Privileged Minorities: Syrian Christianity, Gender, and Minority Rights in Postcolonial India
The title of the book strikes its readers with a rather counter-intuitive choice of words. After all, ‘privileged’ and ‘minorities’ constitute a rather rare pairing. Through the examination of Kerala’s Syrian Catholic, or ‘Syro-Malabar’ Catholics in postcolonial India, Sonja Thomas undertakes the ta...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Univ.
2022
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| In: |
Nidān
Year: 2022, Volume: 7, Issue: 2, Pages: 96-105 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (kostenfrei) |
| Summary: | The title of the book strikes its readers with a rather counter-intuitive choice of words. After all, ‘privileged’ and ‘minorities’ constitute a rather rare pairing. Through the examination of Kerala’s Syrian Catholic, or ‘Syro-Malabar’ Catholics in postcolonial India, Sonja Thomas undertakes the task of deconstructing a rather conventional understanding of religious minorities as necessarily subaltern. (p. 15) In the context of India, the dismantling of the subordinate and vulnerable image of Indian Christians may be especially illuminating; Thomas investigates the privileged positions of this subset of Syrian Christians not solely through a ‘standard’ set of the boundaries of religion, race, gender, and class, but also within the constraints of the caste system. Through a detailed intersectional analysis of the aforementioned categories, Thomas draws an exhaustive picture of how the Syrian Christians, overcoming the impediments of numerical minority status, have negotiated themselves as a dominant community in the sociopolitical realities of postcolonial India. |
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| ISSN: | 2414-8636 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Nidān
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.58125/nidan.2022.2 |