Prophets, Polemics, and Parasitic Nationalism
Deonnie Moodie
Part of our forum, Slandering the Sacred.
In Slandering the Sacred, Barton J. Scott works backwards from a colonial India penal code, taking us into the concrete nineteenth-century world of insults and intimacy, disdain and devotion that produced modern laws governing words. The book is illuminating on several major points with implications across fields of study.
Scott's primary argument is that empire is the ground of the production of secularism and its uncanny twin, religion. It would be ludicrous to suggest that one could study secularism in India without reference to the colonial regime through which that category came to govern Indian life. But Scott argues that it would be equally ludicrous to study secularism in Britain or “the West” without reference to the colonies in general and India specifically. No one would think of doing the former, but people do the latter all the time. Scott shows us that nineteenth-century East India Company administrators found English law a mess of local customs and that they saw India as a chance for a “fresh start” to create a perfect, universal, secular law. In the construction of secularism, then, the colonial case was not on the periphery but in fact at the center. To study secularism without colonialism is to—in Scott’s words—“misrecognize what ‘the West’ was in the first place.” It was the medium of empire through which this North Atlantic regional identity came to be “the West” and through which the “presumptively universal” categories of religion and secularism come into being. Without empire, then, there is no “West” and there is no “secularism.”
In Scott’s first book, Spiritual Despots, he argues in parallel fashion that there is no liberal ideal of the self-ruling subject without the eighteenth and nineteenth-century critiques of priestcraft levied by both Europeans and Indians. From Protestant critiques of the Pope, to James Mill’s polemics of Hindu priests, to Gandhi’s self-denying asceticism, circulations of anti-priestcraft produced the ideal of the liberal subject that would not require external rule because she was capable of governing herself. For Mill, for example, Indians were not yet capable of that self-rule, which is why benevolent despotism was fitting; for Gandhi, Indians were fully capable of that which is why they did not require British rule. But both men are engaged in the same project of producing the self-governed individual. In both book projects then, reading Indian and British works “contrapuntally” highlights the ways that these conversations and the technologies of rule that emerged from them relied upon one another.
Religious Polemics and the Project of Modern Subject Formation
Thinking through Scott’s second book while reflecting on Scott’s first brought to light a very striking parallel. At the end of Slandering the Sacred, we encounter the religious polemics of the Arya Samaj and comparative prophetology that they and others are engaged in at the turn of the twentieth century. Scott argues very convincingly that such polemics are working to regulate affect – to restrict bodies according to a desired behavioral code. One of the ways Rangila Rasul was supposed to work, Scott shows us, was to demonstrate that the Arya Samaj cultivated a mode of restraint including—and especially—sexual restraint. Its leader Dayananda Saraswati was offered as the exemplar and juxtaposed to the prophet Muhammad whose sexual profligacy was evident (so they said) in the fact that he had many wives. (Here Scott draws this incredibly productive parallel between (1) the polemical text of the Rangila Rasul and (2) section 295A as both being in the business of regulating Indian bodies. (Pandit Chamupati and Thomas Babington Macaulay are strange bedfellows in this task in much the same way that James Mill and Gandhi are strange bedfellows in the first book.)
So, in Slandering the Sacred, we see religious polemics against prophets working to produce the self-governed individual. In Spiritual Despots, we see polemics against popes, priests, and gurus as working to produce the self-governed individual. I want to think more about this parallel. What is it about living and dead so-framed “sacred” or “religious” figures that derision of them produces these configurations of modernity Scott points to? Or, perhaps we should put the question conversely. What is it about modern subjectivity that makes derision of others— especially here other peoples’ sacred figures—central to projects of self-making? There is a fetishization of the individual that both liberalism and capitalism produce and support as W.C. Smith has argued and as Scott points to. Might we also, then, infer from Scott’s work an argument that the colonial production of secularism—that is, the production of religion as a distinct sphere of life (one that is special even if it isn’t “true”)—fetishizes the individual prophet or priest as much as the individual Hindu, Muslim, or Christian who is deeply tied to such figures?
Affect and Textual Production
Slandering the Sacred wonderfully demonstrates the ways that the boring, flimsy materiality of written works produces affect—from lust to disgust, from pleasure to outrage—and through biography and polemics as much as through law and scholarly writing. Scott flips the script and ask how affect produces written works. Drawing on biographies of the colonial administrator Thomas Babington Macaulay who first drafted the Penal Code in 1837 that formed the basis for Section 295A, Scott demonstrates that his manly self-possessed exterior hid an internal affect of depression, self-isolation, and debilitation that was fueled in great part by his incestuous love for his two youngest sisters. He called this his “war on nature” and, in private letters to his sisters, he asked them to keep it a secret. Meanwhile, he channeled his erotic energies into the reading of Roman and Greek classics for hours each day, and engaging in profuse “graphomania.” Scott argues in turn that the Penal Code was as much about Macaulay governing his own affect as about governing anyone else’s. And if I am reading Scott correctly, he is arguing that it’s not the lust itself that produces this desire to govern himself, but the fact that he was compelled to keep it a secret. The operative affect, then, is not lust but shame (or some kind of self-censure).
