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Decoloniality article

A Decolonial Theory of Religion


Columbus Before the Queen (1843) by Emanuel Leutze. Linking key events in the timeline of Ibero-colonial encounters, Leutze anachronistically depicts Columbus before the “Catholic Monarchs” inside the Alhambra palace of the recently conquered Emirate of Granada. {{PD-US}}

Decolonial thought presents important challenges to the academic study of religion. Numerous studies probing its relation to religion have been published in recent years within the various sub-disciplines in the field, yet the full significance decolonial thought offers for the study of religion needs yet to be unpacked. Decolonial thought and its analytic of modernity/coloniality as a theory and method for the study of religion calls for a careful reconsideration of the dominant—yet often unmarked and unnoticed–Eurocentric epistemic framework dictating the field.

The emergence of decolonial thought in the Americas is rooted in the long history of anti-colonial movement and criticism in Latin America and the Caribbean dating back to the first colonial encounter. It is, however, in the recent works of the Argentinean-Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel and the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano that a clearer notion of decolonial thinking emerges that parallels and complements postcolonial theory as developed by Edward Said and his interlocutors. Quijano’s notion of the coloniality of power highlights the polychronic nature of power that is operative in colonialism. On this account, coloniality manifests itself beyond the historical institution of colonization.

In his genealogical study of the modern category of religion, Talal Asad shows how the category of religion came to refer to a privatized notion of religion, one which essentializes religions based on their compatibility with the universalizing norm of secular rationality. Many have argued, after Asad, that the construction and the essentialization of the category of religion is itself a problematic endeavor because it reinforces the colonial framework of knowledge (Fitzgerald 2000). Likewise, because their definitions are dependent on one another, the emergence of the secular cannot be separated from the category of religion. Recent debates about secularism interrogate the modern concept of religion, pointing out the undying influence of religion in the constitution of the modern West (Charles Taylor, Jurgen Habermas, Jose Casanova). Yet others point at secularism’s significant role in the constitution of the modern colonial world. A critical study of secularism, they insist, attends to the complex structure of power configuration and power exchange at work in (neo)colonial governance as well. These complex structures both inform the construction of the secular and obscure the normativization of Western liberalism. In other words, the secular has been serving as the ideological banner of modern Western universalism which preserves Western/Christian hegemony while depoliticizing (the notion of) religion. [1]

A protest in Barcelona, where multiple organizations marched towards the statue of Columbus denouncing the genocide and the plundering of the entire colonial process of Latin America. Photo Credit: Flickr user fotomovimiento.org

The modern notion of religion can therefore be viewed as a product of the emergence of modernity/coloniality. Here, secularism functions as the mirror twin of modern religion that welds together the two ends of modernity/coloniality. As Walter Mignolo and Nelson Maldonado Torres have shown, the invention of race cannot be articulated apart from the emergence of the modern concept of religion. The traditional lines demarcating ontological difference between people shifted from a religious language (religious difference) to a secular language of scientific reason (racial difference). In other words, Europe’s colonial imaginary was constituted by the newly emerging racial categories which now replaced religion’s role of drawing lines of hierarchal difference among diverse populations. From the fifteenth-century Spanish inquisition to the sixteenth-century Valladolid debate, and from the missionary activities in the new world to the rise of comparative study of religion in nineteenth century Europe, religion—in its secularized iteration—was racialized and became instrumental in marking off ontological differences which aligned with Europe’s colonial interests.[2]

The substantial role religion has played in the historical trajectory of modernity/coloniality is obscured by the hegemonic installation of secularism as the ideology dictating the Western epistemic framework. This means that the secular can be viewed as the medium through which religion enacts coloniality. The large absence of engagement with religion in the study of modernity/coloniality is symptomatic of the coloniality of knowledge which informs the religious/secular binary. Taking decolonial thought seriously means considering the challenges and insights decolonial thought offers to the study of religion, especially as they pertain to questions about methods, texts, sites, and conceptual frameworks. There is an urgent need for a Trans-Atlantic, decolonial theory (or a decolonial method) for the study of religion in which scholars re-situate the Americas and the Trans-Atlantic historical experience as primary sites for theorizing modern religion. The collusion between the colonial encounter and the emergence of the modern study of religion has been pointed out by many already. Many suggest that the eighteenth and nineteenth century of colonialism are primary reference points for this collusion. While the modern discipline of the academic study of religion was certainly informed by the more recent imperialist enterprises of Europe, there is a much older and more important time and place for understanding the symbiotic relation between the simultaneous invention of the colonial other and the modern imaginary of the West: the colonial encounter of 1492.

Using the Spanish-American colonial encounter as a frame of reference for the study of religion and modernity/coloniality offers a more efficient starting point for interrogating the fundamental epistemic assumptions inscribed in the conceptual-theoretical frameworks employed in the study of modern religion. At the same time, focusing here also helps us to read the Latin American intervention in religion from a decolonial angle, highlighting the decolonial seeds that existed all along in Latin American religious thought. Eventually, this endeavor will lead to the call for an engagement with Latin American/Caribbean intellectual traditions among scholars of religion in the North American academy.

A decolonial theory of religion would involve reconsidering the Trans-Atlantic process of imperial designing as the primary site for analyzing modern religion—a process which involves the reconfiguration of the religious (racial) cartography in the Iberian peninsula (Spanish Inquisition), the colonial encounter, and the theological-legal debates on the humanity of the colonial other (Valladolid debates).[3] Other key sites that deserve equally important attention include the various anti-colonial indigenous thoughts and movements, liberation philosophies and theologies, as well as the work of scholars who turn to the historical experience of the African diaspora in order to probe and reflect on an alternative to the modern/colonial order and its worldview that is based on anti-blackness.

An auto-da-fé of the Spanish Inquisition and the execution of sentences by burning heretics on the stake in a market place. Wood engraving by Bocort after H.D. Linton.

The general lack of engagement with religion in the field of decolonial theory is indicative of the hegemonic secularist regime which informs the theoretical categories employed for identifying and analyzing religion. Consequently, not only is the role of religion in coloniality unexplored, but so are the complex intellectual genealogies constituting diverse forms of anti-colonial movements and ideas (many of which are inspired and informed by religious sources). This is why engaging secular texts and thinkers deserves equally as much attention as religious ideas and movements in the Americas. When considering the mutual imbrication of religious/aesthetic/cultural sensibilities and political vision in the Americas, it is highly imperative that we reconsider these secular texts (such as Frantz Fanon’s or José Martí’s) as sources for theorizing religion. Failure to do so results in the continuous loss of nuanced critiques and understandings of religion in those texts, as well as an understanding of the full implication of their political vision. The fact that the study of Latin American and Caribbean religions is primarily dominated by the study of local communities’ “practice” elements, while little attention is given to their intellectual production, might be symptomatic of the practitioner-scholar divide in religious studies that Aisha M Beliso-De Jesús has recently observed. Such a divide reproduces the academic division of labor between the West and the non-West, or between the northern hemisphere and the global south, in which the Christian West/North produces knowledge through theory (text), while the contribution of the non-Christian global South is consigned to practice (ritual).

Using the Ibero-colonial encounter as the primary reference for the study of religion and colonialism offers critical resources for reconsidering the problem of knowledge and power inscribed in the process of knowledge production within the field of religious studies. It exposes the complex layers of coloniality of power in which religion (and its study) is implicated. The analytics of modernity/coloniality allows us to see the critical importance of re-situating the study of Western religion in the Trans-Atlantic framework. At the same time, examining the colonial Americas from the Trans-Atlantic perspective leads us to a fuller understanding of Western-secular modernity which emerges with its inseparable other, coloniality.

 

[1] On these points see Richard King, Peter Van der Veer (here and here), Talal Asad, and Tomoko Masuzawa.

[2] These issues are discussed in the works by J. Z. Smith; David Chidester; Brent Nongbri; Charles Long, and  Nelson Maldonado-Torres

[3] Lewis Hanke and Anthony Pagden have published numerous studies on the impact of the Valladolid Debates in the colonial encounter.

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An Yountae
An Yountae is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at California State University, Northridge. He specializes in Religions of the Americas with a particular focus on Latin American/Caribbean religion and philosophy. He is the author of The Decolonial Abyss (Fordham University Press, 2016) as well as the co-editor with Eleanor Craig of Beyond Man: Race, Coloniality, and Philosophy of Religion (Duke University Press, 2021). His new book, The Coloniality of the Secular: Race, Religion, and Poetics of World Making is forthcoming from Duke University Press (2023).
Decoloniality article

Introduction to Decoloniality and the Study of Religion


Mexico City – Palacio Nacional. Mural by Diego Rivera showing the History of Mexico: Detail showing the burning of Maya literature by the Catholic Church. Image Credit: Wolfgang Sauber.

Theories of (de)coloniality raise profound questions and possibilities for the study of religion. Decolonial theory names and challenges enduring social, economic, political, and epistemic Eurocentrism that continues to define modernity even beyond the era of direct colonial domination. Bringing a decolonial lens to Contending Modernities opens up crucial new sites of analysis and engagement, as we consider how the academic study of religion—and the concept of religion itself—has helped to perpetuate modernity’s violences, and might yet contribute to the project of decoloniality. Contending Modernities’ new series, “Decoloniality and the Study of Religion,” brings together preliminary reflections from thinkers exploring the intersection between decolonial thought and the academic study of religion, with future posts planned that will delve into different sub-disciplines in the study of religion such as comparative religious ethics, philosophy of religion, and theory and method in the study of religion.

