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1. Introduction: The Deal with Deities—Ways Vows Work in South Asia
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1 Introduction The Deal with Deities—Ways Vows Work in South Asia SELVA J. RAJ AND WILLIAM P. HARMAN Setting out to find common threads among the major religious traditions of South Asia— Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism— had better be a daunting task. Our resolve here is to propose a few modest but significant generalizations about six major religious traditions as they are understood by specialist scholars who offer here their collective expertise. The ambitious abstraction of our task may be, we hope, balanced by the fact that we are offering specific studies of particular religious practices in specific locations involving particular groups of devotees. Still, the sacred places studied vary enormously . They include the Muslim shrine of Shahul Hamid in Nagore; the Hindu Mariyamman temple at Samayapuram in Tamil Nadu; newly constructed Hindu temples for Sri Lankan immigrants in Germany; the majestic Sikh Bangla Saheb Gurdwara in New Delhi; Sufi Muslim shrines (mazars) in Chittagong, Bangladesh; Christian shrines in southern India, including those dedicated to St. Anne, St. Anthony, and St. John de Britto; and the Buddhist Kanda Kumara Shrine in Kataragama, Sri Lanka. Culturally, historically, and geographically we propose to cut across a wide swath of spiritually significant locations and traditions. Well before undertaking this project we were aware that scholars have quibbled—and continue to quibble, almost ad nauseam—in their attempts to isolate the defining features of religiosity in South Asia. One ominous instance: Hinduism, one of the most dominant traditions of this region, seems to defy all attempts to define its essential or unique characteristics (Smith 1988: 32–55). 1 2 Selva J. Raj and William P. Harman Recently, in a public forum that was later published, specialists in Hinduism brought a bewildering series of perspectives to bear on attempts to determine who is best equipped to speak authoritatively for that tradition.1 No one perspective received enthusiastic acclaim. In the context of such disagreement about identifying the distinguishing features in just one tradition among the six we are considering, skepticism about finding common features among them all seems wise. If it is so complicated to agree about the common defining features of a single South Asian tradition, how much more complicated must it be to deal with common elements in all six? Our determination to proceed with this project emerged slowly and only after we discovered in conversations with fellow authors in this volume that there seem to be basic common motifs, and that those motifs are possible to isolate and to analyze. In what we do here, we take refuge in the advice attributed to Alfred North Whitehead: “Seek simplicity and distrust it.” At the least, our efforts may encourage our more cautious and specialized colleagues to ask larger, comparative questions about religion in South Asia. Perhaps, too, it will become obvious that elements of these traditions have been selectively dissolved in a historically, culturally, and geographically saturated solution, a solution that in turn seeps into and leaves its cumulative residue in unpredictable patterns on the traditions of which it is composed. Our efforts to achieve a bigger picture might be regarded as premature or even foolhardy. Within and among these six traditions there is much that is dynamic and still changing. As readers will soon see, the “imported” traditions of Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism as described here respectively by Raj, Narayanan, and Goonasekera have had to accommodate to South Asian apprehensions of the supernatural in India and Sri Lanka. If it is true that travel changes people, the same can be said of religious traditions: when religious traditions travel, they must adapt to new contexts if they are to survive. Whether that adaptation achieves official opprobrium among authorities of that tradition is often an issue, and in all three of these described cases the official perspective taken toward certain kinds of religious vows is one of disapproval. In short, culture and geography inevitably modify what traditions become and how they are practiced. From our perspective, the theme that emerges time after time in these essays is how a tradition learns to accommodate itself to changing circumstances, demands, and requirements. But more to the point, it is how faithful lay members of traditions will take steps to make a tradition meet and fit their own needs, often despite officially sanctioned instructions by the professional guardians of that tradition. Lay people will improvise on the traditions in many ways, but most spontaneously and effectively they do it by formulating and acting...