Religious Co-existence in Northwest India

Sponsored by the European Commission: Marie Curie Fellowship

Abstract

For several decades the Indian Federal State of Jammu-Kashmir has witnessed the political tensions between the Muslim majority and representatives of the Indian State erupting into outright violence. No attention has been paid, however, to communities in the region, in which for centuries a peaceful co-existence between adherents of Islam and Buddhism has been the standard social praxis. As a result, we have insufficient analytical insights into the social conditions and their ideological foundations that make such local societies resistant to an increasing religious fundamentalism of any kind, hence preclude such violence to erupt in the first place.

The research promoted by the European Commission addresses precisely this question. It aims to research the socio-cultural dynamics of multi-religious communities in the region, in which the absolutist exclusiveness of world-religious discourses - including the political aspirations grounded in them - is rejected in favour of communal identities, which transcend the different world-religious identities of their members. To that end the researches of Southeast Asian states and societies, conducted at the Institute of Ethnology and the Institute of Political Sciences of the WWU will serve as heuristic and explanatory models.

The case to be studied by Dr. Salomé Deboos is that of the Zanskar Valley, situated in the Himalayan Range to the Southwest of Tibet, to the South of Afghanistan and to the Southeast of Pakistan. For centuries its population of some 12.000 Zanskari (a Tibeto-Burman language) speakers has been composed of both Sunni-Muslims and Mahayana-Buddhists. They interact in the context of ritualised exchange processes within the community, whereas the Muslims of old mediated the external political and economic relationships between the Tibetan-speaking Zanskar Kingdom and the Urdu-speaking Mogul empire, ensuring both the political independence of the former from the latter and a smooth supraregional caravan-conducted trade.

Dr. Deboos will therefore not only focus on the processes of religious radicalisation and orthodox religious separation but also on the social and ritual conditions that have counteracted - and in Zanskar Valley still counteract - such processes. It proceeds on the assumption that developing such insights is necessary for understanding precisely under what conditions such forms of inter-religious social cohesion yield to a radical separation between world-religious orthodoxies. Moreover, Dr. Deboos will study these processes not primarily from the angle of external political and/or economic influences and pressures on a local society ('radicalisation from without'), but from that of the social logic of their ritually enacted processes of exchange and reproduction ('resistance from within'). This will enable her to understand the social dynamics of communities that have upheld and valorised religious co-existence for centuries. Her research is methodologically innovative in that it applies models, constructed from both social anthropological and political science researches of Southeast Asian societies, to the analysis of a South Asian society that significantly differs in linguistic, historical and cultural respects. Bridging the gap between different theoretical approaches - each traditionally applied to Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent respectively – she will contribute to a trans-regional understanding.

Researcher

In the course of her Masters and PhD studies Dr. Deboos has acquired a considerable competence in the fields of social anthropological research of the societies in the Himalayan region and of the analysis of systems of social organisation, religion, ritual exchange and local politics. She pursued her academic aims by selecting a research topic in Jammu-Kashmir, which was not immediately self-evident. In a region ridden by inter-religious and political conflicts, where terror and violence are rampant and the advocates of fundamentalist religions of different types compete for orthodox hegemony and political supremacy Dr. Deboos chose not to dedicate her research to the cultural logic of conflict and violence. On the contrary, she became deeply interested in the conditions that make it possible for people to resist the attractions of self-congratulatory religious purity and opt for the benefits of social cohesion and collective belonging instead. In doing so, she has gone her own way in the complex and varied field North Indian studies.