The Modern Spirit of Asia: The Spiritual and the Secular in China and India [Course Book ed.] 9781400848553

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The Modern Spirit of Asia

The Modern Spirit of Asia The Spiritual and the Secular in China and India

Peter van der Veer

Princeton University Press Princeton and Oxford

Copyright © 2014 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW press.princeton.edu Jacket photographs: Mao Tse Tung (1893–1976) on horseback before a battle in 1947. Black and white photograph, Chinese photographer / Private Collection / Archives Charmet / The Bridgeman Art Library. Mahatma Gandhi and Sarojini Maidu on the Salt March, 1930. Black and white photograph, German photographer / © SZ Photo / The Bridgeman Art Library All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Veer, Peter van der.   The modern spirit of Asia : the spiritual and the secular in China and India / Peter van der Veer.   pages cm.   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-0-691-12814-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-691-12815-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1.  Religion and sociology—China.  2.  Religion and sociology—India.  3. Secularism—China—History.  4. Secularism—India—History.  5.  China—Religious life and customs  6.  India—Religious life and customs.  7. Nationalism—China—Religious aspects.  8. Nationalism— India—Religious aspects.  I.  Title.   BL1033.V44 2014   306.6095—dc23     2012051029 British Library Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data is available This book has been composed in John Sans Lite Pro, John Sans Medium Pro, and Baskerville 10 Pro Printed on acid-­free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Tâm

Contents

Prefaceix Chapter 1

Introduction

1

Chapter 2

Spirituality in Modern Society

35

Chapter 3

The Making of Oriental Religion

63

Chapter 4

Conversion to Indian and Chinese Modernities

90

Chapter 5

Secularism’s Magic

115

Chapter 6

“Smash Temples, Build Schools”: Comparing Secularism in India and China

140

Chapter 7

The Spiritual Body

168

Chapter 8

Muslims in India and China

193

Chapter 9

Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

214 231 253 271

Preface

When I was twenty I went to India just for the fun of adventurous traveling like so many of my generation. I hitchhiked to Istanbul, took the Magic Bus to Delhi, and went by train and bus to Kathmandu, Benares, Calcutta, Madras, Madurai, Goa, and Bombay. Nothing in my education had prepared me for Indian culture and society and I was particularly bewildered by Hindu practices as I saw them in Benares, Jagannath Puri, and Madurai. When I returned to Holland I studied Indology (Sanskrit, Pali, and Hindi) as well as cultural anthropology to get a better understanding of what I had experienced. I have continued to work on the anthropology of India ever since. After a short trip to China in 2003 (during the SARS epidemic) I paid my first serious visit to China in 2004. I went to Xiamen (South China) and to Gulangyu, a small island near Xiamen, where my favorite Dutch romantic poet, Slauerhoff, had lived. The Chinese graduate students who studied at Amsterdam University where I worked at the time had told me that religion was quite unimportant in China, very different from India. However, I found on this and subsequent visits that this is the official, intellectual view and, in fact, quite beside reality. Religion is thriving in the great Buddhist monastery of Nanputuo just next to the campus of Xiamen University, and in the fishing communities not far from that campus. The rituals I witnessed reminded me very much of India. In the last couple of years I have been learning Mandarin and have visited China often, for longer periods. My early, intimate encounter with Indian society cannot be repeated, but I feel more and more at home in China. Going to China has confronted me with a number of questions about India that I had not thought of before. It seems to me, for instance, that the question of secularism in India can be fruitfully pursued by a

