Mark Juergensmeyer - Religion As Social Vision in South Asia

Religion As Social Vision in South Asia

Juergensmeyer’s first book, Religion as Social Vision: The Movement Against Untouchability in 20th Century Punjab, focused on the religious and political activism of the lowest stratum of North Indian society, the so-called “Untouchable” castes. Through interviews and field studies Juergensmeyer developed the thesis that the way that lower caste activists perceived the society around them dictated their political strategies. Since they saw Indian society as shaped by Hindu religious concepts, they reasoned that political change in society would have to involve changes in religion. Hence their major movement for social improvement was also a religious movement—a new religion, which they called Adi Dharm, or “the original religion”. This book was followed by Radhasoami Reality: The Logic of a Modern Faith, that analyzed another religious movement in the Punjab, one that appealed to a wider swath of Indian society, especially its merchant and administrative classes. This movement, Radhasoami Satsang, also provided a distinctive social vision—the image of a modern egalitarian society that embodied the virtues of religious fellowship and the moral authority of a spiritual master. Again religion provided an alternative sense of social reality, one that enabled modern adherents to overcome the malaise of modernity with the rigor and values of religion.

The India phase of Juergensmeyer’s research also led to three other books. An edited volume, Sikh Studies, included Juergensmeyer’s study of the Ghadar Party, an Indian nationalist movement suffused with religious imagery that was created by expatriate Indians in California in 1915. In this article Juergensmeyer coined the phrase “the Ghadar syndrome” to describe how extreme forms of nationalist pride can emerge from expatriate communities as a way of displacing their sense of marginalization and humiliation as immigrants. This book also included an essay on Sikhism as a "forgotten religion" within the Western view of world religions. Another book, Songs of the Saints of India, a collection of medieval Hindi poetry, was co-translated with John Stratton Hawley. These poems provide religious versions of social protest and reconceptions of the social whole voiced by saints from Indian society’s periphery. A third book, Fighting with Gandhi (later revised and re-issued under the title, Gandhi’s Way), provided a primer on Gandhi's approach to conflict resolution. It shows how Gandhi reconceived the nature of a conflict by looking for solutions that include the truthful aspects of both sides of a dispute. The book also raises questions about the role of coercion in conflict resolution, and challenges Gandhi’s ideas from the perspectives of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Reinhold Niebuhr.