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Let Us Talk About Your Book:
Arvind Pal Singh Mandair - "Religion & The Specter of The West"
Part I

Q & A with Author by SIKHCHIC.COM

 

 

 

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION TO OUR NEW SERIES

Somewhat removed from all the daily goings-on in the world around us is a kind of a parallel universe -- connected with us, yet removed from us through a self-imposed isolation.

It is the world of academia.

It is where ideas are tossed around, cut and sliced and mixed, to create salads of thought and opinion, of new ideas and novel perspectives. So that we better understand ourselves -- our past and present -- in order to better equip ourselves to take ownership of our future.

The Sikh community today is blessed with an ever-growing front-line of thinkers and teachers who diligently carry on this constant prodding and probing, questioning and answering, on our behalf. They are a pleasant change from their fossilized counterparts of the dusty past. They are young, smart, courageous, daring, informed, trained, skilled, articulate … and committed.

Here at
sikhchic.com, we bring them out from their ivory towers from time to time, to introduce them to you, and to get them to tell us about their work … in simple, every-day terms.

Academic work is slow and plodding, at times dense and elusive. Not surprisingly, it confuses many. Some are wary of it, suspecting it of nefarious intentions. Some misunderstand and misinterpret things to fit them into their own world-view, sometimes unwittingly, sometimes not.

Prof Arvind Pal Singh Mandair, Associate Professor and holder of the Chair in Sikh Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA, is one of our bright lights … in fact, amongst the best of them. His ideas challenge us always to rise to new heights.

You’ve already met him through our earlier series,
“The Making of a Sikh Scholar” which can still be accessed in the PEOPLE Section of sikhchic.com.

Today, we start a new series, consisting of an ongoing, weekly Q & A with Arvind, in an attempt to explore his ideas, in layman’s terms.

We begin with a journey through his extraordinary work, which bears the somewhat complicated title, “
Religion and The Specter of The West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Translation” (Columbia University, 2009).

We welcome your questions and comments, which can be posted beneath each segment.

Enjoy! 

 

 

Q  The complete title of your book is a mouthful: Religion and The Specter of The West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Translation. I find it intriguing. It is obviously written for a scholarly audience. I would like you to describe to me its thesis, briefly and clearly, in as simple and small bites as possible. That is, the key issues that you raise or try to address in your book.
 
A   The book grapples with many different issues and analyzes a wide variety of different phenomena, all at once. Let me try to list just a few of them. 

At the simplest level, I would say that this book looks at the nature of the encounter between Sikhs and Western modernity.

This is not merely a topic of historical interest. The encounter is not just something that happened two centuries ago and then stopped happening. It continues to happen right now as Sikhs, South Asians – in fact all non-Western cultures – now live in liberal democracies, i.e., in nation states which first developed on the basis of the separation between Church and State in the West -- a concept which is also referred to as the separation between religion and the secular.

This separation is one of the main consequences of global modernity. This separation between religion and the secular basically divides the world that we live in, into two parts: the Public Sphere and the Private Sphere.

The Public sphere is the realm of politics and its legal guardian is the Nation State which alone holds sovereignty.

The Private sphere is the domain accorded to Religion, and any culture, once it gets defined as a ‘religion’, has to legally accept the sovereignty of the nation state.

Q   And this applies to us as well … the 30 million Sikhs who live across the globe?
 
A   All cultures have to submit to this distinction or separation whether their traditions allow it or not. By submitting to the separation of politics and religion, their cultural consciousness becomes inextricably linked to global consciousness of modernity – and this global consciousness is composed at this point in time by Western (essentially European-American) cultural, economic and linguistic forms.

This modern global consciousness is now so pervasive that it has effectively become a new global Empire which masquerades as a provider of freedom, but is in fact the strongest force of cultural domination that the world has ever seen.

No one is immune to this cultural domination.

  But how does it manifest itself?

A   It is everywhere: in the political-economic structures of the global consciousness, and inside our heads, in the sense that this global consciousness determines how we (Sikhs, for example) are able to make meaning of our own culture and heritage and concepts.

