Clothey - Religion in India: a historical introduction

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First published in the USA and Canada 2006
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2006 Fred W. Clothey

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Clothey, Fred W.
Religion in India : an historical introduction / Fred Clothey.
p. cm.
ISBN-13:9780415940238 (hardback : alk. paper)
ISBN-10:0415940230 (hardback : alk. paper)
ISBN-13:9780415940245 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10:0415940249 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. India--Religion. I. Title.
BL2001.3.C56 2006
200.954dc22
2006017656

ISBN13: 978-1-135-94837-5 ePub ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-94023-0 (hbk)

ISBN10: 0-415-94024-9 (pbk)

ISBN10: 0-203-96783-6 (ebk)

ISBN13: 978-0-415-94023-8 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-415-94024-5 (pbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-203-96783-6 (ebk)

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Nowhere is this old adage more appropriate than in the development of this volume. The study of religion in India has become the work of a vast array of specialists who have carved the subcontinent into sub-regions or eras. Theories have come and gone as to how Indian religion should be studied. Indeed, to attempt to put into a single brief volume a history of Indian religion that will be accessible to the beginning student has proven to be an enterprise that cannot possibly do justice to the complex developments in South Asia or to the scholars who study them.

Nonetheless, this book has emerged out of years of teaching and listening listening, on the one hand, to the concerns of undergraduates beginning the process of understanding Indian religions, but also, on the other hand, listening to scholars, Indian savants, and hundreds of regular folks in the villages and cities of the Indian subcontinent. My intention in these pages is to provide a skeletal panorama of the development of Indias rich religious heritage, starting from its prehistory and working into the present.

Certain themes and concerns that have engaged me for some years spiral their way through these pages. I have become convinced, for example, that one of the most fundamental ways religious persons in India have expressed their identities, passed on their traditions, and made manifest their religious orientations is through their ritual life. So, time and again, the reader will find reference to religion that is enacted and embodied, perhaps more than to the religion expressed in conceptual terms. Another concern has been to reflect the transnational character of Indias religious landscape to suggest how the subcontinent has been informed by currents, both indigenous and external, and, how in turn, the subcontinent has impacted the rest of the globe.

Yet another concern has been to depict something of the enormous diversity and plurality in Indias religious experience, and especially how religious minorities have been transplanted to and grow in India, as well as spawned therein. The interactions between these communities teach us much about the way people do or can interact with those with alternative commitments. I have also tried on occasion to weave in the voices of those often overlooked in discussions of Indian religion for I am persuaded that those who have perpetuated classical forms of religion in India have been enriched in their interactions with and indebted to groups sometimes thought to have been marginal that is, to folk and subaltern peoples.

These are heady ambitions indeed. Hence, the reader should beware, that, in a book of this size, not all aspects of Indias rich religious landscape will be explored in depth, nor will all these very concerns be evident on every page. The task becomes even more daunting when one believes, as I do, that religion is best understood when seen in the social, cultural, and political contexts in which it occurs. Nonetheless, I have attempted in this volume to couch the history of Indias religious expressions in the settings in which they plausibly originate or develop. This is a hazardous undertaking for a variety of reasons: just one of them is that the texts on which historians of Indian religion often rely are difficult to date, are almost always the product of an elite literate minority of the population, and are often the end result of a process which has included oral discourses, performances of various kinds, and political agendas. Nor are texts necessarily explicit as to the contexts, sources, or reasons why a certain expression occurs. As a result, I have tried to be sensitive to non-textual sources; indeed, on occasion I have made (hopefully cautious) inferences about these contexts as reflected in certain texts themselves. No doubt specialists will be uncomfortable with some of these suggestions; yet I hope the reader will, nonetheless, appreciate the dialectic between religion and the broad sweep of history in the Indian subcontinent.

Perhaps a word is appropriate as to how the term India is used in this volume. India is used in its broadest sense, much as it was used prior to the coming of independence in 1947, to refer to the South Asian subcontinent as a whole. While the term refers to a geographic setting, it also evokes many perceptions and images, so much so that is devoted to summarizing some of the ways India and especially its religion have been perceived.