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Beyond Religion in India and Pakistan

Author : Virinder S. Kalra

Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing

Page : 304 pages

File Size : 40,15 MB

Release : 2019-12-12

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 1350041777

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Book Description

Drawing on insights from theoretical engagements with borders and subalternity, Beyond Religion in India and Pakistan suggests new frameworks for understanding religious boundaries in South Asia. It looks at the ways in which social categories and structures constitute the bordering logics inherent within enactments of these boundaries, and positions hegemony and resistance through popular religion as an important indication of wider developments of political and social change. The book also shows how borders are continually being maintained through violence at national, community and individual levels. By exploring selected sites and expressions of piety including shrines, texts, practices and movements, Virinder S. Kalra and Navtej K. Purewal argue that the popular religion of Punjab should neither be limited to a polarised picture between formal, institutional religion, nor the 'enchanted universe' of rituals, saints, shrines and village deities. Instead, the book presents a picture of 'religion' as a realm of movement, mobilization, resistance and power in which gender and caste are connate of what comes to be known as 'religious'. Through extensive ethnographic research, the authors explore the reality of the complex, dynamic and contested relations that characterize everyday material and religious lives on the ground. Ultimately, the book highlights how popular religion challenges the borders and boundaries of religious and communal categories, nationalism and theological frameworks while simultaneously reflecting gender/caste society.



Beyond Religion in India and Pakistan

Author : Virinder S. Kalra

Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing

Page : 241 pages

File Size : 40,50 MB

Release : 2019-12-12

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 1350041769

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Book Description

Drawing on insights from theoretical engagements with borders and subalternity, Beyond Religion in India and Pakistan suggests new frameworks for understanding religious boundaries in South Asia. It looks at the ways in which social categories and structures constitute the bordering logics inherent within enactments of these boundaries, and positions hegemony and resistance through popular religion as an important indication of wider developments of political and social change. The book also shows how borders are continually being maintained through violence at national, community and individual levels. By exploring selected sites and expressions of piety including shrines, texts, practices and movements, Virinder S. Kalra and Navtej K. Purewal argue that the popular religion of Punjab should neither be limited to a polarised picture between formal, institutional religion, nor the 'enchanted universe' of rituals, saints, shrines and village deities. Instead, the book presents a picture of 'religion' as a realm of movement, mobilization, resistance and power in which gender and caste are connate of what comes to be known as 'religious'. Through extensive ethnographic research, the authors explore the reality of the complex, dynamic and contested relations that characterize everyday material and religious lives on the ground. Ultimately, the book highlights how popular religion challenges the borders and boundaries of religious and communal categories, nationalism and theological frameworks while simultaneously reflecting gender/caste society.



Temptations of the West

Author : Pankaj Mishra

Publisher : Macmillan + ORM

Page : 338 pages

File Size : 12,77 MB

Release : 2002-04-17

Category : Travel

ISBN : 1429954647

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Book Description

A vivid, often surprising account of South Asia today by the author of An End to Suffering In his new book, Pankaj Mishra brings literary authority and political insight to bear on travels that are at once epic and personal. Traveling in the changing cultures of South Asia, Mishra sees the pressures—the temptations—of Western-style modernity and prosperity, and teases out the paradoxes of globalization. A visit to Allahabad, birthplace of Jawaharlal Nehru, occasions a brief history of the tumultuous post-independence politics Nehru set in motion. In Kashmir, just after the brutal killing of thirtyfive Sikhs, Mishra sees Muslim guerrillas playing with Sikh village children while the media ponder a (largely irrelevant) visit by President Clinton. And in Tibet Mishra exquisitely parses the situation whereby the Chinese government—officially atheist and strongly opposed to a free Tibet—has discovered that Tibetan Buddhism can "be packaged and sold to tourists." Temptations of the West is a book concerned with history still in the making—essential reading about a conflicted and rapidly changing region.



A Secular Age Beyond the West

Author : Mirjam Künkler

Publisher : Cambridge University Press

Page : 441 pages

File Size : 50,91 MB

Release : 2018-07-05

Category : Political Science

ISBN : 110841771X

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Book Description

This book compares secularity in societies not shaped by Western Christianity, particularly in Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa.



Modern Sufis and the State

Author : Katherine Pratt Ewing

Publisher : Columbia University Press

Page : 228 pages

File Size : 37,61 MB

Release : 2020-08-25

Category : Religion

ISBN : 0231551460

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Book Description

Sufism is typically thought of as the mystical side of Islam. In recent years, it has been held up as a supposedly peaceful alternative to the spread of forms of Islam associated with violence, an embodiment of democratic ideals of tolerance and pluralism. Are Sufis in fact as otherworldy and apolitical as this stereotype suggests? Modern Sufis and the State brings together a range of scholars, including anthropologists, historians, and religious-studies specialists, to challenge common assumptions that are made about Sufism today. Focusing on India and Pakistan within a broader global context, this book provides locally grounded accounts of how Sufis in South Asia have engaged in politics from the colonial period to the present. Contributors foreground the effects and unintended consequences of efforts to link Sufism with the spread of democracy and consider what roles scholars and governments have played in the making of twenty-first-century Sufism. They critique the belief that Salafism and Sufism are antithetical, offering nuanced analyses of the diversity, multivalence, and local embeddedness of Sufi political engagements and self-representations in Pakistan and India. Essays question the portrayal of Sufi shrines as sites of toleration, peace, and harmony, exploring cases of tension and conflict. A wide-ranging interdisciplinary collection, Modern Sufis and the State is a timely call to think critically about the role of public discourse in shaping perceptions of Sufism.



