Hinduism and Tribal Religions

Living Edition
| Editors: Pankaj Jain, Rita Sherma, Madhu Khanna

Village Religion

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1036-5_596-1
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Research on village-religion is a rich postcolonial domain of intellectual engagement that utilizes anthropological, subaltern, and feminist theories. These theoretical philosophies deconstruct philological productions of Indian religiosity that are based on classical Brahmanical and Sanskrit textual traditions [17]. Indeed, colonial discussions on classical upper-caste traditions of religious learning had inspired Macaulay to pass his celebrated minute on “educational reforms,” promoting English and Christianized learning in colonial India (1835). Colonial-missionary educational reforms did not consider village religion or vernacular piety threatening, since they did not consider rural practices to constitute “religion.” Therefore, while Sanskrit learning was considered religious and threatening to British supremacy, village rituals were considered superstitious.

Postcolonial anthropology and the subsequent debates on subaltern studies and its categories attempted to explore how...

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© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2018

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Center for the History of EmotionsMax Planck Institute for Human DevelopmentBerlinGermany