Publication announcment: Religion, Science, and Empire: Classifying Hinduism and Islam in British India

H-ASIA
November 8, 2012

Member publication: Religion, Science, and Empire: Classifying Hinduism
and Islam in British India
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From: Peter Gottschalk
pgottschalk@wesleyan.edu

Dear colleagues,

For those who might be interested, I'm pleased to announce the publication
of my book, Religion, Science, and Empire: Classifying Hinduism and Islam
in British India (Oxford University Press, 2012).

The volume offers a study of how, through the British implementation of
scientific taxonomy in the subcontinent, Britons and Indians identified an
inherent divide between mutually antagonistic religious communities.

England's ascent to power coincided with the rise of empirical science as
an authoritative way of knowing not only the natural world, but the human
one as well. The British scientific passion for classification, combined
with the Christian impulse to differentiate people according to religion,
led to a designation of Indians as either Hindu or Muslim according to
rigidly defined criteria that paralleled classification in botanical and
zoological taxonomies.

Through an historical and ethnographic study of the north Indian village
of Chainpur, the volume shows that the Britons' presumed categories did
not necessarily reflect Indian concepts of their own identities, though
many Indians came to embrace this scientism and gradually accepted the
categories the British instituted through projects like the Census of
India, the Archaeological Survey of India, and the India Museum. Today's
propogators of Hindu-Muslim violence often cite scientistic formulations
of difference that descend directly from the categories introduced by
imperial Britain.

Introduction

1. Religion, Science, and Scientism

2. Cartography, the Ideal of Science, and the Place of Religion

First Theoretical Interlude: Th e Dynamics of Comparison and Classification

3. Christocentric Travel Writing: Dynamics of Comparison and Classification

Second Theoretical Interlude: Five Modes of Comparison

4. Humanist Travel Writing: Ascent of Empiricism and the On the Spot

Third Theoretical Interlude: Classification in the Natural Sciences

5. Categories to Count On: Religion and Caste in the Census

6. A Raja, a Ghost, and a Tribe: Studies in Folklore, Ethnology, and Religion

7. Popularizing Chainpur’s Past: Archaeology in Place and in Museums

8. Chainpur Today

Conclusion

Link to publisher:
http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/ReligionTheology/Hinduism/?view=usa&ci=9780195393019

Peter Gottschalk
Professor
Department of Religion
171 Church Street
Wesleyan University
Middletown, CT 06459
(860) 685-2293

pgottschalk@wesleyan.edu