Subaltern agency and the problems in the project of decolonization in the study of religion and liberal secularism

ABSTRACT

Decolonization has become an important process in the present-day academia. Reviewing Jakob De Roover’s new book, this article critically analyses the problems in the methodologies of the decolonization project. The article strongly argues for the need to avoid decontexualisation of historical and contemporary developments, and to take an intersectional approach that would ensure the recognition of subaltern agency.

Introduction

In September 2018, the courts in India deliberated two high-profile lawsuits that challenged the normative claims (or topoi as Roover would call them) of liberalism and secularity. The first lawsuit resulted in decriminalization of consensual gay sex, overturning a 2013 Supreme Court decision and a 157-year-old law. The second lawsuit overturned a famous South Indian temple’s policy and ordered female worshippers to be allowed inside the temple. There was a common theme in both lawsuits – how does historical practices with supposed justifications from religious traditions intersect with civil rights? In both lawsuits, and more so in the second one, religious communities voiced opposition to adapting traditions to contemporary times; and in both, the judges deliberated the topics of traditions, religion and civil rights. These debates are not new, and exacerbate the ambiguity between religion and secular challenging our understandings of how these liberal democracies function and identify their values as tolerance of a diversity of faiths. In short, the question is, when can laws or court rulings intervene in a private sphere (or faith), and when does someone’s faith or spiritual practices interfere with the public sphere?

The myth of liberal secularism

Much of the postcolonial approach to the study of religion has focused on semantics and the genealogy of the terms ‘religion’ and ‘secular’. Of course, deconstructing these terms are vital. But there are two questions that follow: (a) after deconstruction, now what? (b) how are these terms continued to be used whether we deconstruct them or not? These questions are not to be treated lightly. In his book, Roover conducts a detailed analysis of an Italian court’s deliberation on the definitions of religion, secular (23–27); these issues have implications on our society because these decisions set legal precedence for the future. However, like the two lawsuits mentioned in the introduction, what happens when civil rights and liberties intersect with the questions of religion and secular? How we define the threshold where religion stops and secular begins? It is possible to give an entirely academic, intellectual, and to some extent, abstract responses to these questions. But, what makes these questions pertinent is that they impact upon the daily lives of many minority communities. In our current political milieu, in which minority rights are severely threatened, it becomes imperative answer these questions. Therefore, a decolonized approach to modern history and contemporary issues is rather urgent. It is also why we must avoid making universalizing claims, precisely for which colonial and Western narratives on the non-Western worlds have been critiqued for decades.

In an attempt to provide a truly postcolonial approach, Roover approaches the understandings of religion from the secular side. Roover spends a considerable time providing a rather detailed, and very illuminating chronological genealogical account of the birth of liberal secularism. Instead of focusing on deconstruction of the semantics of the terms religion and secular, Roover identifies the theological rationale underpinning both historical and the contemporary understandings of liberal secularism, and the religious sphere. In particular, using Balagangadhara’s (2010, 141) theorization of the double dynamic of religion, to Roover, what he calls, secularization emerges from religion, more specifically Christianity. This is a pivotal point in the text as Roover then traces the transformations of this double dynamics throughout history to elucidate the process with which we have now arrived at a liberal secularism.

Postcolonial Studies and Religious Studies scholars have long argued, by taking a constructivist approach, that religion and secular are colonial categories that were not indigenous to India, and that such colonial constructions are a product of European Enlightenment thinkers. Roover fills the gap in the literature in this topic by showing exactly how these constructions came into place. Thus, in Chapter 3, Roover gives a rather fascinating account of the effects of monasticising daily life by the Protestant Reformation. Critiquing the power held by the priests, and the laws made by these priests, which laypeople were (often forcibly) subjected to, the Protestant Reformation insisted on a monastic domestic life in which ‘all were a priest’ (97). Simultaneous to the development of this notion was the dichotomy between earthly and the spiritual realm or as Roover calls the ‘two kingdoms’ in which the earthly temporal realm belonged to the humankind whilst the spiritual realm was ruled by (Christian) God. Laity now monasticised in the daily life constantly attempts to live a life closer to this God, but often fail to do so because of succumbing to the earthly material pleasures of the flesh. Thus, the secular, i.e. the earthly realm is not non-religious or devoid of the spiritual; rather, it was created out of the spiritual realm and constantly attempting to live up to its origin but failing to do so because humans are sinful and incapable of achieving such a perfection. Here, Roover shows how this dichotomization, of the ‘spiritual’ and the ‘secular’, is inherently Christian (94). Reformers saw priestly laws, as imposed by the Catholic Church, as fundamentally oppressive. Thus, all human laws imposed on a Christian were seen as the opposite of true religion (100). To break free from such an oppression, from such laws, and to pursue one’s faith in their own way, meant freedom. Such freedom also meant not judging another person’s pursuit of faith for everyone has been created equal by God, and therefore have the spiritual freedom. In doing this, Roover draws parallels between the contemporary liberal secularism which divides the society into religious and secular sphere wherein the religious sphere ensures freedom of religion, and secular sphere contains laws to protect such freedom; similarly, in the theology of two kingdoms, the human/earthly realm contains oppressive laws whereas the spiritual realm represents freedom. Having established that human laws are against the true religion, any human action imposed on the one true religion came to be seen as a sin; thus, idolatry practices were seen as ‘human addition’ and therefore, a sin (119, 131). This notion of freedom, and the anti-Catholic stance, propelled ideas on toleration. This genealogical account of political theology certainly lends support to our understanding of the psyche of the colonial and missionary projects.

