| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the AHR online. About 223 words from this article are provided below; about 537 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the American Historical Association, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time. AHA members can go to the AHA individual membership section to locate their member numbers.
If you are not a member of the American Historical Association, you can:: • Join the AHA and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the American Historical Review.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the American Historical Review (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the American Historical Review.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Gauri Viswanathan. Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1998. Pp. xx, 332. $17.95.

Gauri Viswanathan has offered an apologia for the intransigent role within modern society of religious belief. Her concern is with its "worldliness": its capacity to force the civil rights of minorities on to the agenda of the secular state. Belief, apparently, has little to do with doctrinal authority. Instead, it derives its power from its character as direct, unmediated reflection on experience in autonomy from the state's attempts to enforce on minorities consensual definitions of their identity. Viswanathan invests "dissent" with a manifest historical destiny not simply to contest ecclesiastical orthodoxies but also, more controversially, to "unbuckle the consolidating ambitions of the secular state" (pp. 47, 213). Dissent fulfils this role because it denies modernity's relegation of religion to the marginal private sphere, most noticeably so when dissenters have arrived at their position via the "oppositional gesture" (p. 50) of conversion. Viswanathan endeavors to combine into a single argument the status of the non-Anglican communities in nineteenth-century England and the debates in India precipitated by religious conversion, whether of a celebrated individual such as Pandita Ramabai or of entire communities, as in the 1901 Census's treatment of the Muslim population as being largely the result of conversion from Hinduism. . . .

There are about 537 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.