Shared Idioms Sacred Symbols And The Articulation Of Identities In South Asia

Shared Idioms Sacred Symbols And The Articulation Of Identities In South Asia Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle version is available to download in english. Read online anytime anywhere directly from your device. Click on the download button below to get a free pdf file of Shared Idioms Sacred Symbols And The Articulation Of Identities In South Asia book. This book definitely worth reading, it is an incredibly well-written.

Shared Idioms, Sacred Symbols, and the Articulation of Identities in South Asia

Author : Kelly Pemberton,Michael Nijhawan
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 302 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2009-01-13
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781135904760

Get Book

Shared Idioms, Sacred Symbols, and the Articulation of Identities in South Asia by Kelly Pemberton,Michael Nijhawan Pdf

How do text, performance, and rhetoric simultaneously reflect and challenge notions of distinct community and religious identities? This volume examines evidence of shared idioms of sanctity within a larger framework of religious nationalism, literary productions, and communalism in South Asia. Contributors to this volume are particularly interested in how alternative forms of belonging and religious imaginations in South Asia are articulated in the light of normative, authoritative, and exclusive claims upon the representation of identities. Building upon new and extensive historiographical and ethnographical data, the book challenges clear-cut categorizations of group identity and points to the complex historical and contemporary relationships between different groups, organizations, in part by investigating the discursive formations that are often subsumed under binary distinctions of dominant/subaltern, Hindu/Muslim or orthodox/heterodox. In this respect, the book offers a theoretical contribution beyond South Asia Studies by highlighting a need for a new interdisciplinary effort in rethinking notions of identity, ethnicity, and religion.

Shared Idioms, Sacred Symbols, and the Articulation of Identities in South Asia

Author : Kelly Pemberton,Michael Nijhawan
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 262 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2009-01-13
Category : History
ISBN : 9781135904777

Get Book

Shared Idioms, Sacred Symbols, and the Articulation of Identities in South Asia by Kelly Pemberton,Michael Nijhawan Pdf

This work focuses on processes of articulating identity. The notions of "shared idioms" and "sacred symbols" shaping this volume suggest both a search for common ground and boundary-drawing processes. Individual chapters locate "sites" of these modes and the conditions that engender them, problematizing the truth-claims of unitary markers of identity.

Religious Authority in South Asia

Author : István Keul,Srilata Raman
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 283 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2022-09-30
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781000654929

Get Book

Religious Authority in South Asia by István Keul,Srilata Raman Pdf

This book focuses on genealogies of religious authority in South Asia, examining the figure of the guru in narrative texts, polemical tracts, hagiographies, histories, in contemporary devotional communities, New Age spiritual movements and global guru organizations. Experts in the field present reflections on historically specific contexts in which a guru comes into being, becomes part of a community, is venerated, challenged or repudiated, generates a new canon, remains unique with no clear succession or establishes a succession in which charisma is routinized. The guru emerges and is sustained and routinized from the nexus of guruship, narratives, performances and community. The contributors to the book examine this nexus at specific historical moments with all their elements of change and contingency. The book will be of interest to scholars in the field of South Asian studies, the study of religions and cultural studies.

South Asian Sufis

Author : Clinton Bennett,Charles M. Ramsey
Publisher : A&C Black
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 2012-03-01
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781441135896

Get Book

South Asian Sufis by Clinton Bennett,Charles M. Ramsey Pdf

Often described as the soul of Islam, Sufism is one of the most interesting yet least known facet of this global religion. Sufism is the softer more inclusive and mystical form of Islam. Although militant Islamists dominate the headlines, the Sufi ideal has captured the imagination of many. Nowhere in the world is the handprint of Sufism more observable than South Asia, which has the largest Muslim population of the world, but also the greatest concentration of Sufis. This book examines active Sufi communities in Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh that shed light on the devotion, and deviation, and destiny of Sufism in South Asia. Drawn from extensive work by indigenous and international scholars, this ethnographical study explores the impact of Iran on the development of Sufi thought and practice further east, and also discusses Sufism in diaspora in such contexts as the UK and North America and Iran's influence on South Asian Sufism.

