Dissentiments

'Dissentiments is a model for collective inquiry in the social sciences and a remarkable contribution to the study of non-religion. With meticulous rigor and unusual ethnographic access, the book's five authors, writing in a single voice, analyze the sometimes dire consequences of being perceived as irreligious in South Asia. By focusing on affect, especially collective feelings, they provide future researchers with portable concepts to investigate any context in which non-religious people are a persecuted minority. Dissentiments is also a needed corrective to scholarship that has downplayed the real dangers that freethinkers face in South Asia and other regions throughout the world.' Joseph Blankholm, University of California, Santa Barbara
'Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork across South Asia, Sweden and the Netherlands, Dissentiments offers a unique encounter with 'non-believers' – a hitherto misunderstood, often maligned population which has been at the receiving end of both state and non-state violence in recent years. A major contribution to the study of (non-)religious identification in South Asia and beyond, this is also a gripping account of the trials and tribulations faced by irreligious dissenters when religious norms and sentiments come to set the terms of public debate.' Laurent Gayer, CNRS Senior Research Professor at CERI-Sciences Po, Paris
'Dissentiments is a sophisticated and thorough examination of a phenomenon that often falls outside scholarly analysis of public life across South Asia: the precarious, and shrinking, space for critiques of religious sentiments and advocacy of 'free thinking' – a tradition that has deep roots across South Asia. Writing as a collective, the authors situate their five remarkable ethnographic studies from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan in thoughtful reflections on the changing public spheres and political climates across South Asia. A must read for anyone interested in public life, politics and religion in South Asia.' Thomas Blom Hansen, Professor of Anthropology, Stanford University
This is a deeply sensitive and erudite account of how a spate of 'non-religious' individuals in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and those seeking asylum in Europe, strive to survive against a background of rising surveillance and draconian laws that are enforced arbitrarily. The authors analyze the long afterlives of tragedies – of assassinations and threats against rationalists in Maharashtra, Tarksheel activists in Indian Punjab, freethinkers in Pakistan, bloggers in Bangladesh – and reckon with the grave historical and contemporary challenges against which these groups have had to continually adapt. The authors' nuanced reading of 'graduated silences' is an important contribution to our understanding of how and when people qualify their dissent to face another tomorrow. A profoundly moving work of scholarship. Neeti Nair, University of Virginia