South Asian Islam has a unique and fascinating history. Quite unlike many other places in the globe that came under Islamic influences the multicultural and plurilinguistic tapestry of South Asia made it necessary for Islam to negotiate and often cohabit with a host of local customs and traditions which gave the religion a special complexion and a special flavour.
Of late, there has indeed been a discernible intellectual ques- tioning of certitudes and the present work, it is only fair to say, contributes quite splendidly to that project. Its first intention is to cast doubt upon commonly accepted constructs like ‘Eastern Philosophy’ for, arguably, there is no one such thing that would qualify as such.
Abeysekera has given us a cogent political anthropological study of postcolonial ideological formations in the guise of an anthropology of religion in Sri Lanka. He explores these formations in chapters on the relation of theories of religion
Contemporary writings have enormously widened and enriched the field of ‘Partition Studies’, shifting the focus away from the politics of the ‘high table’ to subaltern perspectives, from meta-narratives to the regions partitioned and from attention to the causes of partition to concern about its human consequences.
Seven of the nine contributions to this collection of essays were presented as papers at a workshop held in Oxford in 2004, sponsored by the Coventry University South Asian Studies Centre and Balliol College, University of Oxford. Editor Ian Talbot
Anthony Low in dramatic syntax announces in his fore- word that the academic world of post-1947 Indian subconti- nent was dominated by political ‘scientists’, while historians only dealt with events happening prior to that year.