Religious Studies: A Global View

South Asia

Introduction

A

T THE OUTSET IT MUST BE RECOGNIZEDthat ‘religious studies’ per se is

hard to find as a separate discipline in south Asian countries in general.

While there may be Islamic studies or theological studies in some of these

countries and the odd department or centre of world religions (as in Dhaka

University, for instance), for the most part ‘religion’ has been studied in South

Asia by historians, anthropologists and sociologists and, in its manifestation

as an ethnic identity, by political scientists as well. It is, in the main, their work

that I shall review in this section.

Much of south Asia, or the subcontinent of India as it was often referred

to, was united under the British Empire and so there are common roots to the

modern study of religion in this region. As I have described elsewhere (Robinson

2003), the work of an entire body of Indological scholars and administrators

came together during the colonial period in the construction of a particular

understanding of the pan-Indian civilization, which elevated the study of

Hinduism, especially Brahmanical Hinduism. While Jainism and Buddhism

could perhaps find some place in a study of religion and civilization that was

dependent on the use of Sanskrit textual material, other religious traditions

were clearly marginalized.

The idea of ‘Hindu India’

Once formulated, the idea that Hinduism synthesized India and constituted its

essence remained firmly in place. A ‘Hindu’ India was distinguished by caste,

its most important social and cultural marker (Inden 1990; Robinson 2003).

Thus, other religions, especially those such as Islam or Christianity, which came

to the subcontinent through diverse routes, were obviously less worthy of

attention. Post-Independence studies initially did little to dismantle this

overarching framework. In India, village and caste studies took centrality in

the period just after Independence. The structural-functional approach and the

folk-civilization continuum model, products of British and American

anthropological traditions respectively, dominated the work of scholars of

religion. Most of these studies emerged from departments of sociology and

social anthropology in different parts of the country, but some doctoral research

was written abroad and funded by the host institutions.

For anthropology, fieldwork, deriving from the school of Malinowski and

inspired by the work generated in Africa, was the basis of the discipline. Studies

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