The Co-Constitution of Racial and Religious Difference

The essays in this series have two goals. First, they show how modern, Western conceptions of religion reinforce a global system of power that decolonial thinkers refer to as modernity/coloniality, revealing the complicity of the academic study of religion in these enduring patterns of violence. As An Yountae’s essay shows, decolonial thinkers draw an explicit linkage between the emergence of the category of religion itself and the simultaneous construction of racial and geographical (European/non-European) difference. In particular, decolonial thinkers point to 1492 and the completion of the settler-colonial Christian conquest of the Iberian Peninsula and the subsequent expulsion or forced conversion of the peninsula’s Jewish and Muslim inhabitants. In the aftermath of the fall of Granada, Jews and Muslims who converted to Catholicism remained persecuted as marranos (“swine”) under suspicions of crypto-Jewish and crypto-Islamic practices, revealing a novel co-mingling of religious and racial difference articulated in contrast with its constitutive (white/Christian/European) other through an emergent racial logic of blood purity. These interlinked Iberian constructions of racial and religious difference were subsequently globalized through European colonial encounters with indigenous peoples on the land that would become the Americas, and through the explosion of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans.

In the centuries since, this foundational construction of religious difference has functioned alongside interrelated and intersecting constructions of racial, gender, and geographical difference to frame systems of social, economic, and political domination—the conditions of coloniality—that reinforce the supremacy of a Eurocentered modernity over and against the perceived inferiority of those it has relegated to its darker side. As Kwok Pui Lan’s essay illustrates, the colonial construction of religion vis-à-vis the referent of a Eurocentered modernity has also been subsequently transmuted through modernity’s “secularist myth,” further reinforcing the othering of non-Western religions as backwards, irrational, and even violent in contrast to the modern, rational, and supposedly peaceful West.

Against this historical backdrop, the academic study of religion has itself functioned as an active participant in the perpetuation of modernity/coloniality’s Eurocentric hierarchy of knowledge production. Both during and beyond the era of direct European colonization, Western scholars of religion have played an active role in the imposition of Western concepts that have invisibilized non-Western ways of knowing and being in the world, flattening the epistemologies and ontologies of non-Western peoples within universalizing categories to fit within modernity’s self-narration. The Western academic delineation of “culture” from “religion” as distinct objects of study functioned through the age of colonial expansion to reductively categorize any number of non-Western epistemologies and constituted ontologies—that is, lived non-Western ways of knowing and being in the world—into the “backwards” or “primitive” categories of folklore, myth, and superstition. Nelson Maldonado-Torres’s essay elucidates a similar Eurocentric logic at work in the construction of the category of non-Western “world religions,” a thinly-veiled proxy indicator for racial, geographic, and even temporal (not “fully modern”) difference that marks the non-Christian religious as constitutively outside the modern West. As Tomoko Masuzawa explains in The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (also quoted by Maldonado-Torres), rather than affirming global religious pluralism as Western scholars might claim, the imposition of the category of “world religions” itself naturalizes an explicitly Christian theological lens for understanding what constitutes a religion in the first place, while simultaneously inscribing all non-Christian religions within a hierarchal system of rank-ordering that continually reaffirms (modern, Western) Christian hegemony. Through these two interpretive categories—world religions and culture—Western scholars thus continue to advance narratives of racialized religious difference whose shared logics are traceable to the encounters of 1492, dividing non-Europeans into those possessed of the wrong religions (Iberian Jews and Muslims first, and later adherents to any of the various non-Christian “world religions”) and those possessed of no religion recognizable as such (especially the indigenous peoples of the Americas).

De-Linking Religion From Modernity/Coloniality

Anti-neoliberalism protestors display flags and other symbols of Chile’s indigenous Mapuche people. Image Credit: Maximiliano Vega.

The second goal of these essays is to contribute to a burgeoning focus on the possibilities of imagining religion de-linked from the universalizing logics of modernity/coloniality. Such an approach rejects a modern Western conception of religion as a unitary, discrete variable that can be neatly disaggregated from other facets of human experience—what Kwok Pui Lan describes as “sui generis and separated from other cultural, social, and political aspects.” Instead, while highlighting the insufficiency of an unreconstructed understanding of religion, these essays also indicate the possibility of reconceptualizing religion in a way not reducible to the all-encompassing epistemological claims of a Westernized modernity. To this end, the essays in this series indicate the vital importance of the many ways of knowing and being in the world that have been suppressed in part through the use of the modern, Western category of religion itself.

Despite religion’s problematic genealogy as a category of Western analysis, these essays indicate the vital roles that decolonized accounts of religion might play in the formation of what decolonial thinkers refer to as “loci of enunciation“—a sense of positionality that reflects how one is acted upon by the global colonial matrix of power—from which ethical and political alternatives to modernity/coloniality can be imagined and enacted. Abdulkader Tayob’s essay in particular highlights the possibilities of a decolonized approach to Islamic Studies—and the study of religion more broadly—rooted not in the universalizing comparative hermeneutics of the colonizers, which presume a neutral vantage point that somehow transcends their subjects of study, but rather in the critical intellectual productions of Muslim communities themselves. Such an approach, to borrow a phrase from Tayob, helps to effect the provincialization of modern, Western approaches to the study of religion without simultaneously re-exceptionalizing them, opening the doors to dialogical possibilities between “other ways of thinking of religion and the religious.”

Decolonial thought unmasks the histories of violence that undergird Europe’s self-appointed status as the sole producer and purveyor of knowledge. Confronting these histories and their enduring structural manifestations requires that we also confront the epistemic legacies of colonialism that inhere within the Western academy. In the study of religion, this includes confronting the Eurocentrism of the field’s definitional concepts and categories and admitting the roles they have played in legitimizing the historic and enduring violences of Europe’s colonial projects. To that end, these essays offer an important and timely intervention into conversations on how the academic study of religion has participated in the maintenance of the modern/colonial world-system’s social, political, economic, and epistemic hierarchicalizations, while also indicating ways forward for the decolonial study of religion.

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Garrett FitzGerald
Garrett FitzGerald is a PhD candidate of Political Science & Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame and Research Associate for Contending Modernities. Garrett’s research interests focus on translating religious resources of meaning into political action, especially around the genesis, conduct, cessation, and processes of reconciliation that follow communal violence. In particular, he hopes to build upon previous field research in Honduras, exploring ways in which religious actors and communities articulate and enact alternatives to violence.
Theorizing Modernities article

Mobility beyond Modernity: A Response to Baum, Englund, Grillo, and Obadare


Landscape of northern Mozambique. Photo Courtesy of Devaka Premawardhana.

It is an author’s dream-come-true to have their work carefully read and thoughtfully evaluated. Even more so in this case, where the interlocutors with my book are among its most important influences. I sincerely thank Robert Baum, Harri Englund, Laura Grillo, and Ebenezer Obadare for their collegial and considerable engagements with Faith in Flux, for capturing as well as they have what I hoped would read as the book’s main interventions, and for continuing the conversation with incisive questions and critiques. Thanks also to Joshua Lupo and the entire editorial team of Contending Modernities for hosting this symposium.

It is significant that each of the interlocutors is an Africanist, a specialist in the continent long considered to be little more than a supplier of data for western knowledge production. Yet each of them has advanced in their own way a necessary corrective: that Africa provides not just raw materials but the very frameworks and paradigms that themselves can illuminate social and historical processes on the continent, but also in different parts of the world and, indeed, with respect to global modernity itself.

Regrettably, the popular and, in even some academic quarters, prevailing view is of Africa as a place of negation. Germane to the argument of Faith in Flux is the Hegelian depiction of Africa having “no movement or development to exhibit.” This trope of stasis finds expression in the unguardedly racist remarks of former French President Nicolas Sarkozy when he says, “The tragedy of Africa is that the African has not fully entered into history.” Yet it is there even in benign pronouncements from Time magazine and the Economist magazine about “Africa rising,” or in  US President Barack Obama’s declaration that Africa is “on the move.” These latter comments refer to Africa’s recent economic gains, health advances, and inroads against corruption. All of these are worth celebrating, of course, but when is it that Africa was not rising, not on the move?

I am grateful to the interlocutors with Faith in Flux for noting as its central argument that the image of “traditional” Africa as timeless and immobile is not just wrong. It runs diametrically counter to much empirical evidence. Mobility as associated with transnationalism, diaspora, and long-distance migration has become a buzzword in the study of modernity. But modernity, it must not be forgotten, has also introduced border regimes and border thinking, promoted settlement and sedentariness, and privileged bounded identities and permanent residents. By looking at mobility beyond Eurocentric accounts of modernity, Faith in Flux aims to disrupt the top-down projects of self-conscious modernizers—whether agents of the state, of Pentecostalism, or of reductive social science—who favor the singular and stable over the multiple and mobile.

For the Makhuwa-speaking people among whom I worked, stasis is tantamount to death. To live is to move, to be is to become, and to endure is to embrace the potentialities—and vulnerabilities—of continuous change. The Makhuwa privilege fluidity and flexibility. Thus, what I document about their ambivalent reception of Pentecostalism should not suggest an incapacity of any sort. The title of my book, Faith in Flux, is not meant to indict the Makhuwa for having a faith that is in flux, but to highlight their capacity for putting their faith in flux—in the virtue or the value of adaptability, elasticity, and change.

Makhuwa carpenters transporting finished products to market. Photo Courtesy of Devaka Premawardhana.

The concern has been raised—not by the interlocutors here—that my book’s focus is too narrow to be of relevance beyond the very small number of researchers who also care about rural Mozambique. Here again is the tendency to find mobility interesting only if it applies transnationally or to consider Pentecostalism significant only with respect to its global reach. But the hope of Faith in Flux is (to invoke the anthropological dictum) to explore large issues from small places. It is also to show that if prominent themes in contemporary theory—hybridity, heterogeneity, mobility, diaspora—are truly relevant, their relevance must hold not only in obviously cosmopolitan sites (urban centers, transnational networks, the World Wide Web), but even in such “out-of-the-way” spaces as rural Africa.

