Author: Eminent Contributors
Editor(s): Rowena Robinson / Sathianthan Clarke
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2003
Language: English
Pages: 420
ISBN/UPC (if available): 978-0-19-566329-7
Description
This volume brings together important and highly original essays by leading scholars of religion, history, and society reflecting upon the idea and practice of conversion in India.
The experience of conversion is viewed as a terrain of multiple and diverse possibilities that focus on new boundaries, identities, beliefs, and practices. Further, the volume explores a range of contexts in which novel forms of piety, and modes of religious dissent and desertion take shape.
The modes, motivations, and symbolic meanings which Jainism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, and Sikhism attach to religious conversion are identified and transformations of sect, caste, and tribe explored across space and time.
As an engagement of sociology, theology, and history in the lively and sometimes vitriolic discourse on religious conversion in India, this volume will be an important and significant resource for students, teachers, and researchers in these diverse fields.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Contributors
Introduction
SECTION ONE
ROWENA ROBINSON
Modes of Conversion to Islam
DOMINIQUE-SILA KHAN
Diverting the Ganges:
The Nizari Ismaili Model of Conversion in South Asia
STEPHEN F DALE
Trade, Conversion, and the Growth of the Islamic Community in Kerala
RICHARD EATON
Who are the Bengal Muslims?
Conversion and Islamization in Bengal
YOGINDER SIKAND
Arya Shuddhi and Muslim Tabligh:
Muslim Reactions to Arya Samaj Proselytization (1923-30)
SECTION TWO
ROWENA ROBINSON
Conversion to Jainism, Sikhism, and Buddhism: Past and Present
PAUL DUNDAS
Conversion to Jainism: Historical Perspectives
LOUIS E FENECH
Conversion and Sikh Tradition
TORKEL BREKKE
Conversion in Buddhism ?
GARY TARTAKOV
B R Ambedkar and the Navayana Diksha
SECTION THREE
Sathianathan Clarke
Transformations of Caste and Tribe
SAURABH DUBE AND ISHITA BANERJEE DUBE
Spectres of Conversion:
Transformations of Caste and Sect in India
DAVID HARDIMAN
Assertion, Conversion, and Indian Nationalism: Govind’s Movement among the Bhils
SECTION FOUR
SATHIANATHAN CLARKE
Conversion to Christianity
ROWENA ROBINSON
Sixteenth Century Conversions to Christianity in Goa
SATHIANATHAN CLARKE
Conversion to Christianity in Tamil Nadu:
Conscious and Constitutive Community Mobilization
Towards a Different symbolic world Vision
JOHN C B WEBSTER
Christian Constitutive in the Punjab: What has Changed?
FREDERICK S DOWNS
Christian Conversion Movements in North East India
Index