Full Description
Studies in Religion and the Everyday is a collection of essays addressing the contours of religious beliefs and practices in the context of everyday life in India. Events and processes in contemporary India--especially post the 1990s--have contributed to distinct modes of articulating religious practices. This volume is an attempt to historicize--and problematize--the categorization of religion as a universally held and analytically distinct feature of human life and seeks to understand the conditions--historical, political, discursive--and processes of authorization under which a particular set of practices, values, and dispositions constitutes the 'religious' at a specific point in time. By bringing together studies that draw from diverse methodological and epistemological approaches, the book will serve as a useful introduction to religion in India for the general reader and as an indispensable resource for students and researchers. The volume presents fresh perspectives on existing fields of study such as the city, capital, minorities, secularization, and the state--no longer seen as distinct from religion but actively co-produced with religion in the context of the theoretical rubric of the everyday--thereby marking a departure from approaching the question of religion solely through the lens of identity and conflict.
Contents
Farhana Ibrahim: Introduction
Section I: Capital, Urban Development, and Social Histories of the City
1: Malavika Kasturi: Maths, Quotidian Conflicts, and Urban Property: Perspectives from Colonial Legal Archives in Banaras
2: Usha Rao: Walking with the Gods: Re-making Ooru in a Global City
3: Shankar Ramaswami: Abhimanyus in Exile: Entanglements and Bonds Among Migrant Workers in Delhi
Section II: Secularization, Democratization, and Community
4: Moyukh Chatterjee: "What Kind of Hindu Are You?" Muscular Hinduism and the Making of Majorities and Minorities
5: Benu Verma: Bovine Sifters: Cows, Indigeneity, and Environmentalism Among an Urban Middle-Class Guru Following
6: Khalid Anis Ansari: "Like a Sackcloth Patch on Muslin": The Anti-Caste Pasmanda Narration of the Muslim Social
7: Michel Boivin and Trisha Lalchandani: Everyday Religiosity among the Hindu Sindhis of India: Sindhi Identity and the Religious Market in the Era of Social Networks
Section III: Markets, Materiality, and Social Reproduction Through Labour, Work, and Employment
8: Chandan Bose: Devi or Art History? Reading Entangled Narratives on the Lineage of Artisanal Skill from Telangana
9: Girish Bahal, Ujaan Chandra, Sriya Iyer, and Anand Shrivastava: Religion and Employment in India
10: Madhulika Sonkar: Taleem, Hunar, Tarbiyat: Meanings of Education and Vocation for Muslim Women in Old Delhi
11: Renny Thomas: Religion, Religious, and Beliefs: The Life of Religion in an Indian Scientific Research Institute
Section IV: Boundaries and Thresholds, Sacred and Secular Sovereignties
12: Tanuja Kothiyal: Crafty Devis of the Thar: Refashioning Charani Sagatis in the Indo-Pak Borderlands
13: Malvika Sharma: Sounds of Religion or Sonic Disorder? Religion and Everyday Life in the Borderland of District Poonch, Jammu and Kashmir
14: Aparna Balachandran: The Sounds of Everyday Christianity: Listening to the Protestant Mission in 19th Century Madras
