Dandekar Pilgrimage Authority and Subversion (1).pdf

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage, 2016

The temple of Jagannath became central to colonial politics as early as the first year of British rule in Puri. Throughout the 19th century, the temple was an essential concern for British administrators, both in the colony as well as in the metropolis. In this paper, I demonstrate how pilgrimage became a pivotal anchor surrounding which a convoluted narrative of colonial politics played out. I have looked closely at the concept of ‘itinerancy’ associated with pilgrimage, and have tried to explain how itinerancy in the early 19th century became a governmental hazard for the colonial overlords. The constant fear of a faceless and mobile crowd prompted the advent of newer governmental techniques, primary of which was the documentation of pilgrim identities. My central concern is with the various modalities through which the government sought to bring pilgrims and pilgrimage under surveillance. The paper interrogates how in early 19 th century Orissa, the innocuous act of pilgrimage wa...

2010

It may be argued that in times of conflict, monuments and other historical structures are destroyed or whole communities converted in one way or the other to conqueror’s religion. The destruction of Hindu temples and monuments by Muslim rulers and vice-versa was a historical reality in the medieval period. 1 Colonial hegemony gave the colonisers not only the power to set the pattern of Indian historiography but also to take up issues related to religion, 2 general progress and modernity to the ‘subject’ peoples. Not surprisingly then, there were formal links between Christianity and the British Raj. Missionaries too had easy access to the highest government offices in British India.When religious doctrines were considered as the essence of world religions, the concept of true religion began to appear in the scene. 6 Nevertheless, the ironies of colonialism were very much visible. 7

in *Languages of Religion: Exploring the Politics of the Sacred,* Sipra Mukherjee, Ed. (Routledge), 2018

This chapter studies the role that the written word and language played in the religious conversion to Christianity of the Satnampanthis amongst the Chamars, a Dalit caste of Chhattisgarh, India. This essay examines the power that the written word was believed to possess and how its enigmatic influence functioned. A sacred text being a mark of religious authenticity to both Christians and Satnamis, the fact that Satnamis had no text they could call their own was a source of some communal insecurity. The association of Christianity with books, and in particular with the Bible, proved its superiority to the faith of Satnamis with the written word functioning as a sign of epistemological authority. The chapter argues that the religious texts, therefore, were not merely lifeless pieces of paper here but sacred and potent religious objects that empowered communities. Keywords: Christianity, Satnampanthis, Chamars, Dalit, Chhattisgarh, Bible

Journal of Asian Studies, 2009

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage, 2019

Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 2013

Journal of Hindu-Christian Studies, 2021

The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 2021

This essay aims to understand the role of religion in the social work of Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922). By focusing on a twenty-five-year period commencing with her conversion to Christianity in 1883, we argue that religion constructed a political framework for her work in Sharada Sadan and Mukti Mission. There is a lacuna in the conventional scholarship that underplays the nuances of religion in Ramabai's reform efforts, which we try to fill by conceptualising faith and religiosity as two distinct signifiers of her private and public religious presentations respectively. Drawing on her published letters, the annual reports of the Ramabai Association in America, and a number of evangelical periodicals published during her lifetime, we analyse how she explored Christianity not just as a personal faith but also as a conduit for funds. The conversion enabled her access to American supporters, concomitantly consolidating their claim over her social work. Her peculiar religious identity-a conflation of Hinduism and Christianity-provoked strong protests from the Hindu orthodoxy while leading to a fallout with the evangelists at the same time. Ramabai shaped the public portrayal of her religiosity to maximise support from American patrons, the colonial state, and liberal Indians, resisting the orthodoxy's oppositions with these material exploits. Rather than surrendering to patriarchal cynicism, she capitalised on the socio-political volatilities of colonial India to further the nascent women's movement.

2009

subjects welcomed the new identities and new social networks proffered by voluntary religious associations. 39 Fourth, and finally: as the above discussion suggests, print culture redrew the line between "public" and "private" in colonial South Asia, often interlacing the two quite vertiginously. 40 Print artifacts founded their public on readerly solitude, although this solitude was often complicated by the common practice of reading newspapers aloud in places like teashops. They circulated anonymously and, in principle, infinitely to convene an eerily immaterial public, the only concrete manifestations of which were the metonymic pages of print artifacts themselves. 41 Print media were, moreover, of central importance to the closeted political project that, according to Partha Chatterjee, gave rise to anti-colonial nationalism. 42 The domain of "spiritual" sovereignty demarcated and defended by elites in Bengal relied heavily on the literary