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The article discusses the Pandits of Kashmir, now a contested area of both India and Pakistan, from the 1846 sale of Kashmir by its Hindu Dogra ruler Gulab Singh to the British. Other historical events considered include the 1947 partition of India and India's 1954 Constitution, as well as ongoing militarization and violence in the area between Hindus and its Muslim majority and Kashmiri independence movements.

This article explores how Indian and Pakistani immigrant groups from the Bay Area in North California relate to and interact with one another. There is limited research on the role of religion in shaping sentiments of distinctiveness or “groupness” among diasporic Indians and Pakistanis in the UK and North America. Through conducting qualitative interviews with 18 Indian and Pakistani immigrants in the Bay Area, I recognized three factors pertaining to religion that were salient in influencing notions of groupness—notions of modernity, sociopolitical factors, and rituals. With respect to these three variables, I flesh out the spectrum of associated groupness; while some factors were linked with high levels of groupness, others enabled the immigrant groups to find commonality with one another. This research is integral to a better understanding of the interactions between South Asians in the diaspora, as well as to gain insight into how these immigrant groups—whose countries of origin share a history of religious conflict—perceive and interact with one another.

Three types of academic sources are crucial for understanding the Hindu tradition in our times: a) scriptures and the classical texts that are available mostly in Sanskrit b) works in the English language produced by orientalists, religious studies scholars, and some modern Hindu religious leaders themselves, and c) writings of colonial/post-colonial Hindu and Muslim scholars on Hinduism in Hindi/Urdu language that is understood by a vast majority of the population in South Asia. Many Hindu authors used to write on their religion in Urdu using the Perso-Arabic script in colonial India. Similarly, some Muslim authors also produced scholarly works on Hinduism in Urdu, which could open up better Hindu-Muslim understanding. However, Urdu ceased to be the medium of such writings when religion and language surfaced as two vital factors in national identity constructions in the changing sociopolitical milieu, a process through which the Urdu language became associated with Muslim culture and religion. As a result, the number of Urdu works on Hinduism decreased sharply after British India's partition along religious lines. Nevertheless, this body of Urdu literature is an essential part of the history of modern Hinduism. Keeping this in view, we have produced a comprehensive thematic bibliography of Urdu works on Hinduism, including books, dissertations, and journal articles, which would help preserve the history of the indigenous study of Hinduism in modern times.

The genesis of the book may be traced to the simmering Hindu-Muslim discontent of the 1980's culminating in the Babri Masjid violence at Ayodhya. In particular, Shashi Tharoor has in mind the description of a riot that actually broke in 1989 in Khargone, Madhya Pradesh. Simultaneously, the report of the death of American 'woman in a different part of the 'world: in South Africa, a social 'worker, who had gone there to help the cause of the blacks, was ironically killed by a black youth. In Riot, the two incidents coalesce into a single event: the death of Priscilla Hart, a volunteer from the United States working for a population-control awareness program, killed in a communal riot that breaks out in a small Indian town. This central event merges into a larger network of ideas with other related issues, all of which are worked into the narrative of Riot. The background is the Hindu-Muslim riots over the Ram Shila Pujan but, unlike The Great Indian Novel, Tharoor here chooses to work on a small canvas, a small, dusty town called Zalilgarh. At the same time, the story reaches out across narrow confines, taking into its purview two antipodal, culturally disparate continents, individuals and situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Syed Ahmad Khan Bahadur (1817-1898) was a controversial Muslim figure in nineteenth-century India. In the first half of his life (pre-1857 Mutiny), he appeared to be an advocate of Hindu-Muslim unity in India, but in the second half of it he was more concerned with Muslim religious and educational reforms and the promotion of Indian Muslim unity. His position such as on the Urdu-Hindi controversy raised issues about his views on Hindu-Muslim relations. The aspect of his life and thought that has bearing on Hindu-Muslim relations has received less attention from scholars compared to his reformist and modernist thought and agenda in the religious and educational sphere. Although he worked hard to promote Muslim unity, he sought to emphasize the approach of common religious and cultural values as a means of embracing 'others' in a spirit of fellowship and unity. He presented his unity message against a backdrop of troubled Hindu-Muslim relations and recurring communal riots during his time. The present study investigates Syed Ahmad Khan's inclusive vision of Hindu-Muslim unity and intercultural dialogue as a means to its realization as reflected in some of his literary works. It seeks to explain why he has espoused such a bold vision and how he intended to achieve the goal of Hindu-Muslim unity while acknowledging their religious and cultural differences. Highlighted in this discussion are the salient features of Hindu-Muslim relations prior to and during his time that influenced their later developments. This article also discusses the significance and relevance of his thoughts and ideas on Hindu-Muslims for contemporary India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Guided by a self-categorisation and social-identity framework of identity entrepreneurship (Reicher & Hopkins, 2001), and social representations theory of history (Liu & Hilton, 2005), this paper examines how the Hindu nationalist movement of India defines Hindu nationhood by embedding it in an essentialising historical narrative. The heart of the paper consists of a thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) of the ideological manifestos of the Hindu nationalist movement in India, “Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?” (1928) and “We, or Our Nationhood Defined” (1939), written by two of its founding leaders – Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, respectively. The texts constitute authoritative attempts to define Hindu nationhood that continue to guide the Hindu nationalist movement today. The derived themes and sub-themes indicate that the definition of Hindu nationhood largely was embedded in a narrative about its historical origins and trajectory, but also its future. More specifically, a ‘golden age’ was invoked to define the origins of Hindu nationhood, whereas a dark age in its historical trajectory was invoked to identify peoples considered to be enemies of Hindu nationhood, and thereby to legitimise their exclusion. Through its selective account of past events and its efforts to utilise this as a cohesive mobilising factor, the emergence and rise of the Hindu nationalist movement elucidate lessons that further our understanding of the rise of right-wing movements around the world today.

