Gender and Caste Borders and Boundaries in India and Pakistan ― Gender and Caste Beyond Borders and Boundaries

Drawing on insights from theoretical engagements with materiality and subalternity, Materiality, Practice and Performance at Sacred Sites in India and Pakistan opens new frames for understanding religion in South Asia. The book takes seriously the realm of material expression in popular religion as a very real and important indication of wider developments in political, social and religious identity and practice. As a result, the authors challenge the definition of religion more broadly.

By exploring selected sites of piety including shrines and their associated ephemeral paraphernalia such as amulets, posters, and clay objects, the authors argue that popular religion of Punjab should neither be limited to a polarized picture between formal, institutional religion nor the 'enchanted universe' of rituals, saints, shrines and village deities.

Instead, the book presents a picture of 'religion' as a realm of movement, mobilization, and multiplicity. Through extensive ethnographic research, the authors explore the reality of the complex, fluid and dynamic relations that characterize the everyday material and religious lives on the ground. Ultimately, popular religion challenges the borders and boundaries of religious and communal categories, nationalism, and theological frameworks.

Navtej Purewal is the Deputy Director of the South Asian Studies Institute at SOAS, University of London, UK. Her most recent publication is Son Preference: Sex Selection, Gender and Culture in South Asia (Bloomsbury, 2011).
Virinder S. Kalra is Senior Lecturer in Sociology, at the University of Manchester, UK. His most recent publication is Sacred and Secular Musics: A Postcolonial Approach (Bloomsbury, 2014).