Book - -

Name of the Book
Crossing the Threshold: Understanding Religious Identities in South Asia
Author
Dominique Sila Khan
Publisher
IB Tauris, London
Year
2004
Pages
185
ISBN
185043 435 2
The question of religious identity is a hotly debated one in India today. What precisely does it mean to be a ‘Hindu’ or a ‘Muslim’ when there are so many different, and often mutually conflicting, versions of ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Islam’? Much has been written about this vexed subject. Increasingly, the earlier notion of fixed religious identities as givens and as frozen in time, and as following from a direct reading of religious scriptures unmediated by historical or social context is being challenged by scholars who argue that religious identities are in a constant state of flux and are a product of a complex and never complete process of social construction.
This book deals with the issue of the construction of ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ identities in South Asia. Khan, who has written extensively on popular religion in India, questions the notion of a reified, singular ‘Hindu’ or ‘Muslim’ identity. Challenging the claims of Hindu ‘nationalists’ who speak of a homogenous, well-defined Hindu community, she points out that the very word ‘Hindu’ is absent in the classical ‘Hindu’ texts. The term is, in its origins, a geographical, rather than a religious, one, and one which was used by others, including the ancient Persians and later by Muslim Arabs and Persians, to denote all non-Muslims living to the east of the Indus river. It was, thus, a negative term in that it came to denote inhabitants of the region who were not Muslims, or later, not Jews and Christians as well.
Khan dwells on the development of the notion of ‘Hinduism’ as a world religion on par with Islam and Christianity, showing the complex role of colonial administrators, Christian missionaries, census administrators and ‘high’ caste Hindu, particularly Brahmin, elites in this project. She argues, repeating what several other scholars have pointed out, that ‘Hinduism’ is a modern construct and a reflection of a textual, as opposed to an empirical, understanding of religion that relied on the Brahminical texts as setting down the parameters of what came to be defined as ‘orthodox’ ‘Hinduism’. It thus bore little relation to the bewildering range of creeds, sects and traditions of pre-colonial India. She also shows how the notion of a singular Hinduism and a homogenous Hindu community have been and still are routinely employed to bolster the hegemony of entrenched ‘high’ caste elites, who form a relatively small minority among the Hindus themselves, but who use the logic of majoritarianism to preserve their own vested interests.
Likewise, Khan shows that the notion of a singular Muslim identity, so dear to Islamists as well as their detractors, is completely misleading. Islam in India, as elsewhere, is characterised by considerable diversity, in terms of a multiplicity of sects, each of which claims to represent normative Islam. Islamic diversity is further bolstered by the absence of a church that is authorised to lay down doctrines that would be binding on all believers. As in the Hindu case, Khan argues that the idea of a homogenous Muslim community is a recent construct, a product of collusion between Orientalists, colonial rulers and Muslim elites. It is also an elitist construct which seeks to provide Muslim elites, particularly the ‘ulama, with the moral authority to speak on behalf of all Muslims.
Of particular interest is Khan’s extensive discussion of shared religious traditions in India. Khan cites numerous such cases, such as that of the Isma‘ili Khojas, the Satpanthis of Gujarat, the Pranamis of Madhya Pradesh and the Meos of Mewat, to highlight the often overlooked existence of communities that cannot be neatly classified as unambiguously ‘Hindu’ or ‘Muslim’. She discusses various terms that have been offered to deal with such communities, such as ‘liminal’ and ‘syncretistic’, but argues that they are inadequate on the grounds that they presume the existence of other pre-existing well-defined ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ communities. She prefers to see them, as the title of her book indicates, as ‘in the threshold’, refusing to be boxed into either category, being something of a separate category in themselves. She sees them as profound reminders of the falsity of the notion of singular, homogenous ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ communities that have nothing at all in common and that are defined in opposition to each other. Yet, as she notes, such traditions are increasingly coming to be contested as pressures on them mount to identify themselves as ‘Hindu’ or ‘Muslim’, rather than as a bit of both.
This book is a timely contribution to the ongoing debate on religion and religious identity in contemporary South Asia, one that has been accompanied by much bloodletting. In this regard, Khan’s argument of the social constructedness of religious identity and the multiplicity of competing voices that claim to represent normative Islam or Hinduism is well-taken, forcefully challenging, as it does, the assertions of the merchants of theological terror.