Identifying And Regulating Religion In India - Law, History And The Place of Worship

The inability to define religion and consequently protect religious freedom has been a question that has preoccupied Indian courts. This book investigates the identification and regulation of religion through an intellectual history of law's creation of religion from the colonial to the post-colonial. Moving beyond conventional explanations on the failure of secularism and the secular state, it argues that the impasse in the legal regulation of religion lies in the methodologies and frameworks used by British colonial administrators in identifying and governing religion. Drawing on insights from post-colonial theory and religious studies, it demonstrates the role of secular legal reasoning in the background of Western intellectual history and Christian theology through an illustration of the place of worship.

The book then traces the evolution of the place of worship by showing how legal ideas and processes lead to an understanding of religion being determined by doctrine which is inherited by the modern legal system. It further examines the consequences of the conception that religion is dependent on a set of doctrines through a landmark litigation in the Indian legal system showing that the roots behind religion's ungovernability lies within its governance.

Geetanjali Srikantan is Assistant Professor of Law at Tilburg University, the Netherlands.

This book has been a product of several migrations over disciplines and continents over the past fourteen years. It has its basis in my thesis submitted to the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society in Bangalore, India. I am primarily thankful to the Centre for encouraging me to take up the research questions in this book and providing me with the environment to develop my intellectual capabilities My supervisor, Sitharamam Kakarala, gave me full freedom with my research and I am indebted to him for the support and advice that he has offered me throughout my academic career. I would like to thank Vivek Dhareshwar for the inspiration and critical engagement that he has provided at several moments in this project. I would also like to thank Tejaswini Niranjana, Ashish Rajyadhyaksha, Mrinalini Sebastian, Milind Wakankar and SV. Srinivas.

The origins of many of the questions in this project lay in the litigation around the Bababudangiri dargah and I am grateful to the Sajjada, Nashin of the dargah and Firoze Khan for sharing documents and materials which were crucial to my research questions. I would like to acknowledge the Dalai Lama Foundation's generosity in providing me with a grant that helped fund some of my archival research. I would also like to thank the Charles Wallace Trust, UK (particularly its former chairperson Richard Alford) for providing me with a short-term grant for archival research at the India Office Record Room, the British Library, London.