Boundary Formation and Cultural Construction: How do Chinese andIndian Immigrant Converts Understand Religious Identity?

Most scholars study immigrants\u27 religious lives in a vacuum, paying little attention to the religious lives of people who switch from one religious tradition to another. This article relies on interviews with Chinese and Indian immigrant converts in the U.S. to provide a unique comparative perspective on the religious lives of Asian immigrant converts, with a specific focus on their identity construction processes. Findings indicate that Chinese and Indian immigrants establish different types of boundaries, but form similar cultural content within their identities. I debunk the assumption in existing theories that religious conversion is an either/or transition

Putting Indian christianities into context: Biographies of christian conversion in a leprosy colony

Gandhian and Hindutva-inspired discourses around conversions to Christianity in India over-simplify the historical nexus of relations between missionaries, converts and the colonial state. Challenging the view that conversions were ever only about material gain, this paper draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with leprosy-affected people in South India to consider the role that conversion has also played in establishing alternative, often positively construed, identities for those who came to live in leprosy colonies from the mid twentieth century onwards. The paper draws out the distinctive values associated with a Christian identity in India, exploring local Christianities as sets of practices through which, for example, a positive sense of belonging might be established for those otherwise excluded, rather than being centred upon personal faith and theology per se. Biographical accounts are drawn upon to document and analyse some of the on-the-ground realities, and the different implications - depending on one's wider social positioning - of converting from Hinduism to Christianity in South India. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014

Meeting \u27the Mother Who Takes Across\u27: Christian Encounters with the Fierce Goddesses of Hinduism

This essay revolves around a simple question: what does Hindu-Christian dialogue look like from the Christian side when the Hindu side is represented by Saktism? Or, how do Christians, whether Protestant or Catholic, react and what do they learn when the Hindus they encounter worship a supreme female divinity who is both compassionate and wrathful, whose cult is often associated with blood sacrifice, whose philosophical underpinnings tend to be monistic, and some of whose devotees have been involved in esoteric, often sexual Tantric rites? Where are the cross-overs, the bridges to understanding

Secularity and hinduism’s imaginaries in india

Partiendo del concepto de ‘imaginario social’ de Charles Taylos –es decir, el tipo de comprensión colectiva que un grupo debe tener para darles sentido a sus prácticas– el artículo sostiene que las contradicciones que emergen de las interpretaciones de la Corte Suprema de la India y del Hinduismo y de la gestión de la diversidad religiosa del Estado de la India proceden de la incapacidad de la Constitución de armonizar tres diferentes imaginarios del hinduismo –como una religión, una cultura y una antigua orden–. Sin embargo, además de fomentar el desacuerdo, estas contradicciones también proporcionan una zona franca para el estado de estos conflictos.Drawing on Charles Taylor’s concept of ‘social imaginary’ - the kind of collective understanding a group has to have in order to make sense of their practices - the article argues that the contradictions in the Indian Supreme Court’s interpretations of Hindutva and Hinduism and in the Indian state’s management of religious diversity stem from the inability of the Constitution to reconcile three different imaginaries of Hinduism – as a religion, culture and an ancient order. But these contradictions, while stoking discord, have also provided a buffer zone for the state from such conflicts

Legal Limits on Religious Conversion in India

In contemporary India, government assessments of the legitimacy of conversions tend to rely on two assumptions: first, that people who convert in groups may not have freely chosen conversion, and second, that certain groups are particularly vulnerable to being lured into changing their religion. These assumptions, which pervade the anticonversion laws as well as related court decisions and government committee reports, reinforce social constructions of women and lower castes as inherently naive and susceptible to manipulation. Here, Jenkins contends to carefully scrutinized the assumptions since like protective laws in many other contexts, such laws restrict freedom in highly personal, individual choices

Religious conversion : historical aspects and modern perspective

Religious conversion has become a dangerous social and individual problem. In Latin America, a traditional Catholic area, Protestant sects are successfully con-verting more and more Catholics into their own communities. Therefore the Pope demands a strict control of these activities. In India e.g., the Catholic hierarchy is critizising the Indian governments which have forbidden conversion on non-spiritual reasons. Hindu organizations have started even very successfully to re-convert Indian Christians particularly of Dalit and tribal background. Buddhists are very successful in indirect and even direct conversion of many Westerners. Wah-habit missionaries spread their Neo-Islam in the Muslim societies and get more and more even non-Muslim converts. We should add the forcible and sometimes ex-tremely cruel conversions the atheistic states had executed since the last century. ..

