Anindita Chakrabarti
Anindita Chakrabarti is professor of sociology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Kanpur, India. Her research and teaching interests are in the fields of sociology of religion, economic sociology, and sociology of law (focusing on religion-based family law). She was awarded the Professor M. N. Srinivas Memorial Prize by the Indian Sociological Society in 2010. Her monograph, Faith and Social Movements: Religious Reform in Contemporary India (Cambridge University Press) was published in 2018 and a co-edited volume Religion and Secularities: Reconfiguring Islam in Contemporary India (Orient BlackSwan) was published in 2020. Her co-edited volume Gold in India is in press (Cambridge University Press).
Books
Cambridge University Press, 2018
How do we understand the multitude of faith movements in our post-secular world? Faith and Social Movements explores this question by analyzing the theology and practice as well as the transformation of two discrepant religious movements in contemporary India. The research opens up a conversation between the sociology of religion and social movements. Using a comparative lens, two different movements - a Hindu and an Islamic reform movement - have been studied in ethnographic detail. The book is divided into two parts. The first part dwells on Svadhyaya, a Hindu reform movement, and the second part on the Tablighi Jamaat, an Islamic reform movement. Focusing on the internal dynamics of these movements and the 'unintended consequences' of piety, the author argues that it is only by raising new questions vis-à-vis religion, secularity and civil society that their entanglement could be uncovered. This book aims to raise some of these questions.
Orient Blackswan, 2020
Religion and Secularities brings together a collection of essays focusing on the reconfiguration of Islam in the world’s largest democracy, India. Investigating the relationship between religion, civil society and the state, this volume explores the nation’s long history with Islam as well as the categorisation of Muslims as a minority community.
Based on ethnographic studies conducted in different regions of the country—from Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal to Karnataka and Kerala—this volume addresses the diverse issues of religious piety that include community activism and civic participation; disputes and debates around visitation to historic-religious sites; the changing contours of matrilineal practices in a Muslim community; and how Muslim women negotiate personal/Islamic law in a plural judicial landscape.
Latest Lectures
Recent Publications
ONGOING PROJECTS
Gold in India: Commodity, Culture, and Economic Circuits