ABSTRACT
This chapter distinguishes between the “convert” dual belonger – the person who chooses as a mature adult to include another religious tradition into his or her religious orbit – and the “born” dual belonger – someone who by birth, whether into a particularly mixed religious context or into a family of parents with different religious backgrounds, feels at home in more than one tradition. Focusing then on the born dual belonger, the author offers exemplary studies: the poet Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899–1976), who became dual, showing Muslim and Hindu cultural fluency because of his environmental context in early to mid-twentieth century Bengal, and the author herself, who grew up with a Christian mother and a father who had taken initiation into the Ramakrishna Order. The chapter closes by assessing what we can learn about dual belonging by focusing on the “born” cases.
