Between Temple and Court: The Pushti Marga in Mewar at the 20th European Conference on Modern South Asian Studies (ECMSAS) in Manchester, UK, July 8-11,, 2008

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

The panel which I participated in at ECMSAS was the outgrowth of a project sponsored by Dr. Rosalind O’Hanlon of Oxford University and Dr. Francesca Orsini of the School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS) which is associated with the University of London. The goal of this project has been to move away from interpretations Medieval North Indian history that revolve around an antagonistic opposition between Hindus and Muslims towards an interpretation that emphasizes the fluidity of social processes in North Indian society in which the secular and the sacred overlapped and religious, political, and social groups borrowed from each other freely in order to create their own unique social identities. \n \nThe paper panel was, consequently, interdisciplinary in nature with papers being presented by scholars who have been working on various regions of India during the Medieval Period from the perspective of Literary Studies, History, and Religious Studies. While my own discipline is religious Studies, my principal academic interest has been in trying to recover the social realities behind medieval religious texts and to understand the social context in which they were written, for whom these texts were written, and for what ends these texts were produced. Thus, I have been trying to traverse the fields of both Religious Studies and History in my own research. \n \nMy paper tried to reflect my research interests by focusing on a text which uses a devotional narrative as the basis upon which to legitimate and explain away the very problematic behavior of a group of religious leaders well-known for their involvement in power politics and as well as for their accumulation of wealth. In focusing on this text, I wanted to de-emphasize the traditional image of Indian religious leaders as socially aloof individuals who were focused purely on religious pursuits. Instead, I wanted to to underline how religious leaders moved freely between the realms of the secular and the sacred to the point that the distinctions between the two became extremely blurred. \n \nThere were a total (including my own) of seven thirty minute presentations which served to help me re-evaluate much of my own methodological approaches to North India Religious History in the course of the entire afternoon. The presentations and the discussion sessions that followed did much to remind me about the need to take a more broad analytical approach to understanding the religious history of Medieval North India and to be very aware of the different political and social factors at work when shaping the nature of Indian religious identities in this time period. Thus, I have had to acknowledge the need to re-evaluate my own methodological presuppositions when working on my own research concerning the Pushti Marga (the religious community which has been the focus of my research), and the papers also opened my eyes to the very strong influences of Muslim court life and literary styles on the religious literature of the Pushti Marga and the formation of their own social identity. \n \nThis realization has preoccupied my mind quite a bit since the conference and I will be exploring this more fully as I begin work on another conference paper that I will be presenting this coming October at Berkeley for a conference devoted to exploring the formation of Hindu-Muslim identities in the Medieval North India. \n \nThe connection I made between my own research and the other research papers did not go unnoticed by the audience who attended the panels. Audience members pointed out how certain literary and social processes at work outlined in my own paper had clear parallels with other parts of India and both myself and a fellow presenter, Dr. Heidi Pauwels, engaged in a very interesting exchange during the discussion session about the religious texts we presented upon were quite intent on shaping the religious identities and social responsibilities of both royalty and members of the military. Another presenter, Dr. Tony Stewart, also engaged me in an informal conversation after the panel presentation about how the religious literature of the community he has been working on ( a religious rival to the Pushti Marga) showed some very marked differences from the devotional literature that I have been working on for the last four to five years. The discussions during and both and after the panel discussion tended to reflect how all the panel members were quite excited by the fact that all the paper presentations – though very different in nature – all were in some ways quite interrelated and, thus, contributed to the success of the panel in its entirety. \n \n The panel did allow me to forge new contacts with scholars who I have never met and the conference, in general, allowed me to meet with quite accidentally with other scholars with interests similar to my own. One of these scholars was Professor Raymond Williams of Wabash College who has had a longstanding research interest on religion in Gujarat which is has been integral to my own research on the Pushti Marga community. Professor Williams and myself both had a lovely informal conversation on our research interests and he was kind enough to introduce me to two other individuals at the conference who he has been working with, who in turn, engaged me in an equally interesting conversation for about thirty to forty minutes. Thus, the reception to my particular paper was rather positive in the same way that my own feeling about the entire conference was positive in nature.