Attending the American Academy of Religion (AAR) conference held in Washington in 2006, I was struck persistently by the anxiety which surrounded some of the panels focused on Hinduism. This was the first AAR conference after the so-called California Textbook Controversy (see Reddy, this volume), and several papers I listened to and discussions I took part in were preoccupied with the ramifications of this very public debate over what constitutes Hinduism, carried out amongst Hindus and others in California and more widely. I remember attending one panel where participants discussed the possibility of instituting a public organisation in the United States which was capable of representing a kind of ‘progressive postcolonial Hinduism’, one that ‘recognizes and promotes internal difference’.1 The subtext here was of course the feeling that the existing organisations representing Hindus in the United States were somehow not able to be progressive, but were rather governed by a conservative, essentialising notion of what Hinduism was, and how Hindus were located as a minority in American society. Coming from the outside (the outside, that is, in terms both of America and Hinduism), I viewed these discussions with a degree of awe. My colleagues in the United States, it seemed, were engaged in the fashioning of contemporary politics, rather than keeping their heads down, pushing out their research to fellow academics and a smattering of interested students. There was a sense of the moment; a sense that this was a time when the study of Hinduism itself was moving into different public environments, engaging with and being engaged by new public audiences. Although this was not always a comfortable experience (see Sippy, this volume), it was certainly an opportunity to reflect on the continuities and disjunctures which developed through such encounters.
Rather unusually, the paper I was giving at the conference was not about Hinduism at all, but about the Parliament of the World’s Religions, which I had attended a couple of years previously in Barcelona, Spain. My paper was about the concerns which the representatives of different religions expressed at the Parliament about associations being made between religion and violence in contemporary global politics. For many who attended the Parliament, this association was unjust, and did not reflect what they perceived as the real value of religion in the contemporary world, as a force for peace, respect for the environment and for the diversity of human beings. A connection emerged for me between the anxiety expressed about the ways in which Hinduism was represented in California, and the concern of delegates at the Parliament about the way in which religion more generally was represented in global environments. How does religion become public? What forms of translation or disciplinary processes inform the passage of ideas about what it means to be a Hindu (or, in the context of the Parliament, any of a dizzying number of self-ascribed religious identities) as they are expressed in a range of different public environments? Who feels empowered by such transitions, and who feels dispossessed? These were my preoccupations as I returned to the UK, where I was at that time pursuing research questions associated with the emergence of a more defined and explicit Hindu identity in the politics of British multiculturalism.
All in all, a broad yet compelling research area was suggested, focused on the identification of modes of public representation, and their interaction on the one hand with some grand discourses which construct understandings of what religion ‘is’ or ‘should be’ in contemporary societies, and on the other with the practices and ideas through which people understand themselves as being religious. Such themes, of course, are not confined to political representation. The idea of the public is much broader than that, encompassing the presence of religion in countless, interwoven social spaces. The breadth of the emerging research area seemed to fit with the idea of a network, which could develop in different ways, exploring different dimensions of the negotiation between Hinduism and its public arenas. It is on this basis, then, that I bid for some funding to provide momentum to this research agenda. I was lucky enough to gain the support of a core group of researchers. Together their commitment provided the requisite impetus, and a network was subsequently established which has developed the original ideas, exploring the idea of Hinduism as manifested in multiple public environments associated with three critical country contexts for the modern articulation of Hinduism: India, the UK and the US.2
The network is entitled ‘the public representation of a religion called Hinduism’. One early commentator remarked that this sounded like a verbal affectation similar to that associated with the rock musician Prince, who in the 1990s changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol, and so was known more readily as ‘the artist formerly known as Prince’. A fair point, you may think, and certainly it was not a title to which all those who have participated have taken happily. The idea, however, was to put some critical distance between these two concepts of ‘religion’ and ‘Hinduism’, to point up the tensions between them, and to emphasise the valuable critical work which has gone into unpacking both over the past 20 years or so (see the introduction for more on this). It was on the basis of such critically nuanced approaches that we wanted to explore the many routes through which Hinduism has become public. The network held a series of seminars between 2008 and 2010, exploring themes such as temple building, umbrella organisations, Hinduism and the media, Hindu nationalism, and Hinduism as expressed in educational and social service environments. The contributions in this book have all been developed from papers delivered in this series. A large number of researchers and practitioners have taken part in the series. Many of these remain part of the network and we hope that they will have opportunities to contribute further as time goes on.
At the heart of the project has been its steering group, which has undertaken a large degree of work in organising and taking part in all the seminar sessions, co-ordinating the network and managing its outputs. Steering group members during the life of the project have been Jacqueline Suthren Hirst, Pralay Kanungo, Madhu Purnima Kishwar, Deepa S. Reddy, Maya Warrier, Raymond Brady Williams and John Zavos. The outputs of the project have included a website which continues to form the focus of the network (http://www.arts.manchester.ac.uk/hinduism), a special issue of the International Journal of Hindu Studies (2009, volume 13, number 3) focused on temples and their publics, and this volume, which draws papers from across the seminar series. As you will note, it is five of the steering group that have gone on to become the editors of the volume. We have undertaken this task even though our approaches to scholarly research, our disciplinary backgrounds and our ideas about significant issues in the study of public Hinduisms are sometimes quite divergent. We have approached this divergence as an opportunity for productive debate, working together closely in formulating the volume’s overall themes and content. Our collective hope is that just like our editorial group (and indeed the steering group from which it developed), this book will provide a good range of examples of different approaches, which nevertheless cohere constructively, by engaging with that core objective of exploring contemporary public Hinduisms.
As editors, we would like to thank all those who have taken part in the seminar series, too numerous to mention individually. They have provided the enthusiasm and the intellectual stimulus which has allowed this project to grow and to be sustained since it was first established in 2008. We would also like to thank a range of research institutions for funding our activities. We are most grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK, which provided us with a grant that constituted our baseline funding across seven sessions of the network between 2008 and 2010. In addition, various institutions have provided funding for individual sessions: Jawaharlal Nehru University, the Indian Council of Social Science Research, the Indian University Grants Commission—Special Assistance Programme, Wabash College, the University of Manchester School of Arts, Histories and Cultures, Rice University Humanities Research Center, the University of Houston Clear Lake, the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi and the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi. In holding this series of seminars, we have been assisted by students at our respective institutions, and we are grateful to them, again, too numerous to mention, for giving up their time so willingly. We are grateful also to Jennifer Tribble for help in aspects of organising the book manuscript. We would also like to thank Sugata Ghosh at SAGE Publications. He has provided support and advice patiently and consistently as we have edged closer towards publication.
Lastly, we would like to thank two people without whom this publication, nor the project from which it is drawn, would have been possible. Jacqueline Suthren Hirst provided invaluable support and advice to John during the period in which the network project was being formulated. She then joined the steering group between 2008 and 2009, and worked hard to ensure the success of the network, as well as providing invariably insightful comment during several of the sessions. Madhu Purnima Kishwar was also a member of the steering group between 2008 and 2010, and in this capacity she put a great deal of energy and time into the network sessions despite her own very busy schedules. Madhu has contributed substantially to the intellectual discussions in our sessions, and this is undoubtedly reflected in some of the major themes apparent in this book. For this we are deeply grateful. At the same time (as Madhu would no doubt remind us!), the faults in this book remain very much our own.
The editors made the decision to let each contributor decide on the use of diacritical marks or italics as a system of transliteration. As you will see, in most cases this has resulted in contributors opting to italicise. As editors we have attempted to ensure that there is a consistency across the use of this system. We have opted, for example, to italicise the plural –s at the end of words for ease of presentation, even though this is, strictly speaking, an English adjunct. Proper names, either of people, organisations or social groups (including the names of castes) have not been italicised. Some authors have opted to include diacritical marks in their contributions. In these cases, the system used is the standard international system for transliterating Indian words into the Roman alphabet.
John Zavos, January 2011
1 I quote here from my own notes on these discussions.
2 There are, of course, many other country contexts in which Hinduism is represented publically. As the network from which this volume draws grows, our aim is to explore a broader range of contexts and provide a research context for the exploration of Hinduism across the globe.