Nidan - International Journal of Indian Studies July 2019
This Nidān special issue on ‘Christianity in India’ is an extensive enterprise of most recent scholarship pertaining to the topic. Contributions for this special issue, carried out from a historical, literary and anthropological perspective explore pertinent questions about Christian vernacular movements, identity, texts/ literature, music, poetry, institutions, missionaries and cantonments. All this, further contextualized within the local and regional history of colonialism and Brahmin...
Representing Identity
In this paper I shall demonstrate through the case study of Nanaimo Sikh community how significantly they view their religious orientation as opposed to their ethnic identification. I will point to some implications for them within the Canadian society as a result of them being primarily seen as one among many religious groups.
Victim Discourse the Narrative of Indian Indenture Servitude
When we think of African Americans we immediately associate them with slave history and when we think of the indenture system, we associate it with the Asian migrant workers of the nineteenth century British colonies. Neither of these assumptions have been carefully clarified in the Indian indenture scholarship. Although, indenture history of North American colonies of Britain was extensively covered by economic historians and migration studies, very little has been discussed in regard to the...
Sociology of Hinduism
In this essay on Sociology of Hinduism, I shall first include some classicists who discussed Hindu society primarily through traditional categories of Varna, Jati (literally means birth group, and Kula (clan/ family group) and the general western notion of caste that was applied to Hindu society. Generally in most discussions, although Varna refers to a different type of classification, these terms are not clearly distinguished, and usually conflated with the term ‘caste’.
Religious Pluralism and Religious Education
In this essay, I outline the complexities of the contemporary South African society and point out why the so called Christian majority’s call for a single faith approach to teaching religion in schools will not make a great deal of sense within the context of the Bill of Rights of the South African constitution. Besides, the issue of religion education in South Africa is not only a human rights issue but also a moral issue.
Politics of Defining Hindu texts
In the context of rightwing student protest on Delhi University campus in 2011 to demand the withdrawal of an essay written by Prof A K Ramanujan, there developed a politico-legal situation in which students deployed both political pressure as well as legal suit to achieve their goal. This incident raised not only questions of political involvement in defining what Hinduism should be and how its sacred texts ought to be read, but the debate also attempted to shape the ‘sacred text’ by car...
Place of subcaste
Caste as a social phenomenon has undergone many changes. The most important operative unit that has exemplified caste in its discourse is subcaste ( jati) identity. Both within India and certainly in the diaspora, there is now increasing evidence of the dissolution of subcaste ( jati) identities giving rise to various other formations of groups replacing the endogamous relationships with other arbitrary group formations. In this article, I examine some evidence from South Africa, the West Ind...
Insiders and Outsiders
In this essay, I look at the contemporary debate on the study of religion as to where it is in the academy. Second, in relation to that I look at the debates on the study of Hinduism. I then examine the issue of “who speaks for Hinduism” and whether Hinduism is a case of exception in the study of religion. In conclusion I suggest that Hinduism is a case in point in learning about our comparative project in the study of religion. My line of argument in this essay is based on the premise th...
Freedom in Bhavagad Gita
In this paper, I attempt to clarify the idea of freedom in the Gītā using two important categories found both in the Gītā as well as in the Sāṃkhya philosophical system—Buddhi and Sattva. Much of the liberation idea that is often spoken of in the context of many modern Hindu movements is drawn from the Bhagavad Gītā. There is so much looseness to their ideas that it is necessary to explore what the Gītā actually means by its notion of freedom. Additionally, Gītā is often presen...
Hinduism in Africa
In presenting Hinduism in Africa, the essay limits itself to three important regions—East Africa (Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania), Southern Africa (South Africa) and West Africa (Ghana). The reason for this limitation is that although there are Hindus throughout Africa presently as India begins to expand its trade with Africa, the three regions mentioned have come to represent the vibrant emergence of Hinduism on the African continent unparalleled with countries elsewhere in Africa. Contact be...
Hinduism and the Master Narrative
The study of Hinduism is dominated by brahmanical master narrative. In this essay I suggest alternative ways to study Hinduism. Documenting diverse regional narratives and extracting Hindu practices from these narratives is a starting point. In doing so, reliance on fieldwork-based narratives that provide insight into the different orientations by avoiding the temptation to subordinate the local and regional narratives to an overarching master narrative would help us understand the many aspec...
Grey street in Durban
In this paper, I wish to explore the life in the mid-19th to 20th century in the Durban-based Indian Casbah and its enduring legacy. In exploring the Casbah life in Durban, I wish to pay special attention to the narratives of the people who either were associated with it and had living memories of it, or remember the many stories passed on to them by their families.1 The central question that I explore in analysing these narratives is: does Casbah in the diaspora enable the diasporic communit...
Andhra Pradhesh Economic and Social Relations
The social relations of castes and their tribal counterparts in various regions of Andhra are structured on the basis of various economic exchanges, and the status of being lower and higher is not necessarily expressed in purity and pollution terms vis-a-vis ritual, but rather on the basis of services and products that they can exchange. Privileging the ritual sphere to explain social relations of castes and tribes, as done by Dumont (1980) and many other later anthropologists (Pfaffenberger ...