Gender, Caste and the Practices of Religious Identities

The aim of this project is to show how popular religious practices and texts subvert a range of powerful knowledges and techniques that attempt to fix religious identity. In the context of the region of Punjab spanning India and Pakistan, as well as in Britain, the religious identities Hindu, Sikh and Muslim are ostensibly treated as separate traditions with their own unique practices of worship and textual sources. This perspective is supported by the state ideologies of India, Pakistan and the UK which, in requiring religious distinction, rely upon tools of enumeration and labeling to perpetuate religious difference. The census and the labels used to define 'religous minorities,' for instance, are examples of such tools. However, viewing these identities from the perspective of ritual practices at places of worship in Punjab reveals a range of syncretic and boundary crossing formations. In particular, it is women and low caste groups who are more engaged and enabled in carrying out these practices through their marginal gender and caste positions. In some senses, it could be argued, they are less invested in fixed religious identities.

Our intention is to specifically examine how gender and caste contribute to the framing of religious experience in terms of the practices of worshippers at sites which are ostensibly labelled as Muslim, Hindu and Sikh in East and West Punjab. The region of Punjab is significant for a number of reasons. Firstly, the partition of colonial India in 1947 led to the mass expulsion of Muslims from East Punjab and a similar movement of Hindus and Sikhs from West Punjab. The modern nation states of India and Pakistan were forged in through a 'religious cleansing' process in which an Islamic republic of Pakistan and a 'secular' India were formed. In both states the boundaries of the identities Hindu and Muslim became increasingly pronounced. However, despite state sponsored technologies of difference, common places of worship such as the tombs of saints, or pirs, and Gurdwaras are sustained as sites of syncretic practice and boundary crossing.

Our hypothesis is that women and marginal caste groups in Punjab, over time, have been the least invested in fixed religious identities, despite their co-option in political mobilisations. Further to this, their participation in more popular religious forms offers an important insight into how gender and caste shape the experiences of religious practice while also undermining or reworking centrally-defined religious identities through `popular' means. We also argue that gender and caste shape what is mainstream or orthodox and what is seen as syncretic and marginal.

This is an interdisciplinary project which will engage in literature from religious studies, sociology, anthropology and textual criticism. This will result in the use of plural methods. The research will involve ethnographic fieldwork in six sites ostensibly marked as Hindu, Muslim and Sikh. Interviews will be undertaken to establish patterns of religious worship, ensuring a balance in terms of our interest in gender and caste. The project will also collect 'biographies of worship' in the form of diaries which will offer in-depth insights into rituals and reference points, with a specific interest in how gender and caste mark people's religious experience. Uniquely, the project will also span two nation states and will therefore be able to explore the impact that different state ideologies have on similarly marked spaces, for example a Gurdwara in India and another in Pakistan. Once this analysis is completed, the implications of this practice in the context of the Punjabi diaspora where sites for worship are limited will also be posed in the dissemination dimension of the project.

This is a collaboration between scholars in the UK and South Asia with direct involvement of the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in Pakistan and Punjabi University in India.