well as that of science and magic, down into its discourse-components to get at the speech acts performed, it shows the mythmaking inherent in particular historical understandings of religion and magic, and religion, magic, and science. By performing a kind of archaeology of discourse one gets to see the social, cultural, and political character of the discourse work. And thus, a study of discourse being a site for analysing social formations, the myths of Enlightenment, secularisation, and disenchantment become avenues for understanding the political and socially formative, and the culturally definitive, character of those acts we prefer to call thinking about religion.
Rishad Choudhury presents a new history of imperial connections across the Indian Ocean from 1739 to 1857, a period that witnessed the decline and collapse of Mughal rule and the consolidation of British colonialism in South Asia. In this highly original and comprehensive study, he reveals how the hajj pilgrimage significantly transformed Muslim political culture and colonial attitudes towards it, creating new ideas of religion and rule. Examining links between the Indian Subcontinent and the Ottoman Middle East through multilingual sources – from first-hand accounts to administrative archives of hajj – Choudhury uncovers a striking array of pilgrims who leveraged their experiences and exchanges abroad to address the decline and decentralization of an Islamic old regime at home. Hajjis crucially mediated the birth of modern Muslim political traditions around South Asia. Hajj across Empires argues they did so by channeling inter-imperial crosscurrents to successive surges of imperial revolution and regional regime change.
The Jatavs of the United Provinces were not legally recognised as a separate caste until 1942; and then only as a consequence of an exceptional revision of legislation. Yet, for some considerable time before, the provincial authorities had routinely treated Jatavs as if they had already been granted the status of an officially recognised distinct caste grouping. This was despite a ruling in 1933, endorsed jointly by the India Office, the Government of India, and the provincial government, that the Jatavs were not a separate caste. The case of the Jatavs is examined here in the context of the contradictions and confusion in the policies of the colonial authorities, first towards the Depressed Classes, and later in the construction of the category that eventually became the Scheduled Castes. In addition, it is argued that those contradictions also created interstices of ambiguity that many Dalit representatives explored, interrogated, and exploited as they generated the space in which to assert their agency. The history of the Jatavs is an important instance of subaltern politics participating in the procedures of the colonial regime rather than operating in some separate autonomous domain of activity. By engaging with the existing power structures and processes, Jatav leaders created the opportunity to expose and take advantage of the contradictions generated by the confusion in the exercises of classifying and counting conducted by the colonial state.
The term “Hindu” derives from Persian expressions coined in the 4th century bce to define the traditions found east of the Indus River. Thus, a common start to the archaeological examination of Hinduism are the prehistoric cults found in various regions of the Indian subcontinent. Some elements associated with traditions from the urban Indus civilization of the 3rd millennium bce have been connected to later Hindu iconography and ideals, but these links remain tenuous. By the mid-2nd millennium bce , the introduction of new Vedic ideologies, so called because the earliest references are found in the texts of the Vedas, ushered in significant transformations in ritual and spiritual life, but left little material trace. However, migrating groups associated with these traditions have been traced genetically and linguistically to the Western Steppes of Central Asia. Over the next two thousand years, Vedic traditions became more elaborate and heterogeneous, merging with popular customs, and generating heterodox schools of thought that challenged both the spiritual and social order of Brahmanical Hinduism, which also took form during this time. The early centuries of the Common Era were witness to additional transformations and adaptations, and it is after this period that various forms of temple architecture, sculpture, and the epigraphic record become a wider body of evidence for study in both South and Southeast Asia. During the 1st millennium ce , Hinduism took on more familiar contours, partly driven by the rise in extant religious, philosophical, and secular literature. Alongside this textual record, a wealth of architectural and art historical sources became available; studies of these sources increasingly look to continuities from earlier eras that are documented archaeologically. Nevertheless, much of this body of knowledge derives from institutional and elite contexts; household-level details remain slim and much contemporary interpretation of past daily worship continues to be inferred from the ethnographic record. During the modern period, Hinduism came to acquire its formal definition as a world religion, and with this came the attempt to delineate Hindu identity for first colonial, and then national ends, often in tandem with the Orientalist archaeologies of the early and mid-20th century. Though the definition of modern Hinduism may be more clearly circumscribed, it is certainly no less varied. Modernity continues to impact the understanding of Hinduism in many ways. Technologies such as DNA analysis have been applied to the study of early societies, with the goal of understanding ancient migrations and the composition of different regional populations. While our understanding of past human movement has increased considerably because of these studies, genetics do not serve as a proxy of culture. DNA evidence can provide some details about the movement and interaction of different populations in the past, but categories like race, language, and culture are as incommensurable as they are artificial, and they should be understood as such. Instead of a match for the textual or genetic record, the archaeology of Hinduism should be considered the material study of a broad amalgam of dynamic beliefs and practices that date back into the eras of earliest prehistory and continue to transform and evolve around the world.