Yet it is concerning that both African studies and anthropology have come of late to spurn the rural in favor of the urban and cosmopolitan. There are highly generative ways of studying African Pentecostalism in relation to state power, civil society, and other macro-scale phenomena. Obadare’s groundbreaking scholarship out of Nigeria demonstrates this well. But, in general, as Englund has suggested, the study of Pentecostalism in Africa has focused so much on urban and middle-class populations that much has been missed—for example, “the intricate webs of relationships within which the majority of African Pentecostals live their lives, never quite able, or even willing, to confine their social and spiritual existence to the church.” Baum and Grillo, in their respective long-term projects, exemplify well the value of contextualized research sensitive to cultural complexities even in seemingly remote settings. Against trends within religious studies that see Islam and Christianity displacing what came before, both argue for the resilience of the indigenous in the contemporary world. Evident in the work of all four interlocutors is that to spend time conducting long-term and localized fieldwork is not to dwell on so many irrelevancies, but to take the measure of modernity—or modernities—itself.

I turn now from common ground to questions, critiques, and challenges. For these I also am grateful, not just because they provide an opportunity to clarify key parts of my project, but also because they demonstrate about scholarship what the Makhuwa illustrate about life: it, too, is never static or complete, but rather ever-unfolding with each new encounter.

The first of Obadare’s provocations regards what I describe as the banality of conversion—its regularity and reversibility in the Makhuwa context. He notes from his own work on Nigerian Pentecostals the premium placed on being “born again,” on breaking with one’s former self. I would not deny that a similar understanding operates among the Makhuwa. I only question whether breaking with the past precludes breaking back to it, particularly when that “past” is already marked by an openness to change. There is indeed something powerful about “born again” experiences, but it may be presumptuous to associate them only with born-again Christians, or to assume that being born again cannot be followed by being born again again. Obadare also asks whether Pentecostalism’s presence in the farthest reaches of Mozambique in fact confirms claims of Pentecostal explosion that I call into question. Even if Pentecostalism has failed to take root there, it is there, and that may be the point. This entirely legitimate interpretation allows me to clarify that my critique of the “Pentecostal explosion” narrative does not mean to question the empirical fact of Pentecostal expansion (even “to the ends of the Earth”) but rather the demographic claim that wherever Pentecostalism goes it grows. It is also to question the assumption that wherever Pentecostalism goes it displaces what stands in its way. This notion of rupture does not apply in the case I observed because indigenous traditions persist even in and through the lives of Pentecostal converts—and this is because Makhuwa “tradition” is itself elastic enough to encompass the kinds of radical change demanded by Pentecostal conversion. Finally, Obadare questions my questioning of the bourgeois tendency to locate well-being in secure and stable identities. My worry is the ease with which those who live by this tendency naturalize it, viewing not just themselves but everyone else through what anthropologist Liisa Malkki calls a “sedentarist bias.” This bias makes structurally invisible such liminal figures as refugees (the focus of her research) and converts (the focus of mine) and blinds us to how such people manage to make meaningful lives not despite, but by, living on the edge.

The author with spouse Kalinka Caldas Premawardhana outside their home in Kaveya village. Photo courtesy of Devaka Premawardhana.

In his response, Englund raises fair critiques of the existential-phenomenological approach for which I advocate insofar as it carries with it the potential to shortchange such issues as hierarchy, inequality, and structure. Englund pushes me to practice what I (or the Makhuwa) preach: to be less fixed on agency and improvisation and, instead, to oscillate between a privileging of individual subjectivity and a reckoning with conditions and constraints. I appreciate that Englund notes where I do acknowledge the heavy-handed border policing of state actors, development workers, and Pentecostal evangelists. I also appreciate Englund’s own language of human interactions being “structured and yet not determined.” Precisely this is the dialectic I try to uphold with my theorizing of existential mobility (16-21). My argument there is that some people may be prone to move, and prone to convert, not in spite of cultural conditions and structural constraints, but (at least partially) because of them. Both Makhuwa and Pentecostal frameworks promote mobility from within. The more grounded one is in either, the more conditioned one is to make moves—sometimes within, sometimes beyond. This attempt at reconciling existential and structural approaches may not convince, but if I err I am not ashamed to err on the side of agency and improvisation, on Englund’s “and yet not determined.” Social scientific analyses too often omit living and breathing human beings—individuals in all their indeterminacy and irreducibility. If it is an over-correction to privilege what historian Michel de Certeau terms “the practice of everyday life” or anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski “the imponderabilia of actual life,” it is one that is badly needed, one incidentally that ethnographers are particularly well equipped to make.

Turning to Grillo, I am afraid she misreads me when she writes of my “reach[ing] for an overarching vision” having to do with maternity and matricentric. I did not set out to study gender among the Makhuwa. I wrote as much as I did on the topic only because it presented itself to me in the field. My book does not aim or claim to exhaust the topic, and could not have anyway because my positionality as a male researcher made female perspectives largely inaccessible to me. Grillo faults me for basing my analysis of gender on a male, but not a female, initiation rite. In my defense, I could only go where I was allowed. Perhaps, then, I should have remained silent on gender, but that would have courted a different and well-deserved critique. It also would have caused me to miss extraordinary insights into what was, indeed, the “overarching vision” to which I was reaching: an appreciative understanding of the circularity of religious conversion. With regard to that theme, Grillo rightly raises the issue of maternal return in Makhuwa male initiation. Anthropologists have typically cast male initiation as a unilinear transition—from sexually amorphous childhood to strictly male adulthood—but the prominence of the maternal in Makhuwa male initiation suggests more a “rite of return” than a “rite of passage.” This, I argue, helps us understand why conversion, analogous in many ways to initiation, is frequently also circular, also reversible. Respecting my discussion of the masculinization of social life via modernization, and the ability of Makhuwa women to still retain a degree of autonomy, Grillo is clearly unconvinced. But she oddly dwells more on my argument’s style than on its substance. Her one example of “hard facts” countermanding my “seductive” and “clever” analysis is on a different issue, and here again she misreads me. My assessment of corporeal continuity between Pentecostalism and indigenous traditions does not deny that Pentecostal pastors enact a bodily rigidity at odds with Makhuwa mobility. It does, however, refuse to make pastors the only, or even the best, representatives of Pentecostalism. The “bottom up” approach by which Grillo describes my work entails attending at least as much to the movements of ordinary women and men—movements that cross, and cut across, traditions—as to the efforts of elites to arrest such movements.

The amplification of marginal perspectives is a defining virtue of Baum’s scholarship. It is tremendously gratifying, therefore, to read his generous response to Faith in Flux. Baum has consistently argued for the persistence of the indigenous not despite, but often in and through, processes of modernization, Christianization, and Islamization. He is right to have critiqued Robin Horton’s influential theory of conversion in his 1990 article, and he is kind to say that my approach adds a layer of nuance to his critique. What Baum’s own reading of my work through his earlier reading of Horton calls to mind is a problem with yet another of Horton’s influential discussions—on rationality—in which he bifurcates “closed” traditional cultures and “open” scientific ones. This is precisely the kind of dualism—between tradition and modernity, continuity and change, Africa and the West—against which my book strenuously argues. If anything, it may ironically be African tradition, despite what “tradition” connotes, that does more to promote openness and engagement. It draws not on western metaphysics with its mania for separation, differentiation, and closure, but on African metaphysics, which, as critical theorist Achille Mbembe argues, allows us to think of identity in movement. Thus, what Baum calls “reconversion” may owe not only to the failure of Christianity to respond to “local experience,” but to the ways “local experience” promotes endogenously the kinds of mobility and creativity often associated with the West and denied to Africa.

Let me close by again expressing deep gratitude to Baum, Englund, Grillo, and Obadare for attending so carefully to the arguments of Faith in Flux. What revisiting my book through their eyes, and for this forum, has helped clarify is not just the nature of mobility beyond modernity, but also the many forms mobility may take: local and global, religious and ritual, constrained and gendered, spatial and existential. We have learned to speak of multiple modernities. Going forward, we might now speak of multiple mobilities.

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Devaka Premawardhana
Devaka Premawardhana is Associate Professor in the Department of Religion at Emory University. His first book, Faith in Flux: Pentecostalism and Mobility in Rural Mozambique, received the best book award from the Society for Pentecostal Studies and was a finalist for the best book award of the Journal of Africana Religions. It was also the subject of an earlier Contending Modernities book symposium.
Theorizing Modernities article

Mobility Without Rupture: Makhuwa, Pentecostalism, and Conversion in Mozambique


Makhuwa women participating in a traditional ritual. Photo courtesy of Devaka Premawardhana.

I was delighted to read Devaka Premawardhana’s recent book, Faith in Flux: Pentecostalism and Mobility in Rural Mozambique. This book offers a rich description of the complex process of sustained interaction between Makhuwa religious traditions, Islam and Catholicism, and new religious traditions associated with Pentecostalism that have become important influences since the end of the Mozambican civil war. Premawardhana builds on careful and sustained field research and an ability to step back and interpret his data with an impressive command of theories relevant to the study of religious change, from Robin Horton to Pierre Bourdieu. In far too many studies of the history of Christianity in Africa, authors assume the steady growth of new religious traditions, treating any resurgence of African traditions as backsliding, rather than a creative response to the challenges of an invasive religion. For example, Robin Horton asserts that African religious influence reaches “the limit of its potential for expansion and development,” (107) before traditions ultimately succumb to what Horton sees as depersonalized forms of religion which are better adapted to modernity. These then become the forms of religion which prevail in the future. Premawardhana complicates the assertion both by scholars and by Pentecostals themselves who claim that conversion to their form of Christianity represents a rupture with prior religious traditions. He demonstrates the ways in which the Mahkuwa’s stress on mobility asserts itself even within Pentecostal movements which strive to separate themselves from the more fluid border between Catholicism and Makhuwa traditions. Throughout the work, Premawardhana moves back and forth between rich descriptive materials and insightful interpretations. This book will be useful not only to students of African religions, but also to anthropologists, historians of religion, psychologists interested in religious conversion, and development specialists interested in the ways that indigenous knowledge systems insert themselves into new situations and make them more understandable and controllable.