Hindu Christian Faqir

Author : Timothy S. Dobe
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 384 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2015-10-02
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780190463571

Get Book

Hindu Christian Faqir by Timothy S. Dobe Pdf

In the mid-nineteenth century, the American missionary James Butler predicted that Christian conversion and British law together would eradicate Indian ascetics. His disgust for Hindu holy men (sadhus), whom he called "saints," "yogis," and "filthy fakirs," was largely shared by orientalist scholars and British officials, who likewise imagined these religious elites to be a leading symptom of India's degeneration. Yet within some thirty years of Butler's writing, modern Indian ascetics such as the neo-Vedantin Hindu Swami Rama Tirtha (1873-1906) and, paradoxically, the Protestant Christian convert Sadhu Sundar Singh (1889-1929) achieved international fame as embodiments of the spiritual superiority of the East over the West. Timothy S. Dobe's fine-grained account of the lives of Sundar Singh and Rama Tirtha offers a window on the surprising reversals and potentials of Indian ascetic "sainthood" in the colonial contact zone. His study develops a new model of Indian holy men that is historicized, religiously pluralistic, and located within the tensions and intersections of ascetic practice and modernity. The first in-depth account of two internationally-recognized modern holy men in the colonially-crucial region of Punjab, Hindu Christian Faqir offers new examples and contexts for thinking through these wider issues. Drawing on unexplored Urdu writings by and about both figures, Dobe argues not only that Hinduism and Protestant Christianity are here intimately linked, but that these links are forged from the stuff of regional Islamic traditions of Sufi holy men (faqir). He also re-conceives Indian sainthood through an in-depth examination of ascetic practice as embodied religion, public performance, and relationship, rather than as a theological, otherworldly, and isolated ideal.

Language Ideologies and the Vernacular in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia

Author : Nishat Zaidi,Hans Harder
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 398 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 2023-09-29
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781000930429

Get Book

Language Ideologies and the Vernacular in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia by Nishat Zaidi,Hans Harder Pdf

This volume critically engages with recent formulations and debates regarding the status of the regional languages of the Indian subcontinent vis-à-vis English. It explores how language ideologies of the “vernacular” are positioned in relation to the language ideologies of English in South Asia. The book probes into how we might move beyond the English-vernacular binary in India, explores what happened to “bhasha literatures” during the colonial and post-colonial periods and how to position those literatures by the side of Indian English and international literature. It looks into the ways vernacular community and political rhetoric are intertwined with Anglophone (national or global) positionalities and their roles in political processes. This book will be of interest to researchers, students and scholars of literary and cultural studies, Indian Writing in English, Indian literatures, South Asian languages and popular culture. It will also be extremely valuable for language scholars, sociolinguists, social historians, scholars of cultural studies and those who understand the theoretical issues that concern the notion of “vernacularity”.

Women Mystics and Sufi Shrines in India

Author : Kelly Pemberton
Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
Page : 264 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2013-02-19
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781611172324

Get Book

Women Mystics and Sufi Shrines in India by Kelly Pemberton Pdf

Women Mystics and Sufi Shrines in India combines historical data with years of ethnographic fieldwork to investigate women's participation in the culture of Sufi shrines in India and the manner in which this participation both complicates and sustains traditional conceptions of Islamic womanhood. Kelly Pemberton grounds her firsthand research into India's Sufi shrines and saints by setting her observations against the historical backdrop of colonial-era discourses by British civil servants, Orientalist scholars, and Muslim reformists and the assumptive portrayals of women's activities in the milieu of Sufi orders and shrines inherent in these accounts. These early narratives, Pemberton holds, are driven by social, economic, intellectual, and political undercurrents of self-interest that shaped Western understanding of Indian Muslims and, in particular, of women's participation in the institutions of Sufism. Pemberton's research offers a corrective by assessing the contemporary circumstances under which a woman may be recognized as a spiritual authority or guide—despite official denial of such status—and by examining the discrepancies between the commonly held belief that women cannot perform in the public setting of shrines and her own observations of women doing precisely that. She demonstrates that the existence of multiple models of master and disciple relationships have opened avenues for women to be recognized as spiritual authorities in their own right. Specifically Pemberton explores the work of performance, recitation, and ritual mediation carried out by women connected with Sufi orders through kinship and spiritual ties, and she maps shifting ideas about women's involvement in public ritual events in a variety of contexts, circumstances, and genres of performance. She also highlights the private petitioning of saints, the Prophet, and God performed by poor women of low social standing in Bihar Sharif. These women are often perceived as being exceptionally close to God yet are compelled to operate outside the public sphere of major shrines. Throughout this groundbreaking study, Pemberton sets observed practices of lived religious experiences against the boundaries established by prescriptive behavioral models of Islam to illustrate how the varied reasons given for why women cannot become spiritual masters conflict with the need in Sufi circles for them to do exactly that. Thus this work also invites further inquiry into the ambiguities to be found in Islam's foundational framework for belief and practice.

