Tag Archives: colonial era

Postcolonial and Subaltern Rethinking of Critical Religion

17 Saturday Sep 2016

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Groningen

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The early 20th century formulations of Indian identity involved using the constructions of specific understandings of religion, and gender. Critical Religion (CR) has provided a crucial methodology to understand the workings of these ideological operators in identity formation within such colonial contexts. In this line, CR has rightly shown that constructions of religion/secular, sacred/profane dichotomies enabled the legitimisation of hegemonic colonial discourses. It is crucial for us to look at the question of ‘how’ these appropriations were carried out by the colonised.

Historical archives show conflicting and complex narratives on the indigenous understandings and usage of religion both as an ideological category and as a term. For instance, the archives show that South Indian nationalists often used the terms religion, sacred, secular, science, and profane in their discourses on Hindu/Indian identity. Much as these terms were appropriated, they were not necessarily used as the colonial narratives intended. Thus, whilst secular was criticised as modern, modern here meant materialistic — that is pertaining to materiality such as corporeality (sex), objects (wealth), etc., and therefore, profane). Science was often seen as a ‘Western value’ that potentially contributed to materiality when it was not thoroughly grounded in spirituality as Hindu philosophy was. Sometimes, science was cast aside as ‘not Indian’ . This understanding shifted when science was used to define Hinduism as superior to Western society. Science when grounded in Hindu philosophy was understood as a body of knowledge. Other times nationalists quoted medical knowledge from the ancient texts (for example, Ayurveda and the Vedas) to show that science was embedded in Hindu philosophy.

Thus, Indian nationalistic discourses used the language (terms and categories) of the colonisers to beat them at their own game, as it were. For CR, semantics are important for our understandings of these discourses, but nationalists’ mere use of these terms should not be seen as their adoption of a colonial, Christian understanding of these categories. The nationalists indeed used these terms religion, secular, science, and materialism in some instances that pointed to a colonial understanding of these categories. However, there were other complex ways in which these terms were used. As we can see from the examples give above, these terms had multiple meanings depending on the contexts within which they were used. These also transformed depending on who the discourses were aimed at, whether the colonisers or the subaltern groups. For instance, the regional linguistic nationalism that was a subaltern counter-movement to the hegemonic Indian nationalist movements in South India often advocated the importance of rejection of religion, and embracing science as the objective method of understanding human nature. Strongly grounded in Enlightenment values, these movements, whilst rejecting ‘Hinduism’ as a brahmanical religion, did not reject other faiths because their primarily objective was to hoist a counter-argument to what they saw as brahmanical hegemony. Arguably, the agenda of these movements swayed the way these ideological terms and categories were used.

This emphasizes the fact that we cannot assume that appropriation of the colonial categories were homogenous. We must delve deeper into these movements to provide a contextualized understanding of identity formations. Deconstructing ideological categories and to do away with them might clear the discourses of modernity clouding our understandings of historical, colonial developments. But it does not fully provide a postcolonial subaltern understanding of historical indigenous discourses. To put it simply, the question should not only be whether the term religion was used, and where they learned the term, it is to also ask how the term was used. To not take that into account is to make the mistake of succumbing to the orientalist discourse of a pre-Christian indigenous era when religion and secular were one and the same, and a Christian/colonial indigenous era where these distinctions were introduced, which the nationalists appropriated. This, then, would be a good example of Aditya Nigam argues as a postcoloniality that is an echo of modernity. If we look at the regional anti-colonial discourses, it is obvious that the indigenous nationalists had more agency than that. Subaltern Studies stands as a testimony to it. Perhaps, I should make a point very clear: I am not suggesting that we should abandon Critical Religion (and given the space this blog post is published in, that would be rather ironic!). But, if we are to provide a historical postcolonial subaltern understanding of religion, then we must move beyond (as in, add to) the scope of Critical Religion to listen when the said subaltern speaks. We now have two issues at hand: a) how do we understand the heterogeneity of anti-colonial, and nationalistic discourses; b) how do we listen when the subaltern engages with these heterogenous anti-colonial, and nationalist discourses?

