ABSTRACT
Several contemporary works on the sociology of religion in South Asia provide a useful background for our investigation of the religious culture in the Tharu community. These studies focus on the ways in which religion has influenced and governed communities’ social behavior and helped forge particular social
structure. Caroline Sweetman (1998), in her edited collection, explores the complex relationships between culture, religion, and feminism, which have a direct bearing on development work in the South.1 In the same vein, Ibrahmina Hashim (1998) argues that there are social structures and norms related to religion that may aid the effective realization of development initiatives.2 In yet another influential work, Fatima L.Adamu (1998) discusses the issues of gender, development, and religion by emphasizing the inseparable link between the ideological frameworks of development and religion and examining particularly successful development programs in Muslim societies. Sharon Harper and Kathleen Clancy (1998) expose how the religious ideologies of the self locate women in particularly exploitative contexts. Uma Narayan (1997) and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (1991) also suggest gender inequality in Third World contexts may be rooted in religion and religious identity. Although they accurately note that some studies of contemporary religion have taken religion to be simply a set of beliefs and practices that is unconnected to economic, social, and political agendas, and rightly fear that these inadequate analyses of religion fail to thoroughly explain a complex social phenomenon, they, like many other feminists, often assume an inverse relationship between religiosity and power. That is, they associate a high degree of religiosity and active participation in religious ritual with lower degrees of power as far as women are concerned. This commonly held myth will be challenged in this chapter.