Premawardhana immediately takes the reader into the community where he worked, showing how Pentecostals, Catholics, and adherents of Makhuwa traditions cope with the challenges of post-colonial Mozambique, a nation that gained its independence after a long insurgency, only to be divided by a bitter civil war. He examines the way that these different religious traditions are used to explain success and failure in the economic sphere, as well as the tragic death of a young girl within his host family. He brings us into the lives of the community by situating himself and his wife within it, following the best traditions of reflective anthropology. He also provides the readers with insights into the Mozambican Pentecostal minister and teachers who are deeply troubled by the persistent demands of Makhuwa to move between the new teachings and their own received traditions. The ministers complain that Makhuwa converts maintain “one foot in the church and one foot in tradition” (97). This is strikingly similar to their willingness to build houses in settled communities along the road and their insistence on living out in the bush. Outsiders, from government agents to development specialists to religious teachers, express their frustration with their inability to sustain the changes they seek to impose in Makhuwa communities. These communities insist on incorporating new ideas and practices within their cultural frameworks. He provides interesting examples of the way that the post-Vatican II missionaries have embraced Makhuwa cultural practices and been allowed to play a central religious role in such important events as male initiation. Teachings, however, are carefully separated for the initiates. Catholic teachings are taught in the daytime and Makhuwa traditions are taught at night. Premawardhana’s understanding of this form of community ritual practice allows him to critique ideas of syncretism and hybridity in favor of mobility.

Part of the reason that this mobility persists, however, is the far greater prominence of women healers and ritual specialists in Makhuwa practice than either among Catholics or Muslims. Despite the strenuous opposition of Pentecostals to local traditions, they are the only ones who have a parallel practice of women as healers. Neither Muslim nor Catholic women exercise leadership roles in any way comparable to that of Makhuwa practitioners or the Pentecostals. The parallels between Pentecostal and Makhuwa traditions are not just limited to matters of gender. Their emphasis on using ritual to directly influence people’s daily lives are similar. But Pentecostals place these rituals within the context of rupture, and of a linear progression toward their religious community. Makhuwa seek to shape them in more fluid ways.

I write this as someone who has had a long engagement with these issues, albeit on the opposite end of the continent, among the Diola of Senegal. In a 1990 article, “The Emergence of a Diola Christianity,” I critiqued Robin Horton’s intellectualist theory of conversion by focusing on conversion as a long process in which conflicts between older systems of belief and the demands of the new religious tradition must be resolved, though in a variety of ways. Horton explicitly links conversion to Islam or Christianity from African religious traditions to the colonial-inspired breakdown of localism and a perceived need to emphasize a supreme being which would be better able to deal with problems of what he calls the “macrocosm” than local spirits who dominate what Horton calls the “microcosm.” One way that Diola converts confronted these issues was through what I called “reconversion,” which occurred when the Church did not allow questions arising from local experience to be addressed in the new religious community. When the need for these spiritual questions grew to such an extent that they could not be ignored, converts renounced their new religion and returned to their original religious community, carrying with them new ideas and experiences. Looking back on that article that I wrote 20 years ago, I am struck by how much more nuanced Premawardhana’s approach is. He shows us how Makhuwa assert their own cultural values, and how their ways of understanding community, locations, and mobility were inserted into their new religious communities right from the beginning. His insights into religious mobility will definitely influence my next book project on women prophets in post-colonial Senegal, a book project that I am just beginning to write. In several cases, women raised within the Islamic or Christian tradition became prophets in the Diola religious tradition. In other cases, they have remained outside but aware of these traditions, while embracing their new prophetic roles. Like the Makhuwa, the Diola continue to find understandings of their contemporary situation arising from Diola traditions quite compelling, both within and outside of Christian or Muslim contexts. The concept of religious mobility will help me understand the persistence of the Diola religion within a Senegalese environment dominated by Islam and Christianity.

Devaka Premawardhana has written an important book on the sustained encounter between Makhuwa communities, Christians, and Muslims. His careful field research provides a firm base from which he can shed light on many of the long-standing debates within the study of post-colonial societies and the religious transformations that are so important to understanding them.

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Robert Baum
Robert M. Baum is an associate professor of African and African American Studies and Religion at Dartmouth College. He is an affiliated faculty member of the Program in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. He is the author of the award-winning book, Shrines of the Slave Trade: Diola Religion and Society in Precolonial Senegambia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), which received the American Academy of Religion’s prize for the best first book in the history of religions. He is also the author of West Africa’s Women of God: Alinesitoué and the Diola Prophetic Tradition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016). From 2013 through 2019 he served as Executive Editor of The Journal of Religion. He is currently writing a continent-wide history of African religions, primarily focused on indigenous religions.
Theorizing Modernities article

Evading Masculinized Modernity


Makhuwa women in Mozambique. Photo Credit: Steve Evans.

Devaka Premawardhana’s Faith in Flux is a beautifully written and conceptually rich work that successfully challenges central theoretical assumptions about Pentecostalism in Africa today: that it entails a rupture with the past, especially “traditional” ways of being, and that its spread and imaginal hold has been ubiquitous. Asked to reflect on how Premawardhana’s book resonates with my own, An Intimate Rebuke (2018), I wondered how my study of female genital power (FGP) in the indigenous traditions of West Africa could possibly relate to a work on Pentecostalism in northern Mozambique. Most consonant is a common claim that underlying matrifocal traditions endure and have the capacity to evade the encroachments of a masculinized modernity.

Both our works employ a “bottom up” approach, one that does not deny or minimize the “influence of global forces on local worlds” but reasserts the primacy of local ontologies. Premawardhana’s focus on the “easily overlooked registers” of lived practice (15) is akin to my efforts to make visible the subjugated knowledge of female power. My book strings together the beads of evidence of an ancient and widespread, but often overlooked, “local” ritual of anti-witchcraft, and shows it to embody a foundational African principal: Post-menopausal women, called the Mothers, wield an innate moral authority. Stripping and exposing their breasts and genitals as the seat of their power, they curse any who violate the moral mandates. Women deploy their “bottom power” as a spiritual weapon, but also mobilize and perform FGP to protest the state’s abuse of secular authority. So I argue that the Mothers’ embodied rebuke challenges the meta-narratives of modernity that assume that only a rupture with traditional ways can usher in greater liberation and empowerment. Likewise, Premawardhana reads the everyday occurrences of the Makhuwa people against the grain of well-worked theoretical assumptions about tradition’s inflexibility. Challenging the idea that African Pentecostalism is experienced as a radical break from local tradition, his “counternarrative” relates a more fluid account of conversion, presenting it as an oscillation between different ways of being (19). Living for a year among the Makhuwa, Premawardhana notices that their “pluralistic disposition” allows them to subscribe to multiple, conflicting religious doctrines, depending on context (104). This is not so much a matter of “syncretism” as an expression of their value of community and the “imperative of intersubjectivity” (105). It allows “conversion” to be sincere, even if fleeting or occasional.

The nomadic Makhuwa have a “long history of not just mobility, but mobility of the circular kind” that allows for return and renewal (64). Their “existential mobility” keeps their traditions vital; when faced with the external pressures of masculinizing modernity, the “matricentric” Makhuwa choose migration over confrontation and capitulation. Such flexibility contrasts sharply with the fixity of the state and its development policies that depend on firmly situating its peasantry within its borders. But Makhuwa mobility only challenges the impositions of the state obliquely. By contrast, in West Africa the Mothers’ public performance of the spectacular rite of FGP directly confronts the postcolonial state and condemns its cruel and brutal violence overtly.

An Intimate Rebuke makes “matrifocal morality” the principle underlying the various manifestations of FGP in ritual and politics, and also shows it to be the founding knowledge and binding power that lends cultural coherence to a plethora of traditions in the region. Premawardhana similarly reaches for an overarching vision, aiming to interpret Makhuwa Pentecostalism as a variation on “the theme of centripetal motherhood traced throughout this book” (165). However the book actually offers only two points of entry for understanding “the matricentric character of Makhuwa society” (25). Ironically, the first and main one is Premawardhana’s analysis of male initiation.

Interior of a Pentecostal church in Mozambique. Photo courtesy of Devaka Premawardhana.

Building on Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner’s classic analyses of the symbolic meaning and transformative power of movement through spatial planes, Premawardhana emphasizes the initiates’ multiple, literal processions to show that they foster “border consciousness” (90). His thesis is that the site of self-making is “full of discontinuous and non-contiguous domains” that instill “dispositions toward malleability” and make Makhuwa see rupture as “routine” (90–91). However, the most crucial moment of initiation is not about clean borders and discontinuities. It is a ritual genital modification that inscribes on the body a symbolic conflation of genders. Premawardhana calls it “circumcision,” although he acknowledges that the operation “does not entail the removal of foreskin, but rather a slit across the top of it” (86). Unlike circumcision that “purifies” men of gender ambiguity by removing excess flesh suggestive of the labia, the object is to draw blood. This “mimesis of menstruation” is clearly referenced by the boys’ ritual guardians who sing, “The vagina has opened!” They explicitly state, “you are imitating your mother,” and make the boys submit to the taboos of menstruating women (86–87). Significantly, Makhuwa neophytes are not permanently separated from the female domain but are returned to their mothers who readily identify and reclaim them. Consideration of penile subincision rites elsewhere would have revealed the procedure’s significance as a symbolic usurpation of female power and gender doubling. In a subsequent chapter we belatedly learn that the Makhuwa measure time by the phases of the moon, which are associated with the cyclical rhythm of women’s menses; that the full moon is the time of contact with the ancestral spirits; and that women exclusively act as healers who perform their work at night (124). Subincision and bleeding clearly allow men to capture ritually the natural cyclical movement and innate capacity for renewal as their own. Premawardhana suggests the boys temporarily “pass through womanhood” in order to become differentiated from women (89). But Makhuwa subincision actually seems to establish the permanent assimilation of men with women in order to acquire their innate sacrality.