Multiple explanations have been proposed for what drives India's Hindu–Muslim conflict. Harnessing novel approaches to data acquisition and analysis, this paper uses insights from an electronic survey with 1,414 respondents to test three prominent theories of why individuals promote conflict with out-groups. The results show that security concerns for the future are strong predictors for a hostile stance and approval of violence. Experiences of violence in the past do not seem to systematically perpetuate hostility. Personal experiences with out-groups strongly correlate with hostile sentiments. These results hold across model specifications, post-stratified estimation based on census data, and a benchmark relying on Finite Mixture Models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines moral panics about love jihad in contemporary India. Since 2009, right-wing Hindu activists have alleged that members of the Muslim community are conspiring to marry Hindu women, convert them to Islam, and have Muslim children. Love jihad, according to these activists, threatens to both make Hindus a minority and, consequently, undermine the Hindu religion. I argue that moral panics about love jihad not only serve to marginalize Muslims as 'bad citizens,' but also promotes the gendered moral obligations of the Hindu patriarchal family as civic duty. I consider the ways that the citizen family imagined by anti-love jihad activists complicates some contemporary theorizations of the individualized political subject promoted by neo-liberal governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The city of Gorakhpur presents what may be a unique, and is certainly an unusual, configuration of religion and politics. The sitting MP from 1998 to 2017, Yogi Adityanath, a Hindu monk, had one of the safest seats in India and won five parliamentary elections in a row, a career that culminated in his appointment as the BJP Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh in 2017. Adityanath was both an effective constituency MP and the head of a thriving Math (Hindu monastic temple). Gorakhpur used to be famous for its lawless image and gang warfare. We seek to explain how politics in Gorakhpur have evolved through three distinct periods: (1) Congress hegemony and Hindu-Muslim harmony at the local level; (2) intensified caste competition and the rise of muscular politics; (3) the impact of new caste politics (with the rise of caste-based parties such as the SP and BSP), with the Math as the focus of Gorakhpur's ever-stronger Hindu-based political identity. The BJP's loss of the Gorakhpur seat in 2018, in a by-election consequent on Adityanath's elevation to Chief Minister of UP, may be interpreted as a (probably temporary) rejection of the BJP, but it does not represent a loss of influence by the Math. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Myanmar, hostilities between the majority Burmese and the minority Rakhine people on one side and the minority Rohingya on the other side have been common, but violence has persisted and even increased during the unstable transition away from an authoritarian regime. Most Burmese citizens appear to be united behind the ruling elites on the Rohingya issue. Why is the violence assumed to be of ethnic origin and whose interests are served by the acceptance of such violent acts as routine events? The article attempts to seek answers by following Brass’s framework on Hindu–Muslim violence in India. Its purpose is to examine which actors, mechanisms and institutional developments have been dominant and significant in the re-ethnicisation of the political landscape in Myanmar and how this has consolidated the formation of a contentious and contested specific Rohingya group identity among many Arakanese Muslims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a discourse analysis of four commercially successful Bollywood films between 2012-2013, this paper investigates Bollywood’s role in creation of hierarchical identities in the Indian society wherein Muslims occupy the position of the inferior ‘other’ to the superior Hindu ‘self’. Focusing on Muslim heroines, the paper demonstrates that the selected narratives attempt to move away from the older binary identity narratives of Muslim women such as nation vs. religion and hyper-sexualised courtesan vs. subservient veiled women, towards identity narratives borne out of Muslim women’s choice of education, career and life partner, political participation, and embodied practices. However, in comparison to signs of change the sites of continuity are strongly embedded in the religious-nationalistic meta-narrative that drives the paradigms of Indian femininity/ womanhood. To conclude, the nature of the recent deployment of Muslim heroines in Bollywood reinforce the hierarchy between the genders (male-female), between the communities (Hindu-Muslim) and between nations (India- Pakistan).

In spite of the many beautiful works of art and architecture produced under the patronage of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan (r. 1628-58 CE), including the incomparable Taj Mahal, historians have not generally been kind to him. In scholarship both past and present, he is often compared unfavourably with his grandfather, Akbar, and his father, Jahangir, described pejoratively as an ‘orthodox’ Muslim whose reign was characterised by a stricter adherence to shari‘a and religious intolerance of Hindus and Christians. This article re-examines recurrent issues in the historiography of Shah Jahan's life and rule, his religious views and his attitudes towards Hindus, Jains, Christians and Sufis. Based on a diversity of historical and art historical sources, it concludes that the so-called evidence for his ‘orthodoxy’ has been largely misconstrued. This is perhaps due in part to the inflated rhetoric of royal chronicles and colonial critics, as well as to post-Partition prejudice against Islam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interview with Pakistani artist Shahzia Sikander is presented. She talks about the shared geographies and histories of Hindus and Muslims, as well as her goal to subvert the Hindu-Muslim traditions through her art. She explains how she confronts the issues that arise when she uses religious imagery in her works. She discusses how living outside India and Pakistan has affected her freedom to express her thoughts through her art.

This essay grows out of ongoing conversations between Timothy Dobe, a scholar of South Asian religions and Gandhian studies, and Aaron Sinift, the 'citizen-artist' at the heart of the khadi and ashram-based, transnational '5 Year Plan.' Sinift's work engages Gandhian critiques of neo-liberal capitalism and explores gift economies through the project's organized collaboration with Indian and non-Indian artists and weavers. Dobe explores the relationships of Sinift's art and postcolonial and religious studies work on spirituality, especially regarding the need to attend to Islamic identity and traditions in both South Asia and America. His side of the conversation connects these present Gandhian art experiments with key historical contexts and comparative examples, including: Islamic nationalist fatwas in support of wearing khadi, Kabir's Hindu-Muslim devotional poetry and contemporary subaltern studies work on Muslims, Dalits and weaving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the forms of cosmopolitanism that form an important element of the identities and activities of long-distance Muslim merchants involved in the global trade in Chinese commodities. It focuses on two nodes that are central for this type of trade: Odessa on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast and Yiwu in China’s Zhejiang Province. Ethnographically, the paper focuses on the commercial and social ties that exist between Muslim traders from Afghanistan and those who identify with the country’s dispersed Hindu ethno-religious minority. It argues that the ability to manage heterogeneous social and religious relationships is of critical significance to the activities and identities of these commodity traders. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses is the property of Universidad de La Laguna and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses is the property of Universidad de La Laguna and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Rangila Rasul, a communal diatribe masquerading as an innocuous ‘celebration’ of the ‘Prophet of Many Wives’ published in 1924 was proscribed in 1927 for promoting feelings of hatred against the Muslims of India. Its editors defended the publication as factual in content, measured in tone, and modernising in intent. Providing a scholarly scrutiny of this bold defence, this article juxtaposes the offensive tract with laws regulating age of marriage introduced by reformers at the time, on the one hand, and works of Hindu sexology providing lessons on conjugal modernisation and marital masculinity, on the other. It finds that the contents of the tract did share a common ground with legislative social reform, just as its ‘frank’ discussion of sex matched the tone of the sex manuals ubiquitous at the time. Acontextual reading of these seemingly dissimilar texts suggest that if the private purpose of the sexmanual was to promote eugenic sex and modern marriage, its political life was driven by the abjection of forms of sexuality and conjugality viewed as ‘abnormal’, which were rhetorically ascribed to a host of ‘others’ – especially the stereotyped Muslim of the Hindu nationalist imagination. This article thus reveals an unacknowledged genealogy of marital modernity in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the domestic political and legal thought of BR Ambedkar--champion of India's Dalits, shaper of its constitution and frequent critic of Mohandas Gandhi--has gained increasing notoriety, the international dimensions of his work have received relatively little attention. Ambedkar, in fact, staked out a distinctively universalistic approach to democratic citizenship and legitimacy which has important connections to and can inform current cosmopolitan dialogue. He rejected uncritical loyalty to the state, and he criticized presumptions of unity within states, arguing that foreigners' support for the self-determination of an "Indian people" would merely perpetuate caste oppression within the country. The latter argument provides a significant challenge to some recent nationalist and moderate cosmopolitan accounts, which reject some comprehensive universal rights claims, or suprastate political structures to support them, in the name of respecting a state's domestic culture. Furthermore, Ambedkar's thought on promoting democratic unity across linguistically and culturally diverse political units, as well as on pursuing domestic rights protections through suprastate institutions, offer valuable insights for the development of participation and accountability practices beyond the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sanjay Leela Bhansali’sBajirao Mastani(2015) utilizes an historical account to (re)tell a contemporary story. While Bhansali takes great pains to disavow any intention of religious critique, this article argues that such a critique – of fundamentalist Hindu forces – can be read as the metatext of the film. Such a metatext becomes particularly apparent in the contemporary Indian context, in which the always fraught relations between Hindus and Muslims have been further exacerbated since the 2014 election of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party leader Narendra Modi to the post of prime minister. In this article, I readBajirao Mastaniin light of these current events, excavating in the process the film’s metatextual critique of such fundamentalism and arguing that, in an interesting corollary to Modi’s purported silence, it is Bhansali’s strategy of indirection – addressing contemporary events via a historical tale – that has paradoxically resulted in the film’s overwhelming success. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the history of religious political movement Pakistani Movement. It includes information on the vision of poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal and political leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah. It also discusses topics including views of Jinnah and Iqbal on Hindu Muslim unity, and views of British expert on Urdu Ralph Russell on the comon characteristics of Jinnah and Iqbal.

The article offers information on the manifestations and nature of Hindu-Muslim relations. It discusses the developments when Hinduism and Buddhism started to attract followers in the West at the end of 19th century, and local communities of Hindus emerged changing the demography of western societies. It explores Hinduism, in spite to be one of the greatest religions, was in a deep crisis when Muslim started to arrive in India.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue including theology of Hindu-Muslim relations, perception of Vaisnava of Muslims and comparative study of Islam and Hinduism.

The author shares reflections on an approach to Hindu-Muslim dialogue based on his reading of the advice of theologian and Hindu reformer Bhaktivinoda Thakur. He relates his experience as a child of parents who are Hindu Indian immigrant where he grew up with an awareness of the Muslim as the most problematic and closest religious. It explores dialogue as frequently framed as the worship service's antipode, where worship evokes ideas of fidelity and rigidity to tradition.

The article presents an approach to Hindu-Islamic comparative theology. It examines the conclusive views and opinions of historian Sayyid Manezir Ahsan G&#012B;len&#012B; on the sort of issues and academic engagement he wished to highlight for Hindu-Muslim relations. It discusses the crux of the Quranic teachings as Tawhid, proclaiming emphatically the only worship of the Exalted Lord.

The article offers information about the foundations of choosing the response of formal dialogue to religious tension and conflict, its process and its outcomes. It explores the adoption of the Vaisnava faith by Anuttama Dasa, and become a member of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. It highlights how Sanaullah Kirmani and Dasa were aware of the significance of Hindu-Muslim contemporary and historical relations in the Indian subcontinent in determining to launch the dialogue.

The article presents implications of the analogy between economic health and medical health in both Islamic and Hindu thought on the need for a new economic paradigm. It explores how Islamic and Hindu economics are holistic in their environmental economic health treatment and other economic ailments, which include unsustainable disparities in distribution and concentration of wealth, and failure to offer spiritual and psychological satisfaction to participants in the economic system.

Ethnic riots in India rarely lead to convictions of perpetrators and redress for victims. By implication, antagonisms prevail years after violence has ceased and victims often find themselves sharing everyday spaces with their attackers. The task of identifying the risk factors leading to ethnic violence as well as the nuances of coexistence for individuals ridden with memories of violence and prejudice is rife with methodological and ethical challenges. Concerns surrounding data quality are enhanced when the researcher is also an insider. In a study spanning 26 months (undertaken between 2010 and 2015), I examine the challenges of an insider researcher in the context of Hindu–Muslim violence that occurred in Gujarat in 2002, and offer techniques to improve data quality. Strategies include the cross-verification of sources within official data; interviewing respondents in group and individual settings to address the attitudinal fallacy; and employing respondent-empowered cognitive maps. I argue that visual data, such as cognitive maps, enable a better understanding of abstract social concepts and also facilitate a balance between distance and involvement for the insider researcher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discussion on Hindu-Muslim conflict in India has revolved around religious or ethno-nationalist explanations. Employing the Gujarat riots of 2002 as a case study, I argue that dominant (Hindu) nationalism is linked to the ideas of "race" and has its roots in Brahminical notions of Aryanism and colonial racism. The categories of "foreign, hypermasculine, terrorist Other" widely prevalent in the characterisation of the Muslim Other, are not necessarily produced due to religious differences. Instead, social and cultural cleavages propagated by Hindu nationalists have their origins in race theory that accommodates purity, lineage, classification and hierarchy as part of the democratic discourses that pervade the modern nation-state. It focuses on how the state and non-state actors create discursive silences and normalise violence against minority communities by embodying emotions of fear, hate and anger among its participants to protect Hindu nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does the enumeration of ethnic, racial, and/or religious categories on national household censuses increase the likelihood of conflict? The authors propose a theory of intergroup relations that emphasizes the conflictual effects of institutionalizing boundaries between social identity groups. The article investigates the relationship between counting and various forms of conflict with an original, global data set that classifies the type of enumeration used in more than one thousand census questionnaires in more than 150 countries spanning more than two centuries. Through a series of cross-national statistical analyses, the authors find a robust association between enumeration of ethnic cleavages on the census and various forms of competition and conflict, including violent ethnic civil war. The plausibility of the theory is further demonstrated through case study analysis of religious conflict in India. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article reconsiders some cases of interreligious and intercaste alterity in early modern India by highlighting a motive for depicting otherness that has been neglected in recent scholarship. I argue that depicting otherness can play an important pedagogical role for those who represent it, and I show this by discussing a set of Marathi texts involving Muslims and Untouchables that are attributed to a distinguished and controversial poet-saint from sixteenth-century western India. I also argue that reading with sensitivity to the difference between a discursive other and a historical other is helpful for regarding vernacular devotional literature as a source of historical information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the processes of constructing liveable neighbourhoods in the walled city of Ahmedabad, in the context of 2002. Godhra carnage and subsequent anti-Muslim riots throughout Gujarat, India. The walled city of Ahmedabad have been perceived as riot prone and highly segregated place where Hindus and Muslims have been living separately since the city was built in early fifteenth century. The paper attempts to unpack this relationship between religion and liveability in Indian cities, particularly how religion negotiates normatively religious differences that appear to be incommensurable having high potentiality of violence and yet create sustainable liveable spaces. The paper adopts an ethnographic approach towards understanding the role of religion in the making liveable urban spaces that are socially and culturally sustainable focusing on individual narratives and experiences in order to capture its different meanings and notions, especially at the local micro-level. The narratives, as argued in the paper, articulates the spatialisation of self and their particular cultures through the production of neighbourhoods. The existence of ’my place/places’ or neighbourhoods ensure the survival of these particular cultures as well as the demarcation of ’their place/places’ suggest not the intolerance of the other but recognition of the other and its culture, albeit on the outside. It is this continual negotiation that enables recognition of the self as well as the other making these divided spaces liveable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the shopfloor of an Indian automobile plant, a multi-ethnic workforce exchanges potentially offensive ethnic jokes with one another while remaining largely silent on actual incidences of communal violence. This paper shows how silence and profane humour are important aspects of an inter-ethnic sociality in the workplace, which distances itself from the retaliatory logics of communal violence. Speaking in the indirect register of irony, I argue that jokes about one another's religion and ethnicity are a means by which cultural intimates articulate anti-communal perspectives on public life. I suggest that profanity is a style of interaction that relates to an anti-communal sociality which distances itself from the politics of sanctity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article analyzes Bollywood film "Jodhaa Akbar" directed by Indian director Ashutosh Gowariker, with a particular focus on protests by Rajputs on its name and portrayal of Hindu-Muslim relations. Details related to Indian historical films, their accuracy and authenticity, and cinematic nationalism are presented. According to author, this film depicts the Muslim history of India, inter-religious marriage and religious tolerance.

Brahman Sanskrit intellectuals enjoyed a century of relations with the Mughal elite. Nonetheless, such cross-cultural connections feature only sporadically in Persian chronicles, and Brahmans rarely elaborated on their imperial links in Sanskrit texts. In this essay I analyze a major exception to the Brahmanical silence on their Mughal connections, the Kavīndracandrodaya ("Moonrise of Kavīndra"). More than seventy Brahmans penned the poetry and prose of this Sanskrit work that celebrates Kavīndrācārya's successful attempt to persuade Emperor Shah Jahan to rescind taxes on Hindu pilgrims to Benares and Prayag (Allahabad). I argue that the Kavīndracandrodaya constituted an act of selective remembrance in the Sanskrit tradition of cross-cultural encounters in Mughal India. This enshrined memory was, however, hardly a uniform vision. The work's many authors demonstrate the limits and points of contestation among early moderns regarding how to formulate social and historical commentaries in Sanskrit on imperial relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880–1932) are two stalwarts of twentieth century Bengali literature. Born and raised in very different socio-cultural and religious environments, both lacked formal education, yet both went on to become ardent champions of education. Despite their different religious identities, both writers stepped out of their cultural and gendered borders to embrace the ‘other’ in a spirit of fellowship and unity, against a backdrop of turbulent Hindu–Muslim relationships and recurrent communal riots, throughout most of their adult lives. The present article investigates this cross-cultural, dialogic-inclusive vision of Hindu–Muslim unity as reflected in the literary works of these two writers. It seeks to explain why and how they espoused such a bold vision, going against the grain of religious feuds that characterised the history of the period. The current relevance of such cross-cultural navigation is evident. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than sixty-five years after the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, controversy about partition, its causes and its effects, continues. Yet the emphases in these debates have changed over the years, and it is perhaps time, in the wake of India's recent elections, to take stock once again of how these debates have developed in the last several decades and where they are heading. What gives these controversies particular significance is that they are not just about that singular event, but about the whole trajectory of India's modern history, as interpreted through partition's lens—engaging academic historians, even as they continue to be deeply enmeshed in ongoing political conflict in South Asia, and, indeed, in the world more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the role of the seventeenth-century Mughal Prince Dārā Shukøh in translating the ancient Vedic scriptures and practices for the empire. It is argued that the prince became a commentator of ancient Hindu Sanskrit philosophy and the first to propose to the Ulema of the imperial court that the Vedic Upanisads are works of a monotheistic God. The convergence between the Sanskrit philosophy and Islam is considered.

The aim of this paper is to explore Hindu–Muslim relations through the cinematic register of on-screen inter-faith marriages, and critique the undercurrent of ‘Otherness’ that undergirds most of these narratives in the post-Hindutva milieu. Since the Hindu female embodies the (Hindu) nation in popular imagination, Muslim males gain access to Hindu females only within narrations of perfidy and ‘inappropriate appropriation’, signifying their perceived ‘Otherness’. The cohabitation of the Muslim female with a Hindu male, on the other hand, is framed within quotidian love narratives and marks her homecoming orgharwaapsi. Even as it offers national integration as its central motif,Jodhaa Akbar(JA) offers a narrative in which Akbar must be sufficiently indigenized and homogenized to merit absorption into the nation.JAboth participates in and responds to the construction of this ‘Otherness’, as I shall demonstrate. While charting a new cartography of cinematic terrain where the faith of a minority group occupies the centre stage,JAnevertheless presents a Hindutva polemic aware of accusations of self-aggrandizement and thus amenable to hegemonic concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We model intergroup conflict driven by economic changes within groups. We show that if group incomes are low, increasing group incomes raises violence against that group and lowers violence generated by it. We then apply the model to data on Hindu-Muslim violence in India. Our main result is that an increase in per capita Muslim expenditures generates a large and significant increase in future religious conflict. An increase in Hindu expenditures has a negative or no effect. These findings speak to the origins of Hindu-Muslim violence in post-Independence India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Spring of 1816, the North Indian town of Bareilli witnessed a series of protests following the imposition of a House Tax by the East India Company government. Under the leadership of Mufti 'Iwāz, a local 'āiem associated with reformist Sufi traditions, various Muslim and Hindu communities of Bareilli engaged in collective action which culminated in a violent confrontation. Reading court records against the grain, this paper argues that the protests represented a complex form of negotiation framed within Islamo-Persianate paradigms-including symbols, language, and authority structures-which continued to define modes of popular political expression in the early colonial period. By focusing on Mufti 'Iwāz, the incident provides rare insights into the practical relationship between Muslim orthodoxy, communal dynamics, and political authority. I argue that with the collapse of Mughal rule, the mufti assumed a role as an intermediary between the people of Bareilli and Company officials derived from precolonial conceptions of moral, popular, and spiritual authority shared by Hindu and Muslim communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Notwithstanding the considerable body of scholarship on South Asian history that has appeared over the past several decades, we still live with the image of a monolithic and alien Islam colliding with an equally monolithic Hinduism, construed as indigenous, and from the eleventh century on, politically suppressed. Such a cardboard-cutout caricature survives in much of India's tabloid media, as well as in textbooks informed by a revivalist, aggressively political strand of Hinduism, or “Hindutva.” Though useful for stoking primordial identities or mobilizing support for political agendas, this caricature thrives on a pervasive ignorance of South Asia's past. Removing such ignorance is precisely the endeavor to which academic institutions, and scholarship more generally, are properly committed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The house has stood empty since Partition. Its Muslim family abandoned their Bihari village in India for a new life in West Pakistan, 1,300 kilometers distant. Unlike most other homes left behind by emigrants, this one's doors still open to its owner's keys, since his brothers remained in their homes nearby. One of those brothers follows invitations across north India preaching the Tablighi Islamic revival. In conversation, he demonstrates little interest in the religious traditions of the Hindu majority of his large village. Two decades ago, his son, Farhad, opened one of the first private schools in the area, anticipating the surging demand for education that has overtaken India. Some of the first classrooms built had brick walls pierced by concrete screens decoratively depicting a Quran, crescent moon, and star. Most of the school's students and many of its teachers are Hindu. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent communal violence in Western Uttar Pradesh has put in embracement the entire state of Uttar Pradesh as well as whole of India which is famous for secularism. This violence began in a small conflict between two different communal families that later triggered into a communal shape. The present paper analyses the reason of this communal violence and the measures taken by the district administration to control it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I provide evidence that the degree to which medieval Hindus and Muslims could provide complementary, nonreplicable services and a mechanism to share the gains from exchange has resulted in a sustained legacy of ethnic tolerance in South Asian towns. Due to Muslim-specific advantages in Indian Ocean shipping, interethnic complementarities were strongest in medieval trading ports, leading to the development of institutional mechanisms that further supported interethnic exchange. Using novel town-level data spanning South Asia's medieval and colonial history, I find that medieval ports, despite being more ethnically mixed, were five times less prone to Hindu-Muslim riots between 1850 and 1950, two centuries after Europeans disrupted Muslim overseas trade dominance, and remained half as prone between 1950 and 1995. Household-level evidence suggests that these differences reflect local institutions that emerged to support interethnic medieval trade, continue to influence modern occupational choices and organizations, and substitute for State political incentives in supporting interethnic trust. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]