Organizer: Paula Richman, Oberlin College

Discussants: Barbara D. Metcalf, University of Michigan; Vasudha Dalmia, University of California, Berkeley; Paula Richman, Oberlin College; John E. Cort, Denison University

Most historians and scholars of religion in South Asian Studies receive their graduate training by specializing in a single religious tradition and the regional language(s) of that religion’s texts. As a result, rarely does one find studies of how shared historical, social, economic, political, economic, and technological changes have affected multiple religious reform movements. Historians of Indian religions and scholars of Islam in South Asia have seldom cited each other’s research, even though both kinds of movements were greatly influenced by development of inexpensive print technology, pan-Indian dissemination of pamphlets, or movements giving lay people more control over funds of temples, mosques, or monasteries.

The roundtable will bring together scholars of different religions in South Asia, namely, those studying communities of Hindu, Muslim, Jain, and Buddhist South Asians and enable scholars of specific anguages to consider religious developments across regions, such as south India, the northwest (in Pakistan and India), the Hindi heartland, and western India.

Participants will prepare short remarks responding to one of the following:

• To what extent do different South Asian religious reform movements use indigenous definitions of "reform" when they discuss religion?
• To what extent did religious movements in the 18th-19th century enhance the role of lay people (as opposed to religious
• specialists (priests, mufti, monks, nuns)?
• To what extent did reform movements actually broaden opportunities for religious participation by women, rather than simply talk about women?
• How did access to inexpensive printing transform how moral tales were disseminated?
• To what extent did legal cases transform definitions about what constituted a religious community?
• To what extent did religious movements associated with a particular region in India (e.g. Brahmo Samaj in Calcutta, Self-Respecters in Madras Presidency) have an effect on religious discourse in other (contiguous and non-contiguous) regions?

Discussion: To what extent did different religious reform movements share certain understandings of what "reform" should entail and to what extent did they differ?