Tolerance Secularization And Democratic Politics In South Asia

Offers fresh perspectives on the relationship between secularization, tolerance and democracy through a theoretically informed look at South Asian politics.

Until the 1990s, secularism was understood largely as exclusion of religion from the public domain. However, in the last two decades, the world has witnessed the return of religion as a medium and subject of national, regional, and global politics. With such a shift, the previously unquestioned Western values of modernity and secularism find themselves at loggerheads with the increasing assertion of religious identity, which results in difference-based conflicts. This antagonism also gives rise to a vibrant, religiously pluralistic civil society and speaks of a post-secular turn in modern Southeast Asian democracies. Secularism, Religion, and Democracy in Southeast Asia tries to understand the rise of religion in modern democracies and how everyday economic, social, and political conditions aid this post-secular phenomenon in Southeast Asia. Setting itself apart from most studies of religion in Southeast Asia through its regional focus, this volume explores the ideas, practices, state responses, and anxieties related to the religious–secular divide in this geopolitical region.

The Routledge Handbook of South Asian Religions presents critical research, overviews, and case studies on religion in historical South Asia, in the seven nation states of contemporary South Asia: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives, and in the South Asian diaspora. Chapters by an international set of experts analyse formative developments, roots, changes and transformations, religious practices and ideas, identities, relations, territorialisation, and globalisation in historical and contemporary South Asia. The Handbook is divided into two parts which first analyse historical South Asian religions and their developments and second contemporary South Asia religions that are influenced by both religious pluralism and their close connection to nation states and their ideological power. Contributors argue that religion has been used as a tool for creating nations as well as majorities within those nations in South Asia, despite their enormous diversity, in particular religious diversity. The Handbook explores these diversities and tensions, historical developments, and the present situation across religious traditions by utilising an array of approaches and from the point of view of various academic disciplines. Drawing together a remarkable collection of leading and emerging scholars, this handbook is an invaluable research tool and will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of Asian religion, religion in context, and South Asian religions.

This book brings ethnographies of everyday power and ritual into dialogue with intellectual studies of theology and political theory. It underscores the importance of academic collaboration between scholars of religion, anthropology, and history in uncovering the structures of thinking and action that make politics work. The volume weaves important discussions around sovereignty in modern South Asian history with debates elsewhere on the world map. South Asia’s colonial history – especially India’s twentieth-century emergence as the world’s largest democracy – has made the subcontinent a critical arena for thinking about how transformations and continuities in conceptions of sovereignty provide a vital frame for tracking shifts in political order. The chapters deal with themes such as sovereignty, kingship, democracy, governance, reason, people, nation, colonialism, rule of law, courts, autonomy, and authority, especially within the context of India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. The book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers in politics, ideology, religion, sociology, history, and political culture, as well as the informed reader interested in South Asian studies.

Post-colonial and post-partition South Asia, one of the fastest-growing and yet one of the least integrated regions of the world, is marked by both optimism and pessimism. This intriguing dichotomy of strength and weakness, security and insecurity, hope and fear, connections and disconnects underpins South Asia’s regionalism conundrum and gives birth to borders and boundaries – both material and mental – with a complex territoriality. The Janus-faced nature of South Asian borderlands – the inward nationalizing impulses entangled with the outward regional frontier-orientations – is a stark reminder that history of mobility in this eco-geographical region is much older than the history of territoriality and colonial cartography and ethnography. This collection of meticulously researched, theoretically informed, case studies from South Asia provides useful insights into bordering, ordering and othering narratives as practices and performances that are intricately entangled with identity politics and security discourses. It shows how a sharper focus on subterranean subregionalism(s), border communities, popular geopolitics of enmity, and transborder challenges to sustainability, could open up spaces for new multiple (re)imaginings of borders at diverse scales and sights including sub-urban neighbourhoods, school textbooks/cinema and trans-border conservation initiatives. The chapters in this edited volume have been contributed by both renowned as well as young emerging scholars, looking into the borders and boundaries in South Asia. Each chapter offers new perspectives and insights into themes like trans-Himalayan borderlands, India-Pakistan physical and mental borders, Afghanistan-Pakistan border and numerous social boundaries that we see in everyday South Asia. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Borderlands Studies.

"Nation-Building and Foreign Policy in India: An Identity-Strategy Conflict" presents an evaluation of Indian foreign policy. It analyses the unusual concern of Indian strategic thinking about political values. The book argues that in Indian foreign policy, there has been a shift from a strict concern for national interest towards idealist considerations. Thus creating what the author calls an 'idealist inflection'. This inflection does not have its roots in cultural aspects or grand strategy. Instead, it is best understood with reference to the political process of nation-building, characterised by the specific choices and decisions taken by the two leading protagonists of the Indian National Movement - Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. The values they chose to place at the heart of India's national identity have spilt into the country's foreign policy. The book then goes on to study the changes in India's foreign policy and national identity since Nehru's time until today. "Nation-Building and Foreign Policy in India: An Identity-Strategy Conflict" will be of interest to academicians, policy-makers and general readers with an interest in foreign policy and international relations.

As an invitation to interrogate the secular modality of art, the book unsettles both the categories of 'art' and 'secular' in their theoretical and historical implications. It questions the temporal, spatial and cultural binaries between the 'sacred' and the 'secular' that have shaped art historical scholarship as well as artistic practice. All the essays here are anchored in a conception of a region, whether we call it South Asia or the Indian subcontinent – one, fissured by histories of partition, state formations and religious nationalisms, but still offering a collective site from which to speak to the disciplines of art and the knowledge worlds in which they are embedded. The book asks: How do we complicate the religious designations of pre-modern art and architecture and the new forms of their resurgence in contemporary iconographies and monuments? How do we re-conceptualize the public and the political, as fiery contestations and new curatorial practices reconfigure the meaning of art in the proliferating spaces of museums, galleries, biennales and festivals? How do we understand South Asian art's deep entanglements with the politics of the present?

MAPPING PARTITION “A hugely productive partnership between geography and history, ‘Mapping Partition’ does a great service to the field of Partition studies - it leaves us in no doubt about both the long-term cartographical processes that contributed to how South Asia was divided in 1947, and the importance of bringing a geographer’s insights to bear on this complex history of boundary making.” Professor Sarah Ansari, Professor of History (South Asia), Royal Holloway University of London “Fitzpatrick produces spatial readings of partition’s knowledge formations, geopolitical imaginaries, administrative cartography, and legal geographical expertise. These enrich the histories and geographies of partition through painstaking archival, textual, and visual analysis which will resonate far beyond historical geography and South Asian studies.” Professor Stephen Legg, Professor of Historical Geography, University of Nottingham Mapping Partition delivers the first in-depth geographical account of the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. The book explores the impact of colonial geography and geographers on the boundary, both during the partition process and in the period preceding it. Drawing on extensive archival research, Hannah Fitzpatrick argues that colonial geographical knowledge underpinned the partition process in heretofore unacknowledged ways. The author also discusses the consequences of placing different ethnic, communal, and linguistic groups onto the colonial map and the growing importance of majority and minority populations in representative democratic politics. Mapping Partition: Politics, Territory and the End of Empire in India and Pakistan is required reading for students and researchers studying geography, colonial and imperial history, South Asian studies, and interdisciplinary border studies.