By John Zavos
I stood outside the Ganesh Gate of Prasanthi Nilayam, the Sathya Sai Ashram … in the town of Puttaparthi, in the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. I had just fought my way down the Main Street, passing a tide of Sai devotees lining up for the afternoon darshan (sacred audience) of the charismatic guru and living god, Shri Sathya Sai Baba. The ashram was surrounded by high walls, and only the open gate gave a glimpse of the exciting world beyond; pastel-colored buildings in eggshell blue, pale pink and yellow, embellished with ornate pillars, lotus capitals, gold domes, painted ceilings, carved balconies, trellises, chejjas (window eaves) with painted garlands, and several brightly colored pavilions.
—Srinivas (2009: 301)
We have to stand up for Dharma.… Now the question you should be asking your temple committees, asking the representative bodies of the Hindu communities in the country [is], Who do you represent? Do you represent Dharma? Do you represent almighty god? Or do you represent self interest and politics? What is the purpose of an organization that can not uphold the fundamental tenets of our faith?
—Swami Suryananda, cited in Warrier (2009: 267)
How does modern Hinduism become public? What creative tensions and power plays inform the presentation of symbols, performances, buildings, communities as Hindu? In this book we will be considering these questions. The two passages reproduced here, which are drawn from papers in a related publication (Reddy and Zavos, 2009), point up some of the dynamics involved in conceptualising the encounter between Hinduism and public space. On the one hand, the anthropologist Tulasi Srinivas seems to stand on a threshold, looking in towards a space of Hinduism beyond the public. On the other hand, Swami Suryananda of the Community of the Many Names of God at Skanda Vale, Wales, speaks of the need for Hindus to be sure that their ‘representative bodies’ stand for what he sees as ‘the fundamental tenets’ of Hinduism, as they look outwards to broader socio-political environments in the context of the attempt to protect the life of the temple bull Shambo, who had tested positive for bovine tuberculosis in 2007.
Both these statements, then, seem to be located on the boundary between an internal world of Hinduism and an external, public, world beyond. In fact, however, the location of this boundary is implicitly problematised in both cases. Srinivas is already immersed in the world of the ashram as she struggles through the crowds of devotees on the Main Street. The world beyond as she looks in through the gates, in any case, is another kind of public space, a pastel coloured Hinduism, turned most self-consciously outwards, as is demonstrated by her further exploration of the ashram space in her article (Srinivas, 2009). Swami Suryananda reveals the problems of representation which attach themselves to any self-consciously Hindu organisation. ‘Real Hindus’, he seems to imply, need to establish whether such organisations are themselves ‘on the inside’, whether they understand and represent the ‘dharma’ that for him is self-evidently the internal world of Hinduism. His language, however, begs a broader question about how one can ever identify this idea of the inside. By invoking the ‘fundamental tenets of … faith’, he already relies upon a language and form of religiosity fashioned in some very broad and, we will argue, very modern public contexts, shaped out of the famously pluriform world of Hindu traditions. Whose dharma, after all, is represented in the representation of Hinduism? The answers to such questions as this are critical to understanding the way in which this ‘World Religion’ has established a presence in modern public arenas. But there is no single answer and no single entry point into those arenas in which the idea of Hinduism, the ‘World Religion’, has resonance.
Our focus in this book is on the processes through which the notion of contemporary Hinduism is produced in a variety of social and political contexts. There is a deep complexity in these processes of production, even if the ‘product’ appears as something self-evident, an established feature of the public landscapes of modern societies. Perhaps taking inspiration from Srinivas and Suryananda, we can approach this complexity initially from two different directions. Partly it is a feature of the increasing intricacy of public landscapes. ‘Religion’ and ‘religions’ become public through a dense network of mediation strategies and technologies which shape the collective imagining of social concepts. At the same time, complexity develops from the fact that the traditions represented by this idea (Hinduism) are a particularly extensive and diverse web of structures, agencies, texts and contexts.
