Assertive Religious Identities: India and Europe

480 Pages·2006·64.276 MB·English

by  Satish Saberwal, Mushirul Hasan

ASSERTIVE RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES
INDIA AND EUROPE
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UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
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ASSERTIVE RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES
India, and Europe
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&tiled by
SAT ISH SABERWA L
MUSHIRUL HASAN
MANOH AR
2006
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First published 2006
() Individual Corunbu1ors, 2006
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Contents
Preface 7
Introduction
Sattsh Saberwal 9
TiiE PRE-MODERN WORLD
1. Who is a Malayali Anyway? Language, Community
and Identity in Precolonial Kerala
G. Arunima 33
2. From Dar-ul-Harb to Dar-ul-/slam?:
Chishti Sufi Accounts and the Emergence
of Islam in the Delhi Sultanate
Raziuddin Aquil 59
3. Conflict and Coexistence: Jews in Europe
under Muslim and Christian Rule
Michael Brenner 85
CURRENTS IN ISLAM
4. Living Plurally: A Nineteenth-Century Delhi Intelligentsia
Mushirul Hasan 103
5. Standardizing Muslim Scholarship:
The Nadwat al-ulama
}an-Peter Hartung 121
6. Local Roots of Tablighi jamaat in Orissa
Syed Zainuddin 145
7. Assertive Religious Identities, Secular Nation States and the
Question of Pluralism: The Case of the Tablighi jamaat
Anindita Chalerabarti 171
HINDUlVA
8. Hindutva Ideas of the Past
•
Pradtp Kumar Datta 199
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6
CONTEl'ITS
9. The Navigators of Hindu Rashtra: RSS Pracharaks
Pralay Kanungo 233
10. Trisbul Diksba, Cross Burning and the Politics of Hate
Amar Farooqui 255
POLffiCAL ISLAM
11. Identity Assertions as Contentious Acts
Ranabir Samaddar 271
12. The Evolution of Political Islam in Jammu
and Kashmir
V. Nagendra Rao and Reltba Cbowdbary 295
COMPETITIVE CONVERSIONS
13. Do Hindu and Islamic Transnational Religious
Movements represent Cosmopolitanism
and Difference?
Sbatl Mayarom 323
14. Adivasi vs. Vanvasi: The Politics of Conversion
in Central India
Nandtnt Sundar 357
LOOKING FOR ALT ERNA11VES
15. In Pursuit of Tolerance: Why Liberty should
Receive Priority
Gurpreet Mahajan 395
16. Asserting Religious Identities in the
Federal Republic of Germany
Mtcbael Duscbe 415
17. Transcending Religious Identities:
Amrita Pritam and Partition
Nonica Dalla 439
Lisi of Conlrlbulors 469
Index 473
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Preface
The idea for the volume before you originated in a conversation
between Professor Salish Saberwal and me, in early 2003. We have
both been concerned over processes, sustained over several geµer
ations now, by major institutions-some Hindu, some Muslim-
whose consequences have been socially sepamNve. While these
institutions' ostensible functions are 'religious' or 'cultural', which
seem innocent enough, these have worked out low cost fonns of
organization and activity-hich have given them a rather formidable
expansive dynamic. Furthermore, their activities and campaigns have
served, sometimes unintentionally, to provoke each other, thereby
providing the other side with justification for its own activities, as if
in collective self-defence. The mutual provocation has, over the
decades, confirmed for both sides, a sense of their own victimhood.
We saw here a social mechanism which has had significant social
off
and political consequences but which has remained largely the
radars of the social sciences. We proposed initially a half-day
discussion of the theme; but as we worked on it, we were drawn
into its complexity-and we found numerous colleagues who have
been working on its many facets from different angles. The three
day seminar considered the processes at issue from a long-term
historical perspective; and also a comparative one, reaching out to
another Important region where the mutual relations between major
religious traditions have also been problematical for a very long time.
Fortunately, we were able to persuade three scholars to write on
Europe's experience. Professor Michael Brenner, through the good
offices of Mr Heiko Sievers, Programme Director, Goethe Institut,
New Delhi, and Professor Gurpreet Mahajan and Dr Michael Dusche,
both fromJawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Mr Sievers and
Goethe lnstitut helped us bring in DrJ an Peter Hartung too, and we
greatly appreciate their help.
We are able to publish this volume with unusual speed, thanks to
exemplary cooperation from our contributors and from Mr Ramesh
Jain, our publisher. We are grateful.
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8 PREFACE
l am pa11icularly grateful to Professor Salish Saberwal for his
untiring efforts in organizing the seminar, persuading the contributors
