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.

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.

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.

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.

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”.

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.

This book explores the organic lives of popular Sufi shrines in contemporary Northwest India. It traverses the worldview of shrine spaces, rituals and their complex narratives, and provides an insight into their urban and rural landscapes in the post-Partition (Indian) Punjab. What happened to these shrines when attempts were made to dissuade Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus from their veneration of popular saints in the early twentieth century? What was the fate of popular shrines that persisted even when the Muslim population was virtually wiped off as a result of migration during Partition? How did these shrines manifest in the context of the threat posed by militants in the 1980s? How did such popular practices reconfigure themselves when some important centres of Sufism were left behind in the West Punjab (now Pakistan)? This book examines several of these questions and utilizes a combination of analytical tools, new theoretical tropes and an ethnographic approach to understand and situate popular Sufi shrines so that they are both historicized and spatialized. As such, it lays out some crucial contours of the method and practice of understanding popular sacred spaces (within India and elsewhere), bridging the everyday and the metanarratives of power structures and state formation. This book will be useful to scholars, researchers and those engaged in interdisciplinary work in history, social anthropology, historical sociology, cultural studies, historical geography, religion and art history, as well as those interested in Sufism and its shrines in South Asia.

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.

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.

Insightful field research into the complexity of women's roles in a subset of Islamic culture. 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.