Many scholars have problematised or struggled to conceptualise this web of traditions as a religion. Recognising this struggle, some have even turned to Hinduism as a starting point for a critique of the concept of religion itself or of the idea of ‘World Religions’ with which it is so often associated (Fitzgerald, 1990, 2000, 2005; King, 1999). This line of enquiry is promising as it indicates the sharply critical edge which has developed in explorations of the relationship between ‘religion’ and ‘Hinduism’. Most of this work, however, focuses on the early modern and/or colonial period as a time when religious traditions in India were decisively altered. The intent in the present volume is to take account of these changes and their implications and also to move beyond them, by mapping the multiple ways in which the idea of Hinduism has presented itself in the modern and late modern period, as the complexity of public space has proliferated. Our approach is premised on the recognition that the modern concept of religion is deeply influenced by such contexts. Over the past 20 years or so, a range of theorists working in the fields of religious studies and anthropology have developed new approaches to religion, which understand it not so much as a phenomenon associated with the development of human societies, but rather as a feature of modern social relations, modern networks of power (Asad, 1993; McCutcheon, 1997). How is Hinduism situated as a category and a practice in this field? The essays in this book contribute to our understanding of the processes through which contemporary Hinduism is produced in complex, imbricated ways.
This book is the culmination of a series of seminars which were focused on ‘the public representation of a religion called Hinduism’. All the contributions started life as presentations in this series of seminars, held across the three countries of India, the UK and the US. In this introduction, I want to explore some of the issues raised by this series as a way of introducing the core themes of the book. In the first instance, and in the best traditions of scholarship on Hinduism, we need to lay down some markers in terms of definitions: as it was posed to us at an early session of the project, what exactly do we mean by the ‘public representation’ of a ‘religion’ called ‘Hinduism’?
Our first consideration is to establish some sense of the shaping of Hinduism as a religion. The terminology is specific. Research on the early modern and colonial period has revealed how the idea of modern Hinduism was gradually fashioned through the work of a range of agents in emerging public environments. In particular, it demonstrates how these environments provided platforms for the articulation of new forms of religious organisation (see Pennington, 2005; Sweetman, 2003) and new ways of projecting religious communities (see Freitag, 1989; Oberoi, 1994; Waghorne, 2004). There is an ongoing debate about the extent to which such changes constituted what some authors have referred to as the ‘invention of Hinduism’ (for a recent exploration of the debate, see Bloch, Keppens and Hegde, 2010). However one feels about this characterisation (and there are certainly some sharply divergent views), the historical evidence is clear that the idea of Hinduism was articulated in new ways, in terms of both forms and contexts of mediation. Take, for example, this comment by the author of the 1891 General Report on the Census of India, Jervoise Baines: ‘By the process of exclusion, we reach the conclusion that Hinduism is the large residuum that is not Sikh, or Jain, or Buddhist, or professedly Animistic, or included in one of the foreign religions’ (Baines, 1893: 158). The 1891 Census was the third in the decennial series which continues to this day. The General Reports on early censuses like this one provided an extraordinary commentary, supported by a distinctive scientistic discourse, on different aspects of Indian life, published and subsequently debated in a range of public environments. As Michael Haan (2005: 15) has noted, ‘every ten years a debate would re-emerge among Indian intellectuals, political activists and colonial administrators over whether Hinduism even existed, and if it did, over how it could be measured’. Baines’ comment demonstrates how one distinctive approach fashioned in the context of the Census was to view Hinduism as a kind of ‘default’ religion, shaped in the space created by the identification of other religions. Understandably, such approaches inspired vociferous debate during this period, carried out in press and pamphlet literature and in meetings held under the auspices of the increasing number of publicly established associations with an interest in religious matters. Undoubtedly, the religion called Hinduism came to be debated, thought about and understood in new ways through these exchanges.
As this evidence demonstrates, the role of the colonial state in these processes was critical. But it is important also to place this role within the broader context of a developing conceptual modernity, which was partly configured by new notions of what religion was and how it related to secularism. Most critically, as Talal Asad (1993: 42) points out, ‘from being a concrete set of practical rules attached to specific processes of power and knowledge, religion has come to be abstracted and universalised’. These twin processes of abstraction and universalisation enable the projection of religion as a globally relational category. As a result of these processes, Hindu traditions were drawn progressively into a comparative framework and organised in a manner which enabled them to be represented as one of a number of major ‘religious systems’ which, though different, were all examples of the common category of human experience and action known as religion. Baines’ ‘process of exclusion’ exemplifies the relational trend. Even if it could not be identified through the (admittedly often fragile) empiricism of the enumeration exercise, Hinduism was nevertheless ‘there’ in the Census, courtesy of everything it was not.
