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Book Summary of Religious Faith, Ideology, Citizenship
This volume looks at the relation between religion, the state and citizenship in the Indian context ” a postcolonial nation-state aspir- ing for democratic secular modernity. Refusing to gesture towards a comfortable historical relativism, the articles argue how the complex relations between these three worlds are informed both by past contexts as well as by individual choices. Deploying gender and caste as the central analytical categories, the authors suggest that equality and justice rest on the strength and vitality of the exchanges be- tween the worlds of the religious, the state and the civic, and not on their strict separation.
The individual articles are on diverse histories and ideas, ranging from Gandhian civic action to anti-caste radicalism and freethought in colonial Madras, from liberation theologies, which take their cue from specific and lived experiences of oppression and humiliation, to the universalism promised by an expansive Islam. Further, under- scoring the need to re-map the terrain of the secular, the book goes beyond time-honoured dualities ” between the secular and the communal, or the secular and the pre-modern ” bringing together the lively debates on secularism that have emerged in the twenty- first century in West, South and South-east Asia.
About the Author
V. Geetha is Editor at Tara Books, Chennai.
Nalini Rajan is Professor at the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai.
isbn
9780415677851
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Pages : 212
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