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Essay on Critical Book Review - Gerald James Larson's India's Agony over Religion
Many of ancient India's religious traditions are alive in modern India, and many of these religious traditions are in conflict with one another regarding the future of India. Even the so-called "secular state" is deeply pervaded by religious sentiments growing out of the Neo-Hindu nationalist movement of Gandhi and Nehru. A careful analysis of the current religious scene when placed in its proper long-term historical perspective raises interesting questions about the nature and future of religion not only in India but elsewhere as well. The five crises that Larson signals at the start - with the Sikhs in the Punjab, in Jammu and Kashmir, between Hindus and Muslims over the Shah Bano case, the implementation of the Mandal Commission Report, and the Babri Masjid/Ramjanmabhumi issue - and that he returns to in his penultimate chapter are indeed major crises. Equally, as he argues strongly, they are only intelligible through knowledge of the background to India's cultural and religious diversity. The demolition of the Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya was more than just an act of vandalism: it was a confrontation of India's two major primordial nations.
The growing attention to cultural analysis among theologians also contains an implicit critique of the sequestering of religion and theology that has defined their modern incarnation. Developing this trajectory within theology is vital if the discipline is to adapt to the changing religious-cultural landscape. Although the conceptual grid constituted by the modern constructs “religion” and “religions” may never have been a fully adequate map to lived reality, its lack of fit has grown, and grown increasingly apparent. Recent comparative and historical studies in religion and culture have pointed to the limitations of this conceptual grid in ways that are of considerable relevance for theologians. In his recent study of religion and the state in India, for example, Gerald Larson (1995) contends that the conventional meaning of “religion, ”........
