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This paper focuses on the discourse on Muslim women's rights in India, aiming to trace how policies concerning Muslim women affect their constitutional rights to equality and non-discrimination. In doing so, this paper explores a colonial continuity of policies in the post-independence era and the subsequent governments. The purpose of this paper is to provide an extensive and nuanced discussion on Muslim women's rights in light of their historical evolution, the existence of personal laws, and the ongoing debates on a Uniform Civil Code. This article concludes that Muslim women continue to struggle for their rights to equal citizenship at the intersection of gender, religion, colonialism, and secularism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines how Hindu nationalist social service organizations, specifically the Deseeya Seva Bharathi (DSB), reconfigured the religious conception of 'Seva' to advance the project of constructing a Hindu social identity during the COVID-19 pandemic in the state of Kerala. The southern Indian state of Kerala has remained an exception in the story of the rise of the Hindu nationalist movement in contemporary India, which has repeatedly failed to make any considerable political inroads in the state. However, the disastrous economic consequences and livelihood challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic in the state, which was heavily dependent on foreign remittance and service industries, have opened up new spaces of engagement for Hindu nationalists. Drawing on the fieldwork conducted in central Kerala during the pandemic, this paper will elaborate on how the DSB used the crisis moment of the pandemic to reach out to economically and socially disadvantaged communities using the language of 'Seva' to build a Hindu social identity, which imbues the influence of majoritarian Hindu nationalist politics. The paper argues that the DSB's articulation of 'Seva' as a distinct and superior form of social service that is 'self-less', 'non-instrumental' and 'non-reciprocal' is significant in understanding the growing appeal of Hindu nationalist social service in the contested political sphere of Kerala, which is marked by competing social provisions by the state as well as other secular and religious groups. The paper notes that the reconfiguration of 'Seva' as a continuous religious concept enables Hindu nationalists to attain greater acceptance and legitimacy that even the secular state welfare could not achieve, while also concealing the inherent instrumental nature of its social service towards the construction of a Hindu social identity in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I explore how India's complex regime of control and management of religious institutions and communities—ironically, particularly Hindu institutions—influences the capacity of these institutions to promote various dimensions of human flourishing and socio-economic uplift among the most marginalized. In addition, I provide an overview of India's highly varied landscape when it comes to the freedom of religious institutions from state control, and in particular discuss how some minority religious institutions experience fewer government constraints on some aspects of their freedom to self-identify and self-govern, especially when compared to some majority institutions, such as Hindu temples. Although some minority institutions still face constraints on certain aspects of their operations, the freedom they have to manage their internal affairs can, at times, translate into greater agility and the ability to innovate and flourish in the context of 21st-century India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article links the feminist debate on women's land rights in India to the current academic debate on critical human-nature relationships in the Anthropocene by studying how married Hindu women weigh the pros and cons of claiming land in their natal family and how they practice their lived relatedness to land in rural Udaipur (Rajasthan, North India). The article disentangles the complex issue of why women do not respond eagerly to Indian state policies that for a long time have promoted gender equality in the domain of land rights. In reaction to the dominant feminist debate on land rights, the authors introduce religion and more-than-human sociality as analytical foci in the examination of women's responsiveness to land legislation. Their ethnographic study is based on fieldwork with married women in landowning families in four villages in Udaipur's countryside. The authors argue that women have well-considered reasons not to claim natal land, and that their intimate relatedness to land as a sentient being, a nonhuman companion, and a powerful goddess explains the women's reluctance to treat land as an inanimate commodity or property. Looking at religion brings to the fore women's core business of making land fruitful and powerful, independent of any legislation. The authors maintain that a decolonized perspective on women's land relatedness that takes religion and women's multispecies perspective seriously may also offer a breakthrough in understanding why some women do not claim land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many people report occasional feelings of anger toward God. However, most evidence pertains to western, predominantly Christian populations. In this study, Indian university students (N = 139; 78% Hindu) completed a survey about anger toward God(s). Polytheists (45%) chose one god to focus on. Measurement invariance tests supported comparisons of anger toward God between the predominantly Hindu Indian sample and three mostly Christian U.S. undergraduate samples (Ns = 1040, 1811, 918). Indian participants reported more current and situation-specific anger toward God than U.S. participants, but less anger toward God over their lifetimes. In the Indian sample, anger toward God correlated positively with other indicators of religious/spiritual struggle, seeing God as cruel and distant, and seeing anger toward God as morally acceptable. Regarding an event involving suffering, anger toward God related positively to the event's harmfulness, seeing God as responsible, seeing God's actions as negative, and responses involving substance use and protest toward God. Generally, these findings replicated those from prior U.S. samples. Polytheists who preferred some gods over others or chose to follow a different god reported greater anger toward gods. Results uphold the comparability of anger toward God(s) between Indian and U.S. undergraduates while beginning to reveal key differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sacred groves are an age-old and world-wide phenomenon, traditionally consisting of forest zones, protected by people based on their spiritual relationship with the deities or ancestral spirits believed to reside there. India alone counts nearly 50,000 sacred groves, with 2000 in Kerala where they are known as kaavu. Presently, the sacred groves are under serious threat with numbers of groves reducing drastically. In this article, the authors challenge one of the dominant theories that sacred groves, while previously protected by religion, now disappear due to the loss of traditional beliefs. Starting from the observation that the destruction of sacred groves has less to do with a loss of faith but more with a change of faith, the article focuses on the ambivalent role of religion and the impact the commercial offer of some specific Hindu rituals has on the declining number of sacred groves. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among grove-owners in Kerala, the authors argue that it may be true that religious perceptions maintained the sacred groves for centuries, but that the same religious tradition now provides both justifications and marketable rituals for cutting them down. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]