The Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition (Oxford India Paperbacks) - Softcover

Oberoi, Harjot

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0195637801 ISBN 13: 9780195637809

Publisher: OUP India, 1998

Synopsis

This book lays the foundation for a major reinterpretation of religion and society in India. By extensively using post-structuralist theory, Professor Oberoi suggests an alternative to earlier scholarly narratives that saw Sikhism, Hinduism, and Islam as historically given categories encompassing well-demarcated and self-conscious units of religious identity. The theoretical advances are made through a searching examination of Sikh historical materials.

About this title

Review

"A valuable contribution to the study of the nineteenth-century Sikh tradition and its formulations of modern Sikh identity. Oberoi's book serves as an excellent starting point in an ongoing debate on the process of identity-formation in the Sikh tradition."--Religious Studies Review

From the Back Cover

In this major reinterpretation of religion and society in India, Oberoi challenges earlier accounts of Sikhism, Hinduism, and Islam as historically given categories encompassing well-demarcated units of religious identity. Through an examination of Sikh historical materials, he shows that early Sikhism recognized multiple identities based in local, regional, religious, and secular loyalties. As a result, religious identities were highly blurred and competing definitions of Sikhism were possible. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, however, the Singh Sabha, a powerful new Sikh movement, began to view the multiplicity in Sikh identity with suspicion and hostility. Aided by cultural forces unleashed by the British Raj, the Singh Sabha sought to recast Sikh tradition and purge it of diversity, bringing about the highly codified culture of modern Sikhism. A study of the process by which a pluralistic religious world view is replaced by a monolithic one, this book questions basic assumptions about the efficacy of fundamentalist claims and the construction of all social and religious identities.

Edition details

• Publisher: OUP India
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0195637801
• ISBN 13: 9780195637809
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 516