The Languages and Linguistics of South Asia

Author : Hans Henrich Hock,Elena Bashir
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 927 pages
File Size : 47,8 Mb
Release : 2016-05-24
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9783110423303

Get Book

The Languages and Linguistics of South Asia by Hans Henrich Hock,Elena Bashir Pdf

With nearly a quarter of the world’s population, members of at least five major language families plus several putative language isolates, South Asia is a fascinating arena for linguistic investigations, whether comparative-historical linguistics, studies of language contact and multilingualism, or general linguistic theory. This volume provides a state-of-the-art survey of linguistic research on the languages of South Asia, with contributions by well-known experts. Focus is both on what has been accomplished so far and on what remains unresolved or controversial and hence offers challenges for future research. In addition to covering the languages, their histories, and their genetic classification, as well as phonetics/phonology, morphology, syntax, and sociolinguistics, the volume provides special coverage of contact and convergence, indigenous South Asian grammatical traditions, applications of modern technology to South Asian languages, and South Asian writing systems. An appendix offers a classified listing of major sources and resources, both digital/online and printed.

The Oxford Handbook of Sikh Studies

Author : Pashaura Singh,Louis E. Fenech
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 673 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 2014-03
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780199699308

Get Book

The Oxford Handbook of Sikh Studies by Pashaura Singh,Louis E. Fenech Pdf

This handbook innovatively combines the ways in which scholars diverse fields (including philosophy, psychology, literary studies, history, sociology, anthropology, political science, and economics) have integrated the study of Sikhism within critical and postcolonial perspectives on the nature of religion.

A Multilingual Nation

Author : Rita Kothari
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 376 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2017-11-21
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780199095322

Get Book

A Multilingual Nation by Rita Kothari Pdf

How does India live through the oddity of being both a nation and multilingual? Is multilingualism in India to be understood as a neatly laid set of discrete languages or a criss-crossing of languages that runs through every source language and text? The questions take us to reviewing what is meant by language, multilingualism, and translation. Challenging these institutions, A Multilingual Nation illustrates how the received notions of translation discipline do not apply to India. It provocatively argues that translation is not a ‘solution’ to the allegedly chaotic situation of many languages, rather it is its inherent and inalienable part. An unusual and unorthodox collection of essays by leading thinkers and writers, new and young researchers, it establishes the all-pervasive nature of translation in every sphere in India and reverses the assumptions of the steady nature of language, its definition, and the peculiar fragility that is revealed in the process of translation.

Writing Tamil Catholicism

Author : Margherita Trento
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 369 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2022-05-02
Category : History
ISBN : 9789004511620

Get Book

Writing Tamil Catholicism by Margherita Trento Pdf

In Writing Tamil Catholicism: Literature, Persuasion and Devotion in the Eighteenth Century, Margherita Trento explores the process by which the Jesuit missionary Costanzo Giuseppe Beschi (1680-1747), in collaboration with a group of local lay elites identified by their profession as catechists, chose Tamil poetry as the social and political language of Catholicism in eighteenth-century South India. Trento analyzes a corpus of Tamil grammars and poems, chiefly Beschi’s Tēmpāvaṇi, alongside archival documents to show how, by presenting themselves as poets and intellectuals, Catholic elites gained a persuasive voice as well as entrance into the learned society of the Tamil country and its networks of patronage. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 840879.

