Download or read book Religious Conversion in India written by Rowena Robinson and published by OUP India. This book was released on 2007-03-01 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together original essays by leading scholars of religion, history, and society refelcting upon the idea and practice of conversion in India.
Download or read book Religious Freedom and Mass Conversion in India written by Laura Dudley Jenkins and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2019-05-31 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hinduism is the largest religion in India, encompassing roughly 80 percent of the population, while 14 percent of the population practices Islam and the remaining 6 percent adheres to other religions. The right to "freely profess, practice, and propagate religion" in India's constitution is one of the most comprehensive articulations of the right to religious freedom. Yet from the late colonial era to the present, mass conversions to minority religions have inflamed majority-minority relations in India and complicated the exercise of this right. In Religious Freedom and Mass Conversion in India, Laura Dudley Jenkins examines three mass conversion movements in India: among Christians in the 1930s, Dalit Buddhists in the 1950s, and Mizo Jews in the 2000s. Critics of these movements claimed mass converts were victims of overzealous proselytizers promising material benefits, but defenders insisted the converts were individuals choosing to convert for spiritual reasons. Jenkins traces the origins of these opposing arguments to the 1930s and 1940s, when emerging human rights frameworks and early social scientific studies of religion posited an ideal convert: an individual making a purely spiritual choice. However, she observes that India's mass conversions did not adhere to this model and therefore sparked scrutiny of mass converts' individual agency and spiritual sincerity. Jenkins demonstrates that the preoccupation with converts' agency and sincerity has resulted in significant challenges to religious freedom. One is the proliferation of legislation limiting induced conversions. Another is the restriction of affirmative action rights of low caste people who choose to practice Islam or Christianity. Last, incendiary rumors are intentionally spread of women being converted to Islam via seduction. Religious Freedom and Mass Conversion in India illuminates the ways in which these tactics immobilize potential converts, reinforce damaging assumptions about women, lower castes, and religious minorities, and continue to restrict religious freedom in India today.
Download or read book Religious Conversion written by Sarah Claerhout and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-05-06 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book re-examines the issue of religious conversion, which has been a site of conflict in India for several centuries. It discusses wide-ranging themes such as conversion, education, and reform in colonial India; the process and practices of conversion in Christian Europe; Gandhi, conversion, and the equality of religions; perspectives from Hindu nationalism, secularism, and religious minorities; religious freedom and the limits of propagating religion; and conversion in constitutional law, commissions, and courts, to chart new directions for research on religion, tradition, and conversion. Tracing developments from the 19th-century colonial era to contemporary times, the book analyses cultural background frameworks and the origins of religious conversion and its conceptualisation in Western Christianity. It further delves into how Indian culture and its traditions have shaped responses to conversion. Part of the Critical Humanities Across Cultures series, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of critical humanities, religion, cultural studies, sociology of religion, comparative religion, philosophy, anthropology, theology, Indology, history, politics, postcolonial studies, critical theory, and South Asian studies.
Download or read book Christianity in India written by Rebecca Samuel Shah and published by Fortress Press. This book was released on 2018-11-08 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christianity has been present in India since at least the third century, but the faith remains a small minority. Even so, Christianity is growing rapidly in parts of the subcontinent, and has made an impact far beyond its numbers. Yet Indian Christianity remains highly controversial, and it has suffered growing discrimination and violence. This book shows how Christian converts and communities continue to make contributions to Indian society, even amid social pressure and violent persecution. In a time of controversy in India about the legitimacy of conversion and the value of religious diversity, Christianity in India addresses the complex issues of faith, identity, caste, and culture. It documents the outsized role of Christians in promoting human rights, providing education and healthcare, fighting injustice and exploitation, and stimulating economic uplift for the poor. Readers will come away surprised and sobered to learn how these active initiatives often invite persecution today. The essays draw on intimate and personal encounters with Christians in India, past and present, and address the challenges of religious freedom in contemporary India.
Download or read book Religious Freedom in India written by Goldie Osuri and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-09-10 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the critical and theoretical concepts of sovereignty, biopolitics, and necropolitics, this book examines how a normative liberal and secular understanding of India’s religious identity is translatable by Hindu nationalists into discrimination and violence against minoritized religious communities. Extending these concepts to an analysis of historical, political and legal genealogies of conversion, the author demonstrates how a concern for sovereignty links past and present anti-conversion campaigns and laws. The book illustrates how sovereignty informs the making of secularism as well as religious difference. The focus on sovereignty sheds light on the manner in which religious difference becomes a point of reference for the religio-secular idioms of Bombay cinema, for legal judgements on communal violence, for human rights organizations, and those seeking justice for communal violence. This wide-ranging examination and discussion of the trajectories of (anti) conversion politics through historical, legal, philosophical, popular cultural, archival and ethnographic material offers a cogent argument for shifting the stakes and rethinking the relationship between sovereignty and religious freedom. The book is a timely contribution to broader theoretical and political discussions of (post) secularism and human rights, and is of interest to students and scholars of postcolonial studies, cultural studies, law, and religious studies.
Download or read book Pentecostalism and Politics of Conversion in India written by Sarbeswar Sahoo and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-03 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book studies the politics of Pentecostal conversion and anti-Christian violence in India. It asks: why has India been experiencing increasing incidents of anti-Christian violence since the 1990s? Why are the Bhil Adivasis increasingly converting to Pentecostalism? And, what are the implications of conversion for religion within indigenous communities on the one hand and broader issues of secularism, religious freedom and democratic rights on the other? Drawing on extended ethnographic fieldwork amongst the Bhils of Northern India since 2006, this book asserts that ideological incompatibility and antagonism between Christian missionaries and Hindu nationalists provide only a partial explanation for anti-Christian violence in India. It unravels the complex interactions between different actors/ agents in the production of anti-Christian violence and provides detailed ethnographic narratives on Pentecostal conversion, Hindu nationalist politics and anti-Christian violence in the largest state of India that has hitherto been dominated by upper caste Rajput Hindu(tva) ideology.
Download or read book The Conversion of India written by George Smith and published by . This book was released on 1893 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Debating Conversion in Hinduism and Christianity written by Ankur Barua and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-03-27 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hindu and Christian debates over the meanings, motivations, and modalities of ‘conversion’ provide the central connecting theme running through this book. It focuses on the reasons offered by both sides to defend or oppose the possibility of these cross-border movements, and shows how these reasons form part of a wider constellation of ideas, concepts, and practices of the Christian and the Hindu worlds. The book draws upon several historical case-studies of Christian missionaries and of Hindus who encountered these missionaries. By analysing some of the complex negotiations, intersections, and conflicts between Hindus and Christians over the question of ‘conversion’, it demonstrates that these encounters revolve around three main contested themes. Firstly, who can properly ‘speak for the convert’? Secondly, how is ‘tolerating’ the religious other connected to an appraisal of the other’s viewpoints which may be held to be incorrect, inadequate, or incomplete? Finally, what is, in fact, the ‘true Religion’? The book demonstrates that it is necessary to wrestle with these questions for an adequate understanding of the Hindu and Christian debates over ‘conversion.’ Questioning what ‘conversion’ precisely is, and why it has been such a volatile issue on India’s political-legal landscape, the book will be a useful contribution to studies of Hinduism, Christianity and Asian Religion and Philosophy.
Download or read book Constructing Indian Christianities written by Chad M. Bauman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-08-07 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers insights into the current ‘public-square’ debates on Indian Christianity. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork as well as rigorous analyses, it discusses the myriad histories of Christianity in India, its everyday practice and contestations and the process of its indigenisation. It addresses complex and pertinent themes such as Dalit Indian Christianity, diasporic nationalism and conversion. The work will interest scholars and researchers of religious studies, Dalit and subaltern studies, modern Indian history, and politics.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion written by Lewis R. Rambo and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-06 with total page 829 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion offers a comprehensive exploration of the dynamics of religious conversion, which for centuries has profoundly shaped societies, cultures, and individuals throughout the world. Scholars from a wide array of religions and disciplines interpret both the varieties of conversion experiences and the processes that inform this personal and communal phenomenon. This volume examines the experiences of individuals and communities who change religions, those who experience an intensification of their religion of origin, and those who encounter new religions through colonial intrusion, missionary work, and charismatic and revitalization movements. The thirty-two innovative essays provide overviews of the history of particular religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Sikhism, Islam, Christianity, Judaism, indigenous religions, and new religious movements. The essays also offer a wide range of disciplinary perspectives-psychological, sociological, anthropological, legal, political, feminist, and geographical-on methods and theories deployed in understanding conversion, and insight into various forms of deconversion.
Download or read book A Matter of Belief written by Vibha Joshi and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2012-09-01 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Nagaland for Christ’ and ‘Jesus Saves’ are familiar slogans prominently displayed on public transport and celebratory banners in Nagaland, north-east India. They express an idealization of Christian homogeneity that belies the underlying tensions and negotiations between Christian and non-Christian Naga. This religious division is intertwined with that of healing beliefs and practices, both animistic and biomedical. This study focuses on the particular experiences of the Angami Naga, one of the many Naga peoples. Like other Naga, they are citizens of the state of India but extend ethnolinguistically into Tibeto-Burman south-east Asia. This ambiguity and how it affects their Christianity, global involvement, indigenous cultural assertiveness and nationalist struggle is explored. Not simply describing continuity through change, this study reveals the alternating Christian and non-Christian streams of discourse, one masking the other but at different times and in different guises.
Download or read book The Anthropology of Religious Conversion written by Andrew Buckser and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2003 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Table of contents
Download or read book Caste Conversion A Colonial Conspiracy What Every Hindu and Christian Must Know about Caste written by Pt Satish K. Sharma and published by . This book was released on 2021-02-11 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Almost everyone on the planet has heard of the "Ancient Hindu Caste" system and somehow, almost everyone knows how horrible it is, but what if it wasn't ancient and it wasn't Hindu? Almost everyone on the planet knows that the colonialist erasure of indigenous languages and ideas was a horrific chapter in human history, but what if it's not over, what if it's morphed in to a new form, just as devastating and destructive, and what if the Caste issue holds the key to revealing it? Every Hindu walks through life carrying a subliminal guilt that his or her ancestors were "caste discriminators" and every devout Christian walks tall and proud in the knowledge that his or her ancestors helped to free the crushed, downtrodden from the depraved Hindoo caste system, and being an accepted "truth" no-one questions it any more. What if they are both victims of the same deception, of the same multigenerational fraud? In 2016, the British Hindu community was rocked when it became the target of demonisation and dehumanisation by anti-Hindu Anglican Evangelists. Allegations were made that caste discrimination was not a relic of history but was present and not only present but rife amongst the British Indian community. The difficulty was that there was no experience of it at the grass roots level, and there was no evidence of it being either systemic nor endemic, so what was afoot? The author Pt Satish K Sharma, a Dharmic Scholar and Theologian and a long serving community worker under took the task of determining, once and for all, the real history of Caste and of establishing and quantifying its presence or absence in the Britain of the 21st Century. There were mountains of academic accounts of the theory, allegations and anecdotes abounded and yet the reality at ground level was remarkably different. The revelations contained in this work were the revelations which incinerated the false claims which had been levelled, revealed the hidden hand behind the anti-Hindu media campaign but also provided the context and framework with which this long running civilisational wound could heal. The contents of this book include actual communications which took place, the information which was presented to Parliamentarians. Legislators and Community leaders as well as eye witness accounts of meetings and "consultations", as well as the authors research, research which led eventually to the senior leaders of the Church of England requesting that Parliament review the whole issue once more. We have the strange situation that Parliament passed legislation without adequate consultation and the Government chose not to enact the legislation, a phenomenon never before arisen in British History, this book provides the answers as to why. The Caste issue remains a colonialist force for harm, and the tropes which underly it cause suffering to the Hindu community in every corner of the world even today, as Isabel Wilkersons recent tragically uninfomed book prove. This book will go a long way to to reversing this harm and should be compulsory reading for every Hindu, Christian and activist working to reverse the civilisational trauma of European Colonialism "I find it extraordinary that there are issues here of which until now I have had absolutely no knowledge. My feeling is that the majority of native Britons will share this reaction. The Church, Christianity, which had perverted the simple message of its founder, believed it could justify imposing its version on a "primitive" people with a concept of original sin and the claim that it alone possessed the means to personal salvation. Between them, they were able to devise an extraordinarily successful divide-and-rule format which did immense damage to that country... Please forgive us now, so that we can move forward together." M Purton BBC Producer (Retd)
Download or read book Religious Conversion written by Christopher Lamb and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 1999-10-01 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conversion has been an important issue for most of the universal religions - those usually associated with a founder, such as Christianity, Buddhism, Islam and Judaism - which have a mission to spread their message. Other religions have been less concerned with conversion except in so far as it has been a negative force for them to confront. This study explores how conversion has been understood by different religions during different eras, and includes a survey of the textual, legal, ritual, historic and experiential dimensions of the phenomenon of conversion.
Download or read book In Search of Identity written by Sebastian C. H. Kim and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2005 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Very few books have...discussed [religious conversion]in a pan-Indian context...This book both promises and delivers this very perspective... a landmark in studies on conversion...' -- Seminar'The vital importance of this timely and extremely well-written book cannot be stressed enough...Kim offers us a sober, carefully researched and painstakingly documented book on the emergence of the conversion issue during the last one hundred and fifty years in pre- and post-independentIndia...[T]he book...offers us a fine basis to continue the exploration of conversion and its discontents.' -- The book Review'Kim seeks to reveal arguments for and against conversions, wherein lies the appeal of his book... By highlighting contesting philosophies, Kim focuses on crucial conversion issues.' -- Hindustan Times'...Kim's work...prove[s] to be a handy reference both for policy-makers and scholars.' -- The TelegraphThis important volume examines the major arg uments on conversion between Hindus and Christians, and also among Christian theologians in both pre- and post-Independence India. It reveals and interprets the arguments for and against conversion and seeks to understand them within a historical andcontemporary perspective.Engaging and immensely relevant, this book will interest policy-makers, journalists, academics, and lay readers, besides being indispensable to researchers and students of sociology, religion, theology, history, politics, and law.
Download or read book A History of Christian Conversion written by David W. Kling and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 853 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this first in-depth and wide-ranging history of Christian conversion, David Kling examines the dynamic of turning to the Christian faith by individuals, families, and people groups. Global in reach and engaging recent methods and theories in conversion studies, the narrative progresses from early Christian beginnings in the Roman world to Christianity's expansion into Europe, the Americas, China, India, and Africa. Although conversion is often associated with a particular strand of modern Christianity (evangelical) and a particular type of experience (sudden, overwhelming), when examined over two millennia, it emerges as a phenomenon far more complex than any one-dimensional profile would suggest.
Download or read book Changing Gods written by Rudolf C. Heredia and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conversion Is A Complex And Emotionally Charged Issue. Fundamentalists Exploit It, Liberals Complicate It, Many Do Not Comprehend What The Fuss Is About, And Others Shy Away From Getting Involved. In Today S Pluri-Religious Society, Change Of Faith Can Precipitate Religious Antagonism--Or It Can Facilitate Social Diversity And Tolerance. While Religious Commitment Is Essentially A Matter Of Personal Conscience And Choice, It Inevitably Impacts Other Levels Of Individual And Social Life. Author Rudolf C. Heredia Is A Jesuit Sociologist Who, With His Long Experience Of Working With Marginalized Communities, Shows How Mass Conversions Have Alienated People From Their Past Traditions And Lived Beliefs. Challenging The Traditional Orthodoxies Which Promote Or Oppose Religious Conversions, The Author Sees No Religious Merit In Political Posturing Or Conversion For Socio-Economic Gain. Instead, To Defuse Tensions, He Advocates Rethinking Religious Conversion In India With A Determined Religious Disarmament, Discarding Aggression. Here Is A Provocative Writer Who, Remaining Anchored Firmly In His Faith, Challenges Us To Seek A Common Ground For Tolerance And Dialogue, Premised On A Constructive Interaction With Other Faith Traditions.
