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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 January 2019
The three reflections joined together in this essay develop a notion of “the sociality of secularism”—a phrase that gestures to how secularism structures the social field, becoming an intimate part of the practice of self for subjects who are always inextricably intertwined with others in a network of connectedness that is central to what it means to be worldly. The first reflection, by following the English word priestcraft to colonial India, delineates a mode of Enlightenment focused on persons not ideas. The second asks how the secularist division between the public and the private relegated religion to the feminized domestic sphere. The third argues that postcolonial ethics has, from its inception, presented the self as inherently social. A substantial conclusion unites these threads by asking how religio-political writing from colonial India can reframe contemporary debates about the place of the “free” subject in the global political order.
I would like to thank Ato Quayson for inviting me to write this piece, Nada Moumtaz for helping me to frame it, Yurou Zhong for reading an earlier draft, and Kajri Jain, Malavika Kasturi, Ruth Marshall, Srilata Raman, Deonnie Moodie, Andrew Kunze, Kirtan Patel, Jack Hawley, Ananda Abeysekera, and Brian Hatcher for their generous responses to Spiritual Despots in writing and in person—responses that helped me to clarify the project of the book in ways that I hope are reflected in this essay.
1 For the publication history of Hind Swaraj, see Hofmeyr, Isbael, Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .
2 For a classic argument as to liberalism’s complicity with empire, see Mehta, Uday Singh, Liberalism and Empire (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999)Google Scholar . For a complication of that argument, see for example Mantena, Karuna, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .
3 Macpherson, C. B., The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Don Mills, Ontario, Canada: Oxford University Press, 2001 [1962])Google Scholar . This ideal, of course, needs to be carefully historicized and in some cases rethought, as happens in Hadley, Elaine, Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar . For a survey of Indian efforts to reterritorialize liberalism, see Bayly, C. A., Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .
4 In this, they departed starkly from an earlier generation, for whom to become “free” was to become more like the English, as I discuss further in J. Barton Scott, “Translated Liberties: Karsandas Mulji’s Travels in England and the Anthropology of the Victorian Self,” Modern Intellectual History, forthcoming (available online at https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479244317000579).
5 See Kapila, Shruti, “Self, Spencer and Swaraj: Nationalist Thought and Critiques of Liberalism, 1890-1920,” Modern Intellectual History 4.1 (2007): 109–127 CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Majeed, Javed, Autobiography, Travel, and Postnational Identity: Gandhi, Nehru, and Iqbal (New York: Palgrave, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Vajpeiyi, Ananya, The Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; and Elam, J. Daniel, “Echoes of Ghadr: Lala Har Dayal and the Time of Anticolonialism,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 34.1 (2014): 9–23 Google Scholar . This Indian archive should not be studied in isolation, however. As Kapila and Majeed both suggest, the literature on anticolonial selfhood that assumed full form between around the 1910s and the 1940s was part of a transnational cultural moment that included such global intellectual movements as psychoanalysis and literary modernism.
6 Scott, J. Barton, Spiritual Despots: Modern Hinduism and the Genealogies of Self-Rule (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .
7 See Gluck, Carol and Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, eds., Words in Motion: Toward a Global Lexicon (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .
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14 Marx, Karl, “Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” in The Marx-Engels Reader 2e, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978)Google Scholar .
15 For a more recent iteration of this classically nineteenth-century narrative, see Gauchet, Marcel, The Disenchantment of the World, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999)Google Scholar .
16 Mahmood, Saba, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 22 Google Scholar .
17 Aravamudan, Srinivas, Guru English: South Asian Religion in a Cosmopolitan Language (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005)Google Scholar ; Aravamudan, Srinivas, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999)Google Scholar .
18 See, for example, Schmidt, Leigh Eric, Hearing Thing: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002)Google Scholar ; Walker, David, “The Humbug in American Religion,” Religion and American Culture 23.1 (2013): 30–74 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .
19 Derrida, Jacques, “Faith and Knowledge: Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar, trans. Samuel Weber (New York: Routledge, 2002), 40–101 Google Scholar .
20 Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2007)Google Scholar .