As this suggests, comparison and an associated atmosphere of competition had a strong influence on the ways in which Hinduism was represented in the public spaces of colonialism (Zavos, 2010). Christian missionaries frequently characterised Hinduism as idolatrous, polytheistic and socially oppressive (see Oddie, 2006). Scholars, practitioners and even some missionaries were active in countering such depictions throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, sometimes representing Hinduism as uniquely spiritual, tolerant and undogmatic in contradistinction to other religions. The classic exponent of this view was Swami Vivekananda, who in 1893 represented (in both senses of the word, see Note 4) Hinduism at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago. Vivekananda offered a revisionist vision of Advaita Vedanta as the essence of Hindu spirituality, holding it up as a counterpoint to what he perceived as the materialist and spiritually impoverished West. Significantly, it was in the wake of the Chicago event that Vivekananda established the Ramakrishna Mission, a modern organisation with a mission of salvation and social service in this compromised modern world (Beckerlegge, 2006; Chapter 29 in this volume). The Mission has served as a kind of template, with a number of other organisations styled along these lines emerging in the colonial and postcolonial period. The concerns of these organisations reflect the emerging character of Hinduism as a modern, publicly conscious religion. The many ways in which this idea manifests itself is the key theme this book seeks to explore.
Making the bridge from early modern and colonial developments to the present involves thinking carefully about the complexity of the public arenas in which ideas such as Hinduism are fashioned and sustained. Talal Asad reflects in the context of Muslim interventions in the public space in Britain in the 1980s–90s:
If the adherents of a religion enter the public sphere, can their entry leave the pre-existing discursive structure intact? The public space is not an empty space for carrying out debates. It is constituted by the sensibilities—memories and aspirations, fears and hopes—of speakers and listeners, and also by the way they exist (and are made to exist) for each other. (Asad, 1999: 181)
This stimulating intervention indicates the complexity of the notion of public space, its ‘fullness’ (it is ‘not an empty space’) and its dialogical role in the construction of subjectivity, including, evidently, religious subjectivity.
Such an approach is some way distant from the elaboration of a universal, secular rational public space by Jurgen Habermas (1989). This Habermasian public sphere has been deconstructed by a range of commentators, particularly as it has developed in late modern contexts (for a range of approaches, see Calhoun, 1992). The idea of universalism has been subverted by the identification of numerous networks of political action which challenge the discourses and institutions of mainstream politics. In this sense, it is more accurate to envisage a network of particular public spaces which operate across and in dialogue with each other.1 Similarly, the cognitive trajectory of the Habermasian public sphere is now recognised as being offset by emotional or aesthetic interventions which can have a major impact on political discourse in any particular time or space.2 These arguments point us towards an understanding of the idea of the public as a web or network of spaces with a multiplicity of discursive registers. Thinking of the public in these terms introduces a level of complexity which is appropriate to the variety of ways in which religions take on a public profile in a late modern context.
Considering Hinduism (amongst others), a further layer of complexity is invoked by the elaboration of colonial and postcolonial publics. In the undemocratic context of colonialism, we might expect the official public sphere (that recognised as legitimate by the State) in India to have been entirely closed down. The discourse of benevolent imperialism, however, ensured that a form of public sphere did indeed develop, albeit heavily constrained by the consistent intervention of the State. As Kalpagam (2002: 38) states, the colonial public sphere became part of ‘a new game of politics’ in which symbols of liberal governmentality ensured ‘the efficacy of colonial power itself’. The modalities of this constrained public space were very significant in producing imaginings both of Hinduism as a religion, and of Hindus as a community to be represented in political arenas (see Sugirtharaja, 2003; Zavos, 2010). At the same time, the colonial condition of dominance and constraint invoked the emergence of what Nancy Fraser has called ‘subaltern counterpublics’, that is, ‘parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counter discourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests and needs’ (1992: 123; see also Freitag, 1989, 2005). These counter-publics were well developed in the context of anti-colonial insurgency and related politics of resistance, in which the language of Hinduism was deeply implicated.3 Such histories ensure that a postcolonial notion of public space is always already understood as multilayered and contested, replete with political and creative tensions.