Purifying the nation : the Arya Samaj in Gujarat 1895-1930

This article examines the impact of the Arya Samaj in Gujarat from 1895 to 1930. Although the founder of this body, Dayanand Saraswati, was from Gujarat, it proved less popular there initially than in the Punjab. The first important Arya Samajists in Gujarat were Punjabis, brought there by Sayajirao Gaekwad of Baroda to carry out educational work amongst untouchables. The Arya Samaj only became a mass organisation in Gujarat after a wave of conversions to Christianity in central Gujarat by untouchables, with Arya Samajists starting orphanages to ‘save’ orphans from the clutches of the Christian missionaries. The movement then made considerable headway in Gujarat. The main followers were from the urban middle classes, higher farming castes, and gentry of the Koli caste. Each had their own reasons for embracing the organisation, ranging from a desire for higher social status, to religious reform, to building caste unity, and as a means, in the case of the Koli gentry, to ‘reconvert’ Kolis who had adopted Islam in medieval times. The movement lost its momentum after Gandhi arrived on the political scene, and many erstwhile Arya Samajists embraced the Gandhian movement. When the Gandhian movement itself flagged after 1922, there was an upsurge in communal antagonism in Gujarat in which Arya Samajists played a provocative role. A riot in Godhra in 1928 is examined. Over the past decade, Gujarat has come to be seen as a hotbed of communalism, ruled by a state government that has connived at, and even encouraged, murderous attacks on Muslims and Christians. At the time of the notorious pogrom against Muslims of 2002, several observers commented on the irony that this should have occurred in the homeland of Gandhi, the great proponent of non-violence and Hindu-Muslim unity.1 They saw this as violating not only the memory of the Mahatma, but also the very history of this region – one known, it was said, for its spirit of tolerance and regard for the sacredness of all life. As Tridip Suhrud stated in anguish: What has happened to the dialogic space that Gandhi nurtured? What has happened to the Jain ethos, which informed the structure of mercantile capitalism and from which Gandhi drew sustenance?2 Although these are questions that we should certainly ask, they project only one view of Gujarat and its history, for this is not an area that has escaped violence, bigotry and communal strife in the past. Communal tension between Hindus and Muslims, and even violence between the two, has a genealogy that stretches back well over a century; predating Gandhi’s arrival on the political scene in 1915.3 In this article, I shall examine an aspect of this history by focusing on the growth and development of the Arya Samaj in Gujarat between the years 1895 and 1930. It is not suggested that there was an inevitable progress from the doctrines and activities propagated by this body to the Hindu bigotry that dominates the political scene in modern Gujarat, for there were many countervailing forces at both a popular and elite level that might have produced a different trajectory.4 Also, many of the features of the modern manifestation of Hindutva were not present in the early decades of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, a way of thinking about the modern nation state and the place of Hindus and Hinduism within it became a part of the public culture of this region, and this could be deployed in new ways, and to new effect, in changing political circumstances.5 1 For example Panikkar, K. N. ‘The Agony of Gujarat,’ The Hindu, 19 March 2002; Suhrud, T. ‘Gujarat: No Room for Dialogue,’ Economic and Political Weekly, [Hereafter EPW], 37 (11), 16 March 2002, pp. 1011-12. 2 Ibid, p.1011. 3 To take one case, there was a long history of tension between Hindus and Muslims in Somnath in Kathiawad in the later nineteenth century that led to a fracas in 1892, followed by a riot in which several died in 1893. See file on ‘Patan Riot: Hindus and Mussulmans Patan Commission, Part I,’ Oriental and India Office Collection, R/2/721/56; Krishnaswamy, S. ‘A Riot in Bombay, August 11, 1893: A Study in Hindu-Muslim Relations in Western India during the Late Nineteenth Century,’ unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago, 1966, pp. 76-90. 4 As pointed out for India as a whole by Fischer-Tiné, H., ‘Kindly Elders of the Hindu Biradri’: The Arya Samaj’s Struggle for Influence and its Effects on Hindu-Muslim Relations, 1800-1925,’ in Copley, A. (ed.), Gurus and their Followers: New Religious Reform Movements in India, New Delhi, 2000, pp.107-08. 5 In the ways alluded to for Bengal by Sarkar, S. ‘Intimations of Hindutva: Ideologies, Caste, and Class in Post-Swadeshi Bengal,’ in Sarkar, S. Beyond Nationalist Frames: Postmodernism, Hindu Fundamentalism, History, New Delhi, 2002, pp.81-95; and for the United Provinces by Gould, W. Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late Colonial India, Cambridge 2004, p. 37

Book Review: Protestant Origins in India: Tamil Evangelical Christians, 1706-1835

A review of Protestant Origins in India: Tamil Evangelical Christians, 1706-1835 by D. Dennis Hudson

The Inner Revolution: Shuddhi and the Reinvention of Hinduism

The Shuddhi movement of the late 19th century was a religious revolutionary movement that aimed to intrinsically restructure and transform the Hinduism and Hindu society into a more socially equalized and religiously universal system. It was a quest to reconstruct Hindu religious and social identity in response to socioeconomic modernism and challenges from Christian and Islamic proselytization. The first phase of the movement lasted from the 1880s to the late 1910s and was defined by a persistent struggle with orthodox society to transform Hinduism by opening its doors to induct and assimilate returning and new converts. The second phase of Shuddhi began in the early 1920s with the emergence of a consensus between the orthodox and the Arya-led reformers, who expanded the Shuddhi movement to confront the challenges presented by Islam and Christianity; this phase ended in 1947

The Theological Misappropriation of Christianity as a Civilizing Force

The theological misappropriation of Christianity as a civilizing force occurs when individuals convert to Christianity due to deception that ignores the faith-based aspect of Christianity. The history of Western education in India illustrates the hidden curriculum that Christian missionaries employed to disrupt the Indian educational system. This unnerving pedagogy points to the need for a postcolonial theoretical framework that relates the inescapable hybridity of religion and culture where Orientalism has the potential to occur. To press the ongoing urgency of this discussion, I convey how the history of British India connects to my lived-reality as an American Hindu. Overall, I point to hybridity as a lived paradox of ambiguous conflict that embraces interfaith relations. I offer implications for Christian missionaries today to foster authentic interfaith connections without engaging in colonizing ideologies