Persistence of 'Folk Hinduism' in Malaysia and Singapore
Keywords:
Folk Hinduism, Malaysia, SingaporeAbstract
This article examines contemporary forms of religiosity prevalent among Hindu communities in the modern-nation states of Malaysia and Singapore, recently separated as such, but with a long shared socio-cultural and religious history. The theoretical concerns in this paper—rethinking such categories as ‘folk Hinduism’ and exploring the shape of Hinduism in the Diaspora—are grounded in the current religious lives of Tamil, Hindu migrants, whose ancestors were moved into British Malaya from the mid-nineteenth century to the early decades of the twentieth century, as part of a larger colonial initiative. Today their descendants in the region are conspicuous in staunchly adhering to a range of ‘traditional’ Hindu religious practices imported from India, even as this domain is invented. The paper is grounded in primary ethnographic data that allow a mapping of the current field of ‘folk Hinduism’ in these regions. The discussion also centers on broader questions about the significance and consequences of this attachment to, and preference for, ‘folk’ Hindu elements amongst urban-based, formally educated individuals who also self-define themselves as rational, modern and progressive Hindus.
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