Indigenous Religious Traditions in Five Minutes - Molly Bassett
20. Is Adivasi religion the same as Hinduism?
Indigenous Religious Traditions in Five Minutes - Molly Bassett
William Elison [+]
University of California, Santa Barbara
William Elison is associate professor of religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. An ethnographer and historian, he specializes in the religions of modern South Asia. He is the author of The Neighborhood of Gods: The Sacred and the Visible at the Margins of Mumbai (University of Chicago Press, 2018), and is currently at work on a short history of Mumbai for Cambridge University Press.
Description
What's at stake in this equation? This essay introduces India's Adivasis, or "Scheduled Tribes," and lays out some key factors to take into account: questions of caste, colonial epistemology, Brahminical tradition, and the politics of Hindu nationalism. For the present-day Hindu Right, the solution to the equation is: "Essentially, yes."