Arya Samaj

This chapter analyses the positionality of Halis—former bonded
labourers, ploughers and animal carcass removers—who constitute the most subordinated Scheduled Caste (SC) community within the Gaddi tribal orbit. For many
Halis, the struggle for Scheduled Tribe (ST) recognition begins with legally undoing
their ancestral conversion to the Ayra Samaj. In the early twentieth century, many
Halis officially replaced their caste name with ‘Arya’ or ‘Gaddi Arya’ in the Revenue
Record in order to combat tribal casteism. For a time, they adopted the purifying techniques and caste-obliterating ideologies of the Arya Samaj. This strategy of upward caste mobility backfired, however, when Arya was classified as a forward caste and converted Halis were denied SC/ST benefits in the initial constitutional scheduling. Their official status as Aryas continues to deprive thousands of Halis of much-needed reservation protections. Through fieldwork data collected between 2014 and 16, I highlight the psychosocial anguish of many Halis as they waste inordinate amounts of time and resources bribing bureaucrats, negotiating with state administrators, excavating the archive for non-existent property documents, and being exploited by lawyers—all in the pursuit of restoring their Hali caste name to qualify for SC benefits. Many Halis—non-literate village scratch farmers—are defeated by feelings of worthlessness and inadequacy. Their struggle is further complicated by a desire to
ascend the escalator of state recognition from forward caste Aryas to SC Halis to
ST Gaddi Dalits. Based on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that state
(mis)recognition can drive marginalization and coarsen psychosocial wellbeing.

Before he died in 1883, Swami Dayanand Saraswati expressly forbade his followers from turning him into a saint. His mission, he explained, was to rid India of the ‘smell of gurudom’. Nonetheless, as the Arya Samaj rose to prominence, its members extolled its founder’s extraordinary virtues in a series of texts that can only be termed hagiographic. The literary genre of Arya hagiography that emerged between the 1880s and 1920s was thus shaped by a constitutive contradiction: disavowing its hagiographic impulses, it sought to close the gap between ‘great men’ and ‘ordinary’ people, even as it also inevitably reinforced this divide. This article briefly surveys the genre of Arya hagiography before situating it within a broader cultural formation that I term ‘print asceticism’. How, I ask, did colonial writers position print as vehicle for the renunciation of the self for the good of the nation?

The Guptis of Bhavnagar, India, represent an unexplored case of taqiyya, or precautionary dissimulation, and challenge traditional categories of religious identity in South Asia. Taqiyya is normally practiced by minority or otherwise disadvantaged groups of Muslims who fear negative repercussions should their real faith become known. Historically, the Shi'a, whether Ithna-'ashari or Ismaili, have commonly dissimulated as Sunnis, who form the dominant community. However, the Guptis, who are followers of the Ismaili imam, and whose name means "secret" or "hidden ones," dissimulate not as Sunni Muslims, but as Hindus. The Gupti practice of taqiyya is exceptional for another reason: Hinduism is not simply a veil used to avoid harmful consequences, but forms an integral part of the Guptis’ belief system and identity, and the basis of their conviction in the Aga Khan, not only as the imam, but as the avatara of the current age.

The prominent scientific citation indexing service Web of Science (WoS) ranked this article in the top 5% of most cited articles in the discipline of Area Studies, based on 10,533 articles in the category for the period of its publication.

Religious polemics is a significant research area in the field of History of Religions. Even though there are many precious scientific studies on the Jews-Christian-Muslim polemics, the number of academic researches related to Hindu perception of Muslim as well as their mutual relations of which date backs to early year of Islam is almost nonexistent in Turkish academia. To offer a certain amount of contribution to the field, in this article Dayananda Saraswati, who has impressed modern period of Hindu-ism with his distinctive thoughts and became the founder of Arya Samaj, a reformist movement originated in Hinduism, has been selected a model. Saraswati's criticism on the style of Quran and its contents has been examined by focusing on his masterpiece book called Satyarth Prakash written originally in Hindi, which means " the light of truth ". It is also aimed in this paper to inform the readers on the Hindu-Muslim polemic tradition and to guide to skilled researchers who are interested in the field of Indian religions and history.

