At the Confluence of Two Rivers: Muslims and Hindus in South India
By- Jackie Assayag
Relations between Hindus and Muslims are a matter of
vital concern in contemporary India. Analysis of the relations between Islam
and Hinduism, frequently reduced to stereotypes, is not always accompanied by a
thorough consideration of the complexity of the mutual relations of attraction
and repulsion which ‘the people of the Book’ and various Hindu castes have
maintained for more than a thousand years.
Having evoked the historical and social circumstances
of the implantation of Islam in South Asia, the author presents the situation
of Muslims in Karnataka, where the dynamics of the cultural forms of pair
alterity/identity has seldom been studied. In the framework of an anthropological
investigation conducted in the region over a period of several years, the
complexity of interactions between Hindus and Muslims fully emerges. Their
relations are explored in the village and in the urban milleu, among saints
cum-healers or during ceremonies of fakirs, across hybrid cults or within the
individual community, in daily life as well as on the occasion of festivals.
Finally, the socio-historical study of the rise to prominence of the
inter-communitarian conflict in a town of average size reveals how the
demarcation of new boundaries, which are nevertheless secular, today heightens
a communitarian exclusivism which extends to the core of collective memories.
Thus, local knowledge casts light on the destiny of the subcontinent, at the
same time as it offers possibilities of comparison.
Jackie Assayag
is Director of Research at the CNRS (National Centre for Scientific Research)
and affiliated to EHESS, Paris. He has worked extensively on anthropology,
sociology and politics in modern India.
ISBN 81-7304-512-7 2003 314p.
Rs.650/Pounds 50
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