We construct a unique geocoded dataset on temples, dynasties and battles in medieval India and propose a test to identify the motive for observed temple desecrations in that period. We test two competing historical narratives of temple desecrations. The first focuses on the idea of iconoclasm, i.e. destruction of religious sites and imagery deemed heretical, as embedded in Islamic theology. The...

The paper attempts to understand ways in which gender and racially defined communal ideologies worked simultaneously to produce Muslim women in colonial Bengal as invisible within nationalist historiography. It argues that the negative representations of Muslim women underpinned the construction of other identity categories in colonial Bengal, and highlights the participation of Hindu/Brahmo wo...

This Article, with a descriptive-analytical method and phenomenological approach, tries to explain the motives, solutions, and achievements of Dārā Shukūh (fl. 11th century AH) in Muslim-Hindu relations. It will also describe his ways of interaction and explain some negative reactions against his policies. Dārā Shukūh’s main motives were his special family upbringing, his chivalrous ...

Arrack is one of the forms of alcoholic beverage or liquor which is produced from palm or date juice and commonly consumed by the lower social class of all religious/ethnic communities in the north-western villages of Bangladesh. The purpose of the study was to compare arrack drinking patterns associated with socio-demographic status among the Muslim, Hindu, Santal, and Oraon communities in the...

Prior research on fundamentalist religious movements has focused attention on the complicated relationship among gender, family, and religion. Using data from a nationally representative survey of 30,000 Hindu and Muslim women, this study compares the daily public and private behaviors of women in India to examine how gender and family norms are shaped in the context of communalized identity po...

How do Christians, Muslims and Hindus interpret religions other than their own? The theoretical framework of the research is models of religious pluralism developed by scholars in the field of theology of religions, especially Knitter. The authors pay special attention to pluralistic models, which have so far remained rather unclear. Special attention is paid to gender as a factor influencing l...

Jitendra Mohan, Sudhanshu Maheshwari, Durg S. Chauhan Department of Electronics and Communications, Jaypee University of Information Technology, Solan, India Department of Electronics Engineering, Z. H. College of Engineering and Technology, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, India Department of Electrical Engineering, Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India E-mail: ...

The aim of the present research was to determine whether religion moderates the relationship between women’s domestic power and the use of family planning methods in India. It has been suggested that contraception is less extensively used by the Muslim minority than the Hindu population because domestic power is weaker among Muslim women. An analysis of women’s responses in the 2005-06 India Na...

The aim of this study is to examine the change of population composition in terms of religion and language in the districts of state Assam in Northeast India during post independence period. The analysis is based on district level census data of Assam during 1951 to 2001. The result shows that the proportion of Muslim population has been rising rapidly in some districts whereas the Hindu popula...