ABSTRACT
AT THE OUTSET IT MUST BE RECOGNIZED that ‘religious studies’ per se ishard to find as a separate discipline in south Asian countries in general. While there may be Islamic studies or theological studies in some of these countries and the odd department or centre of world religions (as in Dhaka University, for instance), for the most part ‘religion’ has been studied in South Asia by historians, anthropologists and sociologists and, in its manifestation as an ethnic identity, by political scientists as well. It is, in the main, their work that I shall review in this section.
