Religious Studies: A Global View

In recent years, the Indic Studies Project, located at the Centre for Developing

Societies in Delhi (CSDS), has been launched by the well-known Indian feminist

and writer Madhu Kishwar along with others in collaboration with Infinity

Foundation (New Jersey, USA). The first international conference on religions

and cultures in the Indic civilization was hosted jointly by CSDS and the

International Association for the History of Religions in 2003. It was signi-

ficantly supported by Infinity Foundation, which hosted the second conference

in 2005. Several speakers and participants at these two conferences openly and

clearly espoused Hindu right-wing ideologies.

The Infinity Foundation is closely linked with the Hindu American

Foundation, which was recently at the forefront of the Californian textbook

battle, attempting to revise sixth grade textbooks seen to be making biased

remarks against Hinduism. Several Dalit and secular organizations, together

with South Asian scholars from different universities, opposed the revision

move. The case finally went to Court, which ruled in favor of retaining the

original texts. Many scholars were deeply troubled by the attempt of Hindu

groups to write out protest, resistance and uncomfortable truths from

Hinduism’s past. As we have seen, scholarship in India, particularly in history,

has been fraught by somewhat similar battles in recent times.

Studies of other religious communities

As mentioned earlier, as a result of established paradigms, non-Hindu

communities have often tended to be viewed in the first instance through the

categories employed for the study of Hinduism. Thus, in the initial stages of

research into Muslim and other communities, one of the first questions to be

raised was: is there caste in non-Hindu communities? (Ahmad [ed.] 1973).

Ahmad pioneered studies into the world of Muslim communities, and

enunciated his ideas in Contributions to Indian Sociology(1972), where he

stated that greater attention must be paid to non-Hindu communities to build

a comprehensive sociology of India.

Despite this initiative, the paradigms of debate did not at first alter radically.

Certain forms of ritual such as life-crisis rituals came in for a good deal of

attention (Ahmad [ed.] 1978), perhaps because they could be more easily

captured by the conceptual category of ‘syncretism’. This perspective allowed

for the idea that Islam (or Christianity) in India was somehow not quite

authentic. It appeared that the most important feature of these religions was

their syncretic character, marked in the first instance by the ‘adoption’ of caste.

It is interesting, though perhaps not inexplicable, that interest in Muslims,

Christians or Sikhs has often developed in relation to their importance vis-à-

vis Hindu society, usually due to conflict. Hence, studies of Muslims, especially

among historians, figured for a long while in the area of the politics of

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ROWENA ROBINSON AND VINEETA SINHA