x

Preface

comparison between India and China. The literature on secularism, secularization, and secularity is too dominated by studies of Western societies. Similarly, the stereotypes that Indians and Chinese have about each other prevent them from seeing the parallels in their histories and the alternatives for the paths they have chosen. I have come to the conclusion that the modern histories of China and India are at the same time very different and very similar and that comparison would benefit our understanding of these societies. This does not imply a turning away from the immense influence of imperial modernity on these societies. Europe (and later the USA) is the counterpart of imperial interactions with Chinese and Indian societies. At the conceptual level Europe therefore remains central to the formation of Chinese and Indian modernities. It is impossible for a social scientist to understand these societies without the conceptual framework and vocabulary of the social sciences which originated in Europe. This entails a constant reflexive act of translation. This book has had a long period of gestation. I have often felt that those friends and colleagues who had warned me that I was too old to start learning a new immense culture and language had probably been right. However, the excitement about learning Chinese and learning about China (especially in comparison to better-known India) has kept me going. I am grateful to Professor Song Ping for introducing me to Xiamen, and to Professor Wu Da for introducing me to Shanghai and Beijing. I have been gracefully welcomed in their circles by China scholars, including Mayfair Yang, Prasenjit Duara, Kenneth Dean, Vincent Goossaert, David Palmer, Adam Chau, Ji Zhe, Richard Madsen, Rob Weller, and many others. I have given papers on my research at the University of California, Santa Barbara; at the London School of Economics; at CNRS in Paris; at the National University of Singapore; at Boston University; at the New School in New York; at Minzu University Renmin University, and at the Chinese Academy for Social Sciences (CASS), all in Beijing; at Shanghai University and Fudan University, both in Shanghai; at the Tata Institute for Social Sciences in Mumbai; and at var-

Preface

xi

ious SSRC conferences. A Chinese translation of this book has been prepared by Professor Jin Ze of the Institute for World Religions of CASS. This book could not have been written without the support of Utrecht University, which awarded me a Distinguished University Professorship that gave me full freedom for research; as well as that of the Max Planck Society, which appointed me as a Member and as a Director at the newly founded Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen. I am grateful to subsequent Rectores Magnifici (Professors Gispen, Stoof, and van der Zwaan) of Utrecht University and to the Presidium of the Max Planck Society (Professors Gruss and Schön) for their trust in me and my work. The writing was further supported by fellowships at the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore and the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. The wonderful scholarly environment of the new Max Planck Institute in Göttingen has been perfect for my kind of comparative work and I want to thank my colleagues, and especially my co-Director Steve Vertovec, for their encouragement. At Princeton University Press Fred Appel continued to give unstinting support even when the project took much longer than both of us had thought. I want to thank especially Prasenjit Duara, Chris Fuller, and Jeffrey Kripal for their stimulating comments on my manuscript. While I was writing this book my oldest son finished an MA in Sinology in Leiden and now lives in Beijing, while my youngest son is specializing in Asian history. The fact that Asia fever is all in the family makes me happy. My wife, Tâm Ngo, was writing her book on the Hmong of Vietnam at the table across from me when I was finishing this book. I could not have done without her and I dedicate this book to her and to a shared future, scholarly and otherwise.

The Modern Spirit of Asia

Chapter 1

Introduction This book examines India and China and the ways in which they have been transformed by Western imperial modernity. In my understanding the onset of modernity is located in the nineteenth century and is characterized politically by the emergence of the nation-­state, economically by industrialization, and ideologically by an emphasis on progress and liberation. What I call “imperial modernity” is the formation of modernity under conditions of imperialism. This is a study in comparative historical sociology, informed by anthropological theory. The field of comparative historical sociology of culture was founded by Max Weber and practiced by his followers, of whom Robert Bellah and the late S. N. Eisenstadt are among the best known. It has been connected to interpretive anthropological theory and to insights gained in ethnography, especially in the work of Clifford Geertz. However, the overwhelming increase of sophisticated specialist historical work has led scholars to limit themselves to the nation-­state as the unit of analysis. Moreover, the emphasis on economics and politics in comparative work has made it hard to pursue this line of interpretive analysis.1 The complexities of Indian and Chinese societies and their modern transformation are vast, and our knowledge of them has increased greatly since Weber compiled his studies. This makes a comparative project difficult, but I am convinced that in an era of increasing specialization it is important to do comparative work if it succeeds in highlighting issues that are neglected or ignored because of the specialist’s focus on a singular national society. The nation-­form itself is a global form2 that emerges in the nineteenth century and cannot be understood as the product of one particular society. It is the dominant societal form today, and India and China have gradually developed into

2

Chapter 1

nation-­states. For this reason, one can compare India and China at the level of nation-­states, although these societies are internally immensely differentiated and the particular nation-­form they have taken is historically contingent. India and China are taking on a globally available form that is characteristic for modernity, but they are following quite different pathways. These differences can be highlighted and understood through comparison. China’s and India’s nation-­forms are comparable: Both are based on huge societies with deeply rooted cultural histories that have united large numbers of people over vast territories and over long periods of time. Both have taken the nation-­form in interaction with Western imperialism. The comparative analysis introduced here takes the nation-­form not as something natural or already preconditioned by deep civilizational or ethnic histories, but as something historically contingent and fragmented.3 By focusing on the comparative analysis of the different pathways of two nation-­states in a global (imperial) context, the argument goes beyond methodological nationalism.4

