Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Anthropology
Episode: Geetanjali Srikantan, "Identifying and Regulating Religion in India: Law, History and the Place of Worship" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
Description: Judicial debates on the regulation of religion in post-colonial India have been characterised by the inability of courts to identify religion as a governable phenomenon. Geetanjali Srikantan's book Identifying and Regulating Religion in India: Law, History and the Place of Worship (Cambridge UP, 2020) investigates the identification and regulation of religion through an intellectual history of law's creation of religion from the colonial to the post-colonial. Moving beyond conventional explanations on the failure of secularism and the secular state, it argues that the impasse in the legal regulation of religion lies in the methodologies and frameworks used by British colonial ad...