It is perhaps because of such tensions that Appadurai and Breckenridge (1988: 6–7) identify postcolonial public culture as a ‘contested terrain’, a ‘zone of cultural debate’ designed to appeal to ‘a diversity of audiences’. Although they begin by articulating a concern with understanding the ‘consciousness of the emergent Indian public’ (p. 7), part of their reasoning for envisaging this contested terrain is also to open up the potential for the theorisation of cosmopolitan cultures which cut across national boundaries. The zone of cultural debate is marked out in relation to the ‘interactional contexts formed by media, market and travel dynamics’ (p. 8). It is just such contexts which enable Appadurai (1996) to develop his influential notion of ‘ethnoscapes’ and other ‘-scapes’—fluid and shifting landscapes of conscious connectivity which are formed very much as a type of public space. The current book acknowledges such spaces as influential in the representation of contemporary Hindu-ness. Our focus is on three geographical regions—India, the US and the UK—which together provide the context for the development of interactional ethnoscapes in which different media, markets and patterns of travel (including, of course, migration) have influenced the representation of Hinduism.
The objective, then, is to investigate the ways in which ideas of both Hinduism and Hindus as a recognisable community are represented in this network of public spaces, and how these ideas impact across the network. But what does that idea of representation signify, how critical is it to our understanding of what modern Hinduism ‘is’? The question of representation has become central to social science research because of the recognition that social reality is constructed in cultural context through ‘systems of representation’ (Hall, 1997: 17). Such systems, it is argued, construct, rather than reflect, that reality. Quite pragmatically, they make the world meaningful. As Brosius (2005: 3) notes, drawing also on the work of Stuart Hall, ‘representation does not re-present a meaning that is already there and static’. Rather, it is ‘a signifying practice within a particular discourse that constitutes reality’.
In the context of public Hinduisms, then, this is a process through which ‘Hinduism’, ‘Hindu’ and associated signifiers are brought together with practices, ideas and objects marked out—or signified—as such within discursive constraints configured by different types of public space. In these public contexts, a significant dynamic occurs in the process of representation. That is a dynamic between the dual meaning of representation, as ‘speaking of’ and ‘speaking for’, which Gayatri Spivak (1990), amongst others, has articulated as darstellen (portrait) and vertreten (proxy). In particular, Spivak signals the way in which any attempt to speak for a particular constituency invokes the production of images, representations associated with that constituency.4 Such representations, then, become crucial moments for the construction of community and ideas around which communities cluster. The chapters in this book demonstrate that images (or portraits) of Hinduism as a religion are continually being produced and contested by a variety of agents, many of whom claim explicitly to speak (or proxy) for communities of Hindus in different public spaces. Such claims, then, should be examined not just in terms of their legitimacy but also in terms of the images of Hindu-ness they produce, as these will, as we have noted, have their impact on the public spaces in which such notions of community are projected and contested.
Mapping the parameters of our field of enquiry in this way demonstrates the many complexities that are thrown up by the conjunction ‘Public Hinduisms’. The discussions in the project from which this book has developed have attempted both to draw out and draw on this complexity, and a variety of persistent debates have emerged. In this section, I want to highlight some of these debates as a way of framing the discussions undertaken by particular authors in the main body of the book.
A central question that has been posed throughout this project has been, how do different public spaces shape different forms of Hinduism? As indicated above, public Hinduisms exist in a network of public spaces. Some of these spaces are more ‘official’ than others. Some spaces, for example, are clearly configured by explicit concerns related to the formal recognition of Hindus as a community or Hinduism as a religion, whilst others are framed by concerns related to aesthetics, emotions and the fleeting coming together of devotional constituencies. Some are framed by discourses in which States have a clear investment, whilst others may be governed by discourses of tradition conceptualised at a number of different levels or by discourses of violence fashioned through decades of communal politics. It seems clear that these varied public arenas have their impact on the way in which Hinduism and Hindu communities are conceptualised. In the context of ethnic plurality as an issue of political concern in the UK and the US, for example, notions of Hinduism have been fashioned by some organisations to respond to the expectations of a political space governed by the logics of multiculturalism, constructing congregational forms, mechanisms of transmission and structured theological conceptions of Hinduism appropriate to this space (see in this volume: Kurien, Chapter 7; Zavos, Chapter 6). In India, however, some Hindu organisations have responded to the communalisation of public spaces, particularly in urban environments, by moving away from identification with Hinduism altogether, preferring instead to emphasise a kind of ecumenical ‘spirituality’ (see McLain, Chapter 14 in this volume). Other types of public space associated with religion in India, such as festival occasions, demonstrate different forms of representation, often governed by the changed social status or political consciousness of engaged caste and other groups (see Bouillier, Chapter 27 in this volume; see also Clark-Deces, 2008).
