This book opens the doors to a social and cultural sphere beyond the limited world of the English-speaking elite and provides the basis for an understanding of religious controversy and internal reform. It explores the dynamics of religious interaction and conflict that points toward later developments of communalism and religious separatism still plaguing the subcontinent. Religious Controversy in British India reveals a world expressed in South Asian dialects that has been closed to many scholars and students of the subcontinent. During the nineteenth century polemical religious literature and those who wrote it mobilized groups and led them back to the "fundamentals." Sacred texts supporting movements were translated and made available in inexpensive editions. Even texts from the well established oral tradition were put into print. This process was often initiated in response to Christian missionary activity, a response that ultimately expanded to include other religions. In this book, scholars examine the writings of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs responsible for significant changes within different communities and for a heightened sense of boundary-defining identity.

This book opens the doors to a social and cultural sphere beyond the limited world of the English-speaking elite and provides the basis for an understanding of religious controversy and internal reform. It explores the dynamics of religious interaction and conflict that points toward later developments of communalism and religious separatism still plaguing the subcontinent. Religious Controversy in British India reveals a world expressed in South Asian dialects that has been closed to many scholars and students of the subcontinent. During the nineteenth century polemical religious literature and those who wrote it mobilized groups and led them back to the "fundamentals." Sacred texts supporting movements were translated and made available in inexpensive editions. Even texts from the well established oral tradition were put into print. This process was often initiated in response to Christian missionary activity, a response that ultimately expanded to include other religions. In this book, scholars examine the writings of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs responsible for significant changes within different communities and for a heightened sense of boundary-defining identity.

Many of ancient India's religious traditions are alive in modern India, and many of these religious traditions are in conflict with one another regarding the future of India. Even the so-called "secular state" is deeply pervaded by religious sentiments growing out of the Neo-Hindu nationalist movement of Gandhi and Nehru. A careful analysis of the current religious scene when placed in its proper long-term historical perspective raises interesting questions about the nature and future of religion not only in India but elsewhere as well.

An overview of the East India Company's policy towards religion throughout its period of rule in India. This wide-ranging book charts how the East India Company grappled with religious issues in its multi-faith empire, putting them into the context of pressures exerted both in Britain and on the subcontinent, from the Company's early mercantile beginnings to the bloody end of its rule in 1858. Religion was at the heart of the East India Company's relationship with India, but the course of its religious policy has rarely been examined in any systematic way. The free exercise of religion, the policy the Company adopted in its early days in order to safeguard the security of its possessions, was challenged by Evangelicals in the late eighteenth century. They demanded that the Company should grant free access to Christians of all Protestant denominations and an end to 'barbaric' Indian religious practices. This gave rise to an unprecedented petitioning movement in 1813, comparable in strength to that for theabolition of the slave trade the following year. It was an important milestone in British domestic politics. The final years of the Company's rule were dominated by its attempts to withstand Evangelical demands in the face of growing hostility from Indians. In the end it pleased no one, and its rule came to a gory and ignominious end. In this compelling account, Penny Carson examines the twists and turns of the East India Company's policy on religious issues. The story of how the Company dealt with the fact that it was a Christian Company, trying to be equitable to the different faiths it found in India, has resonances for Britain today as it attempts to accommodate the religions of all its peoples within the Christian heritage and structure of the state. Penelope Carson is an independent scholar with a doctorate from King's College, London.

Dr Kozlowski's important study pioneers a fresh approach to the study of a critical Muslim institution: the endowments or awqaf which almost everywhere in the Islamic world provide support for mosques, schools and shrines. The wealthier Muslims who establish endowments inevitably have an eye on social, political and economic conditions and have traditionally used awqaf as part of an effort to preserve their wealth and influence, especially in periods of change and uncertainty. The book focuses on the use of endowments by Muslims suffering the dislocations caused by the imposition of British rule in India and examines in detail the social and political implications of the controversy over endowments that took place in the imperial courts and councils. The author's observations and insights can be applied to many periods and places in the Muslim world and his novel approach will attract all those interested in the study of Islam.

Explores how religious travel in India is transforming religious identities and self-constructions. In an increasingly global world where convenient modes of travel have opened the door to international and intraregional tourism and brought together people from different religious and ethnic communities, religious journeying in India has become the site of evolving and often paradoxical forms of self-construction. Through ethnographic reflections, the contributors to this volume explore religious and nonreligious motivations for religious travel in India and show how pilgrimages, missionary travel, the exportation of cultural art forms, and leisure travel among coreligionists are transforming not only religious but also regional, national, transnational, and personal identities. The volume engages with central themes in South Asian studies such as gender, exile, and spirituality; a variety of religions, including Sikhism, Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity; and understudied regions and emerging places of pilgrimage such as Manipur and Maharashtra. “It’s rare to find such diverse accounts of religious travel collected in a single volume, where scholars’ engagements with individual places of pilgrimage in India and with the journeys surrounding them are truly in conversation with one another. For readers, it makes for a deeply enlightening journey. It also raises an interesting question: Is the reality of India powerful enough that it absorbs divergent expressions of religious tourism, making of them a common fabric? Here, so unusually, readers have the materials to decide.” — John Stratton Hawley, author of A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement

This book was written by a Hindu, the grandson of Mohandas K. Gandhi. His intent, in writing on eight Muslims and their influence on India in the twentieth century, is to reduce the gulf between Hindu and Muslims. Focusing on figures viewed as heroes by sub-continent Muslims, he shows that they can be admired by Hindus as well--that they need not be frozen in Hindu minds as foes. Here is a fascinating account of twentieth-century India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh told through biographical sketches of eight men: Sayyid Ahmed Khan (1817-1898), Fazlul Huq (1873-1962), Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876-1948), Muhammad Iqbal (1876-1938), Muhammad Ali (1878-1931), Abul Kalam Azad (1888-1958), Liaqat Ali Khan (1895-1951), and Zakir Husain (1897-1969).

How can religious freedom be granted to people who do not have a religion? While Indian indentured workers in colonial Trinidad practiced cherished rituals, "Hinduism" was not a widespread category in India at the time. On this Caribbean island, people of South Asian descent and African descent came together--under the watchful eyes of the British rulers--to walk on hot coals for fierce goddesses, summon spirits of the dead, or honor Muslim martyrs, practices that challenged colonial norms for religion and race. Drawing deeply on colonial archives, Alexander Rocklin examines the role of the category of religion in the regulation of the lives of Indian laborers struggling for autonomy. Gradually, Indians learned to narrate the origins, similarities, and differences among their fellows' cosmological views, and to define Hindus, Muslims, and Christians as distinct groups. Their goal in doing this work of subaltern comparative religion, as Rocklin puts it, was to avoid criminalization and to have their rituals authorized as legitimate religion--they wanted nothing less than to gain access to the British promise of religious freedom. With the indenture system's end, the culmination of this politics of recognition was the gradual transformation of Hindus' rituals and the reorganization of their lives--they fabricated a "world religion" called Hinduism.