Religious Controversy In British India

This book opens the doors to a social and cultural sphere beyond the limited world of the English-speaking elite and provides the basis for an understanding of religious controversy and internal reform. It explores the dynamics of religious interaction and conflict that points toward later developments of communalism and religious separatism still plaguing the subcontinent. Religious Controversy in British India reveals a world expressed in South Asian dialects that has been closed to many scholars and students of the subcontinent. During the nineteenth century polemical religious literature and those who wrote it mobilized groups and led them back to the "fundamentals." Sacred texts supporting movements were translated and made available in inexpensive editions. Even texts from the well established oral tradition were put into print. This process was often initiated in response to Christian missionary activity, a response that ultimately expanded to include other religions. In this book, scholars examine the writings of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs responsible for significant changes within different communities and for a heightened sense of boundary-defining identity.

This volume, part of the 'Debates in Indian History and Society' series identifies the major issues within the history of socio-religious reform among Hindus in modern times. Amiya Sen's introduction places the various points of debate in context and also tries to formulate an acceptable definition of 'reform' in the given context.

Peter Gottschalk offers a compelling study of how, through the British implementation of scientific taxonomy in the subcontinent, Britons and Indians identified an inherent divide between mutually antagonistic religious communities. England's ascent to power coincided with the rise of empirical science as an authoritative way of knowing not only the natural world, but the human one as well. The British scientific passion for classification, combined with the Christian impulse to differentiate people according to religion, led to a designation of Indians as either Hindu or Muslim according to rigidly defined criteria that paralleled classification in botanical and zoological taxonomies. Through an historical and ethnographic study of the north Indian village of Chainpur, Gottschalk shows that the Britons' presumed categories did not necessarily reflect the Indians' concepts of their own identities, though many Indians came to embrace this scientism and gradually accepted the categories the British instituted through projects like the Census of India, the Archaeological Survey of India, and the India Museum. Today's propogators of Hindu-Muslim violence often cite scientistic formulations of difference that descend directly from the categories introduced by imperial Britain. Religion, Science, and Empire will be a valuable resource to anyone interested in the colonial and postcolonial history of religion in India.

This book opens the doors to a social and cultural sphere beyond the limited world of the English-speaking elite and provides the basis for an understanding of religious controversy and internal reform. It explores the dynamics of religious interaction and conflict that points toward later developments of communalism and religious separatism still plaguing the subcontinent. Religious Controversy in British India reveals a world expressed in South Asian dialects that has been closed to many scholars and students of the subcontinent. During the nineteenth century polemical religious literature and those who wrote it mobilized groups and led them back to the "fundamentals." Sacred texts supporting movements were translated and made available in inexpensive editions. Even texts from the well established oral tradition were put into print. This process was often initiated in response to Christian missionary activity, a response that ultimately expanded to include other religions. In this book, scholars examine the writings of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs responsible for significant changes within different communities and for a heightened sense of boundary-defining identity.

This volume in The New Cambridge History of India looks at the numerous nineteenth-century movements for social and religious change--Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, and Zoroastrian--that used various forms of religious authority to legitimize their reform programs. Such movements were both indigenous and colonial in their origins, and the author shows how each adapted to the challenge of competing nationalisms as political circumstances changed. The volume considers the overall impact of British rule on the whole sphere of religion, social behavior, and culture.