India and China Why compare India and China in the modern period? Contrary to what might be assumed, the reasons for comparison do not lie in a continuous long-­term history of interactions between India and China. The words “China” and “Mandarin” derive from Sanskrit cina (“land of the Chin”) and mantri (“minister”). That such principal terms of foreign reference to the Middle Kingdom (zhongguo, 中国) and to its learned civilization come from India suggests a long, continuous history of interaction between the two civilizations up to today. However, such a civilizational interaction was in fact largely limited to the first millennium CE. While this exchange was of great importance and continued for a millennium, it was very much limited to the spread of Buddhism. It therefore gradually ended when Buddhism more or less disappeared from India under the influence

Introduction

3

of new Hindu devotional movements as well as the spread of Islam. Buddhism in China lost its connection with India and became now entirely Chinese. This is obviously not to underestimate the enormous influence of Buddhism on Chinese thought or to deny its Indian origins. Concepts of “belief” in Chinese (xin, 信) may well be derived from Buddhist thought and thus from Sanskrit shraddha, which gives doctrine and the act of believing a central place in religious discipline. It follows that if we recognize this Indian influence, we may understand that the notion of belief might be much more important in Chinese religious practice than is often assumed by those who emphasize orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy in Chinese religion.5 Nevertheless, while one can hear Sanskrit mantras being chanted in Buddhist monasteries in China today and every literate Chinese knows Wu Chen-­En’s sixteenth-­century classic novel Journey to the West—in which a monkey king, modeled on the Hindu monkey-­god Hanuman, goes to India to find wisdom—the interaction with India has long ago come to a halt. Certainly, there is a continuous story, largely untold, of Indian, Chinese, and Arab traders plying the coasts of the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean with their goods, and one does have the inspiring narrative of Admiral Zheng He (a Muslim Chinese from South China) going to India and Africa with enormous fleets in the fifteenth century.6 However, while they are important, those stories do not show an interaction in terms of the expansion of empires and/or religious traditions, such as Buddhism, between India and China in the second millennium CE. One must acknowledge a universe of exchanges in the Far East in which China plays a dominant role over the centuries up to today. This universe includes countries now called Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.7 At the same time there is also a universe of exchanges between India and the Islamic world on the one hand and the Malay world on the other, including countries now called Yemen, Indonesia, and Malaysia.8 While these universes of exchange and interaction touch each other at the edges, especially in the Malay world, they do not interact in their cores.

4

Chapter 1

From the sixteenth century onward these exchanges and interactions come to be gradually controlled by Western maritime expansion in the entire region while connecting the region to a more global system of exchanges.9 Whatever the importance of exchanges and interactions between India and China in the premodern world may have been, they are not the basis of the comparison that is offered here. This book focuses on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, on religion and nationalism in the imperial context. It takes as its starting point the nineteenth-­century imperial history of Western interactions with India and China. In terms of world history, it is a relatively short, though recent, history of Western dominance that emerged out of the Industrial Revolution. It is also a period of dramatic transformation in the entire world.10 The ascendancy of the West is accompanied by the decline of India and China. This book compares the interactions between India and Western modernity with the interactions between China and Western modernity. Indian and Chinese modernities are produced by interactions with imperial formations that can be compared to further our general understanding of the cultural history of modernity. This comparison is fruitful not only because these are large-­scale neighboring societies with deep cultural histories that have had far-­reaching influence on all the societies around them, but also because they share a number of similar and comparable features. From the sixteenth century on India was ruled by the Mughals, while China was ruled by the Qing. Both were dynasties that came from outside and remained distinct from the rest of society in a number of ways, but while Islam played an important role in the distinctiveness of the Mughals, it was Manchu ethnicity that was central in the case of the Qing. Both dynasties were toppled under Western influence in the nineteenth century. India was colonized after the Mutiny of 1857 and incorporated into the British Empire, while the Qing dynasty was fundamentally weakened by the Opium Wars (1839–1842 and 1856–1860) and replaced by the Republic of China in 1912. This republic never

