Religion and the Specter of the West

by Mandair, Arvind-Pal Singh

• ISBN13: 9780231147248
• ISBN10: 0231147244
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-10-02
• Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr

Summary

Arguing that intellectual movements, such as deconstruction, postsecular theory, and political theology, have different implications for cultures and societies that live with the debilitating effects of past imperialisms, Arvind Mandair unsettles the politics of knowledge construction in which the category of "religion" continues to be central. Through a case study of Sikhism, he launches an extended critique of religion as a cultural universal. At the same time, he presents a portrait of how certain aspects of Sikh tradition were reinvented as "religion" during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.India's imperial elite subtly recast Sikh tradition as a sui generis religion, which robbed its teachings of their political force. In turn, Sikhs began to define themselves as a "nation" and a "world religion" that was separate from, but parallel to, the rise of the Indian state and global Hinduism. Rather than investigate these processes in isolation from Europe, Mandair shifts the focus closer to the political history of ideas, thereby recovering part of Europe's repressed colonial memory.Mandair rethinks the intersection of religion and the secular in discourses such as history of religions, postcolonial theory, and recent continental philosophy. Though seemingly unconnected, these discourses are shown to be linked to a philosophy of "generalized translation" that emerged as a key conceptual matrix in the colonial encounter between India and the West. In this riveting study, Mandair demonstrates how this philosophy of translation continues to influence the repetitions of religion and identity politics in the lives of South Asians, and the way the academy, state, and media have analyzed such phenomena.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. xi
Acknowledgments	p. xvii
Introduction	p. 1
"Indian Religions" and Western Thought
Disorders of Identity and the Memory of Politics
Theology as Cultural Translation
Postcoloniality, Theory, and the Afterlives of Religion
"Indian Religions" and Western Thought
Mono-theo-lingualism: Religion, Language, and Subjectivity in Colonial North India	p. 45
The "Failure of Secular Creeds" in Politics and Theory
Religion and Nationalism in Colonial North India
"Dialogue" and the Emergence of public Spheres in Britain and India
The Colonial Idiom: The Anglicist Reversal of the "Hindoo" Stereotype
Indian Public Responses to the Colonial Idiom
Rethinking the "Interactionist" Model of Colonial Agency
Modes of Address: English and the Purification of Native Speech
Fabrication of the "Mother Tongue(s)"
The English Orthopaideia: "Generalized Translation" and the Transition to the Global Fiduciary
Hegel and the Comparative Imaginary of the West	p. 106
The Orthodoxy of Secular Anti-Imperialist Critique
Cultural Nationalism and the "Intellectual Rekindling of Christianity"
Monogenesis: Race, Reason, and Monotheism in Orientalism1
Indology and the Pantheist Controversy: Herder, Schlegel, and Schelling
Naming the Origin: Hegel's Critique of Deism and Natural Religion
Of Passage and Installation: The Question of Spirit
Linking Aufhebung to the Ontological Proof for God's Existence
Hegel's Schema as a Diagram for the Production of History
Influences of Hegel's Schema
Theosophy, Indology, and the Religious Reform Movements
Theology as Cultural Translation
Sikhism and the Politics of Religion-Making	p. 175
Early Colonial Accounts of Sikhs and Sikhism
Demacrating a Regime of Translation: Trumpp's "Odium Theologicum"
Pincott and the Politics of Classification
Manufacturing Native Informancy: Macauliffe's "Dialogue" with the Sikh Reformists
Reinstalling Sikhism within the History of Religions
Reconstituting Gurmat as "Sikh Theology"
Nation and the Time of Novitas: Teja Singh's The Growth of Responsibility in Sikhism
Transcedence and the Over-coming of Lack
Refiguring Time as Eternity: The Eclipse of Nonduality in the Vernacular Commentaries on Sikh Scripture
From the Ontological Proof to the Formulation of Sikhism as a "World Religion"
Violence, Mysticism, and the Capture of Subjectivity	p. 240
Wars of Scholarship
How Sacred Origins Construct a "Critical" History of the Sikh Religion
The Sant Ideal: nirgu&nbdot; bhakti
What Is Modern Sikh Theology?
Guru, Śabda, Nam: Language and the Location of Author(ity)
Reading the "Divine Self-Expression"
Voice, Language, Subjectivity: A Theoretical Digression
Translation and the Normalization of "Religious" Subjectivity
Sui Generis Religion and the Question of Pluralism
Translating the Theory of Religion Into the Liberal Imaginary
Violence and the Mediatization of the Sikhs, 1984 to 9/II
Postcolonial Exits
Ideologies of Sacred Sound	p. 313
Language and the Crises of Humanism
The Phonemic Principle in Hermeneutics and Ethnology
Orality, Texts, and the Nationalist Imaginary
Ethnoscience and the Problem of Translation: The Case of Sikh Scripture
Sounding the Vedic Economy
Deontologizing the Word (śabda): Metaphysics of "Eternal Sanskrit" and the Production of a Sonic Mimetology
Sonic Hermeneutics as an Ethnology of Sikhism
Revisiting the Site of Lack
Reclaiming the Nondual Ground of the Guru Granth
The Word as Guru: Toward a Materialist Sketch of N&abar;nak's Teachings
Decolonizing Postsecular Theory	p. 379
The Cultural Bias of Theory
Reassessing the Narratives of Emancipation
Europe's Secret Responsibility and Fundamental Fear
Postcolonial Assessments
Historical Difference in Theory
The Global Fiduciary
"What If Religio Remained Untranslatable?": Geopolitics and Theory
Epilogue	p. 433
Notes	p. 437
Glossary of Indic Terms	p. 485
Index	p. 489
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