Hospitality and Hostility in Colonial South Asia
Elaine Fisher
Part of Perilous Intimacies: A Forum
As with SherAli Tareen’s previous publications, Perilous Intimacies is a model for boundary-crossing and theoretically informed scholarship for those working in any discipline, South Asia or otherwise. As the title cleverly suggests, Perilous Intimacies is oriented around the vexed concept of hospitality in early modern and colonial-period South Asian religious encounters. Building on Derrida’s invocation of the polyvalence of the Latin hostis, the root of both hospitality and hostility, Tareen uncovers how traditionally educated Muslim theologians tested the limits of interreligious hospitality toward the Hindu other following the decline of the Mughal Empire and the rise of British colonialism—in other words, in an age of waning Muslim sovereignty. Indeed, as Tareen suggest through the similar polyvalence of the Arabic wilaya and wali, both of which fuse resonances of intimacy and sovereignty, the notion of hospitality to the religious other and the limits of Muslim sovereignty at this pivotal moment were intimately intertwined.
There is much here of fundamental concern to any who seek to narrate the South Asian past and its inheritances in the present day. Tareen deserves particular commendation for the caution he takes to avoid reifying the many binaries we take for granted in our scholarship: religion vs. the secular, traditionalism vs. modernism, tolerance and intolerance. What we find in the archive is indeed usually far messier and more complex. Although Perilous Intimacies covers extensive theoretical and textual terrain—far more than expected from a single monograph—I will focus on two key themes of comparative relevance. I first examine how Tareen breaks new ground in conceptualizing interreligious encounter in South Asia through the lens of translation theory, developed at length in his first chapter. And second, I explore a theme that runs throughout many of the case studies, namely, Tareen’s careful and thought-provoking navigation of the religion/secularism binary, and the place of the very category of the secular within the story he sets out to tell.
The first chapter of Perilous Intimacies, “Translating the ‘Other’: Early Modern Muslim Understandings of Hinduism,” in Tareen’s own words, “examines the theme of interreligious translation in the context of early modern India.” The chapter is prefaced by a meticulous engagement with recent scholarship on Hindu-Muslim translation enterprises and intellectual encounters, making it an especially valuable resource for classroom pedagogy on interreligious dialogue and encounter. In surveying this material, Tareen rightly notes that Hindu-Muslim encounters have primarily been approached through the fusing of Sufi and Yogic religious cultures and through the lens of literary translations, but not through an analysis of Islamic juridical writings on interreligious accommodation. Thus, once again taking his cue from Derrida, who defines translation as “the condition of all hospitality,” Tareen sets out to rectify this gap through the pontifications of the eighteenth-century Muslim scholar Mirza Mazhar Jan-i Janan (d. 1781) as preserved in an intriguing letter to one of his students in Persian, in which he confronts head on the significance of Hindu thought and practice for Muslims in the age of waning sovereignty. Through a close reading of this document, he contends that Jan-i Janan’s approach to Hindu thought was founded upon a sort of epistemic hospitality, interpreting certain strands within what we now call Hinduism as a genuine form of monotheism, a religious path that had been pleasing to God prior to the advent of Islam. For instance, Jan-i Janan takes pains to interpret charitably the usually insoluble problem of idol worship, choosing instead to draw connections with the practice of Sufis meditating upon images of their masters, and likewise boldly asserts that belief in transmigration is not sufficient to be charged with unbelief. And yet, throughout, Jan-i Janan was careful to couch his epistemic hospitality through categories that left no ambiguity as to the primacy of Islamic theological categories as the standards for evaluation.
In this chapter, which frames the monograph as a whole within a broader theoretical and historical context, Tareen not only provides us with fresh empirical data on Hindu-Muslim encounters but also juxtaposes this textual analysis with productive engagement with several of the leading voices in translation theory. For instance, he aptly represents Jan-i Janan’s conceptual project through the lens of what Lawrence Venuti has described as a “domesticating” approach to translation, or what Fredrich Schleiermacher has referred to as “naturalizing” translation—that is, a translation project that aims to bring the foreign target as close as possible to the conceptual domain of the ideal reader. In doing so, Tareen broadens our toolbox for understanding the conceptual mechanics of what happens in Hindu-Muslim discursive encounters. He cites with approbation Tony Stewart’s famous model of forging equivalence between terms of Persianate and Sanskritic origin, while still venturing to offer perspectives that exceed the boundaries of this perennial classic in the field.