Introduction

5

achieved hegemony over Chinese territory, but was subjected to constant fragmentation owing to a series of wars and rebellions as well as a Japanese invasion. Only with the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 by the communists after the nationalist army was defeated and escaped to Taiwan did Mainland China come to be unified again under one regime. The current state of India is also a product of the World War II and the collapse of the old colonial arrangements. The Republic of India was founded in 1950, after the separation of Pakistan, a homeland for Muslims. Colonial rule had brought a substantial unification of India and an institutional framework to build on, but independence immediately occasioned an important division of territory and people for reasons of religious nationalism. The post-­1950s history of both India and China also shows remarkably comparable similarities as well as differences. India has a democratic government, chosen by the people in regular, free elections, with a multiparty system, although this has been dominated over the larger period by the Congress, a party characterized by a secular, democratic socialism. China has communist rule without free elections. Although their starting points in 1950 were very similar, the economic development of both societies has also been quite different. While both are agrarian societies that followed a path of industrialization, China has been growing much faster over the last three decades, after it had suffered tremendously during the upheaval caused by the enormous failures of the Great Leap Forward and the Great Cultural Revolution. The Chinese state under communism has launched a much more radical and successful attack on agrarian hierarchical society (including its religious aspects) than anything the Indian state has been able or willing to do. This is immediately clear when one looks at literacy rates, relative poverty, land cultivation rights, and gender relations.11 Both states have had a policy of self-­sufficiency and relative closure to the world market, but in the 1980s both also have liberalized their economies and opened them up for the world market. These economic policies have been implemented in India under con-

6

Chapter 1

ditions of a vibrant civil society and a public sphere with a free press, whereas China has implemented them under conditions of authoritarian rule without free criticism from civil society or public sphere. A great many issues in the comparison of modern India and China need to be addressed in social science if the field is to be less Euro-­America centered, but this is still very insufficiently done. Issues of democracy versus authoritarian rule and their impact on economic development, urbanization and rural industrialization, and the rise of middle classes in India and China—these are all just instances of a possible comparative sociological analysis. One may expect that such analysis will be forthcoming with the growing centrality of India and China in the global economy. However, it is also to be expected that the main emphasis in such a future comparative sociology will be on political economy rather than on culture and religion. This is at least the case in the field of world history, which is dominated by economic analysis.12 From the perspective developed in this book the impact of imperial encounters on culture and religion also deserves comparative analysis. Culture and religion are not marginal but central to the formation of imperial modernity. What is not attempted here is to provide a coherent, encompassing model from which what we know about these two societies can be understood. While one needs narrative coherence, one should also be allowed to leave some space for the fragmented nature of cultural processes. The following focal viewpoints and arguments guide the present analysis in an attempt to retain this narrative coherence.

Spirituality of the East In the imperial encounter the cultures of India and China gradually came to be seen as “spiritual” and thus as different from and in opposition to the materialism of the West. This concept of “spirituality” is critically engaged in this book, both in its Western universalistic genealogy and in its application to trans-

Introduction

7

late and interpret Indian and Chinese traditions. What is the “spiritual”? Scholars would like to avoid this term as much as possible because of its vagueness. This is most easily done by treating it as a marginal term, used only at the fringes of intellectual life, as in our period, for instance, in the New Age Movement. I want to suggest that that is not a correct approach and that spirituality is in fact a crucial term in our understanding of modern society. At the same time it is necessary to reflect on the nature of this kind of concept. Certainly, it does conjure up all the conceptual difficulties that one also encounters with terms like “religion” and “belief,” and perhaps even more so. Obviously, its very conceptual unclarity and undefinability make it so useful for those who want to use it. It suggests more than it defines. Spirituality takes the universalization of the concept of religion a crucial step further by completely severing the ties with religious institutions. The term “religion” has developed in modern European thought as a cross-­cultural, global concept that captures a great variety of traditions and practices. The universalizing deployment of the concept of religion has its roots in notions of Natural Religion and Rational Religion that arose in the aftermath of the religious wars in Europe and in conjunction with European expansion in other parts of the world. A milestone in this development, for instance, has been the relativizing of Christianity in relation to other religions by the eighteenth-­century publication of Picart and Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World.13 I discuss the concept of spirituality here in relation to another equally potent modern concept that is often seen as its opposite—namely, the secular. In doing so I will have to clear the ground for a new perspective on spirituality that does not make it into a marginal form of resistance against secular modernity, but instead shows its centrality to the modern project, and a new perspective on secularity that shows the extent to which secularity is deeply involved with magic and religion. Already in the nineteenth century the concept of religion had become part of a narrative of decline or displacement that has been systematized in the sociological theory of secularization.