Whether through initiation “gender boundaries are thus simultaneously constructed and traversed” (91) remains a question, rather than a conclusion, for although Premawardhana notes that Makhuwa girls’ initiation takes place at the same time as the boys’, we learn nothing more about it. The male ritual stands as the sole basis of Premawardhana’s theory. Premawardhana’s focus on the male ritual reinforces the stereotype of women’s natural profaneness and subordinates their biological capacities to male religious culture. However, Makhuwa tradition, stories, song-riddles, and even the etymology of the sacred mountain who is mother of humanity (“she who menstruates”),  combine to demonstrate that for the Makhuwa, God is not just “conceived of in feminine terms” but is female (124).

The second, more promising point of entry for understanding Makhuwa matricentricity is an exclusively female healing society. When Premawardhana finally turns attention to this traditional domain, he allows himself to be teased by men into intruding into the women’s sacred circle (124). He submits that he was authorized to “violate the gendered divide” by the healer’s husband who urges Premawardhana to observe it “up close,” and who accompanies him into the hut (124). As in the case of female initiation, however, we never learn any details. More might have been made of the woman’s ability to make bodies whole, or of the sinuous meanderings of the eyinlo, the dance ceremony performed “almost entirely by women” that Premawardhana mentions earlier and only in passing (138). As it stands Makhuwa matricentricity remains an abstraction, a shadow, known essentially through the “side-stepping” moves taken to avoid the fixity and permanence that conversion to Pentecostalism supposedly demands.

Chapter 5 in Part III alone attends to the subject of women directly, especially their status in Makhuwa society. It attempts to account for informants’ regular assertion that “Makhua women have no religion” (117). By “religion” they mean Christianity or Islam, and the comment refers to the fact that “girls follow the religion of their maternal uncles; wives follow the religion of their husbands” (117–18). Premawardhana reinterprets the statement, suggesting that it is not about the modern patriarchal constraints that make it impossible for women to choose their own affiliations voluntarily, but something “quite the opposite of internalized oppression” (129). His creative analysis regularly represents the current women’s situation, no matter how diminished or subjugated, as a defiant retention of traditional power, arguing that it is women’s exclusion from the processes of modernization that has enabled them to preserve matricentric Makhuwa ways (117).

Although he recognizes that women’s lack of access to education was “a travesty” that undermined their prospects in an increasingly cash-based economy, he proposes that this made women “the more accomplished evaders” of a masculinized modernity (131–32). By Premawardhana’s reasoning, it is “because of, not in spite of, the prestige they ‘lack’ today” that women have been able to retain social standing (131). He builds his case on the fact that “in the realm of domestic cults… it is not the wife who follows the ‘religion’ of the husband but exactly the opposite” (126). Even so, he questions whether the matrilineal “domestic ancestral cults” qualify as “religions” (126). With this clever move Premawardhana simultaneously makes the assertion that “women have no religion” appear liberating, and establishes an affinity between women’s indigenous traditions and the embodied, oral expressions characteristic of Pentecostal forms of worship which, he argues, similarly “barely register as religions” (129). Another supposed “collateral benefit” of women’s marginalization from “world religions” (a loaded term that Premawardhana unfortunately uses throughout unproblematically) is that women are able to “draw seamlessly from a variety of traditions, unburdened by the normative concerns of religious elites” (136). Such intellectual acrobatics also allow him to account for women’s disproportionate numbers in the otherwise flailing rural congregations and to deem it a sign of female agency. Women are supposedly attracted not because they enjoy “enhanced authority and autonomy” in that religion but “because it is not a religion” at all (129). Here it felt like truth was sacrificed to rhetoric.

Makhuwa women dancing in Pentecostal church. Photo courtesy of Devaka Premawardhana.

Premawardhana’s poetic prose pairs “conceptual antinomies,” like mobility and return or firmness and flexibility, and works them to persuasive effect (154). His arguments hinge on the generative connection that he draws between them. But, such conceptual brilliance should not blind us from hard facts that push back against otherwise seductive intellectual reconciliations. For example, Premawardhana argues on one hand that “Pentecostal and indigenous traditions are corporeally continuous in ways that defy Pentecostalism’s rhetoric of rupture” with the past (156, emphasis mine). On the other hand, he notes elsewhere that the male Pastor’s firm handshake and rigid upright posture intentionally contrast with women’s sinuous dances and therefore represents a conscious break with the fluid dispositions of the Makhuwa somatic habitus (141, emphasis mine).

The book concludes with an anecdote about a dull Pentecostal church meeting enlivened when the minister puts forth a riddle that invites men to consider whether they owe primary duty to their mother or wife. Presented in the style of an African dilemma tale and palaver, the circular discussion is recounted to illustrate the Makhuwa “skill of polyontological mobility” (169). This ability to dissolve dilemma by embracing seemingly opposing possibilities ostensibly keeps Makhuwa “faith in flux.” (169–70). Ironically, these men “on the move” seem not to notice or care that missing from their circle of church leadership are the very women they purport to revere. While the Makhuwa case may not conform to the scholarly trend that characterizes Pentecostalism as a radical break with tradition, neither does it convincingly portray a fluid retention or cyclical movement of return to the “’Mother’ religions” that Premawardhana suggests are the essence of local ontology.

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Laura S. Grillo
Laura S. Grillo earned her Ph.D. in History of Religions from The University of Chicago, and M.Div. from Union Theological Seminary. Her book,
An Intimate Rebuke: Female Genital Power in Ritual and Politics in West Africa (Duke UP, 2018) was a finalist for the Raboteau Prize in Africana Studies. Laura is co-author of the innovative textbook,
Religions in Contemporary Africa (Routledge 2019) as well as author of numerous peer-reviewed journal articles, encyclopedia entries, and chapters in critical anthologies on African and African Diaspora religions and religious ethics. She has held Fellowships at Harvard Divinity School and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Chicago, and was awarded research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the West Africa Research Association and the American Academy of Religions (AAR). For six years Laura led the African Religions Group in the AAR; she is now on the steering committee of the Women’s Caucus of the African Studies Association (ASA). She has served on the Editorial Board of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion and is currently an editor for Religion Compass Journal as well as the
Bloomsbury Book Series in “Religion, Gender, and Sexuality.”
Theorizing Modernities article

Inequality in Flux


A boat on the Ilha de Moçambique, an island off the coast of Mozambique. Credit: Flickr user F Mira

Devaka Premawardhana’s study of mobility among Makhuwa-speakers in Northern Mozambique comes with strenuous efforts to denounce analytical models based on the idea of hybridity in religious and social life. These efforts serve to distance his own position from the accusation which the targets of his primary critique could so easily hurl back at him. For Premawardhana is primarily concerned to denounce what he calls “the rupture paradigm” (163), an analytical position that has, particularly in the recent studies of Pentecostal Christianity in the Global South, sought to theorize radical change as a matter of moving from one exclusive system of meaning to another. If not hybridity, what then is Premawardhana’s alternative in this rather high-stakes theoretical argument?

One phrase Premawardhana uses to convey his position is “existential mobility,” which he feels “connotes human improvisation, experimentation, and opportunism” (42). Another phrase is “polyontological mobility,” with which he explores his finding that while Makhuwa-speakers have come to see religions as “nonoverlapping,” their “facility of transgression” enables them to engage those religions (and other seemingly incompatible practices) as “serially compatible” (100). Mobility is the key term here, not simply to record the important role played by spatial migration in the region both historically and at present, but also to draw attention to the frequent “oscillations” (76) that occur between different symbolic and practical spheres. Makhuwa idioms come to Premawardhana’s aid in conceptualizing the primacy of mobility. For instance, the Makhuwa word for veins is said to do the work that the word for roots does in English-language expressions of identity, with the important difference that where roots serve to locate, veins serve to mobilize through circulation (67). A “language of leaving and entering” also informs local idioms of religious conversion, as it does the everyday oscillations between village and bush (73).

Veins or roots? Credit: Flickr user Dace Kiršpile

Faith in Flux, the author’s own idiom for his overall project, conveys thus both “an inconstant faith” and “faith in the virtue of inconstancy” (20). As one instance of how this is an exemplary work in contemporary anthropology, local idiom and circumstance inspire thoughts on human lives beyond the local confines. “We do not have cultural identities but cultural repertoires,” Premawardhana puts it sagely (17). Yet it is not only the spectre of hybridity that Premawardhana has to worry about throughout the book. Recognized, albeit under-theorized, in his insights is the inequality among human subjects to appropriate cultural repertoires. Premawardhana warns against “unduly romanticizing mobility, fluidity, and flux,” and indicates awareness of border regimes (76). Hybridity aside, how far does his alternative position take us beyond certain other intellectual and political preoccupations of the 1980s and 1990s? It would seem to carry more than a hint of the optimism that then characterized discussions about agency, globalization, and cosmopolitanism.

Premawardhana’s study is subtle enough to consider examples of curtailed or aborted mobility. One example concerns a farmer whose crops had been destroyed by elephants (68–69). The man’s determination to plant again and his refusal to relocate startled Premawardhana, who came to realize that the Makhuwa word for patience was also the word for courage. He reports to have discovered courage, “perhaps even agency,” in the man’s apparent resignation to his fate. In a similar vein, he marvels at the “improvisational skill” among women who had been forced by their men to renounce some aspects of their religious repertoires (121). “The creative ways to respond” that he identifies furnish compelling evidence, but the analytical optimism, welcome as it is in these troubled times, begs more questions than it answers. If linguists’ work on code-switching, for example, provides one analogy for Premawardhana’s approach (100), why not follow their lead and address inequality as well as improvisation and agency in such processes? What are the conditions and constraints of multiplicity that is not simultaneous but serial, the stuff of the above-mentioned “facility of transgression”?

