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Only Connect: Three Reflections on the Sociality of Secularism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2019

J. Barton Scott
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Abstract

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.

Keywords

secularismglobal Enlightenmentaffectpostcolonial ethicsqueer theorymodern South Asia

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Articles
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Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , January 2019 , pp. 48 - 69
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

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.

References

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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).

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25 Scott, Sex and Secularism, 38–39.

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36 Gandhi, Affective Communities, 36, 49.

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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.

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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 .

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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.

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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 .

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