8

Chapter 1

The gradual transformation of a transcendent hierarchical order into a modern immanence that is legitimated in popular sovereignty and is characterized by the market, the public sphere, and the nation-­state has transformed the role of institutional religion and in some historical instances (but not in others) marginalized it, but at the same time it has freed a space for spirituality. Spirituality escapes the confines of organized, institutionalized forms of religion and thus the Christian model of churches and sects that cannot be applied in most non-­Christian environments. It is thus more cross-­culturally variable and flexible and defies sociological attempts at model building. At the same time all the concepts that are used in this context (religion, magic, secularity, spirituality) either emerge or are transformed at the end of the nineteenth century and enable both anti-­religious communism in China and religious (Hindu and Muslim) as well as spiritual (Gandhian) nationalism in India.

Religion and Nationalism A central concern in this book is to illuminate the differences between nationalist understandings of religion in India and those in China. In other words this is a study of the relation between nationalism and religion from a comparative perspective. Both nationalisms share common ideas about progress, rationality, equality, and anti-­imperialism, but the location of religion in Indian and Chinese nationalist imaginings is very different. In short religion is a valued aspect of Indian nationalism, whereas it is seen as an obstacle in Chinese nationalism. I will argue that such a difference in the location of religion in modernity can be understood by comparing the ways in which India and China have been transformed by imperial modernity. As I have argued in an earlier book about the case of Britain and India, imperial interactions have been crucial to the formation of imperial modernities.14 In this book I will speak about Western or Euro-­American imperialism, with an emphasis on British imperialism, which is the global hegemonic force up to the

Introduction

9

World War II. The relation between religion and nationalism is constitutive to Indian and Chinese modernities and forms the general problematic of this book. Globalization in its current phase has forced us to go beyond nationalist histories, but world history more often than not emphasizes economics and politics and in an established secularist fashion underplays the formative role of religion.15 What I present here is an interactional history that emphasizes relations between Euro-­America (also known as “the West”) on the one hand and India and China on the other, with an emphasis on what I call a “syntagmatic chain of religion-­magic-­secularity-­ spirituality.” I borrow the term “syntagmatic” from Saussurean linguistics and use it in a nonlinguistic manner to suggest that these terms are connected, belong to each other, but cannot replace each other. They do not possess stable meanings independently from one another and thus cannot be simply defined separately. They emerge historically together, imply one another, and function as nodes within a shifting field of power. This syntagmatic chain occupies a key position in nationalist imaginings of modernity. Obviously, the emphasis on religion in this book is not to deny the importance of the history of capitalism and of developmental politics. However, the problem with an emphasis on economic development is that the history of modernization takes center stage in world history and that within this history a teleologically unfolding story of secularization takes care of religion. What I offer in this book is a nonsecularist counter-­ narrative. In one sense my narrative is secular, since it takes a position of nonpartisanship toward religion. I am not arguing from a religious point of view when I put forward that there is no opposition between being modern and being religious. Surely there are religious arguments against certain forms of modernity just as there are secular arguments against certain forms of religion. These are arguments that need to be studied from a sociological perspective that in itself is possible only within certain secular conditions. The social sciences emerge

10

Chapter 1

within the framework of the modern nation-­state, which is in a number of crucial respects a secular state. Simply put, my arguments about religion will not lead to my persecution by the state as a heretic. On the other hand, my narrative is nonsecularist in the sense that secularism and secularization are not taken for granted, but are seen as projects that have to be studied in relation to other political projects. While this is often difficult to accomplish because secularism is so much a part of the modern intellectual worldview both in Asia and in Euro-­ America, it is certainly necessary to distance oneself from secularist intellectual projects, such as the Marxist-­Leninist party ideology that is taught in Chinese universities, especially when they are supported by the power of modernizing states. I do not take this position in the spirit of a general critique of “the” secularist state, as some Indian scholars such as Ashis Nandy and T. N. Madan have done, because I will show that their critique may apply to the communist state of China, but is not applicable to the Indian state.16 What I want to show is that religion-­ magic-­ secularity-­ spirituality is an integral part of modernity. Realizing this as an empirical fact rather than as an ideological statement is necessary for a better understanding of contemporary society.

