Understanding the Religious Worlds of the Subalterns: An Analysis of Syncretic Culture in Bengal

Abstract

Debates on multiculturalism in the Western democracies have often fuelled discussions of minority history. After the Second World War, writing of history has increasingly become entangled with the so-called ‘politics’ and production of ‘identity’. Therefore, necessity often arises in all democracies to include in the history of the nation, histories of the indigenous and the ethnic groups who had been previously left out from it. In the 1970s, such studies came to be known as ‘history from below’. Among other things, such studies have also focussed on the belief patterns of the indigenous groups, who have been recently referred to as ‘subalterns.