Religion in Modern India
Author: Robert D. Baird
Publisher:
Published: 1989
Total Pages: 522
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Contributed articles on religious movements in India.
Author: Robert D. Baird
Publisher:
Published: 1989
Total Pages: 522
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Contributed articles on religious movements in India.
Author: Torkel Brekke
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2002-12-05
Total Pages: 190
ISBN-13: 019925236X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This is a book about religious transformation in South Asia in the nineteenth century. On the one hand, a fundamental conceptual transformation in the world of religion among people who were exposed to English language and culture took place. This transformation crystallized religious communities with sharp boundaries and distinct histories. On the other hand, the emerging feeling of religious-communal identity motivated religious and lay leaders to work in the interest of thecommunity. This book is about both of these interrelated developments: the conceptual change and the application of the new ideas to political discourse; the construction and the politics of religious identity.
Author: Rosalind O'Hanlon
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-01-02
Total Pages: 293
ISBN-13: 1317982878
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Religious authority and political power have existed in complex relationships throughout India’s history. The centuries of the ‘early modern’ in South Asia saw particularly dynamic developments in this relationship. Regional as well as imperial states of the period expanded their religious patronage, while new sectarian centres of doctrinal and spiritual authority emerged beyond the confines of the state. Royal and merchant patronage stimulated the growth of new classes of mobile intellectuals deeply committed to the reappraisal of many aspects of religious law and doctrine. Supra-regional institutions and networks of many other kinds - sect-based religious maths, pilgrimage centres and their guardians, sants and sufi orders - flourished, offering greater mobility to wider communities of the pious. This was also a period of growing vigour in the development of vernacular religious literatures of different kinds, and often of new genres blending elements of older devotional, juridical and historical literatures. Oral and manuscript literatures too gained more rapid circulation, although the meaning and canonical status of texts frequently changed as they circulated more widely and reached larger lay audiences. Through explorations of these developments, the essays in this collection make a distinctive contribution to a critical formative period in the making of India’s modern religious cultures. This book was published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.
Author: Fred W. Clothey
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2007-01-24
Total Pages: 297
ISBN-13: 1135948380
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Religion in India is an ideal first introduction to India's fascinating and varied religious history. Fred Clothey surveys the religions of India from prehistory and Indo-European migration through to the modern period. Exploring the interactions between different religious movements over time, and engaging with some of the liveliest debates in religious studies, he examines the rituals, mythologies, arts, ethics and social and cultural contexts of religion as lived in the past and present on the subcontinent. Key topics discussed include: Hinduism, its origins and development over time minority religions, such as Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, Jainism and Buddhism the influences of colonialism on Indian religion the spread of Indian religions in the rest of the world the practice of religion in everyday life, including case studies of pilgrimages, festivals, temples and rituals, and the role of women Written by an experienced teacher, this student-friendly textbook is full of clear, lively discussion and vivid examples. Complete with maps and illustrations, and useful pedagogical features, including timelines, a comprehensive glossary, and recommended further reading specific to each chapter, this is an invaluable resource for students beginning their studies of Indian religions.
Author: Richard S. Weiss
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2019-08-06
Total Pages: 222
ISBN-13: 0520973747
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. The Emergence of Modern Hinduism argues for the importance of regional, vernacular innovation in processes of Hindu modernization. Scholars usually trace the emergence of modern Hinduism to cosmopolitan reform movements, producing accounts that overemphasize the centrality of elite religion and the influence of Western ideas and models. In this study, the author considers religious change on the margins of colonialism by looking at an important local figure, the Tamil Shaiva poet and mystic Ramalinga Swami (1823–1874). Weiss narrates a history of Hindu modernization that demonstrates the transformative role of Hindu ideas, models, and institutions, making this text essential for scholarly audiences of South Asian history, religious studies, Hindu studies, and South Asian studies.
