Religious Studies: A Global View

of tribal and village community had their separate and merged, complicated

and intricate intellectual trajectories in African village studies, legal and

Indological discourses on India, and Marxist writings of a very long period.

The ‘text’, that constant of Indological knowledge was eschewed in favor of the

‘context’, the field. Nevertheless, one may discern in these early approaches

the merging of anthropological and Indological traditions. They linked the

empirical field-based data with the textual tradition. Thus, one had the ‘great’

and the ‘little’ traditions, the ‘civilizational’ and the ‘folk’, the ‘universal’ and

the ‘parochial’ and, the ‘text’ and ‘context’.

The overarching frame appears to have been provided by the search for the

principle by which the entire civilization was structured. Indology had provided

that principle in the pairing of caste and Hinduism. Caste became the major

link binding the field studies with the textual models. Even the centrality that

the village community got in the studies of the 1950s usually linked the village

to the ‘great’ Sanskritic tradition, though this does not mean that studies

produced on popular Hindu deities, rituals and festivals as a result were not

useful (Pillay 1953; S. C. Dube 1955; Ghurye 1960; Fuller 1992).

For the most part, though, India was Hindu and Hinduism was caste. Shades

of the conflation of India with Hinduism emerge in the work of a range of

scholars, including Karve (1961), Ghurye (1969) and Srinivas (1952, 1969

[1955]). Imtiaz Ahmad (1972) suggests that the use of the idea of the ‘Great

Tradition’ and ‘Little Tradition’ precludes the analysis of Muslim culture and

religion. It is difficult to understand Christianity or Islam with this model.

Where is the great ‘Indian’ tradition to which these could be linked?

Alternative histories of religion

A separate and parallel trend in the study of religion came from a few Marxist

scholars. Notably, D. D. Kosambi (1962) and Bipan Chandra (1984), both

Marxist historians, and A. R. Desai (1963), the Marxist sociologist, were the

most prominent figures of this school. The subaltern historians of a later period

derived their name from an essay by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Broadly

speaking, the term ‘subaltern’ applied to any group or person of inferior rank

or station, whatever the basis of that inferiority. The Subaltern Studies Group

arose in the 1980s in an effort to articulate a new understanding of the

histories of south Asian societies. They are, in some sense of the word, on the

left; however, they are very critical of the conventional Marxist reading of

Indian history. There has been a deep influence of post-colonial studies, cultural

studies, and anthropology on their work.

The early volumes of the Subaltern Studies Group saw little on the subject

of religion, apart from the odd piece on communalism (Chatterjee 1982;

Pandey 1983, 1989). It is only with the seventh volume published in 1993 that

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ROWENA ROBINSON AND VINEETA SINHA