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This Book Focuses On How The Notion Of Being `High Caste`, As It Developed And Transformed During The Colonial Period, Contributed, To The Formation Of A `Middle Class` Among The Hindus And The Sikhs.
These essays explore the processes by which gender identities are formalized and ritualized through language, ritual performance, narrative, and politics. They show how gender identities in India have been invented and valued in different historical, religious, and social contexts.
Drawing on insights from theoretical engagements with borders and subalternity, Beyond Religion in India and Pakistan suggests new frameworks for understanding religious boundaries in South Asia. It looks at the ways in which social categories and structures constitute the bordering logics inherent within enactments of these boundaries, and positions hegemony and resistance through popular religion as an important indication of wider developments of political and social change. The book also shows how borders are continually being maintained through violence at national, community and individual levels. By exploring selected sites and expressions of piety including shrines, texts, practices and movements, Virinder S. Kalra and Navtej K. Purewal argue that the popular religion of Punjab should neither be limited to a polarised picture between formal, institutional religion, nor the 'enchanted universe' of rituals, saints, shrines and village deities. Instead, the book presents a picture of 'religion' as a realm of movement, mobilization, resistance and power in which gender and caste are connate of what comes to be known as 'religious'. Through extensive ethnographic research, the authors explore the reality of the complex, dynamic and contested relations that characterize everyday material and religious lives on the ground. Ultimately, the book highlights how popular religion challenges the borders and boundaries of religious and communal categories, nationalism and theological frameworks while simultaneously reflecting gender/caste society.
Appropriating Gender explores the paradoxical relationship of women to religious politics in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. Contrary to the hopes of feminists, many women have responded to religious nationalist appeals; contrary to the hopes of religious nationalists, they have also asserted their gender, class, caste, and religious identities; contrary to the hopes of nation states, they have often challenged state policies and practices. Through a comparative South Asia perspective, Appropriating Gender explores the varied meanings and expressions of gender identity through time, by location, and according to political context. The first work to focus on women's agency and activism within the South Asian context, Appropriating Gender is an outstanding contribution to the field of gender studies.
The middle decades of the nineteenth century in Punjab were a time of the disintegrating Sikh empire and an emerging colonial one. Situating her study in this turbulent time, Anshu Malhotra delves into the tumultuous life of a hitherto unknown woman, Piro, and her little-known sect, the Gulabdasis. Piro's forceful autobiographical narrative knits a fanciful tale of abduction and redemption, while also claiming agency over her life. Piro's is the extraordinary voice of a low-caste Muslim and a former prostitute, who reinvents her life as an acolyte in a heterodox sect. Malhotra argues for the relevance of such a voice for our cultural anchoring and empowering politics. Piro's remarkable poetry deploys bhakti imaginary in exceptional ways, demonstrating how it enriched the lives of women and low castes. Malhotra's work is also a pioneering study of the afterlife of Piro and the Gulabdasis, highlighting the cultural scripts that inform the stories that we tell and the templates that renew the tales we fabricate.
'Caste' is today almost universally perceived as an ancient and unchanging Hindu institution preserved solely by a deep-seated religious ideology. Yet the word itself is an importation from sixteenth-century Europe. This book tracks the long history of the practices amalgamated under this label and shows their connection to changing patterns of social and political power down to the present. It frames caste as an involuted and complex form of ethnicity and explains why it persisted under non-Hindu rulers and in non-Hindu communities across South Asia.
This volume challenges the assumption that Muslims in India constitute a homogeneous community. Focusing specifically on gender issues, the contributors instead locate the Muslim womens community within the social, economic, and political developments that have taken place in the subcontinent, pre- and post-Independence, in order to examine how the
Caste and gender are complex markers of difference that have traditionally been addressed in isolation from each other, with a presumptive maleness present in most studies of Dalits (“untouchables”) and a presumptive upper-casteness in many feminist studies. In this study of the representations of Dalits in the print culture of colonial north India, Charu Gupta enters new territory by looking at images of Dalit women as both victims and vamps, the construction of Dalit masculinities, religious conversion as an alternative to entrapment in the Hindu caste system, and the plight of indentured labor. The Gender of Caste uses print as a critical tool to examine the depictions of Dalits by colonizers, nationalists, reformers, and Dalits themselves and shows how differentials of gender were critical in structuring patterns of domination and subordination.
Religious identity constitutes a key element in the formation, development and sustenance of South Asian diasporic communities. Through studies of South Asian communities situated in multiple locales, this book explores the role of religious identity in the social and political organization of the diaspora. It accounts for the factors that underlie the modification of ritual practice in the process of resettlement, and considers how multicultural policies in the adopted state, trans-generational changes and the proliferation of transnational media has impacted the development of these identities in the diaspora. Also crucial is the gender dimension, in terms of how religion and caste affect women’s roles in the South Asian diaspora. What emerges then from the way separate communities in the diaspora negotiate religion are diverse patterns that are strategic and contingent. Yet, paradoxically, the dynamic and evolving relationship between religion and diaspora becomes necessary, even imperative, for sustaining a cohesive collective identity in these communities. This bookw as published as a special issue of South Asian Diaspora.