Civilizational modes of thinking—ideas that the world can be split up into “Civilizations,” including Euro-American or Western, Chinese, Latin American, African, Hindu, and Islamic—seem to be all too commonplace these days, both in the political realm and—frighteningly, for people who consider culture to be important—within the academy. One of the many problems with such thinking is that it assumes a primarily religious character for certain “civilizations,” most noticeably “Hindu” (for India) and “Islamic” (for the Middle East, Pakistan, Indonesia, and other majority Muslim nations). One’s religion, it is assumed, is one’s foundational identifying characteristic, and ideas of the self, personhood, identity, and the impetus for one’s actions are believed to come primarily out of religious sentiment.

Peter Gottschalk, in his excellent Beyond Hindu and Muslim: Multiple Identity in Narratives from Village India, finds this to be a problem in scholarship on South Asia. Specifically, he argues that “Western scholars of the Subcontinent rely too heavily on Hindu and Muslim as descriptive adjectives and analytic categories” (p. 3). Not only does this show up in the ways scholars conceptualize and write about individuals and groups in South Asia, but it is also reflected in conceptualizations of space, time, and history, which are often split up into a tripartite scheme: “Hindu,” “Muslim,” and (significantly) “Modern” (p. 29). In order to challenge such characterizations, Gottschalk, a historian of religion, has written a thoughtful ethnography—based on 14 months of fieldwork—which focuses on “a local demonstration of some alternative group identities available to individuals … identities that complement and compete with Hindu and Muslim” (p. 4) for residents of a constellation of villages in rural northern India.

Gottschalk highlights these alternative identities, including family, class, caste, gender, territory, and nation, through “group memories” reflected in narratives of past events, which become illuminative of present-day interests. Narratives include those regarding shrines to a Sufi and to a powerful Brahmin spirit, the foundational narratives regarding the village and those who reside there, and narratives of nation. Chapter 1, “Multiple Identities, Singular Representations,” is a critical overview of historiography in India, particularly regarding issues of religious identity and communalism. Chapter 2, “The Village Nexus,” introduces the reader to the villages included in the study, focusing on the importance of territory and place to many group identities. Chapter 3, “Identity, Narrative and Group Memory,” considers narrative and group memory using the theoretical work of Paul Ricoeur, Paul Connerton, and Maurice Halbwachs. Chapters 4 and 5, “Ocean of the Strands of Memory” and “Institutions of Integration and Disintegration,” illustrate how multiple constructions of the past create multiple identities in the present village and nation. There is also an intriguing appendix, which lays out, chapter by chapter, the Indian Standard II to Standard X Social Studies–History class texts.

Beyond Hindu and Muslim was a pleasure to read. Gottschalk’s prose is lucid yet fluid and reflects a rare sensitivity. I do have some quibbles, particularly regarding language. The languages in which Gottschalk conducts his research are primarily Hindi and Urdu, two intimately related and mutually intelligible languages that are, as he describes them, “at opposite ends of a spectrum of north Indian vernacular languages” (p. 31). Most speakers vary their linguistic choices—how “Hindi” or how “Urdu” they choose to speak—depending on many variables, including context and subject matter. Gottschalk takes considerable time and effort to discuss the intertwining of language, politics, and identity in India and what he calls the village “nexus.” He mentions, for example, that those identifying themselves as mother-tongue Hindustani speakers diminished by 99.99 percent between the 1951 and 1961 censuses (p. 31). Yet throughout his account, he identifies speakers by their self-professed mother tongue--going so far as to use different transliteration schemes (pp. xvii–xviii). Such a choice has Gottschalk falling into the trap he accuses others of doing, textually concretizing otherwise fluid (in this case linguistic) identities. The other quibbles regarding language are minor, relating to poor or incorrect translation in some places (he translates the Bhojpuri ham log as “we people,” rather than “we”; he speaks of Gandhi, the Father of the Nation, as rashtrapati (president) rather than rashtripita, and so on). But these are minor errors in an excellent work.

Gottschalk has provided a thoughtful and insightful book, which deserves the attention of all who study South Asia. What makes it particularly useful for an undergraduate classroom—besides the clear, unpretentious writing style—is the accompanying detailed website “A Virtual Village” (http://www.colleges.org/~village/), created by Gottschalk and Mathew N. Schmalz, which allows students to “roam” around the paths, walkways, and locales mentioned in the text, and to some degree to “interact” with residents.