Studies in Religion and the Everyday

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.

About the author:

Farhana Ibrahim is Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. A social anthropologist, her research interests include the study of borders, policing, migration, and ethnographic perspectives on the state. With a PhD from Cornell University, her ethnographic research, spanning almost two decades, centres on the western Indian region of Kutch. Her first book, Settlers, Saints, and Sovereigns: An Ethnography of State Formation in Western India (Routledge, 2009) focuses on Muslim pastoral communities in Gujarat along the Kutch-Sindh border. Her second book, From Family to Police Force: Security and Belonging on a South Asian Border (Cornell University Press, 2021) is an ethnography of policing, civil-military relations, kinship, and surveillance on a South Asian borderland. She has also co-edited South Asian Borderlands: Mobility, History, Affect (with Tanuja Kothiyal; Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Table of contents

Introduction, Farhana Ibrahim
Section I: Capital, Urban Development, and Social Histories of the City
1:Maths, Quotidian Conflicts, and Urban Property: Perspectives from Colonial Legal Archives in Banaras, Malavika Kasturi
2:Walking with the Gods: Re-making Ooru in a Global City, Usha Rao
3:Abhimanyus in Exile: Entanglements and Bonds Among Migrant Workers in Delhi, Shankar Ramaswami
Section II: Secularization, Democratization, and Community
4:"What Kind of Hindu Are You?" Muscular Hinduism and the Making of Majorities and Minorities, Moyukh Chatterjee
5:Bovine Sifters: Cows, Indigeneity, and Environmentalism Among an Urban Middle-Class Guru Following, Benu Verma
6:"Like a Sackcloth Patch on Muslin": The Anti-Caste Pasmanda Narration of the Muslim Social, Khalid Anis Ansari
7:Everyday Religiosity among the Hindu Sindhis of India: Sindhi Identity and the Religious Market in the Era of Social Networks, Michel Boivin and Trisha Lalchandani
Section III: Markets, Materiality, and Social Reproduction Through Labour, Work, and Employment
8:Devi or Art History? Reading Entangled Narratives on the Lineage of Artisanal Skill from Telangana, Chandan Bose
9:Religion and Employment in India, Girish Bahal, Ujaan Chandra, Sriya Iyer, and Anand Shrivastava
10:Taleem, Hunar, Tarbiyat: Meanings of Education and Vocation for Muslim Women in Old Delhi, Madhulika Sonkar
11:Religion, Religious, and Beliefs: The Life of Religion in an Indian Scientific Research Institute, Renny Thomas
Section IV: Boundaries and Thresholds, Sacred and Secular Sovereignties
12:Crafty Devis of the Thar: Refashioning Charani Sagatis in the Indo-Pak Borderlands, Tanuja Kothiyal
13:Sounds of Religion or Sonic Disorder? Religion and Everyday Life in the Borderland of District Poonch, Jammu and Kashmir, Malvika Sharma
14:The Sounds of Everyday Christianity: Listening to the Protestant Mission in 19th Century Madras, Aparna Balachandran