Perhaps the difficulty here is the imagery of “serially compatible” orientations and practices. It does not dispense with the imagery of discrete or mutually exclusive domains that Premawardhana has found so objectionable in the “rupture paradigm.” To dispense fully with such imagery, not least in the interest of examining inequality, takes us to a period before the optimism of the 1990s to applications of field thinking in mid-century social anthropology. Max Gluckman, whom Premawardhana identifies in a footnote as an “antecedent” for changes in anthropology through the 1980s and 1990s (176), developed with his colleagues a set of methods and concepts to address issues such as urbanization and race relations in Central Africa. Characteristic of their work was to combine fine-grained case studies of negotiated and situational meanings with the analysis of social fields. As I have put it elsewhere, “even the most fleeting, small-scale social interactions had to be understood within a field of relationships of another order, structured and yet not determined by political, economic and ideological forces not immediately apparent to the participant observer” (Englund 2018, 130).

Would field thinking, in other words, complement Premawardhana’s principled commitment to phenomenology? The dilemma is, of course, at least as old as the division between phenomenological and structural approaches to the study of social life. Nor are the exemplary qualities of Premawardhana’s work diminished by historical myopia. “Slavery and warfare,” he writes, “infuse the historical consciousness of those among whom I lived” (44). Yet his principled effort to go “against all forms of abstraction” (15) represents little progress from the positions he seeks to overcome. The alternative to rupture and hybridity begins to look like opportunism in which the questions of inequality get sidelined. The challenge, for which methodological remedies were proposed by Gluckman and his colleagues, is to regard apparently disparate social practices in antagonistic integration within a social field. It is, to evoke Premawardhana’s terms, more oscillation than optimism that one would hope to see in the alternative he proposes—oscillation between phenomenology and field thinking.

References

Englund, Harri (2018). “From the Extended-Case Method to Multi-Sited Ethnography (and Back).” In M. Candea (ed.) Schools and Styles of Anthropological Theory, 121–33. London and New York: Routledge.

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Harri Englund
Theorizing Modernities article

The Art of Not Being Converted


Two Makhuwa women walking to perform a ritual at sunset. Photo courtesy of Devaka Premawardhana.

Whence comes conversion? What happens when a social agent makes the all-important decision to, no pun intended, take a leap of faith and embrace a religious formation and spiritual pragmatics different from those to which they’ve been accustomed? Is conversion rupture, a process, or both? These questions have long puzzled anthropologists and historians of religion, yielding a scholarship known more for its disputations than agreements. In this sense alone, Faith in Flux could not have chosen a more muddied stream to step into; yet, the dilemma it leads with could hardly be more clarifying – how to make sense of conversion among a people, not only “predisposed to convert,” but “having done so once… feel little need to stop” (25). The people in question are the Makhuwa (also Makua) of northern Mozambique, a people, as Devaka Premawardhana narrates, not exactly strangers to “flight”—willful or enforced—and of an almost incurably pluralistic disposition.

Premawardhana takes aim at two intellectual sacred cows simultaneously: on the one hand, the presumed antithesis between mobility and contextual analysis; on the other, the prevalent characterization of Pentecostalism as an inexorable force, sometimes completely erasing, sometimes radically modifying, but at all times profoundly affecting every culture it touches. Premawardhana insists, first, that contextual and cultural analysis and existential anthropology are, all things considered, fraternal twins; and second, that in the sheer inconstancy and fluidity of Makhuwa culture, the Pentecostal inexorable has met its immovable.

If the argument in Faith in Flux seems, on the whole, persuasive and sound, it is because Premawardhana is such a brilliant and engaging writer. He not only writes affectionately and respectfully about a people among whom he spent an extended period of time, he also shows how the everyday lives of ostensible spatial outliers can yield instructive moments that deepen our understanding of social change in an era of globalization. Premawardhana’s sensitivity to the cultural integrity of the Makhuwa is matched by his knowledge of the literature by whose lights he admirably refracts their lives. He has chewed over the bones of contention in the literature, and is at his most penetrating when juxtaposing the presuppositions of contending anthropological and theoretical traditions. Still, not once does he apprentice Makhuwa lives to the presumed wisdom of the literature; on the contrary, he insists on close attention to their apparently unruly spiritualities as a way of coming to terms with modes of existence that unsettle those glib distinctions that constitute the very apparatus with which scholars aspire to get a handle on reality. Rural Mozambique (rural anywhere?), we learn, is not some hapless backwater, a homogenous “periphery” prostrate before the advance of global forces, but a space of ceaseless crossings and unsuspected vitality.

In two key areas, Premawardhana mobilizes data and advances arguments that give a new turn to the scholarly debate. The first is in our understanding of mobility, an idea rapidly acquiring the status of a curse word as the North, broadly speaking, angles to batten down against the South. Contra such mobility talk and the angst that always seems to follow in its wake, Premawardhana privileges instead “polyontological mobility,” a cultural constant, at least as observed in the Makhuwa, that gives rise to waves of traversals and reversals. He asks: “Is it possible that there are people for whom movement across borders [you can be sure he doesn’t mean physical borders alone], engagement with alterity, and exposure to the new are, despite their dangers, preconditions for well-being?” (161). Second, and in a direct challenge to the somewhat settled understanding of conversion as a foundational phenomenon, one that prompts new forms of embodiment and emotional resolve, Premawardhana, summoning anthropologist Edmund Leach, wants us to reflect instead on the banality of conversion, i.e. the possibility that “what appear to outsiders as momentous shifts may be experienced by insiders as unexceptional” (161). Far from denying the reality of both mobility and conversion, Premawardhana is in fact reminding us that both are often imbued with a “circular and situational character” (14). Premawardhana’s point about mobility is taken, but his argument in regard to conversion leaves me slightly flustered. Is he not, pace a not insignificant section of the relevant literature, also assuming the fixity or permanence of what is being converted from? Shouldn’t the knife of fluidity (flux) cut both ways? If conversion is really the banal phenomenon that Premawardhana urges us to accept it as, why is it that it often signals new behavioral, moral, and relational protocols on the part of the convert? Among Nigerian Pentecostals, a premium is placed on being “Born Again,” quite literally a convert’s breakup with their former subjectivity.

Exterior of Pentecostal church in northern Mozambique. Photo courtesy of Devaka Premawardhana.

Faith in Flux is a compact but theoretically ambitious work. Although it immediately grapples with religious encounter and social fluidity in a “remote” corner of Africa, the author’s core theoretical concern is to vindicate those (the radical empiricist Michael Jackson is an obvious influence) who endeavor to use existential-phenomenological anthropology as a way of apprehending life “in all its aspects, its contingencies no less than its norms, its shadows no less than its centers” (17). In the joyous freedom with which it weaves the scattered minutiae of Makhuwa lives—from circumcision to dissolution—Faith in Flux is a paragon of this modality.

Some of the book’s claims strike me as not quite plausible or at least in need of urgent reevaluation. For instance, say we set aside conversion: Isn’t the presence of a Pentecostal church in the farthest reaches of Mozambique the very confirmation of the “explosion” that Premawardhana denies? Obviously taken with Makhuwa existential nomadism, Premawardhana appears to speak derisively of “a bourgeois tendency to locate well-being in secure and stable identities, in tethering ourselves to something firm: brick homes, political structures, religious cultures” (161). I ask: What’s wrong with being bourgeois? What’s wrong with that bourgeois tendency? Also, suggesting that “Western intellectual tradition has had a hard time dealing with change” seems an uncharacteristically slack thing to say given Premawardhana’s singular abhorrence of reification.

These quibbles, for that’s what they are, are not meant as an indictment of Premawardhana’s theses in the book, but conversely to prod him toward greater clarity and call his attention to untoward wrinkles on an otherwise splendidly woven fabric.

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Ebenezer Obadare
Ebenezer Obadare is Douglas Dillon Senior Fellow for Africa Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Washington, D.C.; a fellow at the University of South Africa’s Institute of Theology, and contributing editor of Current History. Author and editor of numerous books on religion and politics and state and civil society in Africa, Obadare’s most recent work is Pastoral Power, Clerical State: Pentecostalism, Gender and Sexuality in Nigeria (Notre Dame Press, 2022). He is editor of Journal of Modern African Studies, published by Cambridge University Press.  
Theorizing Modernities article

Introduction to Symposium on Faith in Flux


Devaka Premawardhana’s Faith in Flux: Pentecostalism and Mobility in Rural Mozambique is an ethnographic study of how the Makhuwa, a rural people from northern Mozambique, have experienced conversion from their traditional Makhuwa religion to Pentecostalism. Perhaps counterintuitively to western-educated scholars of religion and anthropology, it is also a study of how such conversion does not necessitate ceasing to engage in traditional Makhuwa religious practices, or preclude returning to them. This is counterintuitive to many scholars because anthropological studies of Pentecostalism have tended to treat conversion to Pentecostalism as an indication that one has made a decisive and irreversible break with the past. This account fails, however, to account for the virtue of mobility that is cultivated through Makhuwa practices. In attending to how Makhuwa organize space, tell their creation narratives, engage in rituals, and relate to the modern nation-state, Premawardhana is able to demonstrate that the Makhuwa are a traditionally mobile people. In other words, the Makhuwa are mobile not because they seek to evade the constraints of tradition, but precisely the opposite, because they are working within them. The arrival of Pentecostalism has certainly set Makhuwa faith in flux, but the potential disruption of this arrival is offset by Makhuwa faith in flux (a virtue that is also prized in Pentecostal practices, if not in the claims of its elite representatives). Conversion to Pentecostalism therefore need not be the beginning nor the end of a story for a Makhuwa person, but simply another chapter.