In making connections to the Enlightenment era and liberal secularism, Roover argues that Locke’s position on secular was rooted in this notion of religious toleration, thereby supporting his and Balagangadhara’s thesis that secular emerges from the religious (read: Christian) realm. It is conceivable that orientalists and colonial officials brought these ideas to India. As Roover points out, the colonial officials faced a dilemma of rejecting idolatry (which they saw the Hindus as practicing much like the Catholics) whilst also practicing religious toleration. This he explains using the example of the case of abolition the practice of sati. In their understanding of Hinduism within the Protestant-model of religion, the British attempted to fit certain rituals and practices within the scriptures, whilst casting those that do not fit as a ‘degenerate form of religion’, as mentioned above, a human corruption to a true religion.

The problem of decolonization (a.k.a. decolonization is not decontextualisation, a.k.a. where are the subaltern?)

We now know the genealogy of liberal secularism, as Roover has laid out with much clarity. Now what? It is commonplace for Western academics to critique European narratives of the East and claim to work towards decolonizing academia. Meanwhile, there are non-Western, subaltern scholars who constantly feel that their voices are not being heard. On that vein, Roover and Balagangadhara have peeled open the carpet to see what is the underlying foundation upon which these methodologies are based. Moving past the mere deconstruct of semantics, they are looking at the nodal points within the secular sphere where religion makes its presence visible. However, as Latré (2016) argues, this is not a particularly novel approach (324). While citing Said’s seminal work rather minimally from which ideas have been heavily borrowed, Roover and Balagangadhara do not acknowledge the works from the past that have dealt with questions already. For instance, the entire field of missionary history has dealt with these questions not only with the Middle East but also in India, and the Asia in general (Grosrichard 1998; Long 2003; Kabbani 2008). More specifically, works of Kabbani, Grosrichard, and Long have specifically discussed about the representations of Islam, gender and sexuality of the Middle East in Western literature. Roover rightly claims that to decolonize one must understand the West first. Moreover, Balagangadhara argues, which Roover refers to, that Christianity, Judaism and Islam are religions because they represent ‘an explanatorily intelligible account of the cosmos and itself’ (68). Then surely it is imperative to read widely to understand the representations of Islam and Christianity not in the West but in the Middle East? While Roover says that all forms of theology ultimately point to the explanatorily intelligible, the question should be of how these theologies differ, and to what end. After all, Liberation Theology born in Latin America influenced subaltern theology in Africa, India, and the Middle East. This should not be discounted through decontexualisation; intersectional understanding of religion and secular using race, class and gender is vital to decolonization.¹ This is not to do a comparative study of the colonial history of the Middle East and Asia; it is too simplistic to claim that the West saw the ‘Orient’ in general as heathens. But, there were common strands of representations that held true for both regions of the world. For instance, Kabbani (2008) has shown that the representations of the Oriental women resulted in the ‘Orient’ seen as ‘peopled by nations who were content to achieve in the erotic domain alone’ (54). These kinds of narratives lead to impositions of Victorian laws on morality, which were heavily influenced by Protestant moral values, which is how Section 377 was passed in India, a law criminalizing gay sex discussed in the introduction.