We can make meaning of our concepts only in relation to the world in which we live. But the world in which we now live may not be of our making. Nevertheless it constitutes our sense of reality. It even comes out of our mouths every time we answer questions such as, for example: “What is your religion?”.

You cannot just escape from it.

But you can contest it in order to make the Sikh life-world regain its sense of sovereignty, which every dominant nation state takes away or asks us to surrender. And it is this spirit of contestation, an entirely democratic contestation, that is the driving force behind my book, Religion and the Specter of the West.

Q   You can’t escape it, you say. But you also seem to suggest that we can fight it. Is it then an exercise in futility?
 
A   Well, some Sikhs might well say, “I’m doing very well, thank-you. I like this modern global system because it puts a lot of money in my pocket and gives me recognition as member of a ‘World-Religion’ ”.

My answer, in short, is that the system recognizes you only because it has nurtured you and taught you to give it recognition first. You have to recognize the system as your master first, you have to give up your sovereign aspect, only then does it give something back to you.

But what it gives back to you is a prison for your mind, a prison that makes us believe that we’re being given something good. In other words, the empire of modern global consciousness has its own belief system. Once you enter into this belief system, it deceives you into giving up your most precious treasure and exchanging it for something that the system returns to you as if it were the same as your treasure.

The name commonly given to this exchange process is translation, but the actual mechanism that drives this kind of translation is something called ‘dialectic’.

  How does one pin-point this phenomenon?

A   My book shows us, especially to Sikhs, how to recognize this belief system as a form of cultural domination, to recognize the workings of ‘dialectic’ which causes Sikhs to give up their sovereign treasure, a sovereign treasure bequeathed by the Sikh Gurus and enshrined in Guru Granth Sahib, for shiny new labels such as “World-Religion”, which may look enticing, but is still just a label – a label which allows the system to pigeon-hole Sikhi and Sikhs into a ‘religious’ compartment, depriving Sikh teachings of their force to act in the world.

Seen from this angle, the label ‘World-Religion’ positions Sikhs negatively, and NOT positively as most people believe. And the reason is that it removes Sikhs from access to the political, to self-governance, to the ability to define their own sovereignty. It is therefore a debilitating form of cultural and political segregation – a segregation no less insidious than racial segregation.

Indigenous Sikh terms and concepts do not recognize or contain this division between the spiritual and the political.

Q   How do we grapple with it, then?

  My remedy is not to escape from this Westernized world that we now inhabit. Running away from it is not an option. Rather I advocate that we should learn how to encounter it differently.

To encounter it differently is to make different connections with the cultures we otherwise have to live in. So the contestation only goes so far. Now, this different mode of encounter is something that I derive from the teachings of the Sikh Gurus. It is a mode of encounter that allows Sikh concepts to breathe in a new soil, but only by first removing the weeds that are strangling it, and then making productive connections with the host culture.

In doing this you end up not only retrieving and exporting the truly positive aspects of your own culture, but using this positivity to change the overtly dominant aspects of the host culture.

The end result is a form of encounter, not between enemies but between friends.

So, from this basic phenomenon of encounter between Sikhs and the West many other questions begin to flow out. These questions touch on a number of interesting issues, in my view.

  Let’s go over them, one by one. Slowly, please. Remember, you are taking me over unchartered territory, at least as far as I ’m concerned.

A   Well, first of all, the central importance of reviving the idea of Sikh sovereignty and its inseparability from the contemporary lived experience of Sikhs and why we need to find different ways of presenting its core components (shabad-guru and Khalsa) to the outside world.

My concern with sovereignty is to rethink this notion beyond its current limitation to an ethnic group or a territory, so that it is able to unleash its potential to go beyond these narrow limitations and respond to today’s complex globalized world.

That takes me to the second area: examining the ideological relationship between religion and secularism and how this affects the Sikh life-world.

People wrongly believe that religion and the secular are opposed.

In Religion and the Specter of the West, I utilize an important strand of contemporary scholarship in the history of ideas which shows convincingly that the modern concept of religion is actually a construction of the secular. It was constructed at the same time that the nation-state came into being.