Two particular issues arise prominently in conjunction with this key arena of debate. First, the relationship between diaspora and home as what might be called ‘broad-brush’ public spaces in which Hinduism is represented. Although clearly there are scenarios in which particular home or diaspora space is crucial, it is important also to acknowledge the many ways in which this binary is no longer relevant in exploring contemporary Hinduisms. This is partly because the notion of public space itself increasingly challenges the constraints of national boundaries and the division between ‘home’ and ‘away’. Transnational Hinduism is projected vigorously by different organisations through rapidly developing new media channels and in different discursive contexts. These spaces can themselves play what Anderson and Eickelman (1999: 1–2) characterise as ‘a significant role in fragmenting and contesting political and religious authority’. One interesting way in which this contestation may occur is through the decentring of sacred space. Transnational Hinduism has fashioned new arenas of sacredness, in ways which potentially challenge traditional ideas about the sacred quality of the Indian landscape. Such possibilities demonstrate how Hinduism is represented differently as public space mutates, being conceptualised in new ways as the world itself is constantly reconstituted.
The second major (and connected) issue arising in relation to the shaping influence of public space is the way in which it influences the presence or prominence of Hindu nationalism. Although this book is not primarily focused on the ‘problem’ of Hindu nationalism, the persistence of this ideology in the public representation of Hinduism cannot be ignored. Several contributions note what appear as almost compulsive associations between public Hindu-ness and Hindutva (see Sippy, Chapter 2; Zavos, Chapter 6; Kurien, Chapter 7; Reddy, Chapter 23; Chaudhuri, Chapter 24; Khanduri, Chapter 25; Kim, Chapter 30). Various writers have explored this issue in previous works (Kurien, 2007; Reddy, 2006), but there is still much to do in terms of unpicking the particular discursive pressures which produce Hindu nationalism in contexts of, for example, multiculturalism and postcolonial environmentalism. One interesting area of debate has been the ways in which Hindu nationalism itself has been transformed by its articulation in transnational public spaces, moving beyond a previously perceived focus on state building and nationalism. It remains to be seen how this kind of development might impact on the shapes of Hindu nationalism as articulated in Indian contexts, but the implication of the arguments put forward in this book is that transnational networks increasingly affect representations, even in strongly wrought nationalist contexts.
The influence of particular organisations in developing these transnational networks is another key debate pointed out in the chapters in this book. Indeed, the role of a particular style or type of organisation in fashioning the idea of modern Hinduism has emerged as a major theme, exploring the dominance of what has been labelled in one earlier contribution as ‘export-quality religion and spirituality’ (McKean, 1996: 165). With this phrase, Lise McKean invokes Hinduism delivered transnationally by sophisticated and highly effective organisations, drawing on the life skills of middle class, professional devotees to propagate the teachings of a guru by exploiting the full range of media technologies and associated structures of modern living. McKean (1996: 1) argues that such organisations reflect the corporatisation of modern social life; she claims that ‘the activities of many gurus and their organisations during the 1980s and 1990s are related to the simultaneous expansion of transnational capitalism in India’.
Work by various scholars indicates that the tropes associated with this ‘export quality religion and spirituality’ can be traced back much further than the 1980s and 1990s. Beckerlegge’s work on the Ramakrishna Mission (2006), as suggested earlier, demonstrates the importance of this organisation as a kind of turn of the century prototype for the development of modern Hindu organisations. McKean herself explores the corporatisation of Sivananda’s Divine Life Society from the 1930s, noting its emerging management structure, its commitment to social action in a wide range of arenas, its focused marketing of literature and associated ephemera and its vigorous exploitation of new media channels in order to spread the teachings of the guru. These factors may almost be said to be generic to modern Hindu organisations, although of course different factors are more or less prominent in different organisations—another issue explored in this book.
McKean’s particular focus on the 1980s and 1990s is significant in one way, as it is the basis for her key argument about the relationship between modern guru organisations and Hindu nationalism. ‘As producers and purveyors of spiritual commodities’, she argues, ‘gurus assist in propagating Hindu nationalism, an ideology that relies on referents to Hindu India’s unparalleled spiritual prowess and moral authority’ (1996: 1). Here, McKean proposes a link between the two which appears as structural, because it is based on an understanding of the ramifications of liberalisation in India, the opening up of the Indian economy to transnational capital. The rise of both Hindu nationalism and guru organisations is related to the rapid expansion of the Indian middle class in the wake of liberalisation. The assertive Hindu identity she associates with this class is reinforced by the guru organisations’ capacity to commodify Hindu spirituality, rendering it ripe for middle-class consumption. Some evidence in this volume would support this view (see Sarkar, Chapter 20; Brosius, Chapter 31), although there is also counter-evidence presented, which casts both the positioning of guru organisations and the trajectory of middle-class ideologies beyond the constraints of an aggressively assertive Hindu nationalism (see McLain, Chapter 14; Toffin, Chapter 17; Kim, Chapter 30; see also Warrier, 2005: 125–26; Kim, 2009). If this evidence is persuasive in loosening the connection between modern Hindu organisations and Hindu nationalism, however, we should at the same time not lose sight of the obvious significance of explicitly Hindu nationalist organisations themselves in representing modern Hinduism. The organisations of the Sangh Parivar have a resonance both in India and the diaspora; they frequently echo the organisational tropes of other modern Hindu organisations and they have been instrumental in developing important public arenas for the collaboration of these organisations. It is hoped that by presenting chapters on both Hindu nationalist and Hindu organisations, and in some cases on the relationship between the two, the present volume will encourage further debate and a rethinking of key issues associated with the role of Hindu nationalism in the representation of contemporary Hinduism.
The final broad area of debate I would like to point up in this section is more methodological, and is continued by the chapters which follow in this introductory section. Vigorous discussions have taken place during the course of the project from which this book has developed about the representation of Hinduism in one particular public context: the academy. The network has recognised this arena of representation as it has others—a space ‘constituted by the sensibilities … of speakers and listeners’ (Asad, 1999: 181)—and has subsequently sought to examine the issues thrown up by this recognition. Debates about what constitutes or how to approach modern Hinduism have been the subject of contestation in particular between positions of scholarship and positions of practice, and the project sought to address this issue by including practitioners in some of our sessions. The ensuing debates have highlighted a very particular set of problems to do with legitimacy and ownership, as some practitioner positions (both within our sessions and more broadly) have been instrumental in questioning the value of scholarship, and the ability of scholars to comment appropriately on the nature of modern Hinduism.
This issue, for example, has arisen repeatedly in the context of American Academy of Religion (AAR) conferences, a point taken up in Shana Sippy’s chapter in this introductory section. She recounts how a flurry of personal and sometimes aggressive emails followed her announcement of a panel at the 2008 AAR on ‘Representing and Misrepresenting Hinduism’. This provides the starting point for a chapter which reflects on the development of oppositional positions, as in recent decades academics have turned increasingly to reflexive, critical positions (‘Historicising Hinduism’) at the same time as diaspora community organisations have asserted a right to protect what they perceived as their authentic tradition in public contexts (‘defending dharma’). Sippy goes on to note that these oppositional positions have developed as stereotypical refrains, and much of her chapter is given over to exploring the nuanced approaches which underlie the stereotypes associated with the ‘defense of dharma’ (in her very approach, perhaps, challenging the stereotypes associated with the academic study of Hinduism—a point, we hope, which is reinforced in other contributions to this volume). She concludes with a suggestion for approaching the representation of Hinduism in new ways, arguing that an ‘engaged hermeneutics of indeterminacy’ will enable a more consistent appreciation of the lack of fixed meaning in the idea of Hinduism. The emphasis on conceptual dynamism here is taken up by Maya Warrier as she focuses on the ‘boundary politics’ between the scholar and the practitioner. Her short essay (see Chapter 3 in this volume) which has been developed from one of a series of discussion papers produced as part of our project, explores the multiple values attached to the boundary between scholar and practitioner.5 Warrier argues that the idea of the boundary cannot stand up to any close scrutiny; nevertheless, it is a useful model as analysing its deployment can provide insights into the political positions which inform the debate over representation. In a manner which resonates with Sippy, Warrier concludes with a call for the development of new paradigms of thought and practice in thinking about the representation of Hinduism in academic arenas and beyond.