This brings us to the next and a closely related issue: it is quite astonishing to read a text that makes no valuable mention of gender and sexuality in relation to religion and secularism. Roover strays close to the questions of representation of Hinduism by the West but makes no obvious connections to a plethora of research on the implications of religion and liberal secularism and the implications on social understandings of gender norms and stereotypes. Much like Kabbani, Parker (1998) and many others² have shown that representations on Hinduism directly led to laws that disproportionately affected certain minority groups such as devadāsi (female performers) more than others. Such decontexualisation, however, is a pattern in many of the publications of Roover and Balagangadhara (2007). Even while discussing the role of the British East India Company’s policies towards indigenous traditions and practices (169–173), Roover does not explicitly show that what was intrinsic here was the role of economics, in the form of international trade, that swayed the company’s policies and that of the British government.

Similarly, Stein (1989) and Dirks (1993) have shown that in India, the derivation of sovereignty and authority by the king from the divine, the temples and the priests (representing the divine), and other realms that were relevant to the king (patronage to arts and other important aspects of the society). By not engaging with the anthropological works of Appadurai and Breckenridge (1976), Stein (1989), and Dirks (1993) on this topic, one assumes that Roover and Balagangadhara are rejecting them as a Western approach disguised as postcolonial. Indeed, Roover argues that the divine authority of the kings did not exist in India or Asia for that matter. But we know from the anthropological works mentioned above, especially that of Appadurai and Breckenridge, that the kings of India engaged in rituals that emphasized on their divine authority much as the Chinese emperors believe in the ‘Mandate of Heaven’ even if Confucianism does not have a personal God in the sense of Christianity. Why did they have similar practices? Is it that, as Roover claims, there are no rational reasons behind it and that the kings performed these rituals because their ancestors did? If so, why did these kings change their allegiance to different schools of philosophies or madams in, for instance, South India? It is one thing to critique the methodology; but if the author is dedicated to decolonizing academic scholarship as he claims, then it is imperative to engage with these historical studies. Moreover, Roover and Balagangadhara’s approach to Hinduism is situated in the phenomenology of orthopraxy even if they do not want to make that explicit. But this idea is not new – during the emergence of nationalist tendencies in the early twentieth century, Vedanta philosopher Vivekananda famously claimed that ‘Hinduism is not a religion but a way of life’. Historically, writings of theosophists, philosophers, Orientalists and contemporarily, courts of law have reiterated this particular point.

The overarching narrative of the book is to move away from a colonial reading of postcolonial scholars of the concepts of religion and secular. Thus, it is helpful to argue that Roger William expressed his ‘horror’ at the idolatry practices of Native-Americans whilst William Penn’s articulation of toleration encompassed his understanding of the secular realm. But that does not provide a complete picture – the effect of colonization was the genocide of Native-Americans partially because their idolatry was seen as a sin. Roover and Balagangadhara take the approach that the secular is religion (read: Christian) but in a different garb. However, scholar such as Talal Asad, and William Cavanaugh have critiqued the categories themselves as ideological constructions. In fact, Dirks (1993), and Appadurai and Breckenridge (1976) have shown that the colonial judicial courts deliberately used religion and secular distinction whilst arbitrating conflicts regarding temple management, and that these courts argued that secular realm does not encompass any spiritual element. Thus, there is a clear disagreement on the theorization of religion and secular. Within performance arts in the early twentieth century South India, deliberate connections between arts, religion, and their distinction from the secular (that is human corruption introduced to religion) as non-spiritual profane elements were introduced. This certainly holds true for the history of devadasis (Soneji 2004). Whilst it is important to understand how secular was defined, it is rather clear that native appropriation of these terms happened. In providing judicial arbitration to temple-related conflicts, the British were not trying to protect the temples from human corruption. Rather, they were attempting to alienate these institutions from a context where they represented both spiritual and economic spheres. In fact, this is also the reason why smaller kings were stripped off their powers in relation to the temples and were made zamindars (or landowners).

Decontextualizing religion and secular from politics and gender does not render us free from the inherent colonial approaches. What it does is to universalize our arguments, which in turn silence the subaltern thereby depriving agency that decolonization attempts to give. So, if this book does not speak about the subaltern, the intersectionality of economics and politics, then who is it written for?

Decolonizing contemporary history: polemics and the burden of proof

As academics striving to decolonize academia, it is very tempting to posit theoretical positions as universalizing, ontological claims. The thought that these claims might then go on to revolutionize an entire field of academia is rather encouraging. To claim, for instance, that the West is religious and the East is not, is polemical. That, in and of itself, is not an issue. The burden of proof, however, lies with us if we make such claims because we are no longer in an era where universal claims will take much hold. After all, Subaltern Studies has shown the need to accommodate voices of minorities in formulations of such theories.

The idea of decolonization has become so embedded in our approach to colonial history through academia that scholars rarely pause to think what it is, and whether what we do is indeed ‘post’ colonial. In other words, how can we perform decolonization? Intersectionality is not just an academic buzzword but a way to hear the voices of the subaltern. This might not be an entirely new proposition. But if academic works continue to decontextualize and make universal claims about religion and secular, it becomes necessary to continue arguing for the need for intersectionality.

Whilst critiquing the argument that the Orientalists’ study of Hindu practices was an exercise of Foucault’s knowledge and power thesis, Roover does not show what is wrong with such an argument. After all, elsewhere in Chapter 6, he shows how colonial officials attempted to situate rituals and practices within the very many sacred texts with the help of priests. That Hindu practices and rituals were understood from within a Protestant model has been argued by both Postcolonial and Religious Studies scholars. In the same vein, Roover critiques the notion that scholars posit – that Orientalists and colonial officials saw Brahmanism and Hinduism as one and the same – after having witnessed the power that priests held in the Hindu society. In addition to not arguing why this argument needs to be critiqued, Roover himself shows that the colonial officials sought the help of priests to understand certain practices and rituals, and place them within the context of the sacred texts. Likewise, Orientalists’ study of Indian spirituality was quite often with the help of the priests.

Dismissing the instances when Indians appropriate colonial and Western narratives, both historically and contemporarily, on religion and secular means depriving them of their agency whilst decontextualizing these narratives. In other words, are all these appropriations innocent of any politics behind them? Are we blindfolding ourselves to the repercussions of such appropriations? In South India, the early twentieth-century nationalist movements were embedded in the redefining music and dance as religious and classical. In doing this, the Indian nationalists went to lengths on how they understood religion, secular, science, materialism, and finally, Hinduism (Kannan 2014). These categories were appropriated from the colonial discourses but the indigenous definitions were different from that of the colonial discourses. Ultimately, it served the purpose of creating a unified identity for nationalistic purposes but it resulted in Othering and marginalizing traditional female dancers as profane and anti-religious. As noted above, these appropriations not only resulted in the passing of Section 377 criminalizing gay sex but also the continuous existence of this law long after Indian independence. Similarly, appropriations of such categories led to abolition of devadasi tradition in 1947 as a form of prostitution. Many who were involved in this were upper-class Indian men and women who were also involved in rendering dance and music as religious and Hindu in South India. To dismiss the appropriation is to dismiss the contemporary effects of such appropriations. In September 2018, several South Indian classical musicians were issued death threats and other forms of intimidation for performing songs on Jesus. Those who found songs on Jesus unsavory claimed that classical music belongs to Hinduism alone (Frayer 2018). This has a direct relationship to the early twentieth century constructions of these performance arts as presentations of Hinduism. The critical rhetoric follows the same rhetoric of the early twentieth century Indian nationalists. It is then unfair to say, as Roover does, that Indian follow rituals because their ancestors do without much rational as to why they do so. This simplistic answer is a result of decontextualizing the political (broadly defined) nature of actions. Roover himself claims that historically Indians had to establish a canonical evidence to justify their practice of sati to the Europeans. Surely, that is performativity of a political moment? This nuance is important – not only to acknowledge the indigenous appropriations of colonial categories but also to explore how these categories were appropriated and what purposes. Appropriation might be a ‘boring’ argument for Roover and Balagangadhara but not dealing with the how question and to continue to claim that there is an acknowledgment of agency is vacuous.

In addition, while many high-profile South Indian classical musicians and their fans claim that this art form is purely religious, and belongs exclusively to Hinduism, they also underscore the need for copyrighting the music in order to protect its authenticity and religiosity. In fact, when the issue of performing songs on Jesus rose, many fans on social media maintained that copyright laws are the only solution. Since the reconstruction and redefinition of South Indian classical music and dance as religious and Hindu, both nationalists and contemporary musicians have emphasised the phenomenological aspects of these art forms as a form of religious practice. While mechanical reproduction of music has certainly opened room for such discussions, what is unclear is how musicians see an expression of religiosity as a private property from which they could profit. In this context, how are the categories of religion and secular defined by the musicians?

