Scholars working on South Asian religious traditions have increasingly come to accept the proposition that the category of “religion” as we commonly understand it today resulted, for the most part, from the imperial encounter between the West and the East. While unpacking the intellectual and epistemological genealogy of the category of religion was the easy part, we still do not have a convincing explanation as to why the people in the East responded so enthusiastically and in such great numbers to the category of religion. Arvind-Pal S. Mandair's brilliant book seeks to provide an answer to this vexing problem.
While he acknowledges the recent historical narratives advanced by Gyan Pandey, Vasudha Dalmia, and Peter van der Veer, Mandair is not interested in what we view as the classic sites of modern Indian religiosity: the colonial census operations, print capitalism and the vernaculars, polarizing polemics in the bazaar, the din of street processions and atavistic cow protection associations. Instead, by using continental philosophy (particularly Martin Heidegger), psychoanalytical literature (namely Jacques Lacan), critical theory (largely Jacques Derrida), and translation theory (predominantly Naoki Sakai) in heavy doses, Mandair responds to the question of modern Indian religious consciousness by insisting that British colonialism entailed the rise of a new subject, and this new colonial subject felt psychologically deficient because it acutely lacked what the colonial masters possessed in abundance: the matrix of religion, the original trope of the West. Thus, according to Mandair, the colonial subject went about the task of diligently constructing and possessing what it most lacked: the category religion and all of its elaborate codes, mechanics, and ornamentations. In the end, this complex trajectory rooted in Western hegemony produced in the subject a mimetic consciousness that readily identifies and responds to the category of religion as manifested in modern Hinduism, Islam, or Sikhism.
Having constructed an elaborate and fecund theoretical framework in part I of the book, Mandair proceeds in part II to test his hypothesis concerning the inventiveness of the category religion and its traumatic lack within South Asia through a close reading of Sikh materials produced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He demonstrates how Orientalist scholarship as represented by Ernest Trumpp and Max Macauliffe and leading Sikh reformers such as Kahan Singh Nabha, Bhai Vir Singh, Jodh Singh, and Teja Singh were all complicit in attaching Sikhism to the world religions panoply. This exercise in what Mandair calls modern “religion-making” (p. 17) was activated through a complex circuit made up of theology, exegesis, scriptural translations, Anglo-vernacular schools, hermeneutic framing, recasting symbolic orders, and metropolitan scholarship.
Having committed himself to a position that views contemporary Sikh identity as an artifice of modernity, in part III of the book, Mandair begins a project to retrieve and reconceptualize what the Sikh tradition may have looked like if the West had not intervened. He suggests a radical reinterpretation of Sikh theology and its sacred lexicon in order to free Sikhs from the traumas of colonial subjugation and inscriptions. Besides delineating the intricate patterns of “religion-making” in modern South Asia and providing the Sikh community with new imaginaries, Mandair has also provided us with a sketch of a postsecular theory that promises to vigorously decolonize the mind and negate identity politics, for such politics, according to the author, are merely a replay and retrieval of colonial space.
Undoubtedly, Mandair has written an ambitious book, and he asks many bold and fascinating questions that will be of considerable interest to historians of religions, cultural anthropologists, and critical theorists. But, as often happens with works of such magnitude and scope, he at times overlooks issues of historical detail. For instance, Mandair is quite correct in identifying Ernest Trumpp's imperial commission to translate the Sri Guru Granth Sahib as the basic impulse behind subsequent Sikh efforts at scriptural exegesis and engagement with Orientalist scholarship. However, the response to Trumpp did not start as late as the 1920s, as Mandair would have us believe. As early as the 1880s, the Sikh ruler of Faridkot commissioned a council of Sikh scholars under the chairmanship of Giani Badan Singh Sekhvan to produce an appropriate rebuttal to Trumpp. One wonders why Mandair overlooks the Faridkot intervention and starts his account of modern Sikh exegetical practices only with Teja Singh and Bhai Vir Singh in the 1920s. Would the inclusion of the Faridkot commentary and annotations disrupt his linear account of Sikh modernities? Similarly, at the theoretical level, although Mandair is persuasive about how the neocolonial elites captured and ran with the Western category of religion, we do not get a clear idea of how mimesis and cultural translation occurred at the popular level. In South Asia, the popular is always the final test of theoretical rigor.