This article offers a new interpretation of the “Indian Wahhabi” beyond an ostensibly religious identity. Examining encounters between a centralizing state and decentralized circulatory regimes, the study thus illuminates an overlooked sociolegal genealogy of the jihadi militant in colonial India. From 1818, the East India Company secured its sovereignty by designating as deviant or permissible a host of itinerant figures in and around South Asia. In police records, court transcripts, and legislative archives, pilgrims with links to Arabia accordingly began appearing as suspected Wahhabis. Yet, in then seeking to distinguish “faqirs” from “fanatics,” colonial law used logics and exceptions with two important implications. First, as the “Wahhabi” came to imply a violent counterclaim to sovereignty, it also became a juridical formulation more political than religious. The faqir pilgrim here supplied the conceit of religion. Second, the complex question of jihad produced a deeper paradox, as grappling with a “religious” problem without “religion” stretched secular jurisprudence to breaking points. Until 1857, around South Asia, states of emergency hence dominated official responses to Wahhabis. Ultimately, colonial law's gestures not only rendered unexceptional its regimes of exception. Ironically, they also reified religion, such that Islam and violence became culturally consubstantial in colonial thought.
This essay responds to the essays comprising the theme issue, Do Religions Die? Theorising Death and Demise of Greek and Roman Religions. Reviewing various case studies and theoretical introductory essays of the volume, The Demise of Religion , and the special issue of Numen 68, no. 2&3 (2021), I argue that at stake are two desiderata: the first relates to defining religion (what counts as religion?), and the second relates to the historiography of the history of religions (who narrates the story of religion deaths, from which perspective, and with what rhetorical purpose?). It is shown how definition of religion and critical historiography in tandem enable an approach from the perspective of discourse theory. From this perspective it is possible to describe, explain, and theorise ‘religion deaths’ as shifts in culture, migration patterns and social formations, concomitant changes in religious formations, yet with continuity in functionalities.
This article compares the ideas, connections, and projects of two South Asian figures who are generally studied separately: the Indian pan-Islamist Muhammad Barkatullah (1864–1927) and the Sinhalese Buddhist reformer Anagarika Dharmapala (1864–1934). In doing so, I argue that we can understand these two figures in a new light, by recognizing their mutual connections as well as the structural similarities in their thought. By focusing on their encounters and work in Japan, this article demonstrates how Japan—particularly after defeating Russia in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905—had become a significant site for inter-Asian conversations about world religions. Importantly, exploring the projects of Barkatullah and Dharmapala makes visible the fact that, from the late nineteenth century until the outbreak of the First World War, religion played a central role—alongside nationalism, race, and empire—in conversations about the possible futures of the international order.
Sacred Games (2018–2019), based on Vikram Chandra’s novel of the same title, is India’s first Netflix crime thriller series. This series shows how the lives of a Sikh policeman, Sartaj Singh, and a powerful gangster, Ganesh Eknath Gaitonde, weave together in a mission to save Mumbai from a nuclear attack. The series immediately received critical acclaim and viewers’ appreciation, but the way the series represents the (mis)use of metanarratives of religious and political ideologies, as they come to influence Gaitonde’s life, needs further perusal. For this purpose, this article investigates how Gaitonde’s life, and its abrupt end, are shaped and challenged by the larger ideological and religious metanarratives of his milieu. At the same time, this article examines Gaitonde’s ability to gain control over his own narrative despite the overwhelming presence of these metanarratives. More specifically, Gaitonde’s transgressive will and his desire to tell his story are brought under scrutiny. Along with the analysis of Gaitonde’s character, this article also examines how the use of various cinematic and narrative techniques heightens self-reflexivity and metafictionality in Sacred Games and emphasizes the role of mini-narratives as unique, singular, and contingent, in contrast to the generic, universal, and permanent tones of metanarratives.
The nature of identity formation is complex. The production of identity in South Asia, with its colonial past, has been largely dependent on the region’s colonial history. In this article we chart the process of political identity formation in Bangladesh. We identify the various historical causes that led to the creation of each of the two types of identity prevalent today. These two divisive identities based on language and religion, one pitted against the other, each became the central platform of each of the two major political parties, the Awami League (AL) and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). This disquisition shows clear patterns of political distress that resulted in the bifurcation of these two divisive political identities that ossified by the late 20th century due chiefly to the actions of the colonial government of the Raj.