Premawardhana is able to see this aspect of Makhuwa tradition because he engages in an existential anthropological approach to the lived experiences of the Makhuwa themselves. What he finds through attending to such lived experiences is that the Makhuwa people with whom he lives and studies see the world through the lens of mobility; mobility is existential, or life-defining, for the Makhuwa (17). And it is this existential mobility that allows for the Makhuwa to move in and out of different traditions without anxiety. In seeking a one-time conversion event, Premawardhana suggests, anthropologists have betrayed a particular Christian understanding of conversion, one that indicates a desire on the part of the theorist to find something like Saint Augustine’s sudden conversion to orthodox Christianity from which he never looked back. While this trope has been secularized in modern anthropological work, its theological potency has remained. Through his existential approach, Premawardhana is able to bring to light a non-Christian theory of change and to push anthropologists to think more expansively about the categories they employ in their work.

The essays collected in this symposium reflect critically on the methodology and conclusions Premawardhana reaches in Faith in Flux. Ebenezer Obadare lauds Premawardhana’s argument in the book, but questions whether or not Premawardhana goes too far in privileging indigenous Makhuwa religion as a stabilizing tradition, even if that tradition is one that countenances change. Harri Englund questions whether or not Premawardhana’s focus on phenomenology to the exclusion of larger ideological structures risks obscuring inequalities that might be present among the Makhuwa. Laura Grillo pushes Premawardhana to reflect more on the gendered dynamics among the Makhuwa, as well as the gendered dynamics that shape Premawardhana’s own analysis. And finally, Robert Baum suggests that Premawardhana’s theory of conversion is one that improves upon an earlier theory of “reconversion” he put forward, and suggests that he will draw on Premawardhana’s insights in his future work on women prophets in post-colonial Senegal. In his response, Premawardhana reflects on the contributions that each of these scholars have made to his own thinking and engages with each of their critiques.

Through its focus on how the Makhuwa uniquely navigate religious, political, and social forces in modern Mozambique, Premawardhana’s book speaks to the ongoing need to balance thick descriptions of communities with reflection on the theoretical tools—which often contain particular Christian theological assumptions—scholars employ to understand them. This ongoing exchange between theory and ethnographic description is key to the Contending Modernities initiative (CM) to improve our understandings of secularism and religion in modernity. These terms, as Premawardhana reminds us, are not static, but must be understood as temporally, geographically, and socially contingent. CM, by focusing on geographical and social settings outside the Euro-American context, seeks to de-provincialize our discussions of religion, secularism, and modernity, and in doing so aid in efforts to decolonize the academic study of all three.

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Joshua S. Lupo
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism  (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
Field Notes article

Madrasa Discourses Goes to Bangladesh


Dr. Ebrahim Moosa presents his talk, “Reconsidering the Ethical in Contemporary Islamic Thought” on January 1, 2020

After a successful winter intensive with our most recent batch of first year students, Contending Modernities co-director and Primary Investigator for the Madrasa Discourses program, Dr. Ebrahim Moosa, and I travelled to Dhaka, Bangladesh to lead a two-day workshop introducing local ulama (religious scholars) to the Madrasa Discourses program (MD). There, Professor Moosa also delivered a public lecture, “Rethinking the Ethical in Contemporary Islamic Thought,” as a part of BRAC University and Georgetown University’s co-sponsored lecture series on faith and development. Moosa’s lecture on January 1, 2020 drew a large crowd, many of whom stuck around after the presentation to continue the conversation over tea. In his talk, Professor Moosa argued that contemporary Islamic ethics too often focuses on law at the expense of spheres of life that influence ethics such as philosophy, science, and art. He suggested that a renewed approach to Islamic ethics would expand its horizons beyond law to consider how these areas of thought could also aid Muslims in deliberating over ethical matters.

The two-day workshop kicked off the following morning with introductions from Dr. Katherine Marshall (Senior Fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center) and from Dr. Samia Huq (Associate Professor as the Department of Economics and Social Science, BRAC University) who organized the public lecture and workshop. Following these introductions, I presented to workshop attendees on the history of science and religion. The lecture and discussion focused on a few chapters from Peter Harrison’s book, The Territories of Science and Religion. In the ancient world, I argued, science and philosophy were less concerned with justifying a set of doctrinal beliefs (as they seem often to be now), and more concerned with the formation of the self. Science and religion, in other words, were focused on instilling virtue rather than establishing objective truths about the world. Participants responded by reflecting on the role of personal formation in the Islamic tradition, and questioning whether the relationship between religion and science in the Euro-American context was the same as in the Islamic context of South Asia and the wider Muslim world. In the afternoon, Dr. Rana Dajani (Hashemite University, Jordan) picked up the discussion, introducing students to the theory of evolution and the modern scientific method. The students responded to her presentations with questions that displayed a keen interest in understanding the nuances of the theory of evolution. Throughout the day Professor Moosa tied together the presentations by describing the history and goals of the Madrasa Discourses program and how these related to the curriculum that attendees were sampling in the lectures.

Dr. Ebrahim Moosa discusses the concept of human dignity during the two-day workshop

The day’s activities were followed by dinner with local ulama and educational leaders in Bangladesh. The discussion focused on the desire of leaders in the Islamic community to refine and update their educational system. Several attendees expressed a desire to create an integrated system of education, where both secular and religious topics would be taught together. Yet, concerns were also raised that madrasas and other educational organizations lacked the institutional support necessary to make such changes. Professor Moosa responded to these comments by suggesting that it was the ulama’s responsibility to press for such changes, and that while Madrasa Discourses was not a place where society-wide educational reform could be accomplished, it was a place where experimental approaches to different forms of education that engage the relationship between Islamic thought and modern science/philosophy could be taken up. One question Professor Moosa posed to the madrasa and ulama leadership around the dinner table was whether they would be open to exploring an integrated knowledge tradition, one that took seriously the developments in the humanities, the social sciences, and science, in conversation with the historical Muslim disciplines of learning. There was some ambiguity in the reply, if not reluctance, to engage with modern knowledge given its Western provenance. Some around the table mentioned that they found the ideas of Sigmund Freud unacceptable. Professor Moosa explained that while Freud is an important thinker, he does not exhaust the Western canon and that the matter required further discussion and deliberation.

The next morning Professor Moosa introduced to workshop attendees in greater detail the historical approach to engaging the Muslim knowledge tradition that MD had pioneered. He developed some the threads of his public lecture and highlighted some of the challenges involved in “rethinking Islamic ethics.”  Here he focused on what scholars of Islam could gain by reading with fresh eyes the writings of important thinkers in Islamic history, such as Al-Ghazali and others. He noted that returning to these thinkers could especially help when it comes to addressing ethical matters such as the dignity of the human person, human rights, the importance of tradition, and practices of interpretation. Following Professor Moosa’s lecture, students broke up into small groups to further discuss ethical issues in contemporary Bangladesh. Topics included the use of milk banks, the Rohingya refugee crisis, the applicability of the humanities and social science for guiding Muslims in everyday moral deliberation, curfews at universities, and divorce.

At the end of the workshop, it was clear that there was enthusiastic interest in both the topics and approach adopted by Madrasa Discourses, the latter of which involves raising questions and asking participants to explore possible solutions to those questions. It was also clear that there were unique challenges as well as possibilities that might come with expanding the existing program to include Bangladesh, most notably in the complex issues facing educational reform in the country. Nonetheless, MD looks forward to the possibility of welcoming a few select students from Bangladesh to its Summer Intensive Program that will be held in Kathmandu in July 2020.

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Joshua S. Lupo
Joshua S. Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism  (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.
Global Currents article

The Hindu Rashtra Comes of Age


The Khanqah-e-Moulla, or Shah-e Hamdan Shrine, in the Old City of Srinagar, is one of the oldest examples of Kashmiri wooden architecture. Photo Credit: Mike Prince.

India consistently pushes the narrative that removing the special status of Indian-administered Kashmir addresses development, curbs nepotism, and fights “terrorism” – all supposedly towards good governance. Scholars, writers, and activists, including myself, have countered the arguments provided in support of the removal as “strawmen.” The Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) across India primarily runs on an anti-Muslim and anti-minority agenda. The erasure of Kashmir’s autonomy and dilution of its Muslim majority by settler colonialism have been part of the BJP’s rallying cries since 1947. It must be kept in mind that all Indian governments from the outset have engineered a steady erosion of Kashmir’s autonomy with the aim of absorbing the region irrespective of the Kashmiri demand for a plebiscite and independence from India. The BJP’s “Kashmir solution” has brazen hyper-religious and nationalistic roots entrenched in Hindu supremacy and ethnonationalism (or Hindutva) [1]. This enterprise is fully fueled by the neoliberal order that aims to sustain India as a modern neocolonial force. Currently in India the ideology of Hindu indigeneity, which casts Muslims living in India as invaders and foreigners, has taken hold. In that equation, Kashmiri Muslims are doubly marked as the demonized other: first as Muslims, and second as Kashmiris who are longstanding dissidents committed to the fight for a UN-mandated plebiscite, democratic sovereignty, and freedom from India (Zia 2018: Chapter 3, 103–28). This ideology has taken shape with India passing the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) recently. The CAA, along with the planned National Register of Citizens (NRC), are a set of laws that will prove discriminatory primarily to Muslims.

Rising international voices have criticized the brutal crackdown by the government of India on the Kashmiris since the revocation of Article 370 was announced on August 5, 2019. Nonetheless, it seems that the wider neoliberal world has bought into arguments in favor of this removal of autonomy, perhaps because of India’s billion-strong market. Since this announcement, life in Kashmir has remained under siege. The region is reeling under a humanitarian crisis, and no international actors have intervened. Basic civil rights including healthcare, education, economy, and expression are all suspended. Curfews have been the order of the day and the internet is shut down. Only landlines and some cellphones have been operational for the past month or so. Since August, Kashmir has been in a communication black hole with little news trickling out. While India touts the removal as serving the interest of development, the economic loss inflicted by the lockdown has cost Kashmiris $2.4 billion [2].

