Reflections in Conclusion
In this book, we have explored a range of issues that are central to an understanding of South Asian religious traditions in the modern era. In Part I, we chose to focus first on what have often been considered essential features of ‘a religion’ or indeed of ‘religion’ as a generic category: notions of deity, sacred texts, myth, ritual and founders or teachers. You will find such headings in many books discussing specific religions or analysing religion as a whole. They appear to generate a fairly clear-cut and generally accepted view of what ‘religion’ is like. In response, our book has tackled these themes,1 but perhaps not always in the expected manner. This is because, as we have argued throughout, our approach has been marked by an attempt to disrupt a single notion of religion and to show that there have been in the past, and can be in the present, multiple ways of looking at religious traditions in South Asia. This led us in Part I to trace these themes across the landscapes of South Asian diversity in a range of contexts both past and present, so that we could examine both continuities and ruptures without privileging particular ways of seeing. Our stress here has been on multiplicity and diversity, on getting you to question how to make sense of what you are looking at in the light shed by many different contexts and perspectives.
Chapter 7A showed this nicely. Here we turned to what has been seen as a key feature of the social structures associated with religious ideas and practice in South Asia and in Hinduism in particular, namely caste. As well as demonstrating that modern ideas about caste are partly a conflation of three rather different ideologies – caste-as-casta, -varna and -jati – and challenging a simple ‘religions’ model, our case study of the Meos enabled us to disaggregate notions of deity, sacred texts, myth, ritual and founding teachers as features of ‘a religion’ that Meos practise. As we did not present the material explicitly in this way in the chapter, you might like to reflect on it further before comparing your views with those suggested in Box 12.1.
Box 12.1 Different Ways of Looking at the Meos of Bisru
Notions of the Divine
Facts: Male Meos in Bisru sometimes attend mosques and the Idgah for Eid ul-Fitr where they will worship Allah saying the Kalima: ‘There is no God but Allah …’. Women periodically worship the deity Bheru in stone form at the caste well.
If we read these facts at face value in the light of a ‘religion and its features’ model, what might we conclude:
Sacred Texts/Myth
Fact: A key Meo oral text is an origin myth that links Meos with the Pandavas from the Mahabharata.
On a ‘religion and its features’ model, might we conclude:
Alternatively:
Rituals
Facts: Kuan puja is an important form of Meo worship as it takes place at key life-cycle rituals. Meo boys are circumcized. Meo bury their dead.
On a ‘religion and its features’ model, might we conclude:
Alternatively:
It could, of course, be suggested that this example is an easy one to pick as the Meos have a ‘liminal’ identity anyway. You might want to test our approach out further by taking an example from one of the other chapters, researching it in more detail and then trying to see what happens if you use different ways of looking (see our summary below). Do not forget that, just as in this book we have taken a particular approach, so other sources will also have their own ‘filters’ on the way they present their data. We hope that Part I has both made you aware of ours and enabled you to become aware of your own, and that these together will help you in your critical reading of other sources that deal with the religions of South Asia.
The Challenge of Modernity
When we examine religion in modern settings, however, we need not just be aware of the great diversity of contexts in which religious traditions are played out. An additional challenge is provided by the need to explore specifically the impact of aspects of modernity on traditions that have endured and developed over many centuries. Part of the challenge here is to resist the temptation to perceive modernity as all-encompassing. We need to acknowledge the emergence of new systems of knowledge, new methods of communication, new forms of social mobility, without seeing these as producing an entirely new world order. Rather, the challenge is to identify the complex interactions that fashion development in multiple and sometimes contradictory ways. In Part II, our book has been focused on capturing these complex interactions, exploring the varied ways in which our landscapes of diversity have engaged with and developed through them. This included in the last chapter a consideration of whether these landscapes may be being eroded by the power of a particular, dominant, modern way of seeing, through which religions are marked off sharply as separate, often competing ‘systems’, defined strongly against each other in terms of values, history, cultural norms. That is why in Chapters 7–9 we looked at aspects of the ways in which (actually quite radically varying notions of) Hinduism and Buddhism, Islam and Sikhism have emerged in South Asia in the modern period, before looking at two spatial ways in which religions have been marked off from one another through the concepts of public and private space, and space at shrines, in Chapters 10 and 11 respectively.
We concluded Chapter 11 by noting the unpredictable ways in which even this paradigm of competing ‘systems’ operates on the ground, and the resilience and plasticity of the landscapes of diversity. We must, however, at the same time acknowledge the relationship between this ‘systems’ paradigm and the powerful discourses that have structured our understanding of what religion ‘is’. More broadly, as we argued in the very first chapter, religion has been fashioned in the context of modernity as the flipside of the secular. The religion/secular dichotomy has been influential in representing the social worlds in which we live through a projection whereby all societies are conceived as more or less religious, and less or more secular, in a directly inverse relationship. The implication here is that religion (and, as it happens, secularism) operates as a single, global category, albeit experienced differently by different people around that globe. This difference is configured largely by the operation of sub-categories, a variety of ‘systems’ that constitute comparable examples of the general category, religion. What we have come to know as the World Religions model has been a critical force in the construction of knowledge and understanding about religion.
In writing this book we have tried to maintain an awareness of this process of construction, and its effects both on the way that religious traditions have played out in modern South Asia, and on the perception of these traditions in the context of the study of religion. One of the most valuable things about researching South Asian religious traditions is that they provide us with an excellent opportunity for this critical reflexive turn. The encounter of established but dynamic traditions with the powerful discourses and material incursions of European nations in and around the period of colonialism enables us to explore the categories, terms and concepts that we use to think more broadly about the idea of religion. So as we indicated in Chapter 8, studying modern South Asian religious traditions can be a critically important postcolonial project. Not only can it involve the recovery and resituating of marginalized ways of being and doing ‘religion’ in South Asia; it also helps us to uncover and perhaps even critique the architecture of knowledge systems through which the modern world has been constructed. This is, of course, a rather grand claim! What we hope is that Part II of the book has provided opportunities to reflect on such issues, from the particular perspective of South Asia.
Kaleidoscopic Ways of Looking
Framed by these broad issues, our strategic intention has been to provide, in the course of this book, the means for a nuanced examination of the realities of South Asian religious traditions. This strategic intention is important, because we could not have, and have not, attempted to provide a comprehensive survey or review of the landscapes of diversity. Doing justice to this range would be a lifetime’s work, and even then we are unsure if it would be possible, because of the multiplicity of experience, the nuances of practice that are apparent across this vast and heavily populated region of the world. Our objective has rather been to provide you with the means to develop a confident approach to this multiplicity. In pursuit of this, we have referred to a variety of ways of looking, models and perspectives that can be applied to this task. Our key analogy has been the kaleidoscope: look at the scintilla and you will notice a certain pattern; twist the wrist, and you will see a rearrangement, a different way of looking at the materials you have in front of you; twist it again and yet another pattern appears. Such an image is, we think, crucial to maintaining a nuanced, critical and multiple approach to our field. We invite you to apply it with us now as we look at the kaleidoscope twists once more.
The first model to consider is of course the World Religions model. We hope to have made clear that, although we are critical of the impact of this model on the perception of South Asian religious traditions, at the same time its influence cannot be ignored. The domination of this model over the past century or so has certainly marginalized certain practices and ways of thinking in the region, and some authors also argue that it has been a destructive force, contributing greatly to the emergence of so-called communalism, that antagonistic essentialism which has so often contributed to ethnic violence in recent years. Under such circumstances, this line of reasoning continues, we should argue against using it and its derivatives in the context of South Asia. As Robert Frykenberg (1989: 29) comments about the idea of Hinduism in particular, ‘a continued and blind acceptance of this concept … is not only erroneous but, I would argue, … dangerous’.
The danger alluded to by Frykenberg, of course, is in perpetuating or contributing to forms of violence related to religious identity. There is a certain political significance to this line of reasoning, then, by which you may be persuaded. There are, however, other approaches to be considered. Most importantly for us, it is important to take account of these concepts as a way of understanding the dynamics of social reality in contemporary South Asia. The World Religions model may be a construct; it may also, in the first instance at least, be an imported, outsider model applied with a certain conceptual violence to the traditions of the region. But it has become a key element of contemporary social reality. Not to use it would, we argue, be in itself a kind of violence towards the way in which people live their lives in the region. No religious or cultural tradition is (or indeed has been) sealed against interaction with others; in fact, the very idea seems to suggest the existence of such traditions as discrete objects, an assumption that takes us back to the problems we have noted throughout with the idea of objectified ‘religion’. Traditions, rather, develop: they become distinctive, endure and decline only through interaction, and through processes of recognition or categorization as traditions that take place in a range of contexts. The incursion of the World Religions model into South Asia forms a part of these interactions, and provides a critical contextual environment for understanding the idea of traditions in this context. We cannot escape it. We need to understand the processes by which it has become a part of the landscapes of diversity. Our approach in this book has been to move towards this understanding by providing other models that help us to place these processes in context. The World Religions model is certainly there, operating in our field. We need to do that field justice by thinking carefully and critically about how it operates, but also how other discourses and ways of looking contribute to the dynamics of religious practice and the development of ideas in that context.
In Chapter 1 we introduced Ballard’s model of four ‘dimensions’ of Punjabi religion: panth, kismet, dharm and qaum. This approach seeks to operate as an alternative to the World Religions model, providing different lenses for understanding religious dynamics in Punjab. In the course of the book, we have referred to elements of this model as appropriate for developing our understanding. For example, in Chapter 5 we found Ballard’s perspective illuminating in providing an approach to worship at shrines that does not see it as aberrant or syncretic: people whose backgrounds cause them to celebrate life cycle rituals in very different (dharmic) ways visit the same shrines as one another to help them cope with the (kismetic) difficulties life throws up. In Chapter 9, we considered how a panthic view of Sikh traditions might alter our understanding. We might also think about our case study in this chapter, the Anand Marriage Act, in terms of how a politicized Sikh (qaumic) identity was helped to develop around the re-fashioning of (dharmic) marriage rituals. At the same time, our approach to this model has been cautious, as we see certain problems with its full deployment. In particular, it might appear that the model operates by breaking down what is perceived as Punjabi religion into four or more dimensions.2 This approach is very useful in terms of making sense of practices that cut across the notional boundaries between religions (Sikhism, Hinduism, Islam). However, it could implicitly reinforce the idea of religion as a separate category of social existence to be analysed in and of itself (panth, kismet, dharm and qaum being all dimensions, or aspects, of Punjabi religion or religion itself more widely). There is also a danger that these dimensions can blind us to historical specificities if we forget that their schema is heuristic, that is, designed to give us a way of understanding diverse material, and imagine it is descriptive, that is, of the material itself.
Much of our argument has been geared towards moving beyond such constraints, exploring the dynamics through which religious traditions are negotiated in multiple economic, social, political and cultural contexts. We recognize that this is challenging, because of the way in which it radically broadens the scope of enquiries associated with the study of religion, but at the same time we hope that we have been able to provide some ways into this broader field of enquiry.
Models for the Arrangement of Social Space
One very influential model for analysing the colonial impact has been that which looks at social space and differentiates it into the public and the private (Chatterjee 1993). A way, then, into a broader field of enquiry, which does not start with religion, is to look at the arrangement of social space, and the ways in which ideas associated with religious traditions (including ideas configured by ‘religion’, the World Religions model) have been organized in relation to it. As we saw in Chapter 10, there is no single or established way in which the boundaries of public and private are marked, nor by which religious traditions are positioned in relation to these arenas. Rather, boundaries are variously drawn through processes of negotiation, the assertion of and resistance against particular modes of power. Interestingly from our point of view, the idea of ‘religious tradition’ in the sense of age-old or even eternal practices that need to be preserved is deeply bound up with such processes, so analysing the movement of these boundaries can be a useful means of recognizing the ways in which particular traditions are actually identified, formulated and maintained by different social groups.
A different model that also looks at the dynamics of how social space is arranged is found in Jackie Assayag’s analysis of processes of dissociation as explored in Chapter 11. Different social groups engaged in worship practices in the shared space at Saundatti are perceived to dissociate themselves from other groups. This process can occur on the basis of a range of different markers, such as caste, geographical grouping and, yes, religious identity. As with the boundary between public and private, this process of differentiation is, as Assayag (2004: 206) says, ‘periodically renegotiated by the protagonists’. Explorations of the ways in which such renegotiations occur enable interesting and revealing analysis of the location of religious traditions in a broader network of social and political relations, in any given time or space. Such explorations demand a different way of looking, a sensitivity to the dynamics of group interaction in a locality that may or may not involve the invocation of (World) religious identities. The important thing is to see the way that this discourse interacts with others to formulate particular social positions.
Teacher Tradition Models
Another twist of the kaleidoscope produces a different way of looking at our materials. Throughout the book we have seen ways in which a teacher– pupil model provides a useful alternative means of looking at structured interaction and worship traditions across South Asia (see especially Chapters 3, 5, 6, 8 and 9). Although often different in their particularity, there is, we have argued, a continuity provided through this model that links, for example, Sufi and guru lineages, in terms of the ways in which they operate in broader social and political contexts. In particular, a model of teacher– pupil traditions enables us to gain a nuanced understanding of many of the ways in which power is legitimated, diffused and contested in South Asia through such social formations. These range from the ruler or contemporary political leader who seeks legitimation of their political power through the sanction of particular lineage heads, alive or dead, to the words of past teachers, which become the authoritative texts of the movement; from the not inconsiderable economic power wielded by lineages in charge of large teacher–pupil-based organizations, to the contestation of succession claims in the court and public press. They include ways of creating the space for women to challenge the norms of social life, at least temporarily, and different ways of conceiving how national identity may be fostered, as well as providing the path to liberation from rebirth or intimacy with Allah for those initiated therein.
Teacher–pupil traditions are often referred to as sects. Although this may be for a variety of reasons, one key point is to suggest that as such they are branches of a ‘religion’; thus, Hinduism is the religion under whose auspices all Hindu sects may be grouped, for example. In our view though, the model enables us to start from the other end and to take seriously particular teacher–pupil formations, seeing how they participate in shared worlds of discourse, yet differentiate themselves from one another in various ways (Chapter 6). We can then see how particular lineages or teacher traditions choose to align themselves with a particular religion, or indeed to resist identification (Radhasoami traditions give us interesting examples of both)
This then links with a third use of the model, for it also provides us with some interesting insights into the ways in which modern Guru traditions sometimes seek to ‘exceed’ religion, by claiming that they are open to those of any religious affiliation, or of none. This fascinatingly is a strategy that develops partly from the competition between religions emerging as systems in the nineteenth century and trying in the process to demonstrate their superior rationality and tolerance over others (Chapter 2 and 8), partly from the distaste of Europeans such as the Theosophists for forms of organized religion (Chapter 8), and partly from earlier roots in which a claim to truth or being the true tradition was a way of subordinating other religious traditions to one’s own (Suthren Hirst 2008). These traditions thus draw on the logics of teacher–pupil relations as they have developed over many centuries in South Asia, even if their approach in the contemporary context is framed by a kind of conscious rejection of religious affiliation as significant. Again we can see here the way in which different discourses operate through interaction, providing interesting and sometimes unpredictable twists to the ways in which such traditions are articulated.
The Gender Twist
If above we have recapitulated a variety of models suggested in this book as different ways of looking at the material, we turn now to the twists that we have applied at the end of each chapter in Part I (and in terms of the religion twist, also in Part II). It is important to see these not as a sort of add-on, but as twists that need to be applied to the material through and through. First we go back to gender. You might expect the gender twist to enable us to see ways in which dominant forms of understanding religious traditions are frequently bound up with forms of patriarchal power. The most obvious example we give of this would be the understanding of the pativrata, or devoted wife, which we looked at in Chapter 4 through Sita, a key character in the Ram-katha. It would also be possible to read the Meo women’s kuan puja to the Bherus as a way of embedding patriarchal values through the focus on the well-being of the patriline (Chapter 7A). Or to see the abuse wielded by certain male gurus as confirming patriarchal oppression (Chapter 6). But we urge caution in seeing the gender twist only in these terms, not least because, although oppression should indeed be identified and challenged (see Chapter 10), there is a danger if we write the agenda for this in Western feminist terms and ignore, say, the positive advantages to women of rituals that strengthen the patriline (Bennett 1983; Balzani 2004). Using a twist on masculinity (Chapter 5), we were able to see both how practices renewing masculinity by chastity might re-entrench male authority over women (as in the reading of the Sabarimala pilgrimage in Osella and Osella 2003) and how masculine vitality brought to the shrine of Shah Nur (see Green’s reading of the ‘urs, Chapter 5) might revitalize a local Muslim community for the year and enable us to understand how such an identity intersected with or sat alongside multiple others being played out in the same context.
The gender twist also, however, gave us a window on the way in which notions of religion (whether governed by or attempting to resist the World Religions model) may themselves unwittingly entrench patriarchal ideas. When, for example, Hinduism is presented in terms of the ‘composite halves’ of Shaivism and Vaishnavism, that is, Shiva-worshipping and Vishnuworshipping traditions (von Stietencron 1989; see also Chapter 2), this implies that each focuses on the Supreme imagined as male. Yet in most of these traditions the male Supreme has a female counterpart who is almost always mentioned first. For example, in the Shrivaishnava tradition (Chapter 3), Shri (Lakshmi) is worshipped alongside her husband Vishnu. Such malecentric approaches also blind us to seeing the many different ways in which the divine is worshipped in female forms across different religious traditions, including those Shakta traditions where the Devi encompasses all male forms (Chapter 2). This is not to imply that powerful female conceptions of the divine necessarily have particular (liberative or other) implications for women themselves. This would again be to import Western agendas (Sunder Rajan 2000). But nor is it to deny that they might have such potential (Kishwar 1997, 1998). It merely highlights how easy it is for a model developed in a cultural context in which God is almost always referred to as He3 to impose its assumptions on the way other religious traditions are labelled. Moreover, as the goddess is frequently seen as one and many in the same instant (Devi on the one hand, and Lakshmi, Kali, Durga, Saraswati, Yellamma and many others on the other), she provides us with a powerful model for disrupting the opposition of monotheism and polytheism in South Asian religious traditions. As we saw in Chapter 2, the idea of these as opposites is itself a construction associated with the ‘coming of religion’, and in particular the critique of observed practices by Christian missionaries.
Like gender, the politics twist is not an optional add-on. Using politics as a key twist has enabled us to root our investigations consistently in the context of relations of power. Of course, this aspect has appeared in any case as we have contextualized our case studies, and it would have been quite impossible to keep it out of the discussions in Part II. However, we hope that our systematic return to this theme in Part I has provided an example of another, significant way of looking at the fabric of South Asian religious traditions, one that, in its interest in power, often intersects with issues of gender too. In Chapter 5 , for example, we saw the role that successive governments have played in supporting or suppressing certain shrines in Pakistan. In Chapter 4, we saw the implication of myth in the political project of specific groups within Indian society, and the development of a sometimes oppressive approach to religious identity. A similar example is explored in Chapter 3, where we saw this idea developing from an excerpt from a nineteenth-century text (Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s ‘Bande Mataram’), through the discourse of anti-colonial nationalism and on to become, in the contemporary period, symbolic of a particular, exclusivist form of nationalist politics. By contrast, in Chapters 2 and 7B we explored religious identity deployed as liberation in the specific context of an emerging consciousness of caste oppression.
These examples demonstrate a point that is in many ways unremarkable: that religious traditions are deeply bound up with issues of political power, to the extent that it is often not fruitful to identify them as separate spheres of social activity. Indeed, we might ascribe the idea of these as separate spheres as an effect of the emergence of modern religion, as indicated above. Certainly, the work of Richard Eaton on the medieval period in South Asia, which we have referred to at various points in this book, demonstrates that the division is not really valuable in analysing pre-modern history, tending rather to obscure the dynamics through which, for example, particular caste groups adopted practices associated with Sufi shrines, as with Jats and the shrine of Baba Farid at Pakpattan in Punjab (Eaton 2000: 203–48). In exploring the modern period, we need to acknowledge these patterns as significant, even as we also acknowledge the power of a dominant discourse that explicitly marks out religious identity as a discrete site of politics, articulated by many commentators as irrevocably opposed to and somehow qualitatively different from the site of secular politics. These discourses, we argue, operate together, contributing to the complex realities of both modern South Asian politics, and modern South Asian religious traditions.
The Religion Twist
It should by now be more than apparent that the religion twist does indeed run through the whole book, and our acknowledgement of the significance of the World Religions model as a way of looking has already indicated that we see this as a key factor in understanding contemporary South Asian societies. Why then devote a separate section to this in each chapter? We have used this device to explore how the diversity demonstrated in our examples has been integrated into a religions model in various ways. In Part II, of course, this was the overt emphasis of our chapters. We nevertheless retained a separate section focused on the religion twist here, as a means of drawing out specific points related to the impact of looking ‘through religion’ in the modern period. In Chapter 7B, for example, we pointed up the role played by low-caste mobilization in enabling the representation of Hinduism as a religion with reforming and orthodox tendencies. In Chapter 10 a similar kind of relationship was examined, between Islam and the veil, asking whether and why this symbol has been so strongly associated with Islam, and how the public–private model that forms the focus of this chapter enables a different perspective. In Chapter 8 we explored the idea of South Asian religions as distinctively ‘spiritual’, contrasted through Orientalism with the ‘pragmatic West’. Again, our examination of the mechanics of the encounter with the West in this chapter provided the basis for a consideration of how and why this specific configuration has become established. In Chapter 9 the focus was on different ways of looking at Sikh traditions, asking questions about how the notion of the panth could unsettle established ideas of Sikh-ism. Similarly, in Chapter 11 the religion twist enabled a methodological consideration of the potential of the religioscape as a different way of understanding the significance of space marked out as religious, and the disputes that may occur between communities using such space, or claiming it as their own.
In Part I of the book, the religion twist enabled us to examine how Rammohun re-read the Advaitin Vedantin interpretation of the Upanishads as a means of presenting ‘Hindooism’ as a religion that demonstrated the Christian requirements of rationality and tolerance better than Christianity itself (Chapter 2). In Chapter 3, we traced the roots of a modern ‘textualizing’ of religion through the work of Dayanand Sarasvati (noting, however, that the Vedic texts he prioritized were different from those chosen by Rammohun). It might be objected that this prioritization of texts was largely a preoccupation of a small male educated elite, and it should have been the intention of this book to decentre such an account. In the multiple other examples we give, we do indeed try to do this. But the focus of the religion twist has been on how this way of looking has influenced and become part of multiple traditions. In this case, the twist precisely emphasizes how such elite, texualist concerns have come to have a profound influence on ordinary people’s lives, not least in the development of legal systems, including Hindu and Muslim personal law, which continue to shape legal and political contexts in South Asia today. A similar point was made in Chapter 4, where we saw how the vibrant Ram-katha stories have been disciplined, fashioned as ‘one of the two Hindu epics’. Although this is not just a modern phenomenon (brahminization of the epics being seen from before the turn of the Common Era), contemporary technologies radically change the reach of such dominant narratives. Yet, as we saw, multiplicity still burgeons. In Chapters 5, 6 and 7A, we have used the religion twist to demonstrate how such multiplicity continues to challenge assumptions often made on the basis of a view of religions as discrete text-based systems: Jains as contradictory in pursuing image worship (Chapter 5 ), Gurus looking self-consciously to transcend the perceived limitations of religion (Chapter 6), and Meos as mixed up all the way through their rituals and myths (Chapter 7A).
Multiplicity and Contextualization
Different models, different means. The kaleidoscope shifts and the scintilla gleam, changing our view, catching our breath, causing us to question. Crucially, our understanding of the value of these different ways of looking is that they provide us with multiple perspectives on – in effect, multiple analytical ways of approaching – our field of study. This multiplicity is key, as it enables a more careful and critically edged understanding of South Asian religious traditions. To return to a statement highlighted in the introduction from the work of Peter Gottschalk (2000: 4), ‘If we find that only one map is enough … we should suspect ourselves of oversimplification.’
This is why we have approached each of our chapter themes through grounded case studies. These enable us to invoke multiple maps, multiple ways of looking. The vital first step in each chapter has been to locate our case studies initially within layered networks of contexts. For these show us precisely the need for developing different perspectives on the case study that can be sensitive to diversity, resist a single ‘packaging’ and yet help us understand the case study’s particular resonance with the respective chapter theme.
Setting multiplicity and contextualization at the centre of our approach does not, however, imply comprehensive coverage, as we argued in the introduction. We are well aware of the limits of our coverage both geographically and in terms of religious traditions, and want you to be clear about them as well. We have not attempted to cover the development of all contemporary South Asian religions, partly because of considerations of space, but also because we want, even in the exploration of these developments, to resist the dominant paradigm of World Religions. It is this paradigm that provokes the desire to provide a ‘total’ account, covering not just the three major religions of Hinduism, Islam and Sikhism, but Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Jainism and possibly even Bahai as well.4 Everything in this book is about resituating this totalizing discourse (as one of many), because we see the idea of this totality as a fantasy. As we have shown, the actuality of South Asian religious traditions cannot be encompassed by such a discourse, because this ‘single map’ provides only one route through the many landscapes of diversity.
That is why once again, and in concluding, we invoke the idea of the kaleidoscope – our objective has been to encourage the twisting of the wrist, to provide a range of ways of looking, enabling the development of critical and nuanced approaches to these multiple landscapes of diversity. The kaleidoscope is in your hands.