The Outrage of Modernity: Loss of the Spiritual Self and the Rise of State Rule
Anand Vivek Taneja
Part of our forum, Slandering the Sacred.
Let us begin with a story.
The Englishman Thomas Coryate—who had walked from Jerusalem to Ajmer and Agra in India and who had had an audience with the Mughal emperor Jahangir—climbed up to a high place in a mosque, at the time of prayer, and gave a garbled Arabic version of the azan, which replaced the attestation of Muhammad’s prophethood with the attestation of Jesus being the son of God. Then he added, in the Hindi vernacular, that the Prophet Muhammad was a liar, just to make sure that no one gathered there would miss the point.
If you’re wondering about Coryate’s personal safety, that is not surprising.
Here we have a large collective of Muslims gathered for prayer, the utterance of a statement contrary to Muslim theology, and an insult to the Prophet. The scene is ripe for religious feelings to be outraged: a structure of feeling that—as J. Barton Scott’s Slandering the Sacred so wonderfully shows us—“the colonial state invited the colonized to inhabit as a legally actionable feeling,” through the legislation of Section 295 A of the Indian Penal Code. I bring up this moment to highlight, both anecdotally and conceptually, the difference that colonialism has made to religious life.
Nothing injurious happened to Thomas Coryate. The congregation ignored his antics as those of a madman.
How might we interpret the crowd’s ignoring of what, for us, and presumably for Coryate, was deliberately provocative religious speech? It would seem from the congregation’s response that in seventeenth century Mughal India, only a literal madman would insult the Prophet. Perhaps Coryate’s potentially insane inflammatory speech was its own defense. He was saved by popular tautology: if only someone devoid of reason would insult the Prophet, then insulting the Prophet is a sign of a loss of reason. Those who lack reason are not responsible for their actions, including speech-acts, and hence are outside the scope of judgement and punishment (or being taken seriously). How do we get from Coryate’s words being ignored—an exclusion from the sphere of ethics—to the Arya mode of polemics as ethics, where bellicose (polemikos) words were used to shape the character (ethos) of self and others?
In Slandering the Sacred, Scott astutely observes, “governmentality as modern political rationality proliferates lines of governance that crisscross “state” and “society” (resulting in a societalization of the state and statification of society), a governmental secularism cannot be adequately studied from the vantage of the state alone. Rather, one needs to ask how state power becomes salient from within society.” I could not agree more; however, I would like to return here to a through-line that Scott himself develops in Part 1 and Part 2 of the book: the governance of the individual self as being inextricably intertwined with the governance of the state and society.
Here I would like to think with both Mughal political theory and then with Scott’s provocative account of Macaulay’s governance of his own feelings through legislating the Indian Penal Code. What were the conditions in which Coryate’s provocations could be dismissed as the antics of a madman? Could we attribute this perhaps to the Mughal concept of sulh-i-kull, peace with all, articulated as a political philosophy in the court of the Emperor Akbar, the father of the emperor Jahangir, in whose reign this incident happened?
Sulh-i Kull has been understood as a political philosophy of tolerance for all—an openness to religious pluralism that many have seen as a precursor to the distinctiveness of “Indian Secularism.” However, as Rajeev Kinra shows, understanding sulh-i kull as only a philosophy of governance is to not understand it at all. Here I quote from the relevant passage from Kinra’s article on the history and historiography of Sulh-i kull:
This emphasis on the self, self-examination, and a kind of self-fashioning brings us to the third distinct sense in which Abu al-Fazl … uses the term sulh-i kull: namely, as an aspirational state of consciousness that the individual must strive to cultivate within him- or herself. In this sense, sulh-i kull was not a policy to be implemented, or even a philosophical basis for intellectual debate and dissent, but rather a state (or more precisely a stage) of being that one needed continually to work toward, and in fact ultimately transcend in order to achieve an even higher stage of consciousness. … other roughly contemporary sources speak of sulh-i kull as being, in fact, a lower station of spiritual attainment than "universal love" (muhabbat-i kull), because, while the former merely "constitutes a recognition of diversity and calls upon one to be benevolent to all," the latter actually transcends difference altogether and enters into a higher state of consciousness in which “only unity remains.” This privileging of love over sulh has an interesting parallel in the akhlaqi (ethics) tradition, specifically in the Akhlaq-i Nasiri, in which Nasir al-Din Tusi avers more than once that in the ideal society love (muhabbat) would be even more important than justice ('adl).
