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Truth of Texts and Teaching (TTT) is a measure of fundamentalism that correlates negatively with religious openness in the West, but positively in India and other non- Western cultural contexts. This contrast might mean that fundamentalism differs across ideological surrounds or that TTT merely lacks validity as a measure fundamentalism outside the West. In this study, 377 Hindu university students in India responded to TTT along with Religious Fundamentalism and Intratextual Fundamentalism scales. All three fundamentalism measures correlated positively with each other and predicted higher religious openness as recorded by the Religious Schema Scales of Xenosophia (XEN) and Fairness, Tolerance, and Rationality (FTR). Fundamentalism measures also correlated positively with Hindu religious commitments, which in turn predicted higher XEN and FTR scores as well. These data confirmed TTT as a valid index of fundamentalism outside the West and supported the conclusion that conservative religious commitments have implications that differ across ideological surrounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at the rise of Hindu nationalism in contemporary India, with a special focus on the eastern city of Kolkata. It argues that while the rise of Hindu nationalism has been a burning problem in recent years, it should be noted that the problem does not exist uniformly throughout the country. The levels of violence in relation to Hindu nationalism differ from place to place. Careful attention needs to be paid to this variation which exists within Hindu nationalism, and also to the variation which exists within the levels of violence associated with it. In other words, while events that took place in Gujarat in 2002 may say something about the situation in western India, they do not necessarily reflect the situation in other parts of India, especially the east of the country. With India being a vast country and each part of the country being grounded in a specific context, keeping this variation in mind is extremely important. The data supporting this argument were collected earlier this year from the state of West Bengal. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The city has been largely ignored in postcolonial studies because it is hard to fit into the classic discourse of decolonizing rhetoric. But the critical feature of postcolonial cities is that they are the first stage, and the microcosm, of the mobility and cultural intermixing that colonialism sets in motion. No city embodies this function better than Bombay/Mumbai. Bombay is the sine qua non of the postcolonial city because in every respect it encapsulates the processes of postcolonial movement and settlement that come to extend globally. An invention of colonialism, no city has been a greater focus of literary writing than Bombay, which demonstrates the mobility and cosmopolitanism of the postcolonial city, and the fluidity, class disparity and ambivalent sense of home that has come to characterize diasporic populations. This essay examines the extent to which Bombay literature, despite the devastating pressures of state control, corruption and fundamentalist violence, expresses a utopian view of the social, religious and cultural openness of this radical conglomeration of peoples, ethnicities, cultures, classes and religions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyses the history of Hindu fundamentalism up to the present time, as it developed since India's independence. In the course of its rise, Hindutva destroyed the Gandhian symbolism of non-violence, reinterpreted cultural symbols to become political signs and prepared the ground for communal violence. Secularists and the religious out-group, Muslims, became targeted as enemies. During the resulting Hindu ethnic dominance, religion was converted from a faith into an ideology. The sequence of events in the development of this movement repeats the common scheme of a religious fundamentalist movement that serves the nationalist goals of political leaders. It is argued that such groups cannot reasonably be conceptualized in terms of an individual psychology or personality, that is, a trait, but as a cultural movement that unites people sharing membership of a social class, that is, a sociocultural state. Such movements, in contrast to Abrahamic religious fundamentalisms, do not form well-established stable groups over time, but are more like a waxing and waning political movement where membership is determined by social class and ethnic identity. Their politics trigger a heightened awareness of ethnic identity, prime a religiously ideological mindset and, as a consequence, release communal violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article stands at the intersection of two historical processes, which evolved on two different time scales. The first is the constitution of South Asian Muslim diasporas over a longer period of time, roughly two centuries. The second is the growth, in a shorter period, from 1920 onwards, of two South Asian Muslim fundamentalist movements: Tablighi Jama'at (hereafter TJ) and Jama'at-i Islami (hereafter JI). These two processes intersected after 1947, i.e. after the independence of the Indian sub-continent and its partition between India and Pakistan - when these movements began spreading abroad. After summing up the origin and growth of the two movements in the Indian sub-continent, this article tries to analyse the different ways in which they came to cater for the needs of Muslim diasporas which pre-dated them, and the doctrines they spread among them. It then asks, in return, how far does their expansion abroad depend on South Asian diaporas; and if, as we suspect, they are anchored in these diasporas, how can they be truly transnational? This circle is explored, in a thoroughly interpretative approach which contrasts the two movements. Finally the author comes to the conclusion that TJ is more globalised, in the sense that it is present everywhere; but that JI is more truly transnational, in the sense that it was able to build real links between strategic areas of the globe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents information on a study which examined the extent of cross-cultural similarities and differences in the moral psychology of individuals in India and the United States who might be expected to tend toward fundamentalism/orthodoxy and modernism/progressivism. Methodology of the study; Result of the study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]