P.T. van der Veer

Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia.

Acknowledgments1Introduction32The Moral State: Religion, Nation, and Empire in Victorian Britain and British India153Protestantism and British National Identity, 1815-1945444Race in Britain and India715History, the Nation, and Religion: The Transformations of the Dutch Religious Past966On Religious and Linguistic Nationalisms: The Second Partition of Bengal1127Nationalism, Modernity, and Muslim Identity in India before 19471298Memory, Mourning, and National Morality: Yasukuni Shrine and the Reunion of State and Religion in Postwar Japan1449Papists and Beggars: National Festivals and Nation Building in the Netherlands during the Nineteenth Century16110Religion, Nation-State, Secularism17811The Goodness of Nations197Bibliography205List of Contributors223Index225

Brahmanism Abroad : On Caribbean Hinduism as an Ethnic Religion

Outside of India, Hinduism plays a central role in organizing and orienting communities of Indian migrants and their descendants. Since Indians have migrated to all parts of the world, Hinduism has become unambiguously a distinct world religion. It is therefore important that the study of Hinduism does not remain confined to the Indian subcontinent. In this essay, we consider the development of Hinduism in the Caribbean context and specifically in Guyana, Suriname, and Trinidad. Our discussion of Caribbean Hinduism is predicated on the assumption that to be a Hindu is neither an unchanging, primordial identity nor an infinitely flexible one which one can adopt or shed at will, depending on circumstances. It is an identity acquired through social practice and, as such, constantly negotiated in changing contexts. Our argument is that the evolution of Caribbean Hinduism can be interpreted as an ethnicization of religion under Brahman leadership. In Caribbean Hinduism differences in social and religious practice have been underplayed in the course of a long-term historical process in which a homogeneous Hindu community has been constructed. Within the Caribbean states of Trinidad, Guyana, and Suriname, Hindus traditionally regard themselves, and are regarded by others, as a distinct ethnic group marked not only by names and religious beliefs, but by criteria of language, kinship, values and aspirations, and social status. In the past, Brahmans have played a major role in consolidating and formulating important symbolic, ideological, and organizational features of Hindu ethnicity in each of the countries concerned. Such features have not only had consequences for ethnic relations and the practice of Hinduism in the Caribbean, they may be seen to carry theoretical relevance to the study of Hinduism in India and to broader studies of religion and social change.

Transnational religion: Hindu and Muslim Movements

In this article I deal with transnational Hindu and Muslim movements. I reject the common assertion that migrant communities are conservative in religious and social matters by arguing that ‘traditionalism’ requires considerable ideological creativity and that this significantly transforms previous practices and discourses. I suggest that religious movements, active among migrants, develop cosmopolitan projects that can be viewed as alternatives to the cosmopolitanism of the European Enlightenment. This raises a number of challenges concerning citizenship, integration and political loyalty for governmentality in the nation-states in which these cosmopolitan projects are carried out. I suggest that rather than looking at religious migrants as at best conservative and at worst terrorist one should perhaps pay some attention to the creative moments in human responses to new challenges and new environments.

Riots and Rituals: The Construction of Violence and Public Space in Hindu Nationalism

Riots and rituals are both often seen as instances of behavior without meaning or purpose. They are portrayed as closed universes in which every move relates to another move, but not rationally and purposefully to a world outside of them.1 In this respect they look like games. There is also quite an opposite interpretation which tends to emphasize the spontaneity of riots and unpredictability of ritual performances which distinguishes them from rule oriented behavior like games.

The Modernity of Religion

Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (1993), 335 (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, £35.00, paperback £13.00).

India, Religions of

A large number of Hindu religious traditions refer, positively or negatively, to a set of religious books, called the Vedas. These scriptures were, originally, the intellectual property of a priestly caste of Brahmans and the basis of their rituals and philosophies. Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism are major Indian traditions which explicitly reject the authority of the Vedas and the social and ritual hegemony of Brahmans. Islam and Christianity are major traditions in India which have been increasingly stigmatized by Hindus as ‘foreign’ to Indian civilization. In the modern period, the expansion of the colonial state is crucial for defining the location of religion in India. The general pattern in all Indian religions is that modern movements attack traditional priestly leadership, so-called ‘backward’ popular religion, and emphasize free, lay access to scripture and to religious debate. In this way, the foundation of religious authority changes and becomes mediated by education and new forms of communication, such as print, and later radio and television. This development also entails a growing participation of religious movements in modern mass politics. The greatest competition in the political arena is between Hindus and Muslims and has led to the partition of British India into India and Pakistan. Hindu nationalism needs to construct a Hindu majority in India, but runs counter to a number of anti-Hindu and anti-Brahmanical movements. Especially in the 1980s and 1990s it has been successful in launching campaigns against Muslims and Christians to bolster ‘Hindu unity.’ Not only Hindus, but also Muslims and Sikhs, have been increasingly active in the political arena.

Fundamentalism and the Secular State

lously engages all these religions because it wants to grapple with the crisis of secularism in contemporary Indian society. I can think of anthropologists who would like to write such a book, but of none who would do it with the authority, humanity and deep concern of T.N. Madan. Madan’s writing emerges from a lifelong professional interest in the anthropology of Indian religions (in the plural) and from a personal engagement with Indian realities today. In that sense it is anthropology at its best, written with detachment and engagement at the same time. Madan was particularly well prepared to write this book because of his participation in the planning and execution of the Fundamentalism project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. While this project has sometimes been condemned for lumping too many religious movements in the category of fundamentalism and thus creating an easy dichotomy between bad religion and good secularism, Madan’s position can never be reduced to that. In his controversial and somewhat polemical address to the American Association of Asian Studies of 1987, he made it perfectly clear that his attitude towards secularism is a critical one. The book under review fleshes out his views on fundamentalism and secularism.