Godroads Modalities of Conversion in India

“The book aims at studying processes of religious change in India. The focus lies neither on any particular religious tradition, nor is it the aim to provide an encyclopaedic overview of conversion in different religious traditions. Instead, the studies presented here investigate the different modalities of religious change across and within religious traditions. In order to understand the different patterns involved, diverse cases are scrutinised. The cases are diverse in different ways. First, they discuss different religious traditions (Hindu traditions and sects, Christianity, Islam and indigenous religions). Second, they cover most regions of India. Third, the chapters discuss historical as well as contemporary examples. Finally, the different cases involve micro, meso and macro dynamics of religious change in different ways, dealing with large-scale political processes of colonialism and nationalism, dimensions of social structure in relation to conversion and subjective meanings of and motives for conversion. In this way, the book seeks to do justice to the complexity of the phenomenon under study, a complexity that is also reflected in the multivalence and multidirectionality of the trope of Godroads, which is introduced here as a heuristic metaphor. Studying modalities of conversion means for the authors of this volume to identify patterns of the processes studied. To this aim, the comprehensive introduction provides, next to an overview of the relevant literature, a thorough discussion of theoretical approaches that attend in particular to structures in these (sudden or continuous) dynamics of religious change. The afterword by the Brazilian anthropologist Aparecida Vilaça, a specialist on conversion in the Amazon region, extends the comparative scope beyond India”–