Paper short abstract:

Drawing upon recent research on the Khrist Bhaktas of Banaras, this paper explores the wider theoretical and methodical issues involved in any "Hindu" and "Christian" study, arguing that a concentration on the particularities of such a comparison are of singular importance.

Paper long abstract:

In light of recent research (2008-2011) in the Banaras region of Uttar Pradesh on the religious community known as Khrist Bhaktas, this paper steps back to explore the wider theoretical and methodical issues involved in this study and in "Hindu" and "Christian" studies more generally, arguing that a concentration on the particularities of such work are of singular importance. This paper traces the genealogies of the terms Hindu and Christian, arguing that they are not in fact as equivalent as we often take for granted. Moreover, the colonial history of Hindu-Christian encounter makes this work particularly fraught and complex. Modern, normative notions of "religion," "Hinduism" and "Christianity" developed out of this interaction, with significant implications for Hindu traditions, Christianities, and the development of the Religious Studies subject-field in subsequent centuries. To complicate matters still further is the postcolonial, post-Independence reality in which we find burgeoning Christian communities, new religious and political emancipatory movements of subalterns, and other movements that refuse to fit into simple categorization. These realities coupled with the rise of transnational Hindu nationalism and charismatic Christianity requires especial interpretive subtlety. The Khrist Bhaktas, for example, can be interpreted as a Hindu movement, as a new Christian community, as pre-Catholics, or as something else. And given the nature of multiple identities or "relational identities" we must refrain from too easily re-inscribing common dyads, e.g. victim-victimizer, oppressed-oppressor, and even Christian-Hindu. Realities on the ground demonstrate that the ground is always shifting.