Arya Dharm: Hindu Consciousness in 19th-Century Punjab

The major focus of this book is on modernising movements — social,religious and cultural — among Punjabi Hindus from the 186s through World War I. The Arya Samaj, one such movement, dominatesthe volume, as it dominated a half-century of change in the Punjab. Prof. Jones begins with an account of the earliest individualattempts of reformers to adapt their cultural traditions to the newworld of the British Empire. He examines the development of newideologies, the creation of group consciousness based on them, andthe resultant expression of an overt Hindu politics. Hedemonstrates that the process underlying cultural interactionbetween the British and Punjabi Hindus, beginning in aparticularistic manner, found expression by the twentieth centuryin the demands of a politicised Hindu elite. He also delineates thepattern of communal conflict among Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs andthe dynamics of the British Raj that contributed to this conflict. Existing historiography on modern South Asia generally deals witheither British imperial history or nationalist political history. Prof. Jones is concerned instead with religious, cultural,political and social developments within the world of South Asians. To illuminate them he draws on a wide range of sources: tracts,pamphlets, institutional records, unpublished manuscripts,government documents, periodicals, memoirs and autobiographies inHindi, Urdu, and English as well as materials in Sanskrit andPunjabi.