But at the same time, the move to define translation as Tareen does, following Derrida, leaves me with as many questions as answers—in particular, concerning the very use of the term translation in the first place for the type of intellectual labor Jan-i Janan is engaged. Derrida’s definition, “the condition of all hospitality,” is conceptually generative but at the same time quite deliberately deemphasizes the sort of multilingual textual work indicated by the typical lexical definition of “translation”—that is, the transposition or transcreation of a particular linguistic product in a source language into a second target language. That is, in his correspondence to his student, Jan-i Janan was not “translating” anything in the typical sense of the term, although, as Tareen argues, “it is obvious that he set out to translate and describe what he considered as an elaborate and systematic tradition with a defined theology, doctrinal apparatus, and set of normative practices.” Likewise, Tareen frequently refers to Jan-i Janan’s “translation of Hindu thought and practice” or his “translation project.” Undoubtedly, translation as a conceptual metaphor for religious encounter has substantial precedent in the field, and remains a generative nexus for emerging scholarship. But for this sort of “translation,” to shift something we might call Hinduism closer to the conceptual lens of Jan-i Janan’s Islam, my question remains: what does language really have to do with anything at all?
I appreciate the impulse to broaden our view of the intellectual work underlying translation beyond simple textual replication, and yet, I also wonder in what ways Jan-i Janan’s project was actually dependent upon prior acts of linguistic transposition. As a particularly poignant example, Tareen suggests that in searching for a Hindu doctrinal framework translatable to his vision of Islam, Jan-i Janan reaches not only for Hindu law as represented by the scholastic discipline of Dharmaśāstra, but a specific text—namely, the Mānavadharmaśāstra or The Laws of Manu, a Sanskrit work, dating perhaps to the third or fourth century of the Common Era, that has come to function as a metonymy for caste-based injustice. Here, some problems remain: does Jan-i Janan mention Manu explicitly by name, or is Tareen inferring that this text is his intended referent? If Jan-i Janan does specifically have Manu in mind, how precisely did he absorb its contents, as he did not read Sanskrit? Could he conceivably have gained access to an intermediary Persian rendering produced to facilitate the infamous English translation of William Jones published in 1796? And if not, on either count, we would nevertheless be forced to posit an interreligious and multilingual discursive milieu in which Jan-i Janan conversed, possibly through intermediaries, with brāhmaṇical and colonial voices also deeply invested in choices about how to narrate the place of Hindu law in South Asian history. In other words, I am sensing a deeper level of cross-linguistic translation beneath the surface of Jan-i Janan’s conceptual translation, and one with further interesting stories to tell about the shifting relationships of religion and law at the onset of colonial modernity.
Another central theme of Perilous Intimacies, woven across multiple chapters and several distinct moments of encounter, is the question of the very nature of the category of religion, and its implicit binary pairing with its purported opposite, secularism. Tareen strikes an admirable balance in this monograph in his use of these contested and indeed historically contingent categories. For instance, he carefully notes that in engaging in an act of interreligious translation, Jan-i Janan nowhere assigns a name to Hinduism as a unified religion, and remains ambivalent about even deploying a term such as din that could stand in comparatively for “religion” in the contemporary Western sense of the term. Indeed, the category “Hinduism” itself remained very much in flux in the centuries in question, as Tareen makes clear in his provisional and heuristic use of this contested term. In the same spirit, he admirably questions our implicit binary between “religion” and “the secular.” Especially worthy of note is that he is quite careful to qualify just about every use of the term “secular” that appears in the monograph, restricting its valence to the modern secular state or colonial modernity. Thus, Tareen quite rightly notes that our normative ideas of the secular and secularization as a historical process are inextricably bound up with Western modernity and the modern Western nation state.