Comparative Framework To understand the connections in what I loosely call the syntagmatic chain of religion-­magic-­secularity-­spirituality, one needs an explicitly comparative framework. In fact, social and cultural analysis is always within a comparative frame. Some of us are acutely aware of this; others less so. In general there is inadequate consideration of the extent to which our approaches depend on arguing and comparing with the already existing literature on a topic, on the use of terms that have emerged in entirely different historical situations and thus convey implicit comparison (such as “middle class” or “bourgeoisie,” or “religion”), and also on the ways in which the people we study them-

Introduction

11

selves are constantly comparing the present with the past or their situation with that of others. To therefore claim that one is a Sinologist or an Indologist or an Africanist and believe that specialization in a region and subject, given sufficient linguistic and cultural competence, is enough to claim mastery over that subject, as if one is not standing constantly in a reflexive relation to both discipline and subject, gives perhaps a certain confidence, but is untenable. The sociology of India, as conceptualized by Louis Dumont and David Pocock at the end of the 1950s, was meant to place the study of India in a comparative framework.17 The principle that guided Dumont and Pocock was that the sociology of India, like the sociology of any other society, could be developed as a form of knowledge that is not ultimately determined by a national(ist) framework. While Indian sociology, again like any other sociology, originates in a national space and is developed within it, comparative sociology may transcend that framework. However, there are serious problems in developing comparative sociology. To give an example that is central to Dumont’s work, it would seem obvious that the study of caste is a crucial element of the comparative analysis of class. Nevertheless, there is a strong tendency in general sociology to simply assume that caste, while an essential characteristic of Indian society, is merely a special case that does not shed much light on other societies and thus can more or less be ignored. To an extent, this tendency is reinforced by using caste as a metaphor for Indian society.18 A similarly unfortunate tendency comes across in discussions on secularization and secularism, in which the secular is a metaphor for modern society. Even in the more recent critiques of Western models of modernization and secularization, one finds only a few examples of comparison with non-­Western societies, while the communist world escapes attention altogether in these discussions.19 The universal pretensions of Western sociology derive from assumptions that are implicit in the modernization paradigm. Because India has been relatively marginal to post–World

12

Chapter 1

War II developments in the West, there has been very little interest in developing a comparative sociology that includes findings and theories from India. It is only in the current phase of globalization that comparisons with India and China, as emerging markets and players on the global scene, become interesting again for those social scientists who are primarily interested in modern, industrial society. Current forms of globalization have made it important to study forms of transnational interaction that by definition escape the comparative frame of nation-­states. Some might argue that globalization makes comparative sociology irrelevant, since global forces shape societies everywhere at the same time and it is these forces that have to be studied. But one may argue that they shape societies in very different ways, ways that need to be compared. To give an example: the information technology (IT) revolution has changed societies worldwide, but this happened very differently in Europe and in India, and even very differently within India in, for instance, Bangalore and Lucknow. In an earlier period of globalization, imperialism shaped Britain and India simultaneously, but quite differently, and the differences and similarities call for comparative analysis. What needs to be compared in relation to the increasing importance of transnational flows is the transformation of nation-­states and their relation to transnational forms of governance. The nation-­state is not in decline but undergoes significant transformations owing to the globalization of the world economy. The different roles that transnational diasporas can play in these transformations is part of the comparative enterprise. For example, the role of the Chinese diaspora in the development of China after the opening up of the economy in 1978 is significantly different from that of the Indian diaspora (if only already in terms of the size of foreign direct investments from the diaspora), and it is the Chinese model that has inspired the Indian state to develop policies to attract investments from its diaspora. One of the greatest flaws in the development of comparative sociology seems to be the almost universal comparison of any

