Religious Cultures in Early Modern India: New Perspectives

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This collection of essays examines different aspects of the history of India's religious cultures. Much scholarly literature associates the major transformations in these religious cultures with the coming of colonialism. This volume seeks to place these colonial transformations in perspective by exploring some of the shifts which took place in the three centuries before the onset of colonialism. This was a time when the Mughal imperial framework provided enhanced communication and degrees of political security never before seen, and a time when India was drawn into the wider changes in society and economy-in commerce, technology, ideology-which transformed the early modern world. These changes formed the context for substantial shifts in India's major religious traditions. Improvements in communication strengthened pre-existing sectarian networks and facilitated the creation of subcontinent-wide forms of religious authority. Within the words both of Hinduism and of Islam, traditions of scriptural as well as popular devotional religion began to converge on a common understanding of the of the spatial context within which they were operating. With the support often of Mughal imperial patrons, intellectuals within the Hindu tradition began to formulate a new kind of 'big tent' Advaita which anticipated the Advaita Vedanta of modern Hinduism. This volume makes a compelling case for the contribution of the Mughal era, which was as vital to the remaking of Hindu India's multiple religious cultures as it was to those within Indian Islam. About The Author Rosalind O'Hanlon is Professor of Indian History and Culture in the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford. David Washbrook is currently Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. Table Of Contents Introduction: Religious cultures in an imperial landscape;  The debate within: A Sufi critique of religious law, tasawwuf and politics in Mughal India;  The four samprada-ys: Ordering the religious past in Mughal North India;  Theology and statecraft;  Advaita Veda - nta in early modern history;  The Brahmin double: The Brahminical construction of anti-Brahminism and anti-caste sentiment in the religious cultures of precolonial Maharashtra;  Speaking from Siva's temple: Banaras scholar households and the Brahman 'ecumene' of Mughal India;  A tale of two temples: Mathura-'s Kesavadeva and Orccha - 's Caturbhujadeva;  Replicating Vaisnava worlds: Organizing devotional space through the architectonics of themandala