Books
Let Us Talk About Your Book:
Arvind Pal Singh - "Religion & The Specter of The West"
Part III
Q & A with Author by SIKHCHIC.COM
Continued from last week …
PART III
Q For the reader who may be unfamiliar with this book, can you provide an outline of the book’s contents, with focus on the way the contents are structured?
A Religion and the Specter of the West is written in a very unconventional manner. I must acknowledge that it may indeed not be easy for the lay reader to follow the way the book is structured and the rhizomatic style in which the book’s various arguments develop and gel together.
This kind of style goes against the kind of simplistic narrations that students are taught, and which even many established scholars continue to follow in the academy.
Q So, what are your reasons for writing in this way?
A Well, then, let me begin by giving a conventional view of the book. So this is what most people would see, or expect to find, if they read it objectively as they would any other scholarly book.
Here’s what the ‘Contents’ pages look like:
The book begins with a preface which tells the reader why I decided to write this particular book rather than something else which I had had in mind. My original project was to do a comparative philosophy of Sikhism. But as I began to think about that project I quickly realized that there was no room in Sikh Studies at that time for a discourse on Sikh philosophy and its basic concepts.
Scholarship was mostly focused on doing history and ethnography. Such a space had to be created, but to carve out this space it would be necessary to go against the current positioning of Sikh studies in the Western academy.
Perhaps I can say more about this later.
Q Sure. What comes next?
A The preface is followed by a comprehensive Introduction. Now this introduction for me was important because it helped me to bring the complicated and multiple strands of this project together. More importantly, though, in the Introduction I elaborated at length on my subjective positioning as a diasporic Sikh, explaining to the reader how this book did not even pretend to be a solely objective exercise. Instead it strongly argues against the very methodology so prevalent in the academy today, which thoroughly objectifies Sikhs and Sikhism as objects of knowledge.
We’re supposed to work in the humanities but the academic environment today operates like a machine that is programmed by set rules of scholarship which force us, the scholars, to think like scientists or technicians, basically forcing us to organize knowledge as data, thereby destroying or marginalizing the human element altogether.
So what I try to show in the Introduction is how a scholar can still work with archival material, still be thoroughly objective and rational, but not let the objectivity overtake the subjective impulse. The subjective impulse is important to me because the topics that I study (Sikhs, Sikhi, etc.) are not mere data, but full of life, a life-world. The way that I do this in the book is by using theory (a word which many Sikh studies scholars both fear and despise). Theory gives me the ability to reprogram this academic machine, so that it no longer positions my-self or my life-world within its data banks.
Rather I can reprogram this machine, connect it to my own memories and life projects, and then drive it like a car. Believe me, theory provides a very thrilling ride!
Q Let’s get to the meat of the book …
A The main portion of the book is divided into three parts. Each part consists of two chapters which explore a variety of themes. Part 1 is entitled “Indian Religions and Western Thought”. It re-examines the intellectual encounter between India and Europe by investing three different phenomena:
i) The closely connected roles of religion and language in the formation of the Indian colonial subject;
ii) The transformation of indigenous traditions of India and the projects of social reform as Indian elites gained access to a newly formed public sphere;
iii) The politico-religious debates in European philosophy that comprised the intellectual backdrop to this activity.
Part 1 consists of two chapters entitled “Mono-theo-lingualism: Religion, Language and Subjectivity in Colonial North India” (chapter 1), and “Hegel and the Comparative Imaginary of the West” (chapter 2).
Part 2 is entitled “Theology as Cultural Translation”. It moves from the broader survey of India in Part 1, to a detailed case study of Sikhism in chapters 3 and 4.
Chapter 3 is titled “Sikhism and the Politics of Religion-Making”. Broadly speaking, it tracks some of the key moments in the encounter between Sikhs and the West, showing how Sikh life-world is conceptually absorbed into the imperial project, and how the Sikh elites helped to repackage the Sikh tradition in terms of its modern self-representation as a ‘world religion”, as a nation (quom) by allowing indigenous terms such as Sikhi, Sikh dharam, Panth, gurmat, etc, to be translated as Sikhism.
Was this repackaging of Sikh tradition a minor adjustment to a modern globalized world dominated by Western powers where nothing substantial happened to the Sikh Panth? Or did this encounter with the West have side-effects which have been largely invisible to ordinary Sikhs?
Q And what's your take on those questions?
A My argument, in short, is that there were major side-effects to this encounter including, most importantly, the de-politicization of the Sikh life-world as Sikh elites unwittingly accepted the terms and conditions of living in a modern world governed by the model of the nation-state.
Chapter 4 (“Violence, Mysticism and the Capture of Subjectivity”) analyzes how some of the key mechanisms of this de-politicization, these vestiges of colonialism, have largely remained intact in the emergence of modern Sikh studies in the Western university.
Part 3 of the book is called “Postcolonial Exits”.
Again, it consists of two chapters that explore ways of going beyond the colonial frameworks that Sikhs (like others who encountered the West) have inherited. However, the way to counteract the depoliticization, is to operationalize Sikh universals, that is, key Sikh concepts drawn from the teachings of the Sikh Gurus and allow them to circulate and compete in the global Anglophone consciousness.
To do this, however, it is necessary to confront theoretical movements such as postcolonial theory and postmodernism that appear to promise some kind of emancipation. The problem with these movements is their adherence to secularity (and hence to the religio-secular binary) and therefore their complicity with the colonial frameworks.
So the freedom they offer is only within secular contexts. In these last two chapters I show how the concept of shabad-guru is able to disrupt and transform the discourses of institutions that re-inscribe the technologies of past imperialisms into the present.
Q To sum up, then ...
A The thrust of my analysis in these chapters is to:
a) make these debilitating mechanisms visible to the reader,
b) to show how they are reproduced in the structures of the State, the Media and Academia,
c) to show how State, Media and Academia are intricately connected; and
d) to suggest some possible ways forward so that Sikhs working in the sphere of politics, media and academia, do not constantly and unwittingly reproduce the frameworks of the dominant culture, but instead learn to re-negotiate the ongoing encounter with the West.
Continued next week …
January 31, 2014