21 Mahmood, Saba, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject 2e (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011)Google Scholar ; Curtis, Finbarr, The Production of American Religious Freedom (New York: NYU Press, 2016), 7–20 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .
22 Scott, Joan Wallach, Sex and Secularism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 4 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .
23 Ibid., 13.
24 Chatterjee, Partha, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993)Google Scholar ; Sinha, Mrinalini, Colonial Masculinity (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1995)Google Scholar . For a fuller consideration of affect in reform Hinduism, see Scott, J. Barton, “A Commonwealth of Affection,” in Constructing Nineteenth-Century Religion: Literary, Historical, and Religious Studies in Dialogue, eds. Joshua King and Winter Jade Werner (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, forthcoming in 2019)Google Scholar .
25 Scott, Sex and Secularism, 38–39.
26 Griffin, Susan M., Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)Google Scholar .
27 See Sarkar, Tanika, “Talking about Scandals: Religion, Law and Love in Late Nineteenth-Century Bengal,” in Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion, and Cultural Nationalism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), 53–94 Google Scholar ; Thakkar, Usha, “Puppets on the Periphery: Women and Social Reform in 19th Century Gujarati Society,” Economic and Political Weekly 32.1–2 (1997): 46–58 Google Scholar ; Shodhan, Amrita, “Women in the Maharaja Libel Case: A Re-examination,” Indian Journal of Gender Studies 4.2 (1997): 123–139 Google Scholar ; Scott, Spiritual Despots, 119–49.
28 Devji, Faisal, “Gender and the Politics of Space: The Movement for Women’s Reform in Muslim India, 1857–1900,” South Asia: The Journal of South Asian Studies 14.1 (1991): 141–153 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .
29 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofky, Epistemology of the Closet, updated ed. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008), 1 Google Scholar .
30 Scott, Sex and Secularism, 66–69.
31 Weber, Max, “Science as Vocation,” in From Max Weber, eds. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 129–158 Google Scholar .
32 Ibid., 155.
33 Forster, E. M., Howards End, ed. Paul B. Armstrong (New York: Norton, 1998), 22 Google Scholar .
34 I realize that the previous discussion begins to beg the question of Weber’s German. In the original, “public life” is just “public” (der Öffentlichkeit) and the phrasing of “personal human relations” is more roundabout but similar in meaning: “immediate relations of individuals with one another” (unmittelbarer Beziehungen der einzelnen zueinander). See Weber, Max, Wissenschaft als Beruf 1917/1919, eds. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Wolfgang Schluchter (Tübingen, Germany: J. C. B. Mohr, 1994), 22 Google Scholar .
35 Forster, E. M., Two Cheers for Democracy (London: Edwin Arnold, 1951)Google Scholar . See Gandhi, Leela, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 10 Google Scholar .
36 Gandhi, Affective Communities, 36, 49.
37 Lowe, Lisa, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 17–21 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .
38 For a more sustained engagement with public sphere theory, see Scott, J. Barton and Ingram, Brannon, “What Is a Public? Notes from South Asia,” South Asia: The Journal of South Asian Studies 38.3 (2015): 357–370 CrossRefGoogle Scholar . For an implicitly queer reading of occult publics (those oxymoronic, semi-closeted things), see Scott, J. Barton, “Miracle Publics: Theosophy, Christianity and the Coulomb Affair,” History of Religions 49.2 (2009): 172–196 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .
39 Gandhi, Leela, The Common Cause: Postcolonial Ethics and the Practice of Democracy, 1900–1955 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press: 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .
40 Gandhi, Leela, “The Pauper’s Gift: Postcolonial Theory and the New Democratic Dispensation,” Public Culture 23.1 (2011): 27–38 Google Scholar .
41 See, for example, the essays in Pandian, Anand and Ali, Daud, Ethical Life in South Asia (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010)Google Scholar .
42 Chatterji, Bankimcandra, Anandamath, or The Sacred Brotherhood, trans. Julius J. Lipner (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005)Google Scholar .
43 Hatcher, Brian, “Bourgeois Vedanta: The Colonial Roots of Middle Class Hinduism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 75.2 (2007): 298–323 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .
44 Scott, Spiritual Despots, 192–95, 207; Scott, “Translated Liberties.”
45 Tagore, Debendranath, The Offering of Srimat Maharshi Devendranath Tagore 2e (Madras, India: Brahmo Orphan Asylum Press, 1898 [1890]), 12–13 Google Scholar .
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid.
48 Tagore is not citing the Gita in this passage, but his phrasing is almost identical to Chatterjee, Mohini M., The Bhagavad Gita, or the Lord’s Lay (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1887), 105–106 Google Scholar .
49 Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments.
50 Scott, Spiritual Despots, 16–20.
51 Quoted in Scott, Spiritual Despots, 40.
52 Most recently, perhaps, Rahul Gandhi invoked the story (voided of the dark literary irony of the Mahabharata) in critiquing a rival political party, the BJP. Accessed July 25, 2018. https://www.indiatvnews.com/politics/national-ekalavya-cut-off-his-right-thumb-on-guru-s-demand-but-bjp-cuts-down-its-own-gurus-rahul-gandhi-takes-a-jibe-at-pm-modi-446973.
53 Nandy, Ashis, The Intimate Enemy: The Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 1983)Google Scholar .
54 This rendering reflects my (perhaps overly Butlerian) reading of Bhabha, Homi, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004)Google Scholar .
55 Gandhi, Affective Communities, 26, 20.
56 Mahmood, The Politics of Piety.
57 Weber, Max, The Sociology of Religion, trans. Ephraim Fischoff (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1993 [1922]), 1 Google Scholar .
58 Taylor, A Secular Age.
59 Scott, Spiritual Despots, 13. For the etymology of “the sacred,” accompanied by a theorization of its politics of division, see Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar .
60 Latour, Bruno, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)Google Scholar .
61 For what I find to be the consistently notion of “sunflower ideas,” see Nathan Heller, “Listen and Learn,” The New Yorker, July 9, 2012.
62 J. Barton Scott, Slandering the Sacred: Law, Media, and Religious Affect in Colonial India (manuscript in progress). For an extract, see Scott, J. Barton, “Aryas Unbound: Print Hinduism and the Cultural Regulation of Religious Offense,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 25.2 (2015): 294–309 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .
63 Osho, Priests and Politicians: The Mafia of the Soul 2e (New York: Osho International, 2016).
64 The year 2018 has produced at least two of these so far: Wild, Wild Country (directors Maclain Way and Chaplain Way), a Netflix documentary series about Osho/Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and his Oregon commune, and Julia Lowrie Henderson’s “Bikram,” the ESPN podcast about Bikram Choudhary, the creator of Bikram Yoga.
65 Su, Anna, Exporting Freedom: Religious Liberty and American Power (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016)Google Scholar ; Wenger, Tisa, Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .
66 See, for instance, Moreton, Bethany, “The Soul of Neoliberalism,” Social Text 25.3 (2007): 103–123 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .
67 For an especially lucid account, see Brown, Wendy, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone, 2015)Google Scholar .
68 Joel Lovell, “Can the A.C.L.U. Become the N.R.A. for the Left?,” New York Times Magazine, July 2, 2018; Michael Barbaro, interview with Anthony Romero, The Daily (New York Times), podcast audio, July 30, 2018.
69 Filby, Eliza, God and Mrs. Thatcher: The Battle for Britain’s Soul (London: Biteback Books, 2015)Google Scholar .
70 For the global scene and Smiles in Gujarati, as well the Thatcher-sponsored republication of Self-Help, see Scott, “Translated Liberties.” For Smiles in Hindi and Urdu, see for example Smiles, Samuel, Taj-e Zindagi: Character of the True Gentleman, trans. Saiyid Ismail Khan (Meerut, India, 1870)Google Scholar ; Dvivedi, Shivnarayan, Caritra Sangathan (Calcutta, India: Haridasa, 1916)Google Scholar ; and Smiles, Samuel, Kartavya, trans. Ramchandra Varma (Benares, India: Nagari-pracharani Sabha, 1923)Google Scholar .
71 Samuel Smiles, Self-Help, Oxford World’s Classics, ed. Peter W. Sinnema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 17.
72 Said, Edward W., The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 290 Google Scholar .
