Religious Freedom and Mass Conversion in India
Religious Freedom and Mass Conversion in India

Author: Laura Dudley Jenkins

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2019-05-31

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0812250923

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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.

Religious Freedom in India
Religious Freedom in India

Author: Goldie Osuri

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-09-10

Total Pages: 218

ISBN-13: 1136302026

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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.

Christianity in India
Christianity in India

Author: Rebecca Samuel Shah

Publisher: Fortress Press

Published: 2018-11-08

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 1506447929

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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.

Religious Conversion
Religious Conversion

Author: Sarah Claerhout

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-05-06

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 1000571130

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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.

Pentecostalism and Politics of Conversion in India
Pentecostalism and Politics of Conversion in India

Author: Sarbeswar Sahoo

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-05-03

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1108553559

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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.

The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion
The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion

Author: Lewis R. Rambo

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2014-03-06

Total Pages: 829

ISBN-13: 0199713545

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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.

Anti-Christian Violence in India
Anti-Christian Violence in India

Author: Chad M. Bauman

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2020-09-15

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 1501751433

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Does religion cause violent conflict, asks Chad M. Bauman, and if so, does it cause conflict more than other social identities? Through an extended history of Christian-Hindu relations, with particular attention to the 2007–2008 riots in Kandhamal, Odisha, Anti-Christian Violence in India examines religious violence and how it pertains to broader aspects of humanity. Is "religious" conflict sui generis, or is it merely one species of intergroup conflict? Why and how might violence become an attractive option for religious actors? What explains the increase in religious violence over the last twenty to thirty years? Integrating theories of anti-Christian violence focused on politics, economics, and proselytization, Anti-Christian Violence in India additionally weaves in recent theory about globalization and, in particular, the forms of resistance against Western secular modernity that globalization periodically helps to provoke. With such theories in mind, Bauman explores the nature of anti-Christian violence in India, contending that resistance to secular modernities is, in fact, an important but often overlooked reason behind Hindu attacks on Christians. Intensifying the widespread Hindu tendency to think of religion in ethnic rather than universal terms, the ideology of Hindutva, or "Hinduness," explicitly rejects both the secular privatization of religion and the separability of religions from the communities that incubate them. And so, with provocative and original analysis, Bauman questions whether anti-Christian violence in contemporary India is really about religion, in the narrowest sense, or rather a manifestation of broader concerns among some Hindus about the Western sociopolitical order with which they associate global Christianity.

Religious Freedom in the Global South
Religious Freedom in the Global South

Author: Waheeda Amien

Publisher:

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 9783036525099

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The aim of this book is to create a space for contributions on religious freedom in the Global South. The contributions speak to diverse themes underscoring religious freedom in the Global South including the impact of religious freedom on majority and minority religious communities, the relationship between religious freedom and the state, and the relationship between religious freedom and other fundamental human rights. Through the adoption of inter- and multidisciplinary approaches, and with reference to various religions such as Islam, Hinduism, Sufism, Sikhism, and Christianity, contributors address the themes across several regions in the world including Africa, South Asia, South-East Asia, South America, and Eastern Europe. Depending on the social, legal, and political context and by relying on diverse examples such as the Muslim call to prayer (adhan), domestic violence, animal sacrifice, religious conversions, abortion, the rights of LGBT persons, and religious education in the public sphere, the contributions illustrate how religious freedom can undermine or promote the rights of majority or minority religious communities, and how it can impact on the rights of marginalised members within minority religious communities.

Godroads
Godroads

Author: Peter Berger

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-10-29

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 1108490506

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Investigates processes of conversion in India from a comparative, multi-disciplinary and theoretical perspective, between, within and across religious traditions.