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Looks at Western understandings of South Asian religions and indigenous responses from pre-colonial to contemporary times.
Focusing on boundaries, appropriations, and resistances involved in Western engagements with South Asian religions, this edited volume considers both the pre- and postcolonial period in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. It pays particular attention to contemporary controversies surrounding the study of South Asian religions, including several scholars' reflection on the contentious reaction to their own work. Other chapters consider such issues as British colonial epistemologies, the relevance of Hegel for the study of South Asia, the canonization of Francis Xavier, feminist interpretations of the mother of the Buddha, and theological dispute among Muslims in Bangladesh and Pakistan. By using the themes of boundaries, appropriations and resistances, this work offers insight into the dynamics and diversity of Western approaches to South Asian religions, and the indigenous responses to them, that avoids simple active/passive binaries.
"Even before opening this book, students and researchers are challenged to think both expansively and carefully about their own subjectivity, their own location within the fields in which they roam. Critical reflectivity has become a major theme in many fields of humanities research, and this volume of interlinked essays on the study of religion in South Asia in the western academy, carefully put together by [Peter] Gottschalk and Matthew Schmalz, contributes provocatively to this theme." — Religions of South Asia
List of Figures
Introduction: Engaging South Asian Religions
PETER GOTTSCHALK AND MATHEW N. SCHMALZ
PART ONE: BOUNDARIES
1. A Science of Defining Boundaries: Classification,Categorization, and the Census of India
PETER GOTTSCHALK
2. The Repetition of Past Imperialisms: Hegel, HistoricalDifference, and the Theorization of Indic Religions
ARVIND MANDAIR
3. Beyond National Borders and Religious Boundaries: Muslim and Hindu Veneration of Bonbibi
SUFIA UDDIN
PART TWO: APPROPRIATIONS
4. Boundaries and Appropriations in North IndianCharismatic Catholicism
MATHEW N. SCHMALZ
5. The Corpse and Cult of St. Francis Xavier, 1552–1623
WILLIAM R. PINCH
6. Sati or Female Supremacy? Feminist Appropriationsof Gotami’s Parinirvana
LIZ WILSON
PART THREE: RESISTANCES
7. Resisting My Attackers; Resisting My Defenders: Representing the Shivaji Narratives
JAMES W. LAINE
8. Resisting Assimilation: Encounters with a Small Islamic Sectin Contemporary Pakistan
SHAHZAD BASHIR
9: Climbing through Paradigms
PAUL B. COURTRIGHT
AFTERWORD AND RESPONSES
Afterword: Scandals, Scholars, Subjects
SAURABH DUBE
Response 1: Historical Difference
ARVIND MANDAIR
Response 2: Legend versus Myth
SUFIA UDDIN
Response 3: Staying With and Thinking Through
MATHEW N. SCHMALZ
List of Contributors
Index