Sulh-i kull was not a policy to be implemented, but a state of being, and a (relatively low) stage of spiritual attainment. The harmonious governance of society arose from selves that worked upon themselves to cleanse themselves of religiously motivated rancor (t‘asub) or partiality whether it be in relationship to other Muslims or non-Muslims. It was such religious cultivation of the self that was integral to the functioning of a plural society. Going by normative texts of Mughal political theory as explored by Muzaffar Alam and others, Mughal government could be characterized first of all as self-government, if I could use that sense of Gandhian swa-raj in an anachronistic context. Those who would rule over the country and bring justice and order to it had first to rule themselves—not just in terms of following ethical rules, but in terms of personal spiritual cultivation, which went far beyond controlling one’s unruly desires or inherited prejudices. Mughal akhlaq texts, rather than codes of law, are full of ethical exhortations on self-mastery, like never giving a judgement in a state of anger, for example. As marvelously explored by Supriya Gandhi and others, the spiritual lives of Mughal emperors and princes show that the Mughal engagement with Hindu religious figures and Hindu texts—rather than a commitment to religious pluralism in the modern, secular sense— was a crucial part of imperial ethical self-fashioning: how to become jivanmukta (a soul liberated from the world while still alive in the world) and hence a truly enlightened ruler.
The notion of Sulh-I kull did not disappear with Aurangzeb, or with the formal end of the Mughal empire in 1857. It continued into nineteenth and twentieth century Urdu literature, where we find major figures in Indian Muslim cultural and religious life using the phrase as a shorthand for both social practices of promoting pluralism, as well as the spiritual self-cultivation necessary to embody the embrace of such pluralism. A fine example would be the famed Urdu and Persian poet Mirza Asadullah Khan “Ghalib” who died in 1869, a few years after the adoption of Macualay’s ’s Indian Penal Code as the law of the land:
āzāda-rau huñ aur mirā maslak hai sulh-e-kul hargiz kabhī kisī se adāvat nahīñ mujhe
I am free countenanced and my way is peace with all I never at any time have enmity with anyone
In a society which actively privileged the religious governance of the self and the removal of prejudice (or t‘asub) from the self as the sine qua non for governing society, Coryate was perhaps not surprisingly treated as a babbling madman—a soul more to be pitied than punished. But under the impact of colonial governance we see the shift from the self as the privileged site of governance, to the legislative and punitive powers of the state as being the site from which the unruly self and society were to be contained and reformed. We see this even in what Scott characterizes as the “lost law” for the Protection of the Prophets, the call for which emerged in the aftermath of the Rajpal judgement, and which Scott sees as “writing the ethos of interreligious respect into law,” and thus converting “a cultural norm into a legal one.” But the proposal of such a law is already a failure in terms of the normative project of Mughal governance, based on the Nasirean ethics alluded to in speaking of sulh-i kull. Contra Cornel West’s assertion that “Justice is what Love Looks like in Public”, Nasir-ud-Din Tusi insists that justice (and the law) is where you get to when the cultivation of selves able to love others has failed: “Justice (‘adl) leads to artificial union, whereas love (muhabbat) generates natural unity… the artificial comes after the natural, and thus it is obvious that the need for justice, which is the most accomplished human virtue, is because of the absence of love. If love among the people were available, justice would not have been needed.”