Author: Martin Fuchs
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2019-02-28
Total Pages: 472
ISBN-13: 9780198081685
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Religions in South Asia have tended to be studied in blocks, whether in the various monolithic traditions in which they are now regarded, thus Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Sikh, Jain, Christian, or indeed in temporal blocks: ancient, medieval, modern. This volume seeks to look at relationships both within and between religions. It explores the diversity and the multiplicity within each tradition, the historical links between the various traditions which have crisscrossed the monoliths, but also the specific forms of their co-existence with each other, whether in accord or in antagonism. It views the interaction between 'reformed' and non-reformed branches within each of the modern monoliths, as for instance the Arya Samaj and the Sanatani positions within Hinduism. Its second major concern is to look for grounds shared in the process of modernizing. Though there has been much research to date on religious reform movements, there has been less concern with investigating and analyzing developments across the religious boundaries that so sharply divide Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism and Islam from each other today, and all of these from Christianity. And finally, it also looks at the changing social and political frames of reference shared by both religious and secularist strands of thought. The 'religions' targeted include Hindu discourses (Brahmo, Arya, Sanatana, and various traditional formations, the Aryan/Dravidian divide), Buddhist, Jain, Sikh and Islamic traditions, and Indian Christianity.
Author: Lawrence A. Babb
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Published: 2020-02-01
Total Pages: 400
ISBN-13: 1780466188
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →An introduction to South Asian religions for non-specialist readers and undergraduate students.
Author: Elaine M. Fisher
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2017-02-24
Total Pages: 300
ISBN-13: 0520966295
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In Hindu Pluralism, Elaine M. Fisher complicates the traditional scholarly narrative of the unification of Hinduism. By calling into question the colonial categories implicit in the term “sectarianism,” Fisher’s work excavates the pluralistic textures of precolonial Hinduism in the centuries prior to British intervention. Drawing on previously unpublished sources in Sanskrit, Tamil, and Telugu, Fisher argues that the performance of plural religious identities in public space in Indian early modernity paved the way for the emergence of a distinctively non-Western form of religious pluralism. This work provides a critical resource for understanding how Hinduism developed in the early modern period, a crucial era that set the tenor for religion's role in public life in India through the present day.
Author: Rupa Viswanath
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2014-07-08
Total Pages: 417
ISBN-13: 0231537506
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Once known as "Pariahs," Dalits are primarily descendants of unfree agrarian laborers. They belong to India's most subordinated castes, face overwhelming poverty and discrimination, and provoke public anxiety. Drawing on a wealth of previously untapped sources, this book follows the conception and evolution of the "Pariah Problem" in public consciousness in the 1890s. It shows how high-caste landlords, state officials, and well-intentioned missionaries conceived of Dalit oppression, and effectively foreclosed the emergence of substantive solutions to the "Problem"—with consequences that continue to be felt today. Rupa Viswanath begins with a description of the everyday lives of Dalit laborers in the 1890s and highlights the systematic efforts made by the state and Indian elites to protect Indian slavery from public scrutiny. Protestant missionaries were the first non-Dalits to draw attention to their plight. The missionaries' vision of the Pariahs' suffering as being a result of Hindu religious prejudice, however, obscured the fact that the entire agrarian political–economic system depended on unfree Pariah labor. Both the Indian public and colonial officials came to share a view compatible with missionary explanations, which meant all subsequent welfare efforts directed at Dalits focused on religious and social transformation rather than on structural reform. Methodologically, theoretically, and empirically, this book breaks new ground to demonstrate how events in the early decades of state-sponsored welfare directed at Dalits laid the groundwork for the present day, where the postcolonial state and well-meaning social and religious reformers continue to downplay Dalits' landlessness, violent suppression, and political subordination.
Author: Brian A. Hatcher
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-10-05
Total Pages: 341
ISBN-13: 113504631X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Hinduism in the Modern World presents a new and unprecedented attempt to survey the nature, range, and significance of modern and contemporary Hinduism in South Asia and the global diaspora. Organized to reflect the direction of recent scholarly research, this volume breaks with earlier texts on this subject by seeking to overcome a misleading dichotomy between an elite, intellectualist "modern" Hinduism and the rest of what has so often been misleadingly termed "traditional" or "popular" Hinduism. Without neglecting the significance of modern reformist visions of Hinduism, this book reconceptualizes the meaning of "modern Hinduism" both by expanding its content and by situating its expression within a larger framework of history, ethnography, and contemporary critical theory. This volume equips undergraduate readers with the tools necessary to appreciate the richness and diversity of Hinduism as it has developed during the past two centuries.