Conference output
Online discussion forum
We would like to invite participants of Rethinking Religion in India to continue the discussions on the themes and questions of the conference cluster on our facebook page
An edited volume of the first conference has been published by Routledge, Rethinking Religion in India: The Colonial Construction of Hinduism.
- Edited by Esther Bloch, Marianne Keppens, Rajaram Hegde
- Series: Routledge South Asian Religion Series
- More information and possibility of ordering the book at www.routledge .com
Contributors
- S.N. Balagangadhara, Ghent University, Belgium.
- Esther Bloch, Ghent University, Belgium.
- Sarah Claerhout, Ghent University, Belgium.
- Jakob De Roover, Ghent University, Belgium.
- Timothy Fitzgerald, University of Stirling, UK.
- Rajaram Hegde, Kuvempu University, Karnataka, India.
- Marianne Keppens, Ghent University, Belgium.
- Richard King, Vanderbilt University, USA.
- David N. Lorenzen, El Colegio de Mexico, Mexico.
- Geoffrey A. Oddie, University of Sydney, Australia.
- Laurie L. Patton, Emory University, Georgia, USA.
- Sharada Sugirtharajah, University of Birmingham, UK.
- John Zavos, University of Manchester, UK.
This book critically assesses recent debates about the colonial construction of Hinduism. Increasingly scholars have come to realise that the dominant understanding of Indian culture and its traditions is unsatisfactory. According to the classical paradigm, Hindu traditions are conceptualized as features of a religion with distinct beliefs, doctrines, sacred laws and holy texts. Today, however, many academics consider this conception to be a colonial ‘construction’. This book focuses on the different versions, arguments and counter-arguments of the thesis that the Hindu religion is a construct of colonialism. Bringing together the different positions in the debate, it provides necessary historical data, arguments and conceptual tools to examine the argument. Organized in two parts, the first half of the book provides new analyses of historical and empirical data; the second presents some of the theoretical questions that have emerged from the debate on the construction of Hinduism. Where some of the contributors argue that Hinduism was created as a result of a western Christian notion of religion and the imperatives of British colonialism, others show that this religion already existed in pre-colonial India; and as an alternative to these standpoints, other writers argue that Hinduism only exists in the European experience and does not correspond to any empirical reality in India. This volume offers new insights into the nature of the construction of religion in India and will be of interest to scholars of the History of Religion, Asian Religion, Postcolonial and South Asian Studies.
Conference visuals
At the end of the conference cluster, we want to merge the different documentaries into one overview of the 5-year conference cluster.