Introduction

13

society with an ideal-­typical Euro-­American modernity. It would be a step forward to compare developments in modern India and modern China with each other. That does not imply a straightforward “provincializing” of Europe, since Europe and the United States are crucial in the formation of Indian and Chinese modernity, but an understanding of the ways in which similar challenges and influences have produced very different societies in India and China.20 Even within the modernization paradigm there is considerable debate about the nature of modernity. While some would emphasize the Western origins of a singular modernity that is exported and responded to in the East, others would emphasize the indigenous development of capitalist modernity without much of a role for imperialism. In the last decade there are more voices arguing for multiple modernities, diversifying both the nature of Western modernity and its impact as well as diversifying the histories in which Western influences have been received.21 More and more the dynamic character of cultural encounters is also taken into account, as well as the ways in which these encounters are productive in creating new cultural formations. This variety is impossible to capture in one guiding interpretive framework. The step forward is to fully acknowledge variety and multiplicity without losing sight of the need to compare. Comparison should not be conceived primarily in terms of comparing societies or events, or institutional arrangements across societies, but as a reflection on our conceptual framework as well as on a history of interactions that have constituted our object of study. One can, for instance, say that one wants to study church-­state relations in India and China, but one has to bring to that a critical reflection on the fact that that kind of study already presupposes the centrality of church-­like organizations as well as the centrality of Western secular state formation in our analysis of developments in India and China. That critical reflection often leads to the argument that India and China (and other societies outside the West) should be understood in their own terms, and cannot be understood in Western

14

Chapter 1

terms. However, Indian and Chinese terms have to be interpreted and translated in relation to Western scholarship. Moreover, such translation and interpretation is part of a long history of interactions with the West. In the Indian case it is good to realize that, despite its foreign origins, English is now also an Indian vernacular. In the case of China it is good to realize that, despite the prevailing notion that everything has an ancient Chinese origin, communism did in fact not originate in the Song dynasty. Any attempt to make a sharp (often nationalist) demarcation of inside and outside is spurious in the period under investigation. And today, because of further evolved patterns of globalization, this field of comparison has been widely democratized by modern media, so that everyone is in mediated touch with everyone else and has views on everyone else, mostly in a comparative sense. Chinese and Indians compare themselves with Europeans and Americans, and increasingly Indians compare themselves with Chinese (much less so the other way around). Whatever we write today falls within the orbit of these increasingly available popular forms of comparison. Comparison is thus not a relatively simple juxtaposition and comparison of two or more different societies, but a complex reflection on the network of concepts that underlie our study of society as well as the formation of those societies themselves. It is always a double act of reflection. While there is an impressive literature examining the interactions between India and the West as well as China and the West, there is hardly any attempt at comparative analysis of these interactions. Indian scholars look at the West, and Chinese scholars do the same, but neither looks at each other’s societies. There is an enormous dearth of China scholarship in India and India scholarship in China. Stereotypes are amply available, but a deeper engagement with each other’s history and society can hardly be found. This is surprising when we consider that India and China are the two dominant societies in Asia, with huge populations and deeply rooted civilizations that have radically influenced all the societies around them. Up to 1800 they not

Introduction

15

only dominated their region but were also the motor of the world economy. This picture is more and more confirmed by the new economic history of India and China. In the last two centuries, however, there has been the hegemony of Western power and of modes of thought that come out of the encounter with the West. The relative neglect of each other’s society and history can thus be explained by the enormous impact of Western modernity on Asia, including the dominance of Western academic institutions and scholarship. Western societies have been taken to be the model of developmental change in Asia and modernization theory, the long-­dominant paradigm of the social sciences, has lent its academic power to this common sense. Much of this thinking is now under revision, partly because of enormous economic growth in China over the last two decades, and, to a lesser extent in India, partly because modernization theory has lost much of its credibility. This has led, for instance, to an insistence on fundamental differences between East and West, particularly on “Asian values,” as promoted by Lee Kuan Yew, the long-­term leader of Singapore (one of the most modern and “Western” of Asian cities). However, since these Asian values are primarily “East Asian values,” this turn to the East has not led to more interest in the comparison between India and China. Another, related, obstacle to comparisons between India and China is orientalist conceptions of unbridgeable differences. India and China come to stand for the total “Other” in eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century European imaginations. Such imaginations can be very positive, as in Chinoiserie and Indomania, but also very negative, as in rejections of “barbaric customs” such as foot-­binding and widow-­burning. Basically, understandings of India and China in the precolonial period were limited and exoticizing, but not without a sense of equality.22 Different from African or Oceanian societies that are more easily represented as “the primitive” and thus as a stage in human evolution, Asian societies were (and continue to be) seen as civilizations that are potentially equal to Western civilization. With the ex-