This has important implications for the strongly held belief that ‘religion’ is a cultural universal. It certainly is not. More importantly, the structures of secular ideology are intimately linked to Christian theology.

Q   This is heavy stuff. I’ll need you to come back to these and explain them in a little more detail. Okay, the third issue?

   The book examines the historical role of translation as a site of colonial hegemony but equally as a site of anti-colonial resistance. I present especially critical readings of the writings of Ernest Trumpp, Max Arthur Macauliffe and W.H. McLeod and show how the Christian-Secular ideology in their interpretations of Sikh scripture permeated the language framework in which Sikhs attempted to articulate the nature of Sikhi and Sikh identity.

Four.

Because Sikh elites were affected by the ideology implicit within translation processes, I argue for the need to re-examine the Singh Sabha legacy with a view to reformulating a new Singh Sabha movement (we could call it Singh Sabha 2) which is more able to resist the flows of dominant global consciousness even as it learns to live with these flows.

The mark of a new Singh Sabha movement (Singh Sabha 2) would be one that is able to operationalize and export Sikh universals into the Anglophone language and consciousness; this would take Sikh concepts into different cultural contexts and thereby complete the Singh Sabha project, which I believe was stalled in the early 20th century as soon as the Sikhs allowed themselves to be segregated as a religious minority in India and elsewhere.

  I see you have your fifth finger out. Five?

A   Fifth -- The book also contests the politics of knowledge construction in the Western university and its connection with State and Media discourses. The ideological source of this connection between State, Media and Academia was G.W.F. Hegel.

Much of this book is essentially a battle against Hegel, who could also be seen as one of the chief architects of the modern global consciousness as a system of cultural domination.

The desired outcome of this battle is to enable discourses on Sikhs and Sikhi that is not totally objectified but enables Sikh subjectivity to emerge.

Finally, six and seven. I think I’m coming to the end of my list.

Six -- In line with my critique of the dominant Christian-Secular universals, I also contest Hindutva Indian secular universals as two sides of the same coin, showing the complicity between Hindu religious fundamentalism and the Indian secularism and its detrimental effects for minorities such as the Sikhs.

  There’s one more ...


  Seventh: Last but not least, the book also provides a strong critique of the overtly secular forms of postcolonial theory and postmodernism.


Continued next week …
January 17, 2014 

Conversation about this article

1: Karamvir Singh (Boston, MA, USA), January 17, 2014, 8:20 AM.

Brilliant discussion. Great food for thought. You are indeed getting us to think outside the box. You've already got me glued ...

2: Gurbani Kaur (Chandigarh, Punjab), January 17, 2014, 8:30 AM.

I love everything I come across on your site. Your postings are like meditations that connect heart and mind ... just as this interview has done. Whether I agree with the writers or not, I am bowled over by your subjects and your treatment of them. A big THANK YOU from the bottom of my heart. Bless you, Arvind ji, for your exciting ruminations. More, please m-o-r-e ...!

3: Inder Singh (New Delhi, India), January 17, 2014, 2:25 PM.

You've certainly piqued my interest. Am going to see if I can purchase the book online. But look forward to your coming segments.

4: Ravinder Singh (Mumbai, India), January 18, 2014, 12:21 PM.

Guru Nanak's way is the belief in One God and the equality of the entire humanity. A revolution for human equality was initiated on the Vaisakhi of 1699. It is amazing that the world views this extraordinary revolution with narrow communal lenses.

5: Ravinder Singh (Westerville, Ohio, USA), January 21, 2014, 4:56 PM.

I started reading Dr Arvind Pal Singh's book a while ago but struggled with it and then put it aside in frustration. The language I thought was beyond me (and I fancy myself quite comfortable with English). I am pleasantly surprised to discover that while his writings may be forbidding, his responses here are very articulate. Is it the same Dr Arvind Pal Singh? I think I am going to go back to his book. Thanks. You've made some very important points that we should seriously reflect on. Especially those Sikhs who have been brain-washed by the Macaullian system of education (and that includes yours truly). Any radical change has to begin with understanding what shackles us in the first place.

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Arvind Pal Singh Mandair - "Religion & The Specter of The West"
Part I"









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