Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Indian Religions
Episode: Parna Sengupta, “Pedagogy for Religion: Missionary Education and the Fashioning of Hindus and Muslims in Bengal” (University of California Press, 2011)
Description: What is the relationship between religion, secularization, and education? Parna Sengupta, Associate Director of Introductory Studies at Stanford University, explores their connections as she reexamines the categories religion, empire, and modernity. In her new book, Pedagogy for Religion: Missionary Education and the Fashioning of Hindus and Muslims in Bengal (University of California Press, 2011), she challenges the myth that Western rule secularized non-Western societies. Pedagogy for Religion focuses on missionary schools and their influence in Bengal from roughly 1850 to the 1930s. Sengupta’s conclusions are drawn from reading what she calls the “mundane aspects of schooling,” rather than high religious discou...