Wiebe, Donald. The Politics of Religious Studies. New York, 1999.
JEFFREY C. RUFF (2005)STUDY OF RELIGION: THE ACADEMIC STUDY
OF RELIGION IN SOUTH ASIA
The locus for the academic study of religion in South Asia
is found in a network of university departments and scholarly
sites rather than in departments of religious studies or com-
parative religion within individual universities. The network
also includes scholars located in nonuniversity settings: theo-
logical institutions, research institutes in social sciences, and
specialized scholarly centers with a tradition of respected
publications in academia.
The South Asian region includes at least 330 state-
supported universities, of which 275 are in India, 17 in Paki-
stan, 18 in Bangladesh, 15 in Sri Lanka, and 5 in Nepal.
Institutions with a multidisciplinary focus in India in-
clude the National Institute of Advanced Studies (natural
and social sciences and technology) and the Christian Insti-
tute for the Study of Religion and Society in Bangalore; the
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi; and
the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies in Shimla. Pakistan
has the Christian Study Centre, located at Rawalpindi, an
ecumenical research and fact-finding site focusing on Islam-
ization, interfaith dialogue, women and minorities, and con-
flict prevention and management among different religious
groups in the region. In Sri Lanka the Ecumenical Institute
for Study and Dialogue, located in Colombo, offers Bud-
dhist studies, comparative religion, and studies of church and
society. Scholars at these institutions have produced distin-
guished comparative and interpretive studies related to the
different religious traditions of South Asia.
The South Asian strand of this field, beginning in a
Western historical context, has for its antecedents in South
Asia a form of study expressed most notably by two North
Indian rulers. One is the emperor A ́soka (c. 265–238 BCE),
who sought to respect and protect all religions, and the other
is the emperor Akbar (1542–1605 CE), whose religious dia-
logues at Fatehpur Sikri encouraged debates among different
religions with a view to synthesizing them into a single reli-
gion. In modern times the South Asian strand of the academ-
ic study of religion can be usefully delineated in the context
of three historical conferences held between 1960 and 2003
in Marburg in Germany and in Bangalore and Delhi in
India.
THE IAHR CONGRESS, MARBURG, 1960. The International
Association for the History of Religions Congress was held
in Marburg, West Germany, in 1960. The prospect of hold-
ing an IAHR Congress in India was raised by Swami B. H.
Bon Maharaj, the rector of the Institute of Oriental Philoso-
phy in Vrindavan, India. In March 1960 he had founded the
Indian national group that sought and obtained affiliation
with IAHR. This proposal was unwelcome to some of the
European members because they felt the Indian representa-
tives were confused about the history of religion as an aca-
demic field. As R. J. Zwi Werblowsky’s report on the con-
gress noted, South Asian representatives showed what others
considered to be a misunderstanding of Western scholarship
in their failure to distinguish between studying religion and
the study of religion. The Indian scholars felt their own tra-
dition of philosophizing about religion and studying it as
part of a religious discipline should be known to the West.
The parochial views expressed at the congress failed to
do justice to the South Asian intellectual tradition, which has
a long association with historical research and scientific
thought. That tradition has produced monographs and
scholarly papers in Indology, archeology, history, and sociol-
ogy relating to functional and causal questions on matters
that now fall under the category of the study of religion. Still
the objective study of religion, as opposed to a moral study,
has been slow to gain recognition in South Asian academia,
and the region has a comparatively insignificant representa-
tion at international conferences on the academic study of
religion. India’s secularist politics are largely responsible and
have provided a model for its universities. The Indian consti-
tution, though tolerant of all religions and showing sensitivi-
ty to religious values, explicitly prohibits favoring any one of
India’s many religious traditions. This prohibition caused a
reluctance among state-funded institutions to introduce reli-
gion as a subject in their curricula.
The avoidance of religion in any state-funded college
curriculum can be seen as early as 1882, when a government
commission recommended teaching the principles of natural
theology, which favored no single religious tradition, in pub-
lic and private colleges. One of the commission members ob-
jected on the grounds that this, far from satisfying the reli-
gious camp, would be a step backward on the secular side.
In 1903 the Indian Universities Commission rejected the
idea of introducing a course on the theology of any one reli-
gion into the state curriculum. Later commissions sought to
preserve the religious neutrality of the state while becoming
more sympathetic to religious studies. A commission chaired
by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan in 1948–1949 pointed out that
to be secular did not mean to be religiously illiterate. The re-
port of the Secondary Education Commission (1952–1953),
headed by A. L. Mudaliar, agreed that secularism did not
mean there was no place for religion. The Sri Prakasa Com-
mittee (1959–1960) report recommended an objective,
comparative, and systematic study of the important religions
of India. The report of the Kothari Commission (1964–
1966) drew a distinction between religious education and ed-
ucation about religion and suggested establishing chairs in
comparative religion at the universities at a time when the
debate in North America was just beginning as to whether
the academic study of religion should remain a secular study
independent of religio-theological approaches.
THE BANGALORE CONSULTATION, BANGALORE, 1967. The
study of religion in Indian universities was addressed at theSTUDY OF RELIGION: THE ACADEMIC STUDY OF RELIGION IN SOUTH ASIA 8789