The study of uti possidetis in international law has proceeded without any detailed examination of its application to South Asian borders. Yet, the consequences of uti possidetis in the Indian subcontinent offer critical insight into the legal and functional critique levied against the doctrine. The South Asian experience provides evidence that uti possidetis cannot be considered a norm of regional customary international law, confined to Latin America and Africa. Simultaneously, it provides compelling proof of this doctrine's ruinous impact on self-determination, pointing to its potential for identity-alteration and intrastate violence: consequences that have received scarce attention in legal scholarship. By undertaking a detailed study of the Radcliffe Line in Punjab, this paper makes a prudent attempt to commence filling this gap in the literature by re-centring South Asia in the debate on uti possidetis.
This essay reflects on contemporary theorizing of religion which embodies an explicit critique of the imperial project, seeing that by most common consent the scholarly disciplinary field of religious studies (history of religion, phenomenology of religion, Religionswissenschaft) is a late nineteenth century invention that coincides with the emergence of anthropology and ethnography as epiphenomena of the colonial project (whether as Orientalism or as exoticism the Other is rendered manageable subjects). The scholarly study of religion is, therefore, simultaneously a study of the history of theory and concept formation, and the social, cultural, and political work performed by such study and theorizing. The metatheory of the study of religion is a main focus of the essay. Alongside that, the essay focuses more pointedly on the concept of discourse, and considers the extraordinary situation where the same methodological vocabulary that functions in religious studies also functions in critical theological studies, which relativizes the division of ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ perspectives. Yet both are conventionally practised either in isolation from each other as distinct theoretical and disciplinary bounded/defined study fields, or—the other and almost direct opposite—religious studies being performed in the context of theological study, situated in and offered by theological faculties. An overview of recent debates in the field of religious studies serves to highlight the continued struggle to demarcate the boundaries between the study of religion and the study of theology—in some of the recent, very strident debates mainstream religious studies is labelled as nothing more than theology. This contribution, then, aims at a kind of metatheoretical reflection on the study of religion and theology both as discourses that serve mythmaking, identity formation, culturally strategic purposes. That is, from the discourse perspective that is proposed here, it is possible to move beyond the definitional divide between religious studies and theology—even beyond ‘religion’ itself—to focus on the mundanely material practices that constitute that which is called religion. In the way in which the terms are used it is clear that the terminologies themselves bear the imprint of historical social discourses that occasioned the rise of their use. This essay, then, is something of a metacritique of the language of the study of religion—beyond religion, and beyond the study of religion and theology.
This chapter will assess the nature of science in Ancient India, focusing mainly upon the period of the Indus Valley Civilisation and the Vedic times. The use and application of science in Ancient India has always been a debated and controversial topic; therefore, in order to present information without the bias of ongoing and old controversies, internal evidence from the Vedic texts is stated and laid out for the reader to interpret. To help readers understand the evolution of science in India, this chapter will investigate the application and use of sciences in the four Vedas and the Smrutis and will relate it to modern education by using frameworks such as curriculum, pedagogy and assessments. Additionally, this chapter will also provide some background information about the education system prevalent in Ancient India and in the subsequent periods that were influenced by Buddhism, Islam and British colonisation.
The Jatavs of western UP during the 1930s fought a long campaign to be recognised as a separate caste. In this article, the progress and eventual success of that campaign are documented and described in detail for the first time. In addition, it is suggested that the Jatav efforts to establish a separate official identity cannot be fully understood within the framework provided by the notion of Sanskritisation. It is argued here that the Jatav endeavours need to be analysed as an expression of a purposeful Dalit engagement with the emerging political framework of the period. In particular, the negotiations about constitutional reform opened up the possibility of challenging the ways in which the colonial regime had previously used the names and numbers of castes as part of its techniques of governance. Dalit groups, often in association with Dr Ambedkar, intervened in the formal investigations conducted in relation to the reforms to expose the frailty and fiction of many of the assumptions of the colonial authorities.
An ethnographic approach to the South Indian festival Ayudha Puja reveals that the celebration plays a role in the construction of scientific communities. Ayudha Puja has the ability to absorb westerners, non-Hindus, and non-Brahmins into Indian science and engineering communities and is thus widely practiced in South Indian industry and academia. The practice of Ayudha Puja thus parallels what M. N. Srinivas labels “Sanskritization.” Within India, the process of Sanskritization refers to the adoption of high-caste habits and diet by upwardly mobile lower-caste communities. While not actually an example of Sanskritization, participation in Ayudha Puja is analogous to that process: by joining a Hindu rite within the scientific and professional workspace, outsiders become part of local laboratory, department, or office culture. Such practices reveal the need for scholars to investigate scientific community building outside the domain of how scientists reveal new facts about the world.
