Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India

Peter van der Veer is a scholar of religion and anthropology, and this University of California Press monograph is his academic study of religious nationalism among Hindus and Muslims in India, examining how religious identity and nationalist politics have shaped each other. Its strength is that van der Veer combines historical and anthropological method to trace how communal religious identities were actively constructed through specific political and social processes rather than simply inherited unchanged from the past. Its limit is that the book addresses developments up to its 1994 publication, so a claim about more recent religious nationalist politics in India needs a more current source alongside this foundational study.