On one hand, this move speaks of an admirable caution to avoid universalizing the European conceptual repertoire exported across the globe during the colonial era. But on the other hand, by restricting the question of the “secular” to the colonial domain, Tareen perhaps inadvertently posits a moment of epistemic rupture, irrevocably separating the knowledge systems of precolonial and colonial South Asia. I expect Tareen would resist this unwanted implication; indeed, ironically, as he asserts in his introduction, he aims precisely to circumvent the “problem space” of rupture vs. continuity, which, in his words, is “animated by the question of whether the event of British colonialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries constituted a major rupture or an underlying continuity in the religious and political imaginaries of indigenous society.” By avoiding the tired rhetoric of rupture, Tareen tells us, we might “shift the camera of analysis” away from the agents of domination to recenter emic moments of encounter outside of the purview of the colonial state. In this latter goal, Tareen succeeds admirably. My question remains, however: to what extent does decentering the colonial state actually obviate questions of what epistemic ruptures might have accompanied the onset of modernity, South Asian or otherwise?
To credit rupture exclusively to colonial influence may amount to rendering modernity itself exclusively a European affair, with South Asia left adrift in a timeless premodernity. I would suggest, rather, that Tareen’s insightful analysis provides us with a rich archive for locating emic dynamics of rupture and continuity, potentially indebted to foreign influence but also emerging organically from what recent scholarship has attempted to reconstruct as the distinctively South Asian experience of early modernity.
In short, the “problem space”—to borrow Tareen’s phrase—of religion and publicity need not be collapsed exclusively into a European vision of the secular nation state. In some cases, Tareen’s archive does suggest a Western logic of liberal secularism being imposed—albeit through the medium of emic debate—onto the South Asian religious landscape. Take, for instance, the Shahjahanpur polemic, a late nineteenth-century public spectacle that served to underpin the reification of interreligious boundaries. In this tripartite interreligious polemic, we find the chapter’s protagonist, Muhammad Qasim Nanautvi, vying with Dayānand Sarasvatī and Father Knowles, a Christian priest from a Methodist-Episcopal mission, each attempting to establish the supremacy of their own religion. Of course, interreligious debate is nothing new to South Asia by the nineteenth century, and yet, as Tareen convincingly argues, the Shahjahanpur polemic framed religion as a universally translatable category, made universally accessible to rational inquiry, its exercise in public space now subject to regulation by the liberal secular state apparatus of colonial modernity. In contrast, other moments in Perilous Intimacies speak to substantial continuities with the conversations of previous centuries. I am struck, for instance, by debates among Muslim theologians concerning imitation, or tashabbuh—in short, the fuzzy lines concerning how, when, and to what extent Muslims were permitted to adopt the embodied signifiers, such as modes of dress and other symbols, customary among other religious communities. The conversations in question took place in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, but, I wonder, how disruptive or innovative was this concern with tashabbuh at this particular moment in time? Comparatively speaking, many early modern Hindu communities had already begun expressing heightened anxieties about the demarcation of religious belonging in public space, and had taken steps to regulate the religious embodiment of practitioners in response.
In other words, I suggest, the evidence Tareen unpacks in Perilous Intimacies opens up further opportunity for comparative work on the relationship between religion and publicity in South Asian religions. Such projects have been undertaken in their own siloed domains; I am reminded in particular of how Sheldon Pollock’s Sanskrit Knowledge Systems project has drawn our attention to precolonial moments of rupture that speak to an emic experience of early modernity. In a similar vein, reflecting on the questions Tareen has posed can allow us to further think synthetically, across the boundaries of language, region, and tradition, about transformations in what we call “religion” interfaced with politics, society, and public space at the twilight of early modernity and throughout colonial rule. South Asian Studies across subfields has yet to reflect more synthetically on what transformations in public space and public discourse may have come to inflect both Hindu (Śaiva, Vaiṣṇava, etc.), Muslim, and other religious communities prior to and during colonial modernity. By pursuing this sort of boundary-crossing inquiry, we might come to better articulate how precolonial religious dynamics directly informed the distinctly South Asian forms of secularism that emerged over the course of the twentieth century. Such answers indeed promise to bear fruit for precisely the sort of scholarship Tareen calls for in the final sentence of Perilous Intimacies—namely, a project to “[imagine] a horizon of interreligious and Hindu-Muslim friendship that is not imperiled by pathological inheritances of imperial political theologies, nor leavened by the seductive yet frequently sour promises of modern secular power and state sovereignty.”
Elaine Fisher is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University and the author of Hindu Pluralism: Religion and the Public Sphere in Early Modern South Asia (University of California Press, 2017). Her research has been supported by the Hellman Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and by a USIEF Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship.
