Beyond Hindu and Muslim: Multiple Identity in Narratives from Village India.

• Author: Gold, Ann Grodzins
• Position: Reviews of Books - Book Review

Beyond Hindu and Muslim: Multiple Identity in Narratives from Village India. By PETER GOTTSCHALK. New York: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2000. Pp. xviii + 215; photos, maps, $49.95.

It is March 2002, as I finish reading Peter Gottschalk's Beyond Hindu and Muslim with a keen sense of its relevance and timeliness. Twice in the last two days I have picked up India Today (March 11 issue) to learn the details of recent violence in Gujarat. Twice I have put it down without finishing, the first time in tears; the second time stupefied by my own anger with those who deliberately manipulate devotional emotion at horrible human cost. Of course, it is hardly just Gujarat; to read of occurrences in Israel, Afghanistan, Eastern Europe, Indonesia, Great Britain, or the United States (to name only a few locations) may equally evoke sorrow, rage, despair, and helplessness in the hearts of religion scholars who often feel their professorial mission is to teach respect and admiration for all expressions of the religious imagination.

Gottschalk's brave and important book will not erase or even soothe any of this anguish. But, for academics and perhaps more significantly for our students, it offers genuine help in understanding how persons caught up in multiple and fluid contexts of culture, history, and politics may construct and reconstruct their mixed identities--religious, familial, territorial, or national. Gottschalk writes in humane and hopeful fashion, even with humor, but successfully avoids sentimentality. He sets about neither to romanticize a harmonious past now under attack, nor particularly to highlight the "contemporary erosion" of Hindu-Muslim commonalities, although he has carefully observed it. That would be too easy. Rather, his purpose is to document, and thus to demonstrate, the complex ways identities are intertwined with narratives (histories, legends), a process he interprets as the workings of group memory.

Gottschalk rightly criticizes authors who have failed to acknowledge the complexity of identity, or flattened its many contours. "By emphasizing only religious identity, scholars rarefy religions, removing them from the social milieu in which they develop" (p. 4). Instead, Gottschalk argues cogently that there exists a "need for a more nuanced understanding of identity in India that comprehends the complexities of grassroots social dynamics" (p. 18). Best of all, he is able to exemplify for his readers just this kind of nuanced study.

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