16

Chapter 1

pansion of modern power in the East, such understandings are replaced with more precise knowledge, necessary to rule or dominate these regions, but also with a new sense of civilizational superiority. Such sentiments are often based on reified differences, as exemplified in Kipling’s “East is East, and West is West and never the twain shall meet.” Colonial rule over India has made India and the Indians less of an unreachable Other than China. The spread of English in India among the middle class and the intellectual elite especially has made cultural conversations easier. China, however, despite its radical modernization, has remained more of an Other in linguistic terms, as illustrated by Foucault’s famous reference to Jorge Luis Borges’s fake Chinese encyclopedia, arguing that Chinese categorizations are fundamentally un-­understandable.23

Comparison and Translation It is precisely the Chinese language, with its characters and tones, that provides the West its image of a deeply alien civilization. Sanskrit and the major modern languages of Northern India belong to the Indo-­European language family, and were thus seen as linguistically (and racially) connected to Western civilization. Chinese, however, was totally different. Nineteenth-­ century linguists, such as William Dwight Whitney in 1868, argued that Chinese was hardly a language since it had no grammatical structure.24 In Wilhelm von Humboldt’s foundational text on comparative linguistics On the Variety of Human Languages (1836), it is argued that “of all known languages, Chinese and Sanskrit stand in the most decisive opposition. . . . The Chinese and Sanskrit languages stand as the two extremes in the field of known languages, not perhaps comparable in their suitability for the development of the mind, but certainly so in the internal consistency and perfect execution of their systems.”25 Sanskrit, then, is a perfect language (sanskrit means “perfect”), with a perfect grammar that is at the origin of Indo-­ European languages, of which indeed the European languages

Introduction

17

are one offshoot. Indo-­European was in the nineteenth century often called Indo-­Aryan and stood for the uniqueness of European heritage against the total difference of Semitic languages (especially Hebrew) and the Chinese language. Sanskrit in its grammatical perfection showed the original genius of the Indo-­ Aryan race that created it. While the Indians as a race had deteriorated and were in need of colonization by their Aryan brethren, the Semites and Chinese were totally Other. While these fascinating and complex theories about language and race have been slowly discredited, especially after World War II, questions about language and thought, about universality and difference have remained with us. The central issue is that of cultural translation and interpretation. Modernity is a universalizing process that has to take on both translation and transformations of traditional conceptual universes. It is precisely that process that produces similarities and differences in a history of power that is the subject of the present book. The difficulties of correct translation of key concepts seem simply insurmountable. I. A. Richards, one of the most important literary critics before the 1960s in Britain and one of the major influences on American “New Criticism,” realized this problem during his visits to China.26 However, he was determined to solve the problem, because he thought that miscommunication had caused World War I, which had wiped out many of his generation. Solving cultural misunderstandings was one of the great tasks he conceived for linguists and literary scholars as well as the impetus behind his book The Meaning of Meaning, co-­authored with C. K. Ogden, and behind his attempt to bring Ogden’s “Basic English” project to China. Basic English was the invention of the logician Ogden and was simplified English that could be used as a second language for all those who did not already speak English. This was not an artificial language like Esperanto, but based on natural English. It was developed to contain not more than 850 words and 18 verbs and, as such, was easy to learn. In his Mencius on the Mind Richards argues that to understand the

18

Chapter 1

way Mencius (ca. 372 to ca. 289 BCE) used language to communicate meaning, totally alien to the Western mind, is crucial for the future of world communication and for the survival of Chinese civilization.27 Both projects, that of promoting Basic English in China with help from the Rockefeller Foundation and that of translating Mencius, failed. But it is important to see that Richards shared with Bertrand Russell and T. S. Eliot, his friends and contemporaries, a sense that although the gap between conceptual universes was almost unbridgeable, miscommunication, as a cause of war, had to be avoided at all cost. This view is less eccentric than it sounds. One of the most instructive disputes between the British and the Chinese before the Opium Wars was about the use of the term yi in trade negotiations, which has been wonderfully analyzed by Lydia Liu.28 In the Treaty of Tianjin of 1858, Article 51 says: “It is agreed that, henceforward, the character Yi (barbarian) shall not be applied to the Government or subjects of Her Britannic Majesty in any official document issued by the Chinese authorities either in the Capital or in the Provinces.” The preceding Article 50 says: “All official communications addressed by the Diplomatic and Consular Agents of her Majesty the Queen to the Chinese Authorