Preface

“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.

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 India’s 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 India’s 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 India’s 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 India’s 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 India’s 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 Chapter 1 is devoted to summarizing some of the ways “India” and especially its religion have been perceived.

The religious landscape of “India” has taught me a great deal; not least of all, it has kept me humble insofar as I am constantly learning new things about it. It has forced me often to become self-conscious of my presup­positions and to regularly rethink my self-definitions. I shall feel rewarded if a single reader of this book is similarly invited on a voyage of discovery, not only of “India” but also of the self.

There are many people and agencies that have had a part in the prepa­ration of this volume. The American Institute of Indian Studies and the Fulbright-Hays program have both provided grants (four times each) over the years that have enabled me to do research and consult with colleagues and numerous informants in India. Undergraduates at Boston University and, for the last thirty years, at the University of Pittsburgh, have taught me something about teaching. More specifically, I have received feedback on this volume from undergraduates on my courses on India over the last three

Preface xi years and active assistance from graduate students, especially from Jeff Brackett, who helped in the development of the text and with the glossary, and Rob Phillips who provided feedback on the text, helped with the glos­sary, and provided several of the photographs. Colleagues at the University of Hyderabad served as ad hoc consultants for different portions of the volume, especially historians Aloka Parasher Sen and R. L. Hangloo, and members of the Folk Studies Center, especially M. K. Murty, P.

Certain of the maps and poetic excerpts have been reprinted in this volume with the express permission of publishers in whose books they previously appeared. I am pleased to acknowledge these permissions here:

The “Hymn to Purusa” and an excerpt from the Milindapanha are reprinted from Sources of 'Indian Tradition, Vol. I, edited by Ainslee T. Embree with the permission of Columbia University Press.

Excerpts from the Chandogya Upanisad VI and the Mundaka Upanisad III are reprinted from Upanisads translated by Patrick Olivelle (Oxford World’s Classics, 1998) by permission of Oxford University Press.

Poems by Nammalvar and by Manikkavacakar are reprinted from Hymns for the Drowning: Poems for Visnu by Nammalvar, translated by A. K. Ramanujan, courtesy of the publishers, Penguin Books India Private Ltd.

Poems of Kabir and Smdas are reprinted from Songs of the Saints of India, edited by John Stratton Hawley, translated by John Stratton Hawley and M. Juergensmeyer, copyright 1988 by Oxford University Press and used by permission of Oxford University Press.

Four maps - those of Asoka’s empire; the Gupta empire; India at the close of the ninth century; and the Mughal empire at the Death of Akbar are reprinted from A Cultural History of India, edited by A. L. Basham (London: Clarendon Press, 1975) with the permission of Oxford University Press.

The map “European Bases in India” is reprinted from “Lectures in Indian Civilization” edited byJoseph Elder (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Co., 1970) with the permission ofJoseph Elder.