From the title and cover art, which depicts a Brahman “gooroo” with his foot upon the head of a prostrating “Hindoo,” one might imagine that Spiritual Despots would be about gurus, priests, and the internal authority structures of modern Hinduism. It both is and is not. In large part, the gurus and priests of modern Hinduism are a foil against which J. Barton Scott presents readers with an excellent intellectual history of the complex reform assemblage, defined as “an open-ended network of unstable elements” (p. 90) of critiques against priestcraft and “pope-lila” as instigated by nineteenth-century reformers, both Hindus in India and British imperial critics. This generalized foil is not solely of Scott's invention, but rather reflects his nineteenth-century intellectual interlocutors, who largely critique the despotism of priests and gurus as an antiquated power formation in need of reform rather than engage in ad hominem attacks (with the exception in chapter 4 of Karsandas Mulji's critiques of Vallabhacharya, founder of the Pushtimarg). Scott's research reveals how both British and Indian intellectuals used the critique of priestcraft to destabilize the religious ideal of the subjugated self and to introduce a new ideal of self-governance through inner-worldly asceticism. This, he argues, was the early antecedent that provided a foundation for the subsequent demand for self-rule, self-governance, and independence.
Spiritual Despots presents a nuanced and intelligent intervention into the nineteenth-century intersections of Protestantism, Hinduism, and liberalism, as enacted in the context of empire. Scott engages scholars like Brian Hatcher, Peter van der Veer, C. S. Adcock, Nicholas Dirks, and Gauri Viswanathan, each of whom have examined the complex assemblages of Victorian era colonial and religious intellectual intersections. He seeks to complicate the simplistic (and largely destabilized) claim of Hindu reformists’ Protestantization of Hinduism (p. 55) by revealing multifaceted assemblages of “techniques of the self” that were dissociated from institutional religion and common to Protestantism, Hinduism, and liberalism in the nineteenth century (p. 3). He does so in six chapters, weaving together a multifaceted assemblage of intellectuals in both metropole (Britain) and colony (India) who critiqued the religious structures of priestcraft.
Chapter 1 begins with James Mill's History of British India (1817), critiques of “oriental despotism” and subsequent imaginings of a forthcoming “Indian Luther,” who would demonstrate “India's ‘latent progress’ toward Christianity” (p. 53). Chapter 2 engages with William Howitt's critique of priestcraft as articulated in A Popular History of Priestcraft in All Ages and Nations (1833) to ultimately argue that “the subjectivation in colony and metropole were remarkably parallel” (p. 69). Chapter 3 delves into critiques of priestcraft from the leading Hindu reformers of the nineteenth century, Rammohan Roy, and later Dabendranath Tagore and Keshub Chunder Sen. Chapter 4 provides a valuable account of Karsandas Mulji's critique of Pushtimarg in the famed Maharaj Libel Case (1862). Chapter 5 focuses on Swami Dayananda Saraswati and the Arya Samaj, and chapter 6 on Madame Blavatsky, Henry Steel Olcott, and the contributions of Theosophy. Scott effectively highlights continuities in each of these intellectual corpuses, as so many intersections in the capillary networks of modern subject formation in India. His genealogy concludes with Gandhi, articulating his advocacy for swaraj (home-rule) as inextricably intertwined with inner-worldly ascetic formulations of the self.
Scott argues that at the intersections of Protestantism, Hinduism, and liberalism, Indian modernists supported distinct ethical formulations that centralized self-governance through the internalization of ascetic techniques. He analyzes these juxtapositions by reading Max Weber's well-known presentation of inner-worldly asceticism through Michel Foucault's writings on asceticism (askesis) and subject formation. Critiquing Charles Taylor's concept of modern “buffered subjectivity,” Scott proposes a model of ascetic self-rule, wherein an inner-worldly asceticism both “entails obedience” to a rule that precedes the subject, yet in the act of subordinating the subject to that rule, the self also becomes self-governing (p. 16). Thus, self-government becomes a political relation of a doubled subject, in the Foucauldian sense. Scott notes that nineteenth-century reformers sought new ethical formations, often dissociated from religion, yet demanded that “ascetic self-rule necessarily entails a form of sociality” (p. 219). He argues, “Precisely because the trope of spiritual despotism was important to the dissemination of the liberal norm of the autonomous individual in India, it was also an important means of rethinking that norm” (p. 219).
Methodologically, Scott challenges scholars to reconstruct conventions of using theory in important ways. Particularly vital is Scott's conviction that “it is thus high time that we took him [Gandhi] as Weber's counterpart—a theorist of worldly asceticism in his own right, rather than an object to which theory is applied” (p. 7). He enacts this provincialization of the West beautifully by presenting Indian intellectuals like Keshub Chunder Sen, Karsandas Mulji, and Mahatma Gandhi as critical theoreticians of the self and modernity alongside oft-cited Western intellectuals like Foucault, Weber, and Taylor.
Spiritual Despots is also useful in that it reveals the intellectual foundations of the two dominant forces of subject formation in India today: the ideal of self-rule/self-governance as expressed in nationalism and the presumption of an autonomous self as expressed in neoliberalism. It is an important resource for theorizing the nuances of modern subjectivity, but it will likely prove difficult reading for most undergraduate audiences.
