Studies in religion and the everyday Farhana Ibrahim.

"The emergence of religion as a category that was distinct from other aspects of social life -such as politics, law, economics, science-is the product of a particular moment in history. 'Religion' in this mode of reckoning is coeval with modernity and the rise of the modern west. Thus, religion as an analytically distinct category (one that has its own 'essence' regardless of other vicissitudes of life) comes into simultaneous existence with the formulation of modern science in Europe. Colonialism enabled the spread of this idea and way of apprehending the world to have far-reaching consequences for the way subject populations in turn were to also come to think of religion. Thus, the conjunction of these historical patterns led to the universalization of this particular definition of religion. India's encounter with colonialism not only marked its engagement with modernity, it also inaugurated an epistemic stance that defined it historically and culturally. Part of the colonial anthropological enterprise consisted of a search for modernity's past: the 'other' of the enlightenment subject"--