Beyond Caste

Author : Sumit Guha

Publisher : BRILL

Page : 256 pages

File Size : 14,61 MB

Release : 2013-09-12

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 9004254854

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Book Description

'Caste' is today almost universally perceived as an ancient and unchanging Hindu institution preserved solely by a deep-seated religious ideology. Yet the word itself is an importation from sixteenth-century Europe. This book tracks the long history of the practices amalgamated under this label and shows their connection to changing patterns of social and political power down to the present. It frames caste as an involuted and complex form of ethnicity and explains why it persisted under non-Hindu rulers and in non-Hindu communities across South Asia.



Beyond Crisis

Author : Naveeda Khan

Publisher : Routledge

Page : 605 pages

File Size : 48,99 MB

Release : 2012-04-27

Category : Political Science

ISBN : 1136517588

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Book Description

Through the essays in this volume, we see how the failure of the state becomes a moment to ruminate on the artificiality of this most modern construct, the failure of nationalism, an opportunity to dream of alternative modes of association, and the failure of sovereignty to consider the threats and possibilities of the realm of foreignness within the nation-state as within the self. The ambition of this volume is not only to complicate standing representations of Pakistan. It is take Pakistan out of the status of exceptionalism that its multiple crises have endowed upon it. By now, many scholars have written of how exile, migrancy, refugeedom, and other modes of displacement constitute modern subjectivities. The arguments made in the book say that Pakistan is no stranger to this condition of human immigrancy and therefore, can be pressed into service in helping us to understand our present condition.



Outrage

Author : Paul Rollier

Publisher : UCL Press

Page : 266 pages

File Size : 29,62 MB

Release : 2019

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 1787355284

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Book Description

Whether spurred by religious images or academic history books, hardly a day goes by in South Asia without an incident or court case occurring as a result of hurt religious feelings. The sharp rise in blasphemy accusations over the past few decades calls for an investigation into why offence politics has become so pronounced, and why it is observable across religious and political differences. Outrage offers an interdisciplinary study of this growing trend. Bringing together researchers in Anthropology, Religious Studies, Languages, South Asia Studies and History, all with rich experience in the variegated ways in which religion and politics intersect in this region, the volume presents a fine-grained analysis that navigates and unpacks the religious sensitivities and political concerns under discussion. Each chapter focuses on a recent case or context of alleged blasphemy or desecration in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar, collectively exploring common denominators across national and religious differences. Among the common features are the rapid introduction of social media and smartphones, the possible political gains of initiating blasphemy accusations, and the growing self-assertion of marginal communities. These features are turning South Asia into a veritable flash point for offence controversies in the world today, and will be of interest to researchers exploring the intersection of religion and politics in South Asia and beyond.



Religion as Critique

Author : Irfan Ahmad

Publisher : UNC Press Books

Page : 300 pages

File Size : 24,54 MB

Release : 2017-11-20

Category : Religion

ISBN : 1469635100

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Book Description

Irfan Ahmad makes the far-reaching argument that potent systems and modes for self-critique as well as critique of others are inherent in Islam--indeed, critique is integral to its fundamental tenets and practices. Challenging common views of Islam as hostile to critical thinking, Ahmad delineates thriving traditions of critique in Islamic culture, focusing in large part on South Asian traditions. Ahmad interrogates Greek and Enlightenment notions of reason and critique, and he notes how they are invoked in relation to "others," including Muslims. Drafting an alternative genealogy of critique in Islam, Ahmad reads religious teachings and texts, drawing on sources in Hindi, Urdu, Farsi, and English, and demonstrates how they serve as expressions of critique. Throughout, he depicts Islam as an agent, not an object, of critique. On a broader level, Ahmad expands the idea of critique itself. Drawing on his fieldwork among marketplace hawkers in Delhi and Aligarh, he construes critique anthropologically as a sociocultural activity in the everyday lives of ordinary Muslims, beyond the world of intellectuals. Religion as Critique allows space for new theoretical considerations of modernity and change, taking on such salient issues as nationhood, women's equality, the state, culture, democracy, and secularism.



Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism

Author :

Publisher : Oxford University Press

Page : 393 pages

File Size : 17,37 MB

Release : 2021-08-03

Category : Political Science

ISBN : 0197530044

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Book Description

A collection of essays that situates and furthers contemporary debates around the prospects of democracy in diverse societies within and beyond the West. Negotiating Democracy and Religious Pluralism examines the relationship between the functioning of democracy and the prior existence of religious plurality in three societies outside the West: India, Pakistan, and Turkey. All three societies had on one hand deep religious diversity and on the other long histories as imperial states that responded to religious diversity through their specific pre-modern imperial institutions. Each country has followed a unique historical trajectory with regard to crafting democratic institutions to deal with such extreme diversity. The volume focuses on three core themes: historical trends before the modern state's emergence that had lasting effects; the genealogies of both the state and religion in politics and law; and the problem of violence toward and domination over religious out-groups. Volume editors Karen Barkey, Sudipta Kaviarj, and Vatsal Naresh have gathered a group of leading scholars across political science, sociology, history, and law to examine this multifaceted topic. Together, they illuminate various trajectories of political thought, state policy, and the exercise of social power during and following a transition to democracy. Just as importantly, they ask us to reflexively examine the political categories and models that shape our understanding of what has unfolded in South Asia and Turkey.