Religious Ethics and Migration

Author : Ilsup Ahn
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 217 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2013-11-12
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781317933236

Get Book

Religious Ethics and Migration by Ilsup Ahn Pdf

What does it mean to provide justice for undocumented workers who have been living among us without proper legal documentation? How can we do justice to the undocumented migrants who have been doing the low-skilled, low-paid jobs unwanted by citizens? Why should we even try to do justice for people who violate the laws of the society? Religious Ethics and Migration: Doing Justice to Undocumented Workers addresses these questions from a distinctive religious ethical perspective: the Christian theology of forgiveness and radical hospitality. In answering these questions, the author employs in-depth interdisciplinary dialogues with other relevant disciplines such as immigration history, global economics, political science, legal philosophy, and social theory. He argues that the political appropriation of a Christian theology of forgiveness and the radical hospitality modeled after it are the most practical and justifiable solutions to the current immigration crisis in North America. Critical and interdisciplinary in its approach, this book offers a unique, comprehensive, and balanced perspective regarding the urgent immigration crisis.

William James's Hidden Religious Imagination

Author : Jeremy Carrette
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2013-05-29
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781134087990

Get Book

William James's Hidden Religious Imagination by Jeremy Carrette Pdf

This book offers a radical new reading of William James’s work on the idea of ‘religion.’ Moving beyond previous psychological and philosophical interpretations, it uncovers a dynamic, imaginative, and critical use of the category of religion. This work argues that we can only fully understand James’s work on religion by returning to the ground of his metaphysics of relations and by incorporating literary and historical themes. Author Jeremy Carette develops original perspectives on the influence of James’s father and Calvinism, on the place of the body and sex in James, on the significance of George Eliot’s novels, and Herbert Spencer’s ‘unknown,’ revealing a social and political discourse of civil religion and republicanism and a poetic imagination at the heart of James understanding of religion. These diverse themes are brought together through a post-structural sensitivity and a recovery of the importance of the French philosopher Charles Renouvier to James’s work. This study pushes new boundaries in Jamesian scholarship by reading James with pluralism and from the French tradition. It will be a benchmark text in the reshaping of James and the nineteenth-century foundations of the modern study of ‘religion.’

Negotiating Languages

Author : Walter N. Hakala
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 317 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2016-08-30
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9780231542128

Get Book

Negotiating Languages by Walter N. Hakala Pdf

Prior to the nineteenth century, South Asian dictionaries, glossaries, and vocabularies reflected a hierarchical vision of nature and human society. By the turn of the twentieth century, the modern dictionary had democratized and politicized language. Compiled "scientifically" through "historical principles," the modern dictionary became a concrete symbol of a nation's arrival on the world stage. Following this phenomenon from the late seventeenth century to the present, Negotiating Languages casts lexicographers as key figures in the political realignment of South Asia under British rule and in the years after independence. Their dictionaries document how a single, mutually intelligible language evolved into two competing registers—Urdu and Hindi—and became associated with contrasting religious and nationalist goals. Each chapter in this volume focuses on a key lexicographical work and its fateful political consequences. Recovering texts by overlooked and even denigrated authors, Negotiating Languages provides insight into the forces that turned intimate speech into a potent nationalist politics, intensifying the passions that partitioned the Indian subcontinent.

Contemporary Pakistani Fiction in English

Author : Cara N. Cilano
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 266 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2013-04-12
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781135907259

Get Book

Contemporary Pakistani Fiction in English by Cara N. Cilano Pdf

Looking at a wide selection of Pakistani novels in English, this book explores how literary texts imaginatively probe the past, convey the present, and project a future in terms that facilitate a sense of collective belonging. The novels discussed cover a range of historical movements and developments, including pre-20th century Islamic history, the 1947 partition, the 1971 Pakistani war, the Zia years, and post-9/11 Pakistan, as well as pervasive themes, including ethnonationalist tensions, the zamindari system, and conspiracy thinking. The book offers a range of representations of how and whether collective belonging takes shape, and illustrates how the Pakistani novel in English, often overshadowed by the proliferation of the Indian novel in English, complements Pakistani multi-lingual literary imaginaries by presenting alternatives to standard versions of history and by highlighting the issues English-language literary production bring to the fore in a broader Pakistani context. It goes on to look at the literary devices and themes used to portray idea, nation and state as a foundation for collective belonging. The book illustrates the distinct contributions the Pakistani novel in English makes to the larger fields of postcolonial and South Asian literary and cultural studies.