Indigenous Spirits, Pluralist Sovereignty, and the Aporia of Surinamese Hindu Belonging

ABSTRACT

This paper explores why Hindu Surinamese continue to propitiate autochthonous Amerindian spirit owners of the land despite the threat that these rituals pose to ideologies of Hindu exceptionalism and secular state sovereignty. Hindu rites to native spirits emerge from lingering diasporic doubts about whether Hindus possess or are in fact themselves possessed by the Surinamese land. Though Hindus feel compelled by uncertainties about familial safety to appease the land’s sovereign indigenous spirits, to do so risks undermining the three key justifications Hindus give for their presence and influence in Surinamese society: Hindu ethnic ethical distinction, the universality of Hindu tradition, and state-sanctioned legal title to the land. This impasse results in an aporia – the inability to achieve resolution – that expresses the contradictions that arise when the paradoxes of Hindu tradition encounter the coercive logics of secular state sovereignty in a pluralist, post-colonial nation state.

KEYWORDS:

• Suriname
• Hinduism
• diaspora
• sovereignty
• doubt
• spirit possession

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Paul Johnson, Peter van der Veer, Brent Crosson, Ismail Alatas, Joshua Shapero, and Gabriele Koch for their incisive comments and contributions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Sanatan Dharm Hinduism is by far the largest Hindu group in Suriname, though the Arya Samaj – a nineteenth-century ‘reform’ movement remains influential if decidedly in the minority. There are a number of other Hindu movements, but these mainly complement Sanatani practice.

2. This should not, of course, be understood as without a complex Indian past in which urban forms of elite ritual, intellectual, and devotional practices had to contend with the complex field of popular practices closely tied to livelihood, sovereignty, and kinship across an often highly mobile and continually redefined territory (Singh 2012; Smith 2006). Similarly, given continued debates over the appropriateness of the terms Hindu and religion for talking about the variegated fields of ritual, power, and authority in pre-colonial South Asia (Balagangadhara 1994; Inden 1990; Lipner 2007), my use of Hindu and Hinduism are strictly contextual, dealing with the ways in which such and identity and object have come to exist through historical interaction with the colonial state in British India and Suriname.

3. Surinamese versions mirror Hindu Guyanese practices of propitiating a property’s ‘land’ and ‘boundary masters’, demonstrating a mutual sensibility inherited from their shared, predominantly Northern Indian past (Williams 1990, see also McNeil 2011 and Vertovec 1992 for Trinidad).

4. Frequent rumors about politician’s patronage of occult ritual specialists attest to the pronounced sense that the state is not sufficiently potent enough on its own, and that real control is to be found elsewhere.

5. Maroons are set to become a plurality of Suriname’s population in the next 10 years.

Additional information

Funding

I gratefully acknowledge the invaluable support of the National Science Foundation (Award #1123530), the Social Science Research Council, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation in funding this research.