Appropriations of these categories are apparent more so in the rhetoric of the current Prime Minister Mr Narendra Modi both during and post-election win. Mr Modi ran on a platform of economic reform and development thereby portraying himself as a secular candidate given he has been accused of practicing exclusionary social agenda against the minorities, especially Muslims. Mr Modi’s campaign rhetoric has touted the neoliberal economic policies that he adopted in his home state of Gujarat that has seen significant growth of its economy. He has presented this as a divide between caste and religion on the one hand and development on the other; and he has portrayed himself as a candidate pro-development. Thus, neoliberal policies that he introduced in Gujarat were used to show the seeming ‘secularity’ credentials of Mr Modi. He has repeatedly argued that his ideology of ‘inclusivity’ has been central to Gujarat’s trade policies, thereby ‘leveling the playing field’ for all and transcending differences in caste and religious identities. Subaltern Studies scholars such as Dipesh Chakrabarty have argued that ahistorical approaches to labour practices as secular enables them to be viewed as objective. It is this ‘secular’ history that Chakrabarty rightly critiques: a holistic, all-encompassing narrative that takes an ahistorical approach, which begs us to question, what about those communities that are being left behind?

In the lawsuit on allowing women worshippers to enter the Sabarimala Temple in South India, a case referred in the introduction of this article, the dissenting voice Justice Indu Malhotra argued that ‘Notions of rationality cannot be brought into matters of religion’ (news18.com). Moreover, she wrote ‘Equality doctrine cannot override fundamental right to worship under Article 25’ (ibid). It is clear here that she distinguishes between rationality and religion. This clearly is then a specific appropriation of a binary distinction between rationality and religion, which is not bound by these constraints. While Roover critiques the need to justify rituals in India as a form of Orientalism, he also argues that rituals in India do not are not rational but are ancestral traditions.

Part of the issue arises from trying to homogenize diverse narratives be it on religion or secular. It is entirely possible to take all these conflicting narratives in India on secularity and theorize that there is a room for multiple secularities. This leads to an array of questions not the least because this would mean understandings of secularity would be on an ad hoc basis. But this would allow for hearing the voices of the subaltern and avoid universalizing theories on both religion and secular.

Conclusion (a.k.a. Now what?)

In the end, what this book provides is an addition to the genealogical deconstruction of liberal secularism. But the text raises more questions than answers: whose agency is the book trying to acknowledge? How does making universal claims about liberal secularism and religions provide a decolonized approach? What about the minority groups that do not conform to these definitions but face repercussions?

It is true that the binary distinctions (as claimed by constructionists and postcolonial scholars to have been used by Orientalists) of religion/secular, sacred/profane did not exist nor was it used by the indigenous groups in a way that has been suggested by the scholars. However, we must see that these categories were appropriated when and where necessary – appropriation of the language (especially in the context of Tamil nationalism) was quite common during particularly nationalistic periods. This might be a simple nuance but it’s a nuance nevertheless for if we are critiquing homogenizing religious practices and traditions by postcolonial scholars, we must not fall into the same trope.

Acknowledgement

Thanks to Dr Alison Jasper and Dr Zhe Gao for helpful discussions on this book, Mr Gustavo Mediolaza and Dr Bashir Saade for helping with access to additional reading materials.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 A similar issue can be found in another article by Roover and Balagangadhara on religious conversion. To look at conversion in India entirely from a legal perspective is unhelpful. Dalit Theology, Dalit Buddhism, etc. are embedded with intersectional issues that problematize the issue of conversion.

2 See, for instance, Whitehead, Judith. ‘Community Honour/Sexual Boundaries: A Discursive Analysis of the Criminalization of Devadāsi in Madras, India, 1920-1947.’ In Prostitution: On Whores, Hustlers and Johns, edited by James Elias, Vern L. Bullough, Veronica Elias, Gwen Brewer & Joycelyn Elders, 91–101. New York: Prometheus, 1998; Srinivasan, Amrit. Temple ‘Prostitution’ and Community Reform: An Examination of Ethnographic, Historical and Textual Contexts of the Devadasi of Tamil Nadu, South India. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1984; Soneji, Davesh. ‘Living History, Performing Memory: Devadāsī Women in Telugu-Speaking South India.’ Dance Research Journal 36, no. 2 (2004).