often overlooked in discussions of Indian religion for I am persuaded that
those who have perpetuated “classical” forms of religion in India have been
enriched in their interactions with and indebted to groups sometimes
thought to have been marginal – that is, to “folk” and subaltern peoples.
These are heady ambitions indeed. Hence, the reader should beware, that,
in a book of this size, not all aspects of India’s rich religious landscape will
be explored in depth, nor will all these very concerns be evident on every
page. The task becomes even more daunting when one believes, as I do, that
religion is best understood when seen in the social, cultural, and political
contexts in which it occurs. Nonetheless, I have attempted in this volume to
couch the history of India’s religious expressions in the settings in which
they plausibly originate or develop. This is a hazardous undertaking for
a variety of reasons: just one of them is that the texts on which historians of
Indian religion often rely are difficult to date, are almost always the product
of an elite literate minority of the population, and are often the end result
of a process which has included oral discourses, performances of various
kinds, and political agendas. Nor are texts necessarily explicit as to the
contexts, sources, or reasons why a certain expression occurs. As a result, I
have tried to be sensitive to non-textual sources; indeed, on occasion I have
made (hopefully cautious) inferences about these contexts as reflected in
certain texts themselves. No doubt specialists will be uncomfortable with
some of these suggestions; yet I hope the reader will, nonetheless, appreciate
the dialectic between religion and the broad sweep of history in the Indian
subcontinent.
Perhaps a word is appropriate as to how the term “India” is used in this
volume. “India” is used in its broadest sense, much as it was used prior to the
coming of independence in 1947, to refer to the South Asian subcontinent
as a whole. While the term refers to a geographic setting, it also evokes many
perceptions and images, so much so that Chapter 1 is devoted to
summarizing some of the ways “India” and especially its religion have been
perceived.
The religious landscape of “India” has taught me a great deal; not least
of all, it has kept me humble insofar as I am constantly learning new things
about it. It has forced me often to become self-conscious of my presup-
positions and to regularly rethink my self-definitions. I shall feel rewarded
if a single reader of this book is similarly invited on a voyage of discovery,
not only of “India” but also of the self.
There are many people and agencies that have had a part in the prepa-
ration of this volume. The American Institute of Indian Studies and the
Fulbright-Hays program have both provided grants (four times each) over
the years that have enabled me to do research and consult with colleagues
and numerous informants in India. Undergraduates at Boston University
and, for the last thirty years, at the University of Pittsburgh, have taught me
something about teaching. More specifically, I have received feedback on
this volume from undergraduates on my courses on India over the last three
x Preface