Rethinking Religion in India: The Colonial Construction of Hinduism / Edition 1

by Esther Bloch, Marianne Keppens, Rajaram Hegde

Overview

This book critically assesses recent debates about the colonial construction of Hinduism. Increasingly scholars have come to realise that the dominant understanding of Indian culture and its traditions is unsatisfactory. According to the classical paradigm, Hindu traditions are conceptualized as features of a religion with distinct beliefs, doctrines, sacred laws and holy texts. Today, however, many academics consider this conception to be a colonial ‘construction’. This book focuses on the different versions, arguments and counter-arguments of the thesis that the Hindu religion is a construct of colonialism. Bringing together the different positions in the debate, it provides necessary historical data, arguments and conceptual tools to examine the argument. Organized in two parts, the first half of the book provides new analyses of historical and empirical data; the second presents some of the theoretical questions that have emerged from the debate on the construction of Hinduism. Where some of the contributors argue that Hinduism was created as a result of a western Christian notion of religion and the imperatives of British colonialism, others show that this religion already existed in pre-colonial India; and as an alternative to these standpoints, other writers argue that Hinduism only exists in the European experience and does not correspond to any empirical reality in India. This volume offers new insights into the nature of the construction of religion in India and will be of interest to scholars of the History of Religion, Asian Religion, Postcolonial and South Asian Studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415548908
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	01/04/2010
Series:	Routledge South Asian Religion Series
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Esther Bloch and Marianne Keppens are Doctoral Researchers at the Research Centre Vergelijkende Cultuurwetenschap, Ghent University, Belgium. Rajaram Hegde is Professor in History and Archaeology at Kuvempu University, Karnataka, India. He is also the Director of the Centre for the Study of Local Cultures - a research collaboration between Ghent University and Kuvempu University.

Table of Contents

Part 1: Historical and Empirical Arguments 1. Hindus and Others 2. Hindu Religious Identity with Special Reference to the Origin and Significance of the Term ‘Hinduism’, c. 1787-1947 3. Representing Religion in Colonial India 4. Colonialism and Religion 5. Women, the Freedom Movement, and Sanskrit: Notes on Religion and Colonialism from the Ethnographic Present Part 2: Theoretical Reflections 6. Colonialism, Hinduism and the Discourse of Religion 7. Who Invented Hinduism? Rethinking Religion in India 8. Orientalism, Postcolonialism and the ‘Construction’ of Religion 9. The Colonial Construction of What?

Editorial Reviews

"[T]hese essays have the merit of making clear the residual Christian theological categories still used in our discipline." - Andrew O. Fort, Texas Christian University (USA); RELIGION, Volume 41, Issue 4

From the Publisher