Özet:

Farklı din mensuplarının birbirlerine karşı yazdıkları savunma veya eleştiri
içeren metinlerden oluşan reddiye geleneği, Dinler Tarihi için önemli bir
çalışma alanıdır. Ülkemizde Yahudi-Hıristiyan-Müslüman reddiye geleneğini
konu alan çok kıymetli çalışmalar mevcuttur. Fakat kökleri İslâm’ın
ilk yıllarına kadar uzanan Hindular ile Müslümanlar arasındaki ilişkileri ve
her iki dinî geleneğe mensup bireylerin birbirlerine yönelik bakışını konu
edinen çalışma yok denecek kadar azdır. Bu alana katkı sunmak amacıyla
kaleme alınan bu yazıda, fikirleriyle modern dönem Hindu düşüncesine yön
vermiş ve Arya Samac hareketinin kuruculuğunu üstlenmiş olan Dayananda
Sarasvati’nin, Kur’ân-ı Kerim’in üslubuna ve muhtevasına dair eleştirileri
incelenmiştir. Konu daha ziyade onun Satyarth Prakaş (Hakikat
Nuru) adlı eserine dayanılarak ele alınmıştır. Böylece Hindu-Müslüman
reddiye geleneği hakkında okuyuculara bilgi verilmiş ve bu alanda yeni çalışmaların
yapılması hususunda birikimli araştırmacıların teşvik edilmesi
amaçlanmıştır.

Contrary to what one may expect, some religious bodies such as Arya Samaj, are prominent in providing marriage services to Indian couples who marry in defiance of familial and social expectations. It is notable that with an increasing number of couples approaching courts to seek state protection after solemnizing their marriages via Arya Samaj, the latter has come under the judicial scanner. This has brought many issues related to such services to the fore. A detailed discussion of one of such cases has been undertaken and contextualized with reference to Arya Marriage Validation Act 1937 and Hindu Marriage Act 1955 to show how these services exist in a dynamic, accommodative, and conflicting relationship with the legal system. This has implications for those who use Arya Samaj services, in our case, couples in non-conformist marriages, as well as for our understanding and evaluation of the Indian variant of legal pluralism.

For performing a 'Vedic Kamana Yagna' (to fulfill some specific desire), this document precisely presents:
1. General terms, rules and considerations;
2. Required arrangements and material;
3. Step-wise specific instructions, procedures and related general mantras;

...... all compiled in simple words, based on underlying vedic scriptures.

This article analyzes a controversial book ban from the 1940s to trace the mutual determinations of print media, the legal regulation of communal sentiment, and the discourse of religious tolerance in late colonial India. Claimed as the Bible of the Arya Samaj, the Satyarth Prakash (The Light of Truth) was banned in the Muslim-majority province of Sindh because of its defamatory remarks about the Prophet Muhammad. The result was a controversy of national proportions. Through theoretically informed close readings of texts from the controversy, Scott shows how the legal regulation of religious offense altered the economy of textual circulation in South Asia. Colonial law fueled a thriving extralegal legal culture that bureaucratized religious affect. It also reorganized the unbounded social imaginary associated with mass publicity. This allowed controversialists to exploit previously unrealized potentialities of the print medium in order to politicize the Hindu public.

For performing a 'routine vedic yagna' by anyone on his/her own (daily/weekly/etc), this document precisely presents:
1. General terms, rules and considerations;
2. Required arrangements and material;
3. Step-wise specific instructions, procedures and related mantras;

...... all compiled in simple words, based on underlying vedic scriptures.

Oxford University Press, 2013.
This book provides a critical history of the distinctive tradition of Indian secularism known as Tolerance.  Since it was first advanced by Mohandas Gandhi, the Tolerance ideal has measured secularism and civil religiosity by contrast with proselytizing religion.  In India today, it informs debates over how the right to religious freedom should be interpreted on the subcontinent.  Not only has Tolerance been an important political ideal in India since the early twentieth century; the framing assumptions of Tolerance permeate historical understandings among scholars of South Asian religion and politics. 

In conventional accounts, the emergence of Tolerance during the 1920s is described as a victory of Indian secularism over the intolerant practice of shuddhi “proselytizing”, pursued by reformist Hindus of the Arya Samaj, that was threatening harmonious Hindu-Muslim relations. This study shows that the designation of shuddhi as religious proselytizing was not fixed; it was the product of decades of political struggle.  The book traces the conditions for the emergence of Tolerance, and the circumstances of its first deployment, by examining the history of debates surrounding Arya Samaj activities in north India between 1880 and 1930.  It asks what political considerations governed Indian actors’ efforts to represent shuddhi as religious on different occasions; and it asks what was lost in translation.  It reveals that by framing shuddhi decisively as a religious matter, Tolerance functioned to disengage Indian secularism from the politics of caste.