This chapter examines inter-ethnic and inter-religious interactions between Buddhists and
Muslims in South Thailand. Thailand’s large and growing Muslim minority have longstanding
and close contacts with (Theravada) Buddhists, like similar minorities in Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Cambodia.The uniqueness of these dynamics should not be overexaggerated. On the basis of its geographical spread, Islam is an overwhelmingly Asian religion, with the vast majority of Muslims residing in South and Southeast Asia. While interest in Christian-Muslim relations is understandable, as these represent the world’s two
largest religious blocks, but Muslim interactions with Hindus and Buddhists
deserve much more attention than they have over the last decade. Interactions between communities speaking different languages following different
religious traditions, and who self-identify as Thai and Malay in South Thailand are many and
varied. Contact – like conflict – take a number of forms, and multi-causality needs to be replaced with (sometimes tantalising) mono-causal myths.
Sir Herbert Risley and William Crooke, both officials in the colonial government, published the first two handbooks of tribes and castes in British India in the 1890s, each containing a lengthy ethnographic glossary with entries for individual tribes and castes. The handbooks are rarely consulted by modern anthropologists of India and have been criticized as colonialist misrepresentation. This article, which reassesses Risley's and Crooke's handbooks as contributions to anthropological knowledge, examines their collection and presentation of ethnographic information, particularly Risley's inquiry into caste ranking. It discusses criticism of the handbooks and their elitist bias, as well as the collaborative contribution made by Indian assistants. It briefly considers why Risley's and Crooke's work was uninteresting to leading metropolitan anthropologists and notes the greater interest of European sociologists.
This essay introduces and frames a collection of essays speaking into a particularly burning and troubling period in South African history. The slow economic decline over a period of roughly ten years have now accelerated into a two year-long running student protest over high costs of university education. The protesters themselves, and commentary on the protest movement, link the protests to the failure of the promises of the 1994 compromise that saw the inauguration of the new South Africa. At the same time, the protests also pick up on another exclusion, i.e., the vestiges of colonial knowledge regimes and cultural alienation. In the essays here, issues are address that speak into this situation from various perspectives, namely, the agency of African in defining their own history, the authority and sovereignty to interpret the context, and the role of religion in education to construct social identity.
p> This paper devotes an introduction of scientific survey of Francis Buchanan ‘Hamilton’. Science is called the greatest triumph of the human mind over nature. Natural sciences focused attention on the investigation of the Indian environment and even placed Indians themselves towards scrutiny & their will themselves never be any great enthusiasm for belonging to a society which is not going forward, our culture is full of unformulated rules of conventional behaviour, and we have placed a perfectly absurd value on the ability to confirm to those rules & thus to preserve the whole system whose behaviour they are supposed to regulate. Just like that a Scottish physician Buchanan ‘Hamilton’ recognised for making significant contributions as a Geographer, zoologist, Botanist & as a historian while living in India. </p
When confronted with the commonality of Islamophobic themes of the fanatic Muslim man, the oppressed Muslim woman, and an intolerant Islamic religion, defenders of these views often respond that their prevalence must reflect their truth. After all, they argue, all stereotypes have some seed of truth. The ironclad quality of this tautology—that past repetition of an allegation is justification for its reiteration—recommends a different tack in refutation. A historical evaluation of these claims that demonstrates their persistence despite historical changes helps demonstrate how the core of American and British Islamophobia derives from received truisms that have established—and continue to establish—basic expectations about how Muslims behave. These expectations shape how information about Muslims is interpreted so that what fails to fit within this frame of reference (e.g., Muslim tolerance, nonviolent Muslim protest) often is overlooked.
If a Mohammedan, Turk, Egyptian, Syrian or African commits a crime the newspaper reports do not tell us that it was committed by a Turk, an Egyptian, a Syrian or an African, but by a Mohammedan. If an Irishman, an Italian, a Spaniard or a German commits a crime in the United States we do not say that it was committed by a Catholic, a Methodist or a Baptist, nor even a Christian; we designate the man by his nationality.1
In this essay some key characteristics of contemporary discourse on biblical hermeneutics and philosophical hermeneutics are identified. A redescriptive archaeology of hermeneutics is suggested. The key characteristics of hermeneutics are re-interpreted and critiqued in light of recent theories of religion and history. There are three domains of critical questions at issue in the open question posed to the practice of hermeneutics, namely 1) redescriptive theorising of religion as a social discourse; 2) the materiality of the tradition; and 3) revisioning history and the relationship to the past.
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