Macauley is the British administrator that we all love to hate. It seems every time I am in India, someone will regale me with condemnations of this man as well as anyone who suffers from what they dub “Macauley Syndrome.” By this, they mean Indians who are ashamed of their own culture—those a little too enamored with their own English education and love of Shakespeare as opposed to Kalidasa or someone else. Among the so many British administrators one could choose from, Macaulay seems to epitomize the racist arrogance of the colonial regime. (I do wonder whether some of the venom saved for Macauley in particular has to do with his denouncement of the elite and hieratic Sanskrit language. If it does, then that line of critique has its own problematic trajectories. But that’s a topic for another book). Scott frames the recovery of Macaulay’s affective life as a feminist project—one that recognizes that the embodied and gendered life worlds of writers effect what they choose to write about, and how they choose to do so. In this work on affect, Scott joins scholars like Lisa Lowe, Ann Laura Stoler as well as SherAli Tareen who have argued that empire is steeped in intimacy and affect. I wonder, what are the limits of this as a feminist project? Can scholars make these jumps from the affective life of someone else to the things they do? There is certainly scholarly precedent for this approach. And yet Macaulay’s private thoughts were presumably multitudinous and mostly completely unknown to us – and probably even to him. I wonder, in drawing the particular connection Scott does, do we risk either projecting onto him or psychologizing him? And in doing so, what interpretive possibilities do we obscure? As an example, if we were going to attribute affect to Macaulay’s production of the Penal Code, why not think about fear? Here’s this tiny minority of British traders and administrators in a territory not their own and among people they feared may rebel at any moment – fears that came to life in 1857. Would not such a fear be just as operative in the creation of a penal code, if not more operative, than shame? Scott does mention fear elsewhere in the book, but he does not dedicate an entire chapter to this affect as he does to shame. I hope it’s clear I am not trying to save Macaulay. He does not need saving. My concern is about the limits of this methodological move.
J. Barton Scott. Slandering the Sacred.
University of Chicago Press, 2023. pp. 272. $30 (paperback)
The American Afterlives of Colonial Secularism
Finally, I want to take up the provocation Scott provides in his conclusion to think about the American afterlives of this colonial secularism. Here, I want to point out a very concrete way that Scott’s work on nineteenth-century colonialism has reshaped my own project on twenty-first century business schools. I share it in the hopes it might inspire others to deploy Scott’s insights in similarly unexpected and fruitful ways.
Scott writes about the ways that Hindu nationalism has “become increasingly parasitic on US empire as a globalized economic formation” in the twenty-first century. Scott points to outrage spread via American media platforms like Twitter and Facebook; the circulation of finances through Silicon Valley that back Hindu nationalist projects; and the American-style business gurus who tout Hinduism as pop psychology. In other words, one of the afterlives of colonial secularism is American support of the religious feelings that Section 295A produces as it governs.
Many would—and have—argued that this outrage and these circulatory systems have only intensified over the past three decades. The Structural Adjustment Program imposed on India in 1991 as a condition of the nation’s acceptance of a World Bank loan takes as its foundation the Washington Consensus of deregulation, liberalization, and privatization. This very purposefully pulled India deeper into economic ties with the United States. And, in recent years, the Hindu Nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP] has come to champion and further exactly these policies. As an example, the BJP loosened restrictions on Foreign Direct Investment such that American-owned Amazon, Walmart, and 7-11 now take their place in the landscape alongside Google and Microsoft. Opportunities for the rich make for great posterchildren of Indian economic progress, but they deepen inequalities and resentments in India as they do in America, and fuel defenses of the purity of Indian culture. Defenses that are always, now, filtered through the colonial history of Orientalism and Hindu nationalism.
My current book project is focused on the “beforelives” of Hindu and neoliberal entanglements. I trace a genealogy of the American-style business gurus Scott talks about who produce Hindu modes of management from the authoritative site of the business school. I’ve started to write about the ways those modes push back against American formulations of management that are touted as scientific and universal and are dominant in Indian business schools because those business schools were founded precisely on the American model in the 1960s. When newly-independent India sought to create institutions to produce a new class of scientific and rational manager, it was to Harvard and MIT the state looked. Management knowledge produced in India ever since has been constituted by a push and pull with that American dominance. Meanwhile, American management faculty take up the spirituality produced in Indian business schools as proof of the universality of their own formulations. Mainstream management knowledge is now locked in this reinforcing feedback loop.
That circulation is interesting, and one could stop there. But when one looks back further than that – as Scott’s work has encouraged me to do—one sees that in fact ideas about India were central to the creation of business schools in the United States. The very earliest of those schools, founded in the 1880s and 1890s, had political economists as their deans and faculty members. Upon reading their economic writings and textbooks, I see they were all citing the English thinkers Scott writes about here—James and John Stuart Mill, David Ricardo, and Jeremy Bentham, for example—all of whom were very much thinking about political economy in terms of the colonies. This is to say that the American business school form that circulates to India in the 1960s and is still being negotiated today was founded on exactly the interlocutions about good Christian civilized citizens and uncivilized Indian subjects in need of self-control that Scott outlines in this book.
Scott's work compels me to draw attention to these interlocutions and to name my stakes as I do so. As Marko Geslani (a fellow forum contributor) has so provocatively pointed out, the field of Hindu Studies has yet to come to terms with the role it has played in creating and amplifying elitist understandings of Hinduism that have given Hindu-Americans a religion to be proud of, and Christian-Americans a religion they can relate to (“A Model Minority Religion: The Race of Hindu Studies,” unpublished paper presented at the 2023 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion). It is these formulations that have made it so easy for Hindu business gurus to produce sectarian modes of management that uphold neoliberal regimes and that Americans can recapture and claim as their own. To be in the field of Hindu Studies and to be equipped with this knowledge is to be compelled to produce not one more understanding of Hinduism, but instead, a genealogy that reveals the ways U.S. empire and its knowledge regimes are implicated in creating the cultural chauvinisms we most condemn.
Deonnie Moodie is Associate Professor of South Asian Religions at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of The Making of a Modern Temple and a Hindu City: Kālīghāṭ and Kolkata (Oxford University Press. 2018).