Kashmiris restricted from open dissent have countered with a civil boycott, or hartal. This means that on top of government restrictions, people have voluntarily ceased their daily activities and are staying indoors. This civilian boycott manifests the excruciating haplessness of the Kashmiri resistance. In order to register some form of protest, people are forced to adopt a politics of self-injury. Only small stores, produce vendors, and automobiles operate for short durations to keep essential supplies circulating. Otherwise, as a Kashmiri friend puts it, “soruy chu thapp” (everything is under a halt.)

When India and Pakistan were birthed in 1947, Kashmir was an independent princely kingdom that wanted to retain its sovereignty. The British gave this swath of a region territorial shape and sold it to a Hindu warlord from the Dogra dynasty in 1846. Called the Amritsar Treaty, this transaction is known as one of the most damaging real estate sales in the history of humanity. The British not only sold the land, but also the people of Kashmir en masse, to the warlord. The Dogra kings in turn brutally extracted maximum profit from their investment. They oversaw an autocratic regime of back-breaking taxes and extreme discrimination against the Muslim populations who formed the majority. The other religious traditions in the region included the Pandits, the name for Kashmiri Shaivite Brahmins given by a Mughal king, and small populations of Sikhs, Buddhists, and Christians.

Two of these communities, the Pandits and Muslims, share ethnic and cultural ties. They began breaking into various sects in the 11th century as casteism, ritualism, and schisms began springing up in the ethno-religious life of Kashmiris. The renowned Kashmiri historian Professor Isaaq Khan described the medieval Kashmiri society “undergoing a crisis of what may be described as ‘human sociality’ versus Brahmanic particularism” (8).

Over centuries, the majority of Kashmiris converted to Islam, encouraged by the egalitarian potential of the religion in comparison to previous practices. The Brahmanical community was treated varyingly by successive dynasties and over time they largely adapted well to changing rulers. By the end of 18th century, they were a dominant, educated, and landowning political elite. A small number of Muslim clergy and landowners also enjoyed the privileges of titles and estates under different rulers. But the majority of Muslims lived in penury, illiteracy, and landless peasantry. Indentured/forced labor—called “begaar”—was rampant. Prostitution and human trafficking, which included children, was legal and taxed. The weavers of the world-famous Kashmiri shawl, brutalized by heavy taxes, began the Shawlbaaf Tehreek (shawl-weavers’ movement), an early and pioneering labor movement. This movement was brutally repressed when on April 29, 1865, the Dogra government killed 28 activists, many of whom were detained and died in jails.

Sheikh Abdullah with other leaders of 1931 agitation. Translation: Sitting R to L: Sardar Gohar Rehman, Mistri Yaqoob Ali, Sheikh Abdullah, Chaudhary Ghulam Abbas. Standing: R: Molvi AbdurRahim, L: Ghulam Nabi Gilkar. [Source: Aatish-e-Chinar, Authors: Sheikh Abdullah, M.Y.Taing]
In 1931, the majority of Kashmiri Muslims rose against Hari Singh, the last in the line of Dogra rulers, fortifying a long-simmering revolt against him. While India sustained its “Quit India” movement against the British crown, the Kashmiri struggle was congealing as a “Quit Kashmir” movement against the autocratic ruler. Those involved in the struggle envisioned a sovereign independent democratic state. Thus, the Kashmiri movement for sovereignty and independence is older than India and Pakistan.

In 1947, British India and the princely states were an amalgam of different territorial entities and hundreds of kingdoms. They were consolidated under the single dominion of the imperial crown. The partition that followed the end of British rule was predicated on religion: Muslims would join Pakistan and Hindus would join India. In the early parleys of state-making, the Indian government deployed all forms of political, diplomatic, and military tools to annex the Kashmir region. The term deployed to describe this process was “integration.” It was accompanied by supposed consensus-building exercises, but was primarily achieved by military annexation. Soon after the two nations of India and Pakistan came into being, they started a war over the territory of Kashmir. Even though the Dogra king had a standstill agreement with Pakistan, which was seen as a prelude to acceding to that country, he hastily signed off the entire territory, and effectively its people, to India: a modern version of the Amritsar treaty. After the United Nations intervened, Kashmir was bifurcated into two parts: the Indian- and Pakistan-administered territories separated by an UN-arbitrated ceasefire line (now called Line of Control, or the LoC).

Kashmiris strongly contest the accession for which they were not consulted. The fleeing king pledged to join India on the precondition that the final settlement would take place through the UN-mandated plebiscite. The King’s decision to accede to India was also influenced by M. S. Golwalkar, the leader of the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu supremacist paramilitary organization. The de-facto coup against Hari Singh was supported by key Kashmiris who were leaders in their own right, but who fell short as visionaries in ensuring a just future for the region. From the get-go, they wittingly or unwittingly served as India’s client politicians, ironically falling prey to the patina of secularism offered by India. The resource-rich Kashmir region was emotively fashioned by Jawahar Lal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India and a Pandit by descent, as crucial for maintaining the secular nature of the dominantly Hindu Indian state. During the violence of Indo-Pak partition, Mahatma Gandhi called the region a ray of hope because of the absence of violence between Muslims and Pandit Kashmiris in the Kashmir Valley. However, in November of 1947, in the other province of the kingdom named Jammu, 200,000 Muslims were massacred in a pogrom. The Dogra king himself distributed weapons to the responsible militia, and the RSS were party to it. The militia helped the Indian army during the war. The BJP, which is ruling India today, is the political arm of the RSS.

Barring a small number, most Kashmiri Pandits have always favored Indian rule. While the majority of Kashmiri Muslims seek independence, a strong section wants to accede to Pakistan. Most Kashmiri Muslims continue to share a deeply affective relation with Pakistan based on religious, spiritual, cultural, and trade ties that predate the partition. The breadth of this relationship is reflected in arguments the Dogra king made when the Indian leaders were influencing him to join their union in 1947. He argued that Kashmir was fully dependent on Pakistan and geographically contiguous as well. Kashmiris across the LoC continue to bear the brunt of the brutal partition of their homeland that separates families and valuable resources.

Article 370, which was drafted to ensure Indian-administered Kashmir’s special status, was in fact a Trojan horse. Nehru and his ilk saw it as a tunnel through which Indian laws and statues could be slyly passed to Kashmir. India steadily implemented laws to criminalize dissent. The laws effectively subsumed the UN resolution for a plebiscite and gradually criminalized the movement for self-determination. Recently, a minister from Indian National Congress—an old party with roots in British politics—publicly boasted that they had diluted Article 370 twelve times without any controversy. Indeed they had done it by discreetly deploying puppet regimes, coercion, rigged elections, and detention. The most important pivot point in the text of Article 370 was Article 35-A, which protected the territorial sovereignty of Kashmir. Native Kashmiris were recognized as “permanent residents” who had the exclusive right to property and franchise, just like any sovereign country.

At the very inception of when Kashmir got its special status, the RSS raised objections and demanded its erasure. This has continued to be one of the main objectives of the RSS. Kashmir’s special autonomous status was seen as an appeasement of Muslims and a threat to Indian unity. It is also important to remember that Mahatma Gandhi was killed by an RSS member because of his belief in the accommodation of Muslims.

A soldier guards the roadside checkpoint outside Srinagar International Airport (SXR) in Jammu and Kashmir, India. (January 2009) License: CC BY-SA 3.0

While the government of India has provided all shades of explanation for the removal of Kashmir’s autonomy, the logic of making India a Hindu Rashtra has not surfaced much. The dominant Muslimness of Kashmir in the context of an India which is simmering in anti-Muslim and anti-minority hate must be accounted for. The lenses of xenophobia and Islamophobia are key to understanding the brutal crackdown on Kashmiris, which run on Hindu supremacy and ethnonationalism, and which are a part of India’s growth as a modern neocolonial power. The day the removal was announced, Hindu nationalists celebrated the event as a “historic step toward establishing the Hindu Rashtra” [Hindu nation]. Indians took to social media taunting Kashmiris about buying land and property in Kashmir. A politician announced that the government was conducting a survey to reopen 50,000 temples which the local Kashmiri pandit leaders countered by noting that Kashmir never had this many temples. Indian politicians and entertainers publicly gave calls to kidnap or marry “fair-skinned Kashmiri girls.” This ethno-nationalistic outpouring in India was the colonial gaze manifest, one which fetishizes an occupied land and its people, and perceives them as spoils of war.

The dilution of the Muslim-majority demography of Kashmir is key to understanding the erasure of Kashmir’s autonomy. With Kashmir’s autonomous status gone, all Indian laws are automatically applicable to the region, hence the CAA & the NRC are stoking further fear in Kashmir. There are protests across India challenging this legislation, which some have compared to Nuremberg laws that laid the foundation of the Jewish Holocaust. In context of rising institutionalization of discrimination against Muslims, Kashmiris fear that Indian settler colonialism and dispossession are becoming increasingly real inside the valley. The question now is: will the world keep silent?

 

[1] See also here and here.

[2] See also Anirudh Kala, Brinelle D’Souza, Revati Laul & Shabnam Hashmi, Kashmir Civil Disobedience: A Citizen’s Report.

 

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Ather Zia
Ather Zia, Ph.D., is a political anthropologist, poet, short fiction writer, and columnist. She is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at the University of Northern Colorado. She is the author of Resisting Disappearances: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir; founder-editor of Kashmir Lit ; and is the co-founder of Critical Kashmir Studies Collective, an interdisciplinary network of scholars working on the Kashmir region. Ather is also a co-editor of Cultural Anthropology. Instagram: aziakashmir, Website: atherzia.com