Nasir-ud-Din Tusi’s statement would seem to be complemented by Macaulay’s statement that the world would not require penal laws if men were virtuous. As Scott astutely observes, by "suggesting that the law regulates behavior where virtue fails to do so, Macaulay would seem to position law and virtue as distinct but complementary registers of governance. He thus understates the extent of their entanglement.” Scott shows us the true extent of their entanglement not just in reshaping Indian subjectivity, reforming manners to create a class of little Englishmen. “Second, and much less obviously, Macaulay addressed the code to his own virtue.” Scott shows us the connection between the “war on nature” that Macaulay saw himself as waging in incestuously loving his own sisters, and the Penal Code’s language of “unnatural lust”, revised in 1860 to “carnal intercourse against the order of nature”. Scott poses it as a question but I choose to read it as a statement: in laying down the law on Indian sexuality, Macaulay was laying down the law for himself. The colonial state and its penal code were meant for the governance of both self and society, an inversion of the Mughal order.
J. Barton Scott. Slandering the Sacred.
University of Chicago Press, 2023. pp. 272. $30 (paperback)
The return to Vedic and Vedantic texts as the basis for scriptural Hinduism, including for Arya Samajists, has roots in the Mughal translation movement as well as in colonial Indology. How do we understand then the particular belligerence of Arya rhetoric, so at odds with the Mughal ethic of sulh-i-kull? As Scott helps us to see, Arya Samaj rhetoric was not that particular in its turn to insult, for not only was it “as much in the tradition of Enlightenment raillery and Victorian freethought as of religious fundamentalisms,” the ability to insult, and to not be insulted in return, was in a sense constitutive of the colonial masculinity, and its hierarchical order. “Arya was a racializing term, structured by state imperatives such that only the speech of the colonized would qualify as excessive, pungent to the point of requiring policing.” I find particularly telling here Scott’s exploration of Justice Horace Avory’s reframing of blasphemy via personal defamation in the 1921 trial of John Gott. “you received by post some abominable libel upon yourself… is not the instinct of every man who is worthy of the name of a man—the instinct to thrash the man who has written a libel on him… (emphasis mine)”.
To be a man, in Avory’s reframing of blasphemy from a theological-political offence into a sentimental offence, is to feel ungovernable emotions. And then, it is to bring the penal authority of the state to bear on the one who has unmanned you, to regulate the one who has incited such ungovernable emotion in you through the force of the law. Like Macaulay unmanned by his own desires, the archetypical colonialist did not regulate his own interior landscape, but outsourced the work to the state, whose job was to prevent interior emotional disturbances through the external force of law. The upper lip was stiffened through state authority. Perhaps it is no surprise that, as the work of Margrit Pernau shows, in the 1870’s the reigning style of emotion in South Asia shifted from balance to fervor. Colonial modernity had definitively shifted the emotional landscape of masculinity and participation in public life.
In post-colonial South Asia, like in the colonial era, religious insult is hierarchical. Only the speech of the subaltern, or one who you wish to show beneath you, counts as cognizable offence. While reading this book I was constantly reminded of the following sh‘er by Akbar Allahabadi (1846-1921), one the most articulate public critics of colonial modernity in the 19th and 20th centuries:
Ham ah bhi lete hain to ho jate hain badnam Voh qatl bhi karte hain to charcha nahin hota
If we even sigh we are maligned Even if they commit a murder, no one talks about it
In the years of the Modi government I often hard stories from Muslim friends about insults to the Prophet, drawing upon the tropes and offensive language of Rangila Rasul—the Arya Samajist polemic against the Prophet Muhammad published in 1924 (the text at the heart of the Rajpal Affair and the legislation of Section 295A of the IPC)—which were casually bandied about in office cooler talk. It was this everydayness of insults to the Prophet, as constitutive of upper-caste Hindu empowerment in the Modi era, that led directly to Nupur Sharma, a Brahmin woman spokesperson for the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party to make similar remarks on television in 2022, where the recorded clip circulated through the internet and social media. The circulation of her insulting speech outside national boundaries brought it to the attention of governments in the Middle East, who India depends on for oil and remittances, so the Indian government was forced to apologize and disavow those remarks. Meanwhile the person who went to jail was Mohammed Zubair, the fact-checker who publicized Nupur Sharma’s comments. He was arrested under Section 295 A for outraging religious feelings.
Anand Vivek Taneja is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi (Stanford University Press, 2018).
