ABSTRACT
A remarkable feature of popular religion in South Asia is thewidespread popularity of shared religious traditions whichbring together Hindus and Muslims, and in some cases Sikhs as well as Christians in common worship and ritual participation. These traditions are, by nature, ambiguous in terms of clearly defined communal categories, defying the logic of neatly separated and demarcated communities defined on the basis of a reified, scripturalist and essentialized understanding of religious identity (Gottschalk 2001). Faced with religious movements for ‘reform’, ‘orthodoxy’, such traditions have increasingly come under attack, as powerful organizations seek to redefine them. Increasingly, ‘fuzzy’ identities are being replaced by clearly demarcated boundaries, resulting in these traditions gradually being identified as unambiguously ‘Hindu’ or ‘Muslim’ or other as the case might be. While the origins of this process may be traced to colonial times, in particular to the introduction of the Census as a tool to map and categorize religious communities and to the politics of competing communalisms, it has, in the post-independence period received added impetus by the active intervention of communal organizations seeking to ‘purify’ these traditions and their followers
of what is seen as their tainted association with the religious beliefs and practices of other communities. In the process, many of these traditions have today emerged as arenas of sharp inter-communal contestation.