In an article soon to be published by Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory, I have attempted to answer the first question using Dipesh Chakrabarty’s now famous theorisation of histories. Chakrabarty theorises History 1 as the ‘universal history of capital’ that abstracts labor as a function that is removed from its contexts, and Histor(ies) 2(s) as ‘numerous other tendencies . . . intimately intertwined with History 1 . . . to arrest the thrust of capital’s universal history and help it find a local ground’. At the outset, History 1 and Histor(ies) 2(s) can be seen as polar opposites that History 1 is the secular capital and Histor(ies) 2(s) are the indigenous traditions, i.e., religion. However, as Chakrabarty has shown, Histor(ies) 2(s) are present in History 1 in order for the capital to function; rituals invoking the divine, such as worshipping tools for weaving, etc. Thus, within these indigenous contexts, religion/secular categories, with the emergence of capitalism, does not function dichotomously. Rather the ‘religious’ is embedded in the secular to prevent a total takeover of the secular. However, this theorisation provides tools to understand only certain nationalistic discourses. For example, it points to the phenomenological aspects of orthopraxy. There are such multitude of hegemonic nationalistic discourses that need to be acknowledged to understand how colonial categories were appropriated. Moreover, we must also look at how subaltern groups engaged with these hegemonic discourses – both of the nationalists and the colonisers. After all, it is rather evident that the methodological tools used to understand the hegemonic nationalist discourses cannot be used to understand the engagement between the hegemonic and subaltern groups.

Michael Marten’s theorising of ‘religious alterity’ helps us to provide a better understanding of these discourses.* Discussing the missionary narratives in the Middle East in the early 20th century, Marten argues that the Protestant missionaries’ understood the native practices and faiths as an Otherness, an ‘alterity’, that was somehow ‘religious’ in a way. In other words, Protestant missionaries encountered practices and faiths that they saw as definitely ‘religious’, but understood them as an alterity, by Othering these native practices. Christian missionaries in the colonies were by no means postcolonial or subaltern. Nor were their understandings of indigenous faiths and beliefs. But as Marten argues, it is important to understand moments of Othering ‘whilst . . . hearing and respecting the language used by the individuals being discussed’. How does this work pertaining to the discourses of South Indian nationalists, and the subaltern groups? In using the colonial categories, South Indian nationalists were involved in two forms of Othering – a) towards the colonisers through consistent differentiation between their ‘superior Hinduism’, and the colonial ‘Western values’; b) towards the subaltern groups that challenged their hegemony — here the distinction was drawn between their version of Hinduism and that of the ‘degenerative’ versions of the Others. Within these forms of alterity, the nationalists used ‘religious’ in multitudinous ways some of which have been describe above. I acknowledge the risk of arguing that the nationalist discourses involved Othering the colonisers. At a fundamental level, this would be akin to making a case for ‘occidentalism’. That is certainly not what I am trying to do here. Rather, I am pointing to the indigenous nationalistic discourses that used similar, if not the same, language of alterity used by the colonisers (and the missionaries) to assert their position and agency in the domain of colonial politics. In doing so, they certainly indulged in ‘religious alterity’ with the subaltern groups. Acknowledging this would enable us listen to the language of the nationalists, and accept that they had more agency than what we admitted that they did. Acknowledging this would also provide us with a new methodology to listen to the ways in which subaltern groups responded to such alterity.

* Marten, Michael. “Missionary Interaction as Implicit Religion”. Presented at Implicit Religion conference, Salisbury, 2016. The author kindly shared this with me; I understand it is being prepared for publication.

Disorganised Religion? We need more of it!

27 Monday Aug 2012

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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I was recently invited to be part of a public conversation at Edinburgh’s Festival of Spirituality and Peace on the theme ‘Disorganised Religion’.  I was asked to offer comment on how I see understandings of ‘religion’ changing and to reflect on whether ‘disorganised religion’ is a helpful term to reflect on questions of religion.  The conversation was chaired by Ekklesia’s Simon Barrow, and Ian Milligan from Exploring Anabaptism in Scotland and the Bert community in Glasgow was the other discussant.  The event was sponsored by Ekklesia and the Iona Community.  This blog entry is a lightly-edited and slightly expanded version of my opening remarks, reflecting also some of the comments from the 60+ audience who came to the conversation; warm thanks to them for their insights.

If we’re thinking about ‘disorganised religion’, it presumes we know what we mean by ‘organised religion’, so I want to explore that a little bit before moving onto thinking about what ‘disorganised religion’ might be.

There is a long tradition in the West, at the latest from the 17th century onwards, of thinking of religion as being something distinct from other areas of life.  In the English-speaking world, this largely derives from Protestant thinking in the colonial context: Europeans went overseas and saw people engaging in what they thought were similar practices to ones they knew – so, for example, killing an animal in some apparently ritual form was seen as similar to an animal sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible, or kneeling and being still was seen as a form of prayer as described in the New Testament.  These things may not have been recognisably Christian because these people – in South America, Africa, or wherever – had obviously not heard of Jesus and the Christian God, but the Westerners understood these practices to be ‘religious behaviour’, even though that may have been a meaningless concept to the local people.  Nonetheless, these actions were being compared to and measured against what the Europeans already knew, and more than that, they were made to be like things the Europeans already knew (Edward Said, the Palestinian-American scholar, famously called this ‘Orientalism’).

From that, we have the beginnings of the so-called separation of church and state: actions and thinking seen as ‘religious’ was to be kept distinct from everything else, and ‘everything else’ was called ‘the secular’ – of course, these terms depend upon each other and if examined closely, have no consistent meaning.  It was but a short step to institutionalisation of this religious-secular distinction – through constitutions, for example – and ‘the religious’ became ever further removed from ‘the secular’, and correspondingly, the organisation of religion was seen as something that was distinct from the concerns of wider society.

So here we have one example of the ways in which thinking about ‘religion’ has changed.  On a related front, this event is being sponsored by the Iona Community, of which I am a long-standing Member, and from its early days, the Community has sought to overcome the distinction that I’ve just elaborated on.  It wanted to find ways to connect the church – by which it initially meant the Church of Scotland – to wider society, to overcome the distinction that I’ve just mentioned.  In the language of the Community, this was about connecting what people do in church on a Sunday and what they do at work on a Monday; today the Community tends to talk more about the connection between work and worship, between prayer and politics, between sacred and secular.  Of course, when the Iona Community was founded in 1938, there was a presumption that most people who describe themselves as Christian would be members of churches, but that is clearly no longer the case.  So the Community has in recent years been seeking to identify news ways of engaging, and that is where terms like ‘disorganised religion’ perhaps help us think about some of these issues.

From different backgrounds then – the Critical Religion analysis of the origins and consequences of much of our thinking about the artificiality of distinctions between ‘secular’ and ‘religion’, and the Iona Community’s attempts to find practical and honest ways of overcoming these distinctions – we can point to very exciting ways of thinking of the future of what ‘religion’ might be.  Disorganised, certainly, if that means a move away from a distinction between ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’ that distorts and hinders the integration of all aspects of our lives.

Of course, such attempts to move away from these distinctions have long existed – and the Anabaptist tradition that Ian is connected to is a perfect example of this – even if the larger churches that aligned themselves to a greater or lesser extent with the ruling powers have found it much harder to move away from the religious-secular distinction.  The Iona Community is another expression of this, and as it has grown, members from other Christian traditions have joined, and they have often been less fixated on institutionalised forms of religion.  Anti-institutional and non-hierarchical traditions in particular have enriched the approach the Community has taken on a number of issues: an example of this is the leading of worship, which has long been a task that non-ordained people have undertaken.

In a wider context: our world is globalising in new ways – the colonial traditions that resulted in religious-secular distinctions are gradually giving way to new kinds of seeing the global.  Globalised economics still privilege the rich, and especially the rich West, but forms of interaction are changing: in a Western Christian context, for example, we can observe the introduction of fresh ways of being church that clearly derive from the Global South, whether this be music and liturgy or sometimes even forms of decision-making and governance; the Iona Community’s John L. Bell has been instrumental in doing some of this for English-speaking communities.  Much of this kind of change relates to people seeking to engage more fully in worship and live their lives in a way that is more consonant with their understanding of priorities.  Emerging church movements and radical alternatives to church are all key to this process, as for some people that can happen in traditionally organised institutions, for others it needs to happen outwith them.

Either way, there is no doubt that ‘disorganised religion’ – in the sense of overcoming the religious-secular divide – is a useful way of thinking about what it is that many people are seeking to do.  Because they almost always perpetuate the religious-secular divide, ‘religious institutions’ are in fact perpetuating their own marginalisation.  This in turn encourages strong reactions from many so-called secularists when such institutions are seen as failing ‘to keep to religious matters’.  We can observe this in the same-sex marriage debate currently taking place in Scotland: there is a clear majority of the population in favour of the government’s moves towards equality, but many institutional religious figures oppose these moves, often arguing (incorrectly) that they will be discriminated against if same-sex marriage is legalised.  This failure to recognise that the granting of privileges that the majority have to everyone is not discrimination but equality, simply furthers the marginalisation of these institutions in wider society and deepens the religious-secular divide.

So if disorganised religion is about subverting the very idea that a religious-secular divide exists, then we need much more of it!  We often hear people say they are ‘spiritual but not religious’.  What is often meant is that people want to do justice to a desire or a need for some kind of spiritual or transcendental experience but they want nothing to do with the institutions that have grown up around what is seen as ‘religion’.  Perhaps such people are finding ways of overcoming the divide between ‘religion’ and ‘secular’ and discovering new ways of being whole human beings.  Certainly, for those on the margins seeking to live out an integrated ‘disorganised’ life, there may be mistakes made and wrong turns taken – but that element of the human condition is also what makes such disorganisation so appealing and so necessary.