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On South Asian religion, postcolonial critique, and the future of the field

It is difficult to imagine the future of a field whose past is littered with skeletons. This is a question for all forms of knowledge that emerge in American universities, whose existence was predicated on settler-colonial violence, enslavement, and segregation, imperial plunder, and accumulation by dispossession. One measure of the humanistic quality of a field, insofar as the creation of new knowledge upon the bones of the disinherited is a moral problem, is the extent to which it has challenged these processes. How does the study of religion, or, to speak only to my remit, the study of South Asian religion, fare in this accounting? Little in my experience of Swift Hall has persuaded me that this is or was widely considered to be a problem. To the contrary, my predecessors in this area felt obligated to defend the powers that created knowledge, not because they agreed with their acts, but out of a commitment to the liberal myth of perfectibility, namely, “[W]e can stop doing it the way they did it and start doing it the way we do it.”[1] Although the “it” in that sentence is the possibility of comparative study in the wake of postcolonial critique, there is more than a little echo of late-twentieth-century American exceptionalism— our bombs are multicultural bombs— that seems quaint beside the full-throated fascism of the present. It feels exhausting to revisit the attachments that could possibly prompt someone to begin a sentence with the phrase “The British also loved India for the right reasons,”[2] but other people’s myths have not held the same fascination for me. More exhausting is the demand to sort through the wreckage of modern research institutions, through ebony and ivy, through ivory and steel, in order to salvage noble causes.[3] Postcolonial critique is not a “gift” that “sours when the giver takes it back” but an ongoing question from the subjects of Western modernity about the claim that “Colonialism is no longer the political force it once was.”[4] 

There are many intellectual resources that circulate within Swift Hall that lay bare the contradictions of intellectual freedom in a context of social and political unfreedom. It is not clear to me that there are corresponding institutional commitments to dialectical resolution. Problems here remain the problems of all liberal arts under neoliberalism: that is, how to convince an anti-intellectual public and a corporate class of the value of scholarship. If anything about the current climate of higher education marks a transition for the school, it must be the insufficiency of this paradigm. After a brief blip in which historically subordinated people were allowed to occupy spaces in universities, so long as their political assertions could be safely redirected into institutional pockets, a combination of legalized racism and debt peonage is poised to ensure those spaces remain beholden to ruling-class interests. Does the study of religion have a future under such conditions? Sure it does. Academic departments, irrespective of their demographic composition, already operate with undemocratic and hierarchical modes of relation. The question is: What kind of future and to what end?[5]

If I had an answer, I would have made a lot more money. What is currently possible for me to do in Swift Hall is to insist that the politics of knowledge is more than a research agenda; it is a struggle for what kinds of things can be thought and taught, and by whom and for whom. This is necessarily imperfect work. In response to someone who criticized the incompleteness of his work, the Hindi writer Rahul Sankrityayan said: “Buddha has said nothing is stationary; everything is transient. Sabbam Khanikam. Lenin also remarked ‘Nothing is final.’… I do not have the monopoly of truth. I do my bit. Let the future generations improve upon me.”[6] Nothing is final. The study of the premodern teaches me that our ways of being, believing, and belonging in the world are by no means uniquely privileged. There is a conservative way to read this work: that the wisdom of the past can stave off the temptations of the present. But there is a radical strain as well: to imagine a different future because the past itself is not past. Time in this imaginary need not be linear. In a remarkable passage in her diary from April 1948, the Catholic anarchist Dorothy Day prays retroactively for Marx and Lenin, that they may find places of refreshment, light, and peace, for “there is no time with God.”[7] Maybe it is in this non-eschatological notion of time, which sits so well with Hindu thought, that we might find another world is possible.

Footnotes

1. ^Wendy Doniger, The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth, 2^nd edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011 [1998]), 78.
2. ^Wendy Doniger, “Presidential Address: ‘I Have Scinde’: Flogging a Dead (White Male Orientalist) Horse,” Journal of Asian Studies 58.4 (1999): 955.
3. ^Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013); Maya Wind, Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom (London: Verso, 2024).
4. ^Doniger, The Implied Spider, 78, 77. Cf. Marko Geslani, “Resentment and retrenchment: Rereading Doniger on Said,” Religion Compass 15.6 (2021): 3: “I suggest that a rhetorical tendency to post‐Saidian retrenchment, wielded by scholars of Asian religions, has served to hold postcolonialism at bay, beyond the purview of our field.”
5. ^ See Kandice Chuh, The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities “After Man” (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 1-2: “[T]he crisis confronting the humanities calls less for their defense and instead prompts the crafting of a vision of what a defensible humanities might be and do, and how it differs from its dominant iteration.”
6. ^ Prabhakar Machwe, Rahul Sankrityayan (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1978), 11.

7. ^ Dorothy Day, On Pilgrimage (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1999), 125.

    

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   Read additional faculty reflections upon Swift Hall's centennial: 

   • "On the 'Advantages of Marginality' in Swift Hall," by Sheila E. Jelen, Director of MA/AMRS Studies, Professor of Religion, Literature and Visual Culture and History of Judaism
   • "The Flight of American Christianity," by William Schultz, Assistant Professor of American Religions
   • "A Place Like No Other" by Dan Arnold, John Henry Barrows Professor of the Philosophy of Religions
   • "Joy, Rest, and the Work of Ethics" By Sarah E. Fredericks, Associate Professor of Environmental Ethics
   • "Exploring the Worlds of the Religions" by William Schweiker, Edward L. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Theological Ethics
   • "Choosing Swift Again and Again," by Sarah Hammerschlag, John Nuveen Professor of Religion and Literature, Philosophy of Religions, and History of Judaism
   • "The Idea of the University of Chicago Divinity School," by Richard A. Rosengarten, Associate Professor of Religion and Literature 
   • "Tough-Minded, Tender-Hearted" by Dwight N. Hopkins, Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor
   • "If Not Here, Where?" by Carolina López-Ruiz, Professor of Ancient Mediterranean Religions and Mythologies
   • "Swift Hall and the Good Life" by Raissa von Doetinchem de Rande, Assistant Professor of Religious Ethics and Islamic Studies
   • "Performance is What Makes Religion Matter" by Abimbola Adelakun, Associate Professor of Global Christianity
   • "The Space Always Wins" by Cynthia G. Lindner, Director of Ministry Studies and Clinical Faculty for Preaching and Pastoral Care
   • “Our Better Angels”: Reflections on My Years in Swift Hall by Willemien Otten, Dorothy Grant MacLear Professor of Theology and the History of Christianity
   • "The Divinity School and the Hebrew Bible: Past, Present, and Future" by Jeffrey Stackert, Caroline E. Haskell Professor of Hebrew Bible