The Aga Khan Case: Religion and Identity in Colonial India

Teena Purohit

Published by Harvard University Press 2012

The Aga Khan Case

Religion and Identity in Colonial India

Teena Purohit

https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674067707

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About this book

An overwhelmingly Arab-centric perspective dominates the West’s understanding of Islam and leads to a view of this religion as exclusively Middle Eastern and monolithic. Teena Purohit presses for a reorientation that would conceptualize Islam instead as a heterogeneous religion that has found a variety of expressions in local contexts throughout history. The story she tells of an Ismaili community in colonial India illustrates how much more complex Muslim identity is, and always has been, than the media would have us believe.

The Aga Khan Case focuses on a nineteenth-century court case in Bombay that influenced how religious identity was defined in India and subsequently the British Empire. The case arose when a group of Indians known as the Khojas refused to pay tithes to the Aga Khan, a Persian nobleman and hereditary spiritual leader of the Ismailis. The Khojas abided by both Hindu and Muslim customs and did not identify with a single religion prior to the court’s ruling in 1866, when the judge declared them to be converts to Ismaili Islam beholden to the Aga Khan.

In her analysis of the ginans, the religious texts of the Khojas that formed the basis of the judge’s decision, Purohit reveals that the religious practices they describe are not derivations of a Middle Eastern Islam but manifestations of a local vernacular one. Purohit suggests that only when we understand Islam as inseparable from the specific cultural milieus in which it flourishes do we fully grasp the meaning of this global religion.

Author / Editor information

Teena Purohit is Assistant Professor of Religion at Boston University.

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Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
Note on Transliteration Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xi
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Chapter one. Prehistories of the Isma‘ili Sect in Nineteenth-Century Bombay Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	18
Chapter two. Sectarian Showdown in the Aga Khan Case of 1866 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	35
Chapter three. Reading Satpanth against the Judicial Archive Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	57
Chapter four. Comparative Formations of the Hindu Swami Narayan “Sect” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	87
Chapter five. Sect and Secularism in the Early Nationalist Period Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	111
Conclusion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	133
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	141
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	175

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Audience: Academics, Students, Libraries, Institutes
Pages
- Main content: 192

eBook

Published: October 31, 2012
ISBN: 9780674067707