In this paper, I want to focus on some aspects of the political process in India that have an impact on the treatment of religious minorities. Much of the discussion on multicultural jurisdictions deals with differentiated citizenship rights that allow religious groups to maintain their normative universe. This literature shows the tensions surrounding individual and group rights. I want to approach the question of religious freedom from a rather different angle. I want to first focus on the protection of bare life in the face of religious violence and then examine the issue of conversion from one religion to another. The issues of human security and conversion are linked in India, since Hindu nationalists see Muslims as forcibly converted Hindus who should be reconverted. To highlight the importance of majoritarian nationalism rather than political systems in the treatment of religious minorities, I offer a brief comparison with China.

A conspicuous part of the parasite fauna of marine fish are ectoparasites, which attach mainly to the fins or gills. The abundant copepods have received much interest due to their negative effects on hosts. However, for many localities the copepod fauna of fish is still poorly known, and we know little about their temporal stability as long-term observations are largely absent. Our study provides the first inventory of ectoparasitic copepods on fish from the western Wadden Sea (North Sea) based on field data from 1968 and 2010 and additional unpublished notes. In total, 47 copepod parasite species have been recorded on 52 fish host species to date. For two copepod species parasitizing the European flounder (Platichthys flesus), a quantitative comparison of infection levels between 1968 and 2010 was possible. Whereas Acanthochondria cornuta did not show a change in the relationship between host size and infection levels, Lepeophtheirus pectoralis shifted towards the infection of smaller hosts, with higher infection levels in 2010 compared to 1968. These differences probably reflect the biology of the species and the observed decrease in abundance and size of flounders during the last decades. The skin-infecting L. pectoralis can probably compensate for dwindling host abundance by infecting smaller fish and increasing its abundance per given host size. In contrast, the gill cavity inhabiting A. cornuta probably faces a spatial constraint (fixed number of gill arches), thus limiting its abundance and setting a minimum for the host size necessary for infections.

Theories of agency are central to any form of explanation or interpretation of human action in the social and behavioral sciences, including the study of history. In studies of religion, they appear to require even more reflection than usual, because of secular skepticism of religious understandings of agency, involving divine intervention or supra-human powers. The major problem with theories of agency is their immense range and complexity. They involve fundamental notions of emotions and intentions, of habits and social practice, of desire and passion, of passions and interests, of resistance and power, of freedom and un-freedom, of the distinction between subject and object, of interiority and exteriority. As such, they have complicated genealogies in different religious and philosophical traditions. Western philosophical traditions are among the many traditions that have wide-ranging theories about the self and agency and express them in a universalistic language.1 These universalistic claims are perhaps common, but the history of European expansion has implied a universalization of Western thought, so that despite its provincial origin Western thought informs both the understanding and the self-understanding of other societies. From the start, one of the tasks of anthropology and history has therefore been to critique universalistic assumptions about, for instance, agency, by examining other ways of life and traditions. Not only is universalism as such being questioned; the universalization of ideas is being critically analyzed.

The subtitle of this book refers to Bangalore, “India's High-Tech City.” Today, Bangalore is indeed best known as a kind of Silicon Valley in India. The author, however, has been ill-advised to put this in the title, since her book hardly touches on that central feature of contemporary Bangalore. Instead it offers a conventional historical account of the Karaga ritual and its performers, the Vahnikula Kshatriyas, a traditional caste of gardeners. The Karaga ritual is an annual performance, featuring an earthen pot carried by a priest. Priest and pot together are seen as a manifestation of the female power (shakti) of Draupadi, one of the main characters of the Mahabharata. The performance belongs to the Karnataka ‘jatre' genre and shares features with other Goddess cults in the region. A special and interesting element is the association of the Karaga performance with a Sufi Saint Cult in Bangalore. The procession of the Karaga can only continue past the Sufi shrine after paying respect to the Saint. Unfortunately, the author does not attempt to analyze this in connection with the growing communal tensions between Muslims and Hindus, even in the South of India. The Vahnikula Kshatriyas are seen as part of a larger community, called Tigala. As a result of the political gains of the backward class movement in Karnataka they claim the status of backward tribe. The author describes in detail the formation of a caste association of the Tigala, a political alliance of several communities.

In this contribution I want to first examine some aspects of the influence of Orientalism and Christianity on the construction of a notion of Hinduism which could serve as the basis for nationalism. Second, I want to explore two influential claims about the uniqueness and superiority of the Hindu religion and its practitioners. The first claim is that Hinduism is the religion of a superior race, namely the Aryan race. The second claim is that Hinduism is a religion which is spiritually superior to other religions. These two claims are never completely separate from each other, but are differently emphasised by different Hindu movements.

In surat, an industrial city in Gujarat, a multiplicity of meanings is attached to the cult of the Rifa'i saint by different groups of Muslims, such as the holy man (pir) and his family, his lay followers, the Rifa'i faqirs, and the Tablighis (Reform Muslims who are the main opponents of the cult), as well as by Hindus. It is argued that none of these meanings have come to dominate and entirely marginalize the others. This article will describe a local arena in which debate about Muslim ritual practice is largely an “internal” one among Muslims about such Islamic issues as the relation between God and believer and the sources of authoritative knowledge and behavior. The concept of hereditary, saintly power is paramount in shaping the Rifa'i forms of celebration or “playing” on the saint's day. In discourse about Rifa'i ritual, it is contrasted with “praying” to God.

There seem to be at least two elusive concepts in the sociology of India: caste and communalism. On caste Eric Wolf makes the point eloquently: ‘The literature on the topic is labyrinthine, and the reader is not always sure there is light at the end of the tunnel’ (1982: 397). The sociological perspective on caste seems to be obscured by a great deal of confusion about the place of religious values and sentiments in Hindu society. According to Louis Dumont (1970: 6, 7), the primary object of the sociology of India should be a system of ideas and the approach that of a sociology of values. Since the religious ideology, on which the caste system is based in his view, seems to have been fixed already in the classical period of Indian civilization, caste becomes a static, a-historical phenomenon in Dumont's writing and in much of the debate originating from it (cf. Van der Veer 1985). The same may easily happen with that other most elusive concept of the sociology of India, communalism. Again Dumont can be our misleading guide here. He argues that ‘communalism is the affirmation of the religious community as a political group’ (1970: 90). In terms of their religious values and norms there is a lasting social heterogeneity of the Hindu and Muslim communities (95–8). This argument amounts to a ‘two-nation’ theory, based upon an a-historical sociology of values.