studies on religion come into much clearer focus. From then onwards, religious
cults (Chatterjee 1993), religious symbolism and new religious movements
(S. Dube 1993), Partition violence (Mayaram 1996), Dalit consciousness and
identity (Illaih 1996), and Hindu–Muslim riots (Pandey 1997), among other
themes, have appeared in the pages of the volumes. Contributors include
persons across a range of disciplines, including history, anthropology, sociology,
and political science. The authors are not all located in south Asia; some are
based in universities in the United States or elsewhere.
The influence and critique of Dumontian Structuralism
From the fieldwork and context-centered tradition established in the 1950s in
sociology and anthropology, the major shift came with the highly influential
work of sociologist Louis Dumont and D. F. Pocock (1957; Dumont 1970).
Dumont undoubtedly saw the study of India as lying at the confluence of
Indology and sociology and returned to the text as the source of indigenous
categories of meaning. His ideas were available early on through the pages of
the Contributions to Indian Sociology, though his magnum opus, Homo
Hierarchicus(1970), came out somewhat later. The notion of subjective
meanings and of cosmologies had entered the field.
Veena Das’ Structure and Cognition(1977), Jain’s Text and Context(1976),
Khare’s Hindu Hearth and Home(1976), Madan’s Non-Renunciation(1996),
and other works all chart the course of this opening up. Hindu cosmic thought
and structure came to lie at the center of studies in the sociology and
anthropology of religion. This was particularly so in foreign scholarship, but
also among Indians. Madan (1992, 2004) brought together some of the voices
in the sociology of religion in India, as did Robinson (2004). Dumont’s writings
undoubtedly had enormous influence on Indian scholarship on caste and
religion, though authors were not slow to critique several aspects of his work
(Das and Uberoi 1971; Madan 1971; Béteille 1979). Clearly, there has been
some healthy cross-cultural debate.
The Dumontian perspective which dominated the study of Hinduism by
Indian scholars as well as others for so long again gave centrality to an upper-
caste, essentialized version of Hinduism and treated it as synonymous with
India. The study of India was therefore and has been, for a long time, the
study of Hindu India. This notion has led both to the reification of Hinduism
and the marginalization of groups and communities which were not Hindu.
In fact, the way in which communities other than Hindu were brought within
the boundaries of study was by viewing them though the aperture of caste,
that essence of Indian social structure.
There have been almost no studies by scholars of Indian origin of modern
religion or religious movements outside India. Giri (1994), Fazal (1999) and
1111
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
1011
1
2
3111
4 5 6 7 8 9
20111
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
30111
1
2
3
4
35
6
7
8
9
40111
42222
3
411
SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIA
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