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.
Author(s): Pemberton Nijha
Year: 2008
Language: English
Pages: 262
Book Cover......Page 1
Title......Page 4
Copyright......Page 5
Contents......Page 6
Acknowledgments......Page 8
Introduction: Toward an Integrative Hermeneutics in the Study of Identity......Page 10
Part I Landscapes of Translation: Linguistics, History, and Culture in Focus......Page 28
1 A House Overturned: A Classical Urdu Lament in Braj Bhasha......Page 30
2 The Politics of Non-duality: Unraveling the Hermeneutics of Modern Sikh Theology......Page 63
3 Who Are the Velalas?: Twentieth-Century Constructions and Contestations of Tamil Identity in Maraimalai Adigal (1876–1950)......Page 87
4 Can a Muslim Be an Indian and Not a Traitor or a Terrorist?......Page 105
5 Variants of Cultural Nationalism in Pakistan: A Reading of Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Jamil Jalibi, and Fahmida Riaz......Page 124
Part II Landscapes of Ritual Performance: Ritual, Agency, and Memory in Focus......Page 150
6 Ambivalent Encounters: The Making of Dhadi as a Sikh Performative Practice......Page 152
7 Ritual, Reform, and Economies of Meaning at a South Asian Sufi Shrine......Page 175
8 Gendered Ritual and the Shaping of Shi‘ah Identity......Page 197
9 History, Memory, and Other Matters of Life and Death......Page 221
Selected Bibliography......Page 242
Contributors......Page 252
Index of Proper Names......Page 256
Thematic Index......Page 258
