Between Muslim Pīr and Hindu Saint: Laldas and the Devotional Culture in North India by Kumar, Mukesh | Hardcover | History

About this book Between Muslim Pīr and Hindu Saint: Laldas and the Devotional Culture in North India by Kumar, Mukesh published by Cambridge University Press. Key highlights - Skillfully blending insights and methods from anthropology, sociology, religious studies and history, Mukesh Kumar's empirically rich and highly original study complicates simplistic understandings of religious ideology and practice in Northern India. One can only hope that his carefully researched monograph will find the broad transdisciplinary readership it deserves. –Harald Fischer-Tiné, ETH-Zurich - This remarkable book shows how sixteenth century North Indian Lāldāsī tradition embraced aspects of cultures which today span a landscape divided by fault lines of Hindu and Muslim identities. Through both intensive field work and in-depth textual-studies it documents both the history of the tradition and modern reconstructions of Lāldāsī identities. - This study will be welcomed by those interested in the interaction between Hindu Sants and Muslim Sufis. This book is a mine of original insights into the original genesis of this Sufi-Sant interaction and a critical examination of how social and religious realities in North India have impacted on living contemporary Lāldāsī traditions. –Peter Friedlander, Australian National University - In the important and highly innovative study, Mukesh Kumar looks at the changing configurations of the networks of sites dedicated to Laldas, a saint whose teachings contain elements commonly associated with both Hinduism and Islam, even though those religious traditions are supposedly mutually incompatible. The politicization of religion in the 20th and 21st centuries has increased contestation over the shrines - "but has also induced many of Laldas’ followers to find covert ways of drawing on both traditions despite the efforts to “purify” the sites that have been made by orthodox Muslim and Hindu leaders. The multi-sited fieldwork data are rich, and the analyses provocative. This book sets a new, high standard for works on shared and contested religious sites in South Asia, and more widely. –Robert M. Hayden, University of Pittsburgh" - This is a very important book. Against the background of India’s current, tragic polarization between Hindus and Muslims, it reminds us that things were not always so. It focuses on the social expressions of nirguna bhakti, worship of the formless absolute, which rejects institutionalized religion altogether and therefore allows and even encourages various forms of religious exchange between Hinduism and Islam. - By means of a subtle, detailed historical and ethnographic analysis, Mukesh Kumar shows how the followers of Laldas, a 16th century mystic, responded to the changing religious landscape in subsequent centuries, trying (but ultimately failing) to preserve their particular form of Hindu-Muslim synthesis in the face of those forces trying to separate the two communities. –William Sax, Heidelberg University - Mukesh Kumar is a postdoctoral fellow (2021-​23) at ETH Zürich. Previously, he was an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral fellow (2019-​21) at the South Asia Institute of Heidelberg University. He has published several research articles in journals, such as Oxford Journal of Law and Religion, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, (Cambridge University Press), Contemporary South Asia (Routledge), History and Anthropology (Routledge), and Economic and Political Weekly. - By focusing on the shared religious figure of Laldas/Khan, the book uncovers fascinating historical and contemporary dimensions of Hindu-Muslim socio-cultural interactions around his shrines. - This book explores the changing form of religious culture in the Mewat region of north India. Related topics religious culture, religion, history, devotional culture, society, anthropology.