Discussions of this sort bring us right back to our foundational questions about how ideas of Hinduism are constructed in different public contexts. The tensions which are sometimes apparent in the relative status of scholar and practitioner constructions reflect the significance of these two discourses in specific public spaces. In particular, these are significant discourses in relation to multiculturalism in the US and the UK as both scholars and practitioners exert authority in arenas in which Hinduism has a resonance as a feature of ethnic plurality, in the context of which policy is frequently formulated (as exemplified by the so-called ‘California Textbook Controversy’, which is explored in this volume by Sippy, Chapter 2; Natrajan, Chapter 11; Chaudhuri, Chapter 24; and Reddy, Chapter 16). This is perhaps less of an issue in India, where Hinduism enters arenas associated with policy formation in different ways, and the academy is less focused on the issue of religion per se. That is not to say that Indian academics do not face challenges to their interpretations; just that these challenges are framed more explicitly by the politics of Hindu nationalism and particular Hindu nationalist articulations of history.
These variations do, however, point up again a key theme that underpins this volume: the meaning of Hinduism is constructed differently in different public spaces and that different agents frequently contest the ‘right of representation’ within those spaces. Our focus has come to be on the deployment or, as Reddy has it, the ‘operationalisation’ of Hinduism as a factor in this range of different public spaces (see Reddy, Chapter 26) and the agents who effect such operationalisation. This focus encompasses darstellen and vertreten: the composite dynamics of representation through which Hinduism is both embodied and spoken for, and places particular emphasis on the construction of Hinduism in specific contexts. Our intention in this book, then, is to lay out a range of constructions, a range of contexts not, as Kim Knott says, in order to reproduce ‘the modernist regime of collecting, classifying, comparing, and typologising data on religion’ but rather to present a constellation of examples of the many ways in which Hinduism is produced as ‘a dynamic and engaged part of a complex social environment or habitat, which is itself criss-crossed with wider communications and power relations’ (Knott, 2005: 119).
Finally, I will comment briefly on the structure of this volume. The book is arranged in a series of thematically ordered sections. These sections reflect some of the issues raised in debates during the course of this project. The reader will note, for example, that each section includes work focused both on India and the diaspora, reflecting our understanding that the home–diaspora binary, whilst still significant in certain cases, is frequently blurred and challenged by the contemporary shaping of Hinduism as a religion. Second, most sections include chapters focused both on Hindu nationalism as it is revealed in a range of public contexts and movements and ideas which are not manifestly part of this project, reflecting our desire to explore continuities and ruptures apparent in relationships between these two. After the introductory section, which hence forward focuses reflexively on the role of the scholar and the practitioner in the act of representation, the volume moves to examine ‘ecumenical constructions’, corporate forms of Hinduism or Hindu organisation which have become particularly prominent in the representation of the religion in diaspora contexts, but which also have an impact on Hinduism in India. We then explore developments in particular traditions, reflecting our concern to focus in on how far particular types of modern organisation affect or shape the representation of Hinduism, and on the dynamics of change and interaction within and between these organisations. Our focus then moves to a variety of examples of the mobilisation of communities of Hindus. Although these mobilisations are often framed by concerns commonly recognised as Hindu nationalist, chapters in this section reflect the ambiguities and contestations apparent in such identifications. The final section explores the many ways in which contemporary Hinduism is mediated in a range of contrasting public spaces, hoping through this juxtaposition to point up the issue of contextualised ‘operationalisation’ which we see as a key factor in the analysis of contemporary Hindu-ness.
