Conversion and Social Equality in India PDF Download

Author: Dick Kooiman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Kerala (India)
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
"Analyses the confrontation between Evangelical missionaries from Victorian England and low caste communities in the Hindu social order, in the social setting of Travancore, an Indian native state tucked away in the South-west corner of the Indian peninsula. However, the problems like social stratifcation and cultural change dealt with by the author in the book concern a much wider field than Travancore or India along."--Dust jacket flap

Author: Rupa Viswanath
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231537506
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Once known as "Pariahs," Dalits are primarily descendants of unfree agrarian laborers. They belong to India's most subordinated castes, face overwhelming poverty and discrimination, and provoke public anxiety. Drawing on a wealth of previously untapped sources, this book follows the conception and evolution of the "Pariah Problem" in public consciousness in the 1890s. It shows how high-caste landlords, state officials, and well-intentioned missionaries conceived of Dalit oppression, and effectively foreclosed the emergence of substantive solutions to the "Problem"—with consequences that continue to be felt today. Rupa Viswanath begins with a description of the everyday lives of Dalit laborers in the 1890s and highlights the systematic efforts made by the state and Indian elites to protect Indian slavery from public scrutiny. Protestant missionaries were the first non-Dalits to draw attention to their plight. The missionaries' vision of the Pariahs' suffering as being a result of Hindu religious prejudice, however, obscured the fact that the entire agrarian political–economic system depended on unfree Pariah labor. Both the Indian public and colonial officials came to share a view compatible with missionary explanations, which meant all subsequent welfare efforts directed at Dalits focused on religious and social transformation rather than on structural reform. Methodologically, theoretically, and empirically, this book breaks new ground to demonstrate how events in the early decades of state-sponsored welfare directed at Dalits laid the groundwork for the present day, where the postcolonial state and well-meaning social and religious reformers continue to downplay Dalits' landlessness, violent suppression, and political subordination.

Author: Sarbeswar Sahoo
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108553559
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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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.

Author: Geoffrey A. Oddie
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780700704729
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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These papers address the issues of religious conversion and religious conversion movements - a topic which has rapidly become the central issue of many scholarly debates. Many religions are discussed along with other relevent issues

Author: Pt Satish K. Sharma
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781838266219
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Almost everyone on the planet has heard of the "Ancient Hindu Caste" system and somehow, almost everyone knows how horrible it is, but what if it wasn't ancient and it wasn't Hindu? Almost everyone on the planet knows that the colonialist erasure of indigenous languages and ideas was a horrific chapter in human history, but what if it's not over, what if it's morphed in to a new form, just as devastating and destructive, and what if the Caste issue holds the key to revealing it? Every Hindu walks through life carrying a subliminal guilt that his or her ancestors were "caste discriminators" and every devout Christian walks tall and proud in the knowledge that his or her ancestors helped to free the crushed, downtrodden from the depraved Hindoo caste system, and being an accepted "truth" no-one questions it any more. What if they are both victims of the same deception, of the same multigenerational fraud? In 2016, the British Hindu community was rocked when it became the target of demonisation and dehumanisation by anti-Hindu Anglican Evangelists. Allegations were made that caste discrimination was not a relic of history but was present and not only present but rife amongst the British Indian community. The difficulty was that there was no experience of it at the grass roots level, and there was no evidence of it being either systemic nor endemic, so what was afoot? The author Pt Satish K Sharma, a Dharmic Scholar and Theologian and a long serving community worker under took the task of determining, once and for all, the real history of Caste and of establishing and quantifying its presence or absence in the Britain of the 21st Century. There were mountains of academic accounts of the theory, allegations and anecdotes abounded and yet the reality at ground level was remarkably different. The revelations contained in this work were the revelations which incinerated the false claims which had been levelled, revealed the hidden hand behind the anti-Hindu media campaign but also provided the context and framework with which this long running civilisational wound could heal. The contents of this book include actual communications which took place, the information which was presented to Parliamentarians. Legislators and Community leaders as well as eye witness accounts of meetings and "consultations", as well as the authors research, research which led eventually to the senior leaders of the Church of England requesting that Parliament review the whole issue once more. We have the strange situation that Parliament passed legislation without adequate consultation and the Government chose not to enact the legislation, a phenomenon never before arisen in British History, this book provides the answers as to why. The Caste issue remains a colonialist force for harm, and the tropes which underly it cause suffering to the Hindu community in every corner of the world even today, as Isabel Wilkersons recent tragically uninfomed book prove. This book will go a long way to to reversing this harm and should be compulsory reading for every Hindu, Christian and activist working to reverse the civilisational trauma of European Colonialism "I find it extraordinary that there are issues here of which until now I have had absolutely no knowledge. My feeling is that the majority of native Britons will share this reaction. The Church, Christianity, which had perverted the simple message of its founder, believed it could justify imposing its version on a "primitive" people with a concept of original sin and the claim that it alone possessed the means to personal salvation. Between them, they were able to devise an extraordinarily successful divide-and-rule format which did immense damage to that country... Please forgive us now, so that we can move forward together." M Purton BBC Producer (Retd)

