a law passed in 1850 allowed a
Christian convert to inherit ancestral property.
This lent further credence to this mass fear. The
belief that their religion was under threat united
large sections of society against the British.
pls explain
Answers
Answer:
Explanation:
In 1993, it became obvious that scholars and teachers do not have the books readily at hand with which to address adequately the intellectual challenges posed by the recent history of communalism in India. Scholars write on communalism from different perspectives. Historians consider communalism in British India. Political scientists analyze independent India. Anthropologists document religion and politics. Indologists and scholars of religion discuss the traditions and texts that inform religious identities. Journalists and critics write volumes about current events. But sophisticated yet concise, accessible, and broadly interpretive books about communalism to enrich the understanding of current events in India among readers outside India are missing.
When the South Asia faculty and graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania resolved to address this need, we received generous help in planning from three experts in the field: Amrita Basu (Political Science, Amherst College), Sandria Freitag (History, American Historical Association), and Peter van der Veer (Anthropology, University of Amsterdam). We then acquired funds from the Ford Foundation's International Predissertation Fellowship Program for an interdisciplinary social science seminar on "The Problematics of Identities and States." We devoted the 1993-4 South Asia Regional Studies Seminar, funded by our Title VI grant from the Department of Education, to the theme, "Exploring Communalism in South Asia." We designed Penn's South Asia Seminar program for 1993-4 academic year around the project of producing a reasonably priced, accessible book representing diverse disciplinary perspectives on communalism, written for a broadly defined audience of readers in the U.S. and worldwide. This volume is the result.
During the 1993-4 academic year, we discussed twenty-nine papers, which covered a much broader range of issues that could be coherently addressed in one volume. As we boiled down the subject matter of the seminar in discussions, issues surrounding Hindu nationalism emerged as most critical. This volume seeks (1) to represent the current state of research on Hindu majoritarianism in anthropology, history, political science, and religious studies; (2) to combine methods, theories, and data from these disciplines to form an interdisciplinary framework for analysis and interpretation; (3) to stimulate new research and collaboration among disciplines; (4) to provide a multivocal, informative, and coherent book for college and university teaching and for the concerned public, which presents top quality scholarship to readers with minimal background knowledge about India; and (5) to formulate a responsible intellectual intervention by a substantial group of scholars from India, Europe, and the U.S. into the understanding of communalism by people who influence public policy and debate.
The seminars that produced this volume allowed for wide-ranging discussions, during five hours of meetings each Wednesday for the whole school year, among a group of about fifty faculty and graduate students; during a two-day workshop in February, 1994, attended by six seminar authors and fifteen local faculty and students, to discuss the format of the volume; and during intense communication among contributors at each stage of the volume's evolution. To keep the cost of the volume low and its coherence high, we reduced the number of chapters to fourteen. Fortunately, many seminar papers not included here will be available to readers elsewhere (see the Bibliography); and many ideas from seminar papers and discussions have been included in the introduction and chapters in this volume