Each section is edited and introduced by a different member of the editorial collective. Section introductions are designed both to draw the chapters together around the section theme and to provide links into the wider concerns of the volume as a whole. In this introduction, I have resisted the temptation to discuss individual chapters in any depth as this task will be accomplished in a focused way by section editors. At the same time, the reader will notice that the sections which provide a conceptual order to our examination of the public Hinduisms are punctuated by a number of shorter contributions, ‘snapshots’ of particular issues, which cut across the order of things. These snapshot pieces provide short commentaries or more polemical accounts which challenge, augment or provide context to the longer research articles. The non-sequential location of snapshots is designed to encourage the reader to make their own associations across the interconnected fields of public Hinduism. The varied themes of these snapshots will hopefully enable this function, as they range from a polemical analysis of the idea of the ‘practising Hindu’ in the US (see Natrajan, Chapter 11) to a short ethnographic account of a shrine-temple to Madhuri Dixit in the industrial town of Tatanagar, Jharkhand (see Kakar, Chapter 8). There are, for example, links to be made between the idea of the practising Hindu and the notions of ‘authentic’ Hindu identity construction discussed in chapters by Sippy (Chapter 2), Kurien (Chapter 7), Zavos (Chapter 6) and Chaudhuri (Chapter 24). Performative practices in the Madhuri Dixit temple may be compared to those undertaken in the public spaces of the Nath Yogi festival explored by Bouillier (Chapter 27) and to the careful engagement of different publics undertaken by the BAPS Swaminaryan Sanstha and International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) as explored by Kim (Chapter 30) and Warrier (Chapter 32) respectively. These connections are, however, to be imagined variously rather than ring-fenced through editorial suggestion.
Other snapshots provide us with ethnographic observations on the role of the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh in the settlement of Bhutanese refugees in Atlanta (see Kumar, Chapter 28), an explanatory commentary on BAPS Swaminarayan websites (see Kim, Chapter 22), a commentary on the relationship between social movement dynamics and the political fortunes of the Bharatiya Janata Party (see Basu, Chapter 18) and a useful timeline and accompanying commentary on the California Textbook controversy (see Reddy, Chapter 16). The sometimes dissonant positioning of snapshots is a purposeful challenge, opening up the possibility of unseen linkages across the different public manifestations of Hinduism, in recognition of the multiple, overlapping and non-linear character of public spaces themselves. The only exception to the rule of snapshot randomness is that contributed by Raymond Williams. This personal reflection on the relationship between scholars and practitioners provides the space for one of the editorial team who has worked for many years in the field of the Study of Religion to comment on one of our major themes, in conversation with the longer chapter which immediately precedes it in this introductory section, on the ‘boundary politics’ between the scholar and the practitioner, contributed by another member of the editorial team, Maya Warrier. This conversation reflects the stimulating debates which have always been at the heart of this project and which I hope will be developed further through engagement with the themes and issues explored in the chapters in this volume.
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1 See, for example, McGuigan (2000: 3). ‘We may’, he says, ‘identify a multiplicity of public spheres, mainly unofficial or semi-official, representing many differences of identity, interest and aspiration yet also, realistically, interacting more or less successfully with official, overarching public spheres that are supposed to be unifying and universalizing’.
2 A point which is emphasised by Asad in his commentary on British Muslims in the wake of the Rushdie Affair (1993).
3 See, for example, Gooptu’s (2001) exploration of the space of the bazaar in colonial UP, or Gould’s examination of Hinduism as part of a ‘heteroglossia of languages’ in UP nationalist politics in the 1930s (2004: 199).
4 See Spivak (1990: 108). ‘In the act of representing politically’, she comments:
you actually represent yourself and your constituency in the portrait sense, as well. You have to think of your constituency as working class, or the black minority, the rainbow coalition, or yet the military-industrial complex and so on. That is representation in the sense of Darstellung. So that you do not ever ‘simply’ vertreten anyone, in fact, not just politically in the sense of true parliamentary forms, but even in political practices outside of parliamentary forms.
5 For this collection of papers, see http://www.arts.manchester.ac.uk/hinduism/resources/papers (last accessed on 13 February 2012).