Author: Laura Dudley Jenkins
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812250923
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
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.

Author: Eliza F. Kent
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190290048
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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With the emergence of Hindu nationalism, the conversion of Indians to Christianity has become a volatile issue, erupting in violence against converts and missionaries. At the height of British colonialism, however, conversion was a path to upward mobility for low-castes and untouchables, especially in the Tamil-speaking south of India. In this book, Eliza F. Kent takes a fresh look at these conversions, focusing especially on the experience of women converts and the ways in which conversion transformed gender roles and expectations. Kent argues that the creation of a new, "respectable" community identity was central to the conversion process for the agricultural laborers and artisans who embraced Protestant Christianity under British rule. At the same time, she shows, this new identity was informed as much by elite Sanskritic customs and ideologies as by Western Christian discourse. Stigmatized by the dominant castes for their ritually polluting occupations and relaxed rules governing kinship and marriage, low-caste converts sought to validate their new higher-status identity in part by the reform of gender relations. These reforms affected ideals of femininity and masculinity in the areas of marriage, domesticity, and dress. By the creation of a "discourse of respectability," says Kent, Tamil Christians hoped to counter the cultural justifications for their social, economic, and sexual exploitation at the hands of high-caste landowners and village elites. Kent's focus on the interactions between Western women missionaries and the Indian Christian women not only adds depth to our understanding of colonial and patriarchal power dynamics, but to the intricacies of conversion itself. Posing an important challenge to normative notions of conversion as a privatized, individual moment in time, Kent's study takes into consideration the ways that public behavior, social status, and the transformation of everyday life inform religious conversion.

Author: Dr. Chittaranjan Mallik
Publisher: REDSHINE Publication
ISBN: 9358793090
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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The idea of writing this book has been germinating in my mind for long time but due to certain unavoidable reason could not get it finished. Really, it is very tough task to put together Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar’s ideas and thoughts on entirety in a single book, yet this book is an attempt to provide a coherent account on his socio-political struggles to establish an egalitarian transformative society with the ideas of liberty, equality, fraternity and social justice through the Constitutional means with all odds of caste indignities; and challenged the age-old social structure intellectually rooting on the ground and rendered unwavering contributions in making modern India.

Author: Panthapalli A. Augustine
Publisher: Concept Publishing Company
ISBN: 9788170223030
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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This Book Attempts To Lay Bare The Deep Roots Of Social Inequality In Indian Society. It Focuses On Three Most Disadvantaged Groups Of People, Namely, The Sudras, Women And The Untouchables. A Clear Understanding Of These Roots Has Been Thought Indispensable For Seeing The Problem Of Inequality In Perspective.

Author: Geoffrey Oddie
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136795057
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
This text examines examples of religious conversion throughout South Asia including: Processes of Conversion of Christianity in 19th Century NW India Islamic Conversion in South India Kartabhaja Converts to Evangelical Christianity in Bengal Central Kerala Dalit Conversion French Mission and Mass Movements Conversion and Non-Conversion Experiences; and more. This book is a significant addition to the growing tradition of scholarship on religious conversion and a valuable resource for scholars and students who are interested in religious, social, and cultural developments of South Asia.