to revise their papers, and editing them with care. Without his active
intervention, this book would not have been published. Let me add
that he has been a great asset as a Visiting Professor at the Academy
of Third World Studies.
NewDelbi
MUSHIRUt~
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Introduction
SAT ISH SABERWA L
The rising tide of chauvinism in South Asia, especiaily of the religious
nationalist sort,. presents the social sciences with an exceptionally
acute challenge. Numerous religious identities have been assertive
in the subcontinent; but extraordinary vehemence, and violence, have
come to be associated with groups claiming to speak for 'Hindus'
and 'Muslims' in South Asia since the early twentieth century. We
can now look back to earlier and crucial horizons. The later' of these
is in the nineteenth century; arising, first, in a particular mix of colonial
political, administrative, and documentary .practices and, second,
in the availability of novel institutional models, and technologies,
-especially for communication. The earlier horizon lies in the medieval
centuries. These latter may be seen as a time both for insulation and
for mixing at the levels of ideas and social relationships, a time both
for myriad cooperation and for contestation.
Of that ambiguous legacy, It is the insulating and the oppositional
traces of memory and attitudes that found fresh energy through the
nineteenth century initiatives, preparing the ground for a more
determined re-carving of social spaces. The social sciences in India
have not taken much notice of this ongoing social reconfiguration,
not to mention its implications. This blindspot seems to have been
overdetermined from several directions.
Clearly, to be able to comprehend the processes at issue required
an openness to historical connections as well as to the inner lives of
social and religious groups. A great deal needed to be considered:
ideologies, social organisation, politics, Interpretations of texts and
of the past, and everyday activities and relationships in the localities.
•1 thank T.N. Madan and Raghurama Raju for reading an earlier vc;mon
critically, and Pradip Datta for his advice. I am grateful also to She~n
Ratnagar for her sage and beneficial advice.
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•
10 SATISH SABERWAL
Further, Sudhir Kakar, Hansen, and others have argued that the
psychological implications of these diverse, pervasive experiences
have been re-shaping categories in the unconscious too. That is to
say, all this demanded of scholarship a simultaneous interest in
multiple disciplinary traditions and pe1spectives: sociology, history,
religious tr.acliti9f\S, the unconscious. Here was a process too large
and diffuse to be apprehended at one go.
Social sciences in India have had difficulty generating stamina of
this order. There has been a certain reluctance to examine the domain
of religion in modem India-and even more so the patterns of
interactions between the major religious traditions. There was the
preliminary difficulty over the categories 'Muslim' and 'Hindu'. Given
the long implication of these categories in social and political conflict,
'secularists' have tended to eschew their use altogether, foregoing
the possibility of grasping their antagonistic interactions in society.
Yet the ongoing re-structurings of religious traditions, and re
structurings of their mutual interactions-sometimes ·provocative
interactions-have been central to the history of modern India (Madan
1997).
Funhennore, our universities function with a division of labour
where an interest in history is assigned to historians. The other social
sciences, and especially sociologists over the past fifty years, have
shown very limited interest in history. On the other side, only a few
historians have cultivated a feel for complex social processes.'
Consequently, there was no effort to put together the bits and pieces
that began to become available through monographic literature in
the 1980s, with key monographs from Francis Robinson, Rafiuddin
Ahmed, Barbara Metcalf and others.
With something like the movements for Pakistan and Ayodhya,
the outcomes have tended to be attributed to immediately preceding
activities, campaigns, negotiations, and the like. Only recently has
scholarship begun to locate these outcomes in their larger contexts,
taking in their prehistories concerning the prior reconfiguring of the
social ground on which the later mobilizations could work.
These notes will review the logics that prevailed along these
several horizons and along those governing the transition from one
to the next: the medieval legacy, the transition to colonialism, and
the rise of contrastive identities since the mid-nineteenth century.
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