The Secular West: The Hindu and Protestant Connection
Marko Geslani
Part of our forum, Slandering the Sacred.
Barton Scott’s Slandering the Sacred is a work that offers a vital perspective on the widest and most urgent implications in Religious Studies. Several times during Slandering the Sacred, I was taken by the sense of reading a text like Tomoko Masuzawa's The Invention of World Religions. Scott’s work is equally momentous—in its ability to synthesize our present sense of the discourse of “religion,” and coeval—in its dogged continuation of postcolonial historicity. (This is of course the temporality of Edward Said, Gauri Vishwanathan, and Partha Chatterjee, among others.) Scott's words, aside from a pithy announcement of his project, might serve as manifesto for the study of religion:
To narrate the history of the modern West as though that history can be abstracted from empire is to misrecognize what “the West” was in the first place: a North Atlantic regional identity of presumptively universal significance, crafted from the remains of Latin Christendom through the medium of empire. Empire is the West’s ontological prior, the thing through which it came into being. The Whig-liberal narrative of blasphemous modernity cannot, however, make sense of secularism’s colonial entanglements because it is in itself a product of these entanglements—a historical artifact that needs explaining. (Scott)
Such a passage recalls an oft-cited quotation by Masuzawa:
The modern discourse on religion and religions was from the very beginning—that is to say, innately, if also ironically—a discourse of secularization; at the same time, it was clearly a discourse of othering. My suspicion…is that some deep symmetry and affinity obtain between these two wings of the religion discourse; that they conjointly enable this discourse to do the vital work of churning the stuff of Europe’s ever-expanding epistemic domain, and of forging from that ferment an enormous apparition: the essential identity of the West.
Both quotations attempt to triangulate the West, Empire, and Secularism. Scott adds needed historical specificity to Masuzawa’s epistemic intervention, refining the profile of her “enormous” Western “apparition” to its regional, Christian, and Whig-liberal parameters. This refinement stems from the sharp design of his project, an interdisciplinary cross section of the historical origins of Indian Penal Code 295A. This is the infamous law that landed, like a postcolonial boomerang, on the doorstep of religious studies in 2014, when Penguin India agreed to cease publication of Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History, as part of a private settlement in a response to a lawsuit, filed by Dinnath Batra of the Shiksha Bachao Andolan (Education Defense Campaign), charging Doniger with no less than five infractions of 295A in her text. In what is now becoming his characteristic style, Scott dissects the moment of this law’s genesis, taking in its cultural, political, and personal dimensions—and taking us from colony to metropole and back again. This is a project that wields legal theory, colonial history, postcolonial studies, affect theory, secularism studies, and Hindi print culture with stunning ambidexterity. Perhaps most crucially, Scott discloses just how Masuzawa’s “modern discourse on religion and religions”—when restored to its legal dimension—operated as a form of governmentality. This insight by itself makes good on the postcolonial promise that genealogical work on “religion” can create conditions for the worldly reorientation of our politics of knowledge—and not simply for the deconstruction of categories.
Among the multiple avenues of possible engagement with this text, it is Scott’s intellectual style—his contrapuntalism—that begs reflection on our part as scholars of religion. Contrapuntalism is the method championed by Edward Said, especially in Culture and Imperialism, as a way to appreciate the coloniality of English literature. It requires accounting for the contemporaneity of the projects of metropole and colony, colonialism and resistance, conquest and independence. Such an approach for Said would aim to capture the historical experience of empire that produced the imperial text, a feat that should destabilize our sense of cultural independence—not just provincializing but hybridizing the West. Scott is certainly not the only scholar of religion to adopt contrapuntalism (David Chidester comes to mind), but he must now be taken as one of its foremost innovators, especially in the study of South Asian religion—a subfield, it turns out, strategically situated for this purpose.
Since his first book, Spiritual Despots, Scott has methodically advanced the reading of the colonial-imperial archive of British India, what he calls “a major laboratory of secular modernity”. Slandering the Sacred reads the Indian penal code from this transcolonial perspective, arguing that “colonial secular law” is “the unseen infrastructure of ‘religious’ feeling.” Constitutional laws that seem to protect religious freedom in the metropole are implicated by governmental laws that manage religious populations in the colony. Liberal religious subjects imply policed religious groups. The sheer clarity of these formulations relays the fortitude of Scott’s method, the sharpness of his historical sense, and the symmetry of the archive thereby defined. Because (with Chatterjee) he takes the colonial case as paradigmatic, Thomas Macaulay’s Indian penal code vaults to the position of root text for modern secular law, and populist groups like the Arya Samaj become innovators in the use of the newly legalized “religious affect” for majoritarian politics—not just in the “province” of “South Asia” but for modernity writ large.
J. Barton Scott. Slandering the Sacred.
University of Chicago Press, 2023. pp. 272. $30 (paperback)
As a result Slandering the Sacred offers a model for the reconfiguration of our common disciplinary mission, a decisive shift to “connective” rather than “comparative” religion—to use an earlier formulation from Spiritual Despots. From Scott’s angle, Hinduism is not a religious tradition comparable to Christianity by virtue of its textuality, ritualism, or pietism, but an assemblage laboriously tied to it through the history of British imperialism. One might study Hinduism, then, not to modulate theoretical categories of the religious, but to comprehend how the conceptual apparatus of “religion” gained utility in the real time of global history. In other words, to persist in the study of religion in the postsecular age, one must study imperialism contrapuntally, that is, from its peripheries. This principle reiterates colonial South Asia as a primary locus for the postcolonial study of religion.
For students of religion in South Asia more generally the implications are manifold, and amount to a kind of second wind for our field. For one thing, the comparative (originary and orientalist) logic of discrete religious traditions loses cogency. Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Islam no longer seem commensurate terms, for we must account for their scalar difference in proportion to empire and majoritarian politics in the region. Hinduism, especially, seems to double as a religion in the conventional sense, and something else entirely. If, as Scott teaches us, Indian secularism is a marriage between Benthamite utilitarianism and Brahmanical Dharmaśāstra, then Hinduism is also the social and political thought of India’s caste majority, and a wellspring of Indian secularism. So when minority religious traditions engage “Hinduism,” they engage not only a discrete religious community but the infrastructure of the secular state.
Consider Scott’s description of a poem by the Congress Party Leader Sarojini Naidu:
What is more, Hinduism is not simply one of the religious particularities joined together by India as a secular nation. It is the aesthetic idiom of that joining. Mother India before whom our diverse children kneel certainly seems like a Hindu Goddess. The “evening prayer” is, despite its Islamic moniker, ultimately addressed to Narayana. This basic pattern recurs throughout Naidu’s poetry and oratory. She imagines India as a “temple,” extols the absorptive capacity of “Vedic culture,” and (in a letter to Jawaharlal Nehru) uses a Puranic metaphor to describe the search for Hindu-Muslim unity: “Let us go on churning the ocean till we do evolve some supreme gift of Harmony.” It does not follow that she was intentionally advancing some kind of Hindu agenda. Indeed, she tried sporadically to break away from Hindu metaphors…Still, her reliance on Hindu metaphor is recurrent and indicative. Naidu once, in 1911, described Hinduism as “the most exquisitely poetic and artistic religion in the world.” To the extent that she conflated the Hindu with the aesthetic and both with the production of “sympathy” as secularist feeling. Naidu was articulating an internally contradictory politics in which the very doubleness of the Hindu (as both religious particularity and generalized cultural substrate) worked to reinscribe Hinduism’s hegemonic centrality.
Like Protestantism in the history of Western secularism, Hinduism operates as secular frame and religious content, a situation that casts a different light on the monotheism-polytheism debates of the nineteenth century. When for instance Max Müller attempted to revise Vedic polytheism as heno or kathenotheism (serial monotheism), we can see now that he was translating not just between two theologies, but rather negotiating new commensurate species of secular power. Put differently, Scott demands, in a way that recalls Milinda Bannerjee’s The Mortal God, the question of the politicaltheology of Hinduism, a project that should reorient the fields of Indology and religious studies. How can these fields help to connect the rich historiography of the premodern Brahmanical state to the genesis of Indian secularism? What would it mean to reorient the study of Hinduism genealogically—not as a tradition animated by an authentic antiquity but as an assemblage wrought from an imperial modernity? Scott’s work helps us imagine the day that every student of first year Sanskrit arrived with a postcolonial education.
Second, Scott presents a new basis for contemplating the politics of Hindu studies. I would argue that this field has traditionally contributed to an image of Hinduism as exemplar of tolerance, an image that is as continuous with Indian secularism as it is available to U.S. based multiculturalism. At the same time, our field has expressed audible alarm at the global rise of “illiberal” Hindutva discourse. So, when we as scholars of US-based Hindu studies contest the Hindu right, do we not do so in the name of a Whig-Liberal principle of free speech, one which can neither account for itself nor dispense with imperial condescension? If so, our well-intentioned interventions on behalf of Dalits, Muslims, gender minorities, and Marxist intellectuals keep tripping on a colonial elephant.
Scott’s work helps us to see these dynamics more clearly than ever. But can scholars of South Asian studies use this new perspective to elaborate an alternative (contrapuntal) political stance? We might begin by unpacking Scott’s commentary to the Doniger affair. In particular, how should we interpret his claim, that when Dinnath Batra anachronistically described Doniger as “Christian,” he obfuscated India’s “imperial dependencies.” Does this refer to India’s inheritance of British colonial secularism or the neocolonial character of U.S.-India relations? The first interpretation would suggest that in his row with Doniger Batra reverted to the framework of Hindu-Christian culture clash in order to conceal India’s debt to British law—an outcome that leaves ironic at best the postcolonial tenor of his argument.
The second interpretation seems more urgent. On this account, Batra’s anachronistic missionary reference concealed the considerable sympathy that had emerged between India and the U.S. after 2000, a period that has witnessed an unprecedented rise in India-U.S. migration in conjunction with growth in the tech sector; a ten-fold increase in bilateral trade; and new heights of military cooperation. Batra’s attack on Doniger maximized the postcolonial (“post-missionary”) indignance of Hindus in the diaspora, reinforcing a vital political lobby. But it minimized reflection on these broader patterns of U.S.-Indian dependence—and most importantly, their coincidence with the War on Terror. If citations of ‘anti-Hindu’ discrimination in the U.S. must ultimately be assessed in light of state-sanctioned Islamophobia (and anti-Blackness), after Scott, should we also recognize the ways in which a defense of liberal secularism in the U.S. might still remain commensurate with a defense of “Hindu” secularism in India?
Marko Geslani is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of Rites of the God-King: Śānti and Ritual Change in Early Hinduism (Oxford University Press, 2018).
