Author: David N Lorenzen
Editor(s): David N Lorenzen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2005
Language: English
Pages: 388
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0-1956-7876-1
Description
This book addresses a range of debates regarding religious movements in the medieval and early modern periods. Eleven key essays debate the linkages between the religious and worldly aims of different movements and the continuity and change in their ideologies, social bases, and organizational structures over time.
They present divergent views on important issues such as the relationship between caste and the sect, the idea of renunciation, the role of the Sufis in the conversion to Islam in medieval India, and the ways in which many South Asian popular movements emerged and gathered force.
In an insightful introduction by David Lorenzen, each debate is discussed in its historical and theoretical context. The influence of Dumont, Engels, and Weber on our understanding of the nature of religious movemtns in and beyond the South Asia is also analysed. Part of the pr estigious Debates in Indian History and Society series, this volume will be useful for students, scholars and teachers of medieval and early modern India, as well as those interested in religious studies, comparative religion, sociology, and anthropology.
REVIEW
It provides a picture, fascinating, of some of the religious movements in Indian history.
-The Book Review
Contents
GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE
INTRODUCTION-DAVID N LORENZEN
ALVARS AND NAYANARS
1. From devotion and dissent to dominance: the Bhakti of the Tamil Alvars and Nayanars
R CHAMPAKALAKSHMI
2. Social mobility and medieval South Indian Hindu sects
BURTON STEIN
CONVERSION TO ISLAM
3. Approaches to the study of conversion to Islam in India
RICHARD M. EATON.
4. The Rishi movement as a social force in medieval Kashmir
MOHAMMAD ISHAQ KHAN
RAMA AND THE MUSLIMS
5. Ramayana and political imagination in India
SHELDON POLLOCK
6. Anachronism of the political imagination
BRAJADULAL CHATTOPADHYAYA
7. The founding of the Ramanandi sect
RICHARD BURGHART
KABIR AND THE SANTS
8. The times and their need
P D BARTHWAL
9. Kabir's place in Indian religious practice
HAJARIPRASAD DVIVEDI
HISTORICAL OVERVIEWS
10. Towards a new perspective
KRISHNA SHARMA
11. Imagined religious communities? : Ancient history and the modern search for a Hindu identity
ROMILA THAPAR
INDEX
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS