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This paper examines the public debate that happened among Delhi's Sikh community following the formation of the Khalsa by Guru Gobind Singh. The detail of this debate was expressed in the early eighteenth century Sikh text, Sri Gur Sobha. The Sri Gur Sobha explains how Delhi's Sikhs became divided into pro-Khalsa and anti-Khalsa factions, and how this conflict resulted in a campaign of persecution against Delhi's Khalsa Sikhs. In this paper I endeavour to analyse exactly why this dispute occurred and how it reflects wider political and socio-economic processes in early modern India and Sikh society. In addition, the paper will explore how the elite Khatri community consequently became an object of hatred in eighteenth century Khalsa Sikh literature. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Gandhian and Hindutva-inspired discourses around conversions to Christianity in India over-simplify the historical nexus of relations between missionaries, converts and the colonial state. Challenging the view that conversions were ever only about material gain, this paper draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with leprosy-affected people in South India to consider the role that conversion has also played in establishing alternative, often positively construed, identities for those who came to live in leprosy colonies from the mid twentieth century onwards. The paper draws out the distinctive values associated with a Christian identity in India, exploring local Christianities as sets of practices through which, for example, a positive sense of belonging might be established for those otherwise excluded, rather than being centred upon personal faith and theology per se. Biographical accounts are drawn upon to document and analyse some of the on-the-ground realities, and the different implications—depending on one's wider social positioning—of converting from Hinduism to Christianity in South India. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the first decades of the twentieth century, classically trained Muslim scholars (`ulama) of the influential Deobandi school of North India issued a number of immensely popular, mass-printed ‘primers’ on Islamic belief and ritual practice. Now ubiquitous in the Islamic bookshops in South Asia and elsewhere, these primers sought to summarize the rudiments of an Islamic education for a nascent lay Muslim reading public. Focusing on three Deobandi `ulama—Ashraf `Ali Thanvi (d. 1943), Mufti Muhammad Kifayatullah (d. 1952), and Muhammad Manzur Nu`mani (d. 1997)—this paper explores how their primers advanced the Deobandi school's well-known critique of popular piety even as they claimed to address Muslims generally, and how their authors negotiated the subtle dynamics of print. Understanding the potentially subversive power of print to open a space for readers to form their own interpretations of minute doctrinal matters and the threat of mass-printed religious texts to their own authority, these `ulama implored readers to refrain from forming their own opinions of the primers’ content and to consult the `ulama throughout the reading process. Thus, even as they took advantage of print's possibilities, they remained deeply suspect of its ramifications. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The old project of modernizing madrasas has acquired a new zeal in South Asia after September 2011, whereby madrasa reform programmes became an acknowledged soft tactic of the war on terror. With 9000 Aliya (reformed) madrasas, the Bangladesh madrasa modernization programme has been identified as a potentially useful model for the neighbouring states of Pakistan and India who have made slower progress in implementing similar programmes. In this paper I argue that, although the Aliya madrasa system in Bangladesh has succeeded in integrating secular subjects in the madrasa curriculum, in reality this modernization project has failed in its underlying ambition to generate a ‘modern discourse’ on Islam—a discourse that is compatible with the demands of western modernity. The right to speak for Islam is still primarily exercised by the ‘ulama and graduates of the Qoumi (unreformed) madrasas. Aliya madrasas today compete with the secular schools not with Qoumi madrasas. The growth of the Aliya madrasa system in Bangladesh, instead of bearing testimony to the popular appeal of the modernization agenda, demonstrates the preference of Muslim parents for increased Islamic content in the school curriculum [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper offers a gendered perspective to British domination in India through the British Indian Army—which in many ways was central to their entire structure of economic and political domination in India. Locating its understanding drawn from the political economy of south-east Punjab, it argues that the designated martial castes and military recruitment structurally and ideologically identified with and privileged those trends of existing masculinities in this region which suited their power structure and empire building. It was a constellation of marital caste status, land ownership, dominant caste syndrome and good bodily physique or physical strength that ideologically came to connect and configure dominant masculinity in colonial Punjab. An Army profession fully supported it. During the two world wars it emerged as the militarized masculinity, amply supported by legal and administrative measures introduced or apparently adopted in deference to certain popular cultural practices. The associated economic and political privileges turned ‘loyalty’ into an inherent and special ingredient of ‘masculinity’ which the nationalists had to confront and deal with till such times that it came to be firmly linked with nationalism and patriotism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]