Browsing by Subject "Hinduism"

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    In the Name of Krishna: The Cultural Landscape of a North Indian Pilgrimage Town
    (2012-04) Ray, Sugata
    An archaeology of social space, a sifting through the accumulated debris of modernity, provides me with a frame to make visible the everyday tactics of space-making through which a modern religion emerged in Vrindavan, the primary pilgrimage site in north India where the god Krishna is said to have spent his youth. Displacing post-Enlightenment dichotomies such as faith/ideology and secular/religious, I show how spatio-visual practices were central in the making of subjectivities in 19th and 20th-century India. In my narrative, the space of religion - both real and metaphoric - becomes a key liminal socio-political arena where religious and visual practices coincide in resisting the epistemological duality of (western) modernity and (nationalist) tradition. By reading together purportedly discrete practices such as temple building and anti-colonial political movements, cartography and theological texts, photography and road-making projects, "In The Name of Krishna" offers an understanding of modern religiosity and its spatial strategies. In its localized forms, the new strategies of space-making articulated in this small north Indian pilgrimage town made possible subjectivities, desires, and imperatives that went beyond the tyranny of modernity and its claim to the universal. My dissertation, then, is an attempt to rethink the terrains of these localized practices - insidious, minute, and fragmentary.
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    Secularizing Caste: Mapping Nineteenth-Century Anti-caste Politics in Western India
    (2021-08) Jaywant, Ketaki
    This dissertation argues that the caste question was first framed as a primarily political phenomenon by the nineteenth-century 'lower-caste' writers in western India. Elite 'upper-caste' reformers in early nineteenth-century Bombay, had secularized caste by untangling it from its divine moorings and grounding it exclusively in social and political processes. By drawing on rare nineteenth-century Marathi-language treatises, journals, newspapers, and books housed in archives in western India and London, I show that 'lower-caste' activists not only secularized caste, but went further to argue that it was an exploitative power relation. They explained how the dominant Brahmanical ideology had historically marginalized 'lower-castes' and the ‘untouchables’ communities by mobilizing objective historical information, analyzing Sanskrit religious texts for internal contradictions, invoking ethics rooted in local heterodox religious traditions, and contextualizing universal principles of humanism and rights from the European enlightenment traditions. The dissertation shows how this new organic political vocabulary was used to acerbically criticize not only orthodox opinions in support of caste, but also 'upper-caste' liberals who viewed caste only as an impediment to fully embracing a modern This ethical political discourse, produced from the margins, continues to shape the contours of Indian democracy in the present.