Religious Cultures in Early Modern India: New Perspectives

by Rosalind O'Hanlon (Editor), David Washbrook (Editor)

Overview

Religious authority and political power have existed in complex relationships throughout India’s history. The centuries of the ‘early modern’ in South Asia saw particularly dynamic developments in this relationship. Regional as well as imperial states of the period expanded their religious patronage, while new sectarian centres of doctrinal and spiritual authority emerged beyond the confines of the state. Royal and merchant patronage stimulated the growth of new classes of mobile intellectuals deeply committed to the reappraisal of many aspects of religious law and doctrine. Supra-regional institutions and networks of many other kinds - sect-based religious maths, pilgrimage centres and their guardians, sants and sufi orders - flourished, offering greater mobility to wider communities of the pious. This was also a period of growing vigour in the development of vernacular religious literatures of different kinds, and often of new genres blending elements of older devotional, juridical and historical literatures. Oral and manuscript literatures too gained more rapid circulation, although the meaning and canonical status of texts frequently changed as they circulated more widely and reached larger lay audiences.

Through explorations of these developments, the essays in this collection make a distinctive contribution to a critical formative period in the making of India’s modern religious cultures.

This book was published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415602327
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	12/21/2011
Series:	Routledge South Asian History and Culture Series
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	6.88(w) x 9.69(h) x (d)

About the Author

Rosalind O’Hanlon is Professor of Indian History and Culture, Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford.

David Washbrook is Senior Research Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Religious cultures in an imperial landscape Rosalind O’Hanlon and David Washbrook 2. The debate within: a Sufi critique of religious law, tasawwuf and politics in Mughal India Muzaffar Alam 3. The four sampradays: ordering the religious past in Mughal North India John Stratton Hawley 4. Theology and statecraft Monika Horstmann 5. Advaita Vedānta in early modern history Christopher Minkowski 6. The Brahmin double: the Brahminical construction of anti-Brahminism and anti-caste sentiment in the religious cultures of precolonial Maharashtra Christian Lee Novetzke 7. Speaking from Siva’s temple: Banaras scholar households and the Brahman ‘ecumene’ of Mughal India Rosalind O’Hanlon 8. A tale of two temples: Mathurā’s Ke´savadeva and Orcchā’s Caturbhujadeva Heidi Pauwels 9. Replicating Vaisnava worlds: organizing devotional space through the architectonics of the mandala Tony K. Stewart