Download or read book Caste and Conversion Movements in India written by Walter Fernandes and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 in India written by Rowena Robinson and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume covers conversion in India to Islam, Christianity, Jainism, Buddhism, and Sikhism. It looks at the influences on conversion in a comparative perspective. The book seeks to look at the pre-British, British and post-Independence periods.
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 Religious Conversion Movements in South Asia written by Geoffrey Oddie and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-31 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text examines examples of religious conversion throughout South Asia including: Processes of Conversion of Christianity in 19th Century NW India Islamic Conversion in South India Kartabhaja Converts to Evangelical Christianity in Bengal Central Kerala Dalit Conversion French Mission and Mass Movements Conversion and Non-Conversion Experiences; and more. This book is a significant addition to the growing tradition of scholarship on religious conversion and a valuable resource for scholars and students who are interested in religious, social, and cultural developments of South Asia.
Download or read book Caste Class and Catholicism in India 1789 1914 written by Kenneth Ballhatchet and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-16 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a study of the ways in which changing social expectations among Indian Catholics confronted the Roman Church with new questions, as well as giving fresh urgency to the old problem of the persistence of caste among Christians. Low-caste restiveness prompted different reactions among European missionaries and high-caste Indian priests, and the socio-economic significance of religious conversion became a problem that reached the level of the Apostolic Delegate, and eventually of the Pope. The English brought their social attitudes to India, where they became racial attitudes while retaining their triple functions of supporting authority structures, protecting vested interests and providing psychological reinforcement, Roman Catholic missionaries came from different European countries and brought with them different national attitudes to social mores. A major question asked in this book is how far such national differences were reflected in attitudes to caste, class and sexual behaviour, how similar were the attitudes of Indian Christians, and how far the functions of such attitudes remained constant.
Download or read book Converting Women written by Eliza F. Kent and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-04-01 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the emergence of Hindu nationalism, the conversion of Indians to Christianity has become a volatile issue, erupting in violence against converts and missionaries. At the height of British colonialism, however, conversion was a path to upward mobility for low-castes and untouchables, especially in the Tamil-speaking south of India. In this book, Eliza F. Kent takes a fresh look at these conversions, focusing especially on the experience of women converts and the ways in which conversion transformed gender roles and expectations. Kent argues that the creation of a new, "respectable" community identity was central to the conversion process for the agricultural laborers and artisans who embraced Protestant Christianity under British rule. At the same time, she shows, this new identity was informed as much by elite Sanskritic customs and ideologies as by Western Christian discourse. Stigmatized by the dominant castes for their ritually polluting occupations and relaxed rules governing kinship and marriage, low-caste converts sought to validate their new higher-status identity in part by the reform of gender relations. These reforms affected ideals of femininity and masculinity in the areas of marriage, domesticity, and dress. By the creation of a "discourse of respectability," says Kent, Tamil Christians hoped to counter the cultural justifications for their social, economic, and sexual exploitation at the hands of high-caste landowners and village elites. Kent's focus on the interactions between Western women missionaries and the Indian Christian women not only adds depth to our understanding of colonial and patriarchal power dynamics, but to the intricacies of conversion itself. Posing an important challenge to normative notions of conversion as a privatized, individual moment in time, Kent's study takes into consideration the ways that public behavior, social status, and the transformation of everyday life inform religious conversion.
Download or read book Caste Gender and Christianity in Colonial India written by J. Taneti and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-12-18 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning in the nineteenth century, native women preachers served and led nascent Protestant churches in much of Southern India, evolving their own mission theology and practices. This volume examines the impact of Telugu socio-political dynamics, such as caste, gender, and empire, on the theology and practices of the Telugu Biblewomen.
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 Converts in India written by Uttara Shastree and published by Mittal Publications. This book was released on 1996 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Pariah Problem written by Rupa Viswanath and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-08 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once known as "Pariahs," Dalits are primarily descendants of unfree agrarian laborers. They belong to India's most subordinated castes, face overwhelming poverty and discrimination, and provoke public anxiety. Drawing on a wealth of previously untapped sources, this book follows the conception and evolution of the "Pariah Problem" in public consciousness in the 1890s. It shows how high-caste landlords, state officials, and well-intentioned missionaries conceived of Dalit oppression, and effectively foreclosed the emergence of substantive solutions to the "Problem"—with consequences that continue to be felt today. Rupa Viswanath begins with a description of the everyday lives of Dalit laborers in the 1890s and highlights the systematic efforts made by the state and Indian elites to protect Indian slavery from public scrutiny. Protestant missionaries were the first non-Dalits to draw attention to their plight. The missionaries' vision of the Pariahs' suffering as being a result of Hindu religious prejudice, however, obscured the fact that the entire agrarian political–economic system depended on unfree Pariah labor. Both the Indian public and colonial officials came to share a view compatible with missionary explanations, which meant all subsequent welfare efforts directed at Dalits focused on religious and social transformation rather than on structural reform. Methodologically, theoretically, and empirically, this book breaks new ground to demonstrate how events in the early decades of state-sponsored welfare directed at Dalits laid the groundwork for the present day, where the postcolonial state and well-meaning social and religious reformers continue to downplay Dalits' landlessness, violent suppression, and political subordination.
Download or read book Religious Conversions in India written by Brojendra Nath Banerjee and published by . This book was released on 1982 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Religious Transformation in South Asia written by Christopher Harding and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2008-09-18 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last decades of the nineteenth century, urgent and unprecedented demands among oppressed peoples in colonial India drove what came to be called 'mass conversion movements' towards a range of Christian denominations, launching a revolution in South Asia's two thousand-year Christian history. For all the scale, drama, and lasting controversy of a movement that approached half a million members in Punjab alone by the end of the 1930s, much actually depended upon a varied range of tempestuous local relationships between converts and mission personnel, based upon uncertain and constantly evolving terms. Making extensive use of Protestant Evangelical and newly-uncovered Catholic mission sources, Religious Transformation in South Asia explores those relationships to reveal what lay behind the great diversity of social and religious aspirations of converts and mission personnel. In this highly accessible study, Christopher Harding overturns the one-dimensional Christian missions of popular imagination by analysing the way that social class, theological training, culture, motivation, and personality produced an extraordinary range of presentations of 'Christianity' in late colonial Punjab. Punjabi converts themselves were animated by a similarly broad spectrum of expectations and pressures, communicated through informal social networks and representing a brand of subaltern consciousness and resistance rarely considered by mainstream Indian historiography. These internal dynamics produced a first generation of rural Punjabi Christianity that was locally variable, highly fluid, and conflict-ridden-testament to the ways in which the meanings of conversion were contested by all sides in an encounter with far-reaching implications for the future of Christianity and religious identity in India and Pakistan.
Download or read book Christians of Scheduled Caste Origin written by Jose Kananaikil and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This monograph examines one peculiar form of such contradictions in our country, namely, the discrimination against the Scheduled Castes.".
Download or read book The Saint in the Banyan Tree written by David Mosse and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2012-10 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This is a powerful and exciting work. Mosse has produced a work of scholarship that is lively and readable without any loss of subtlety and sophistication. It is a ground-breaking study, of critical importance to the ways we understand religious nationalism and the anthropology of postcolonial experience.”—Susan Bayly, author of Asian Voices in a Postcolonial Age
Download or read book Religion in South Asia written by G. A. Oddie and published by . This book was released on 1977 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Social Setting of Christian Conversion in South India written by Sundararaj Manickam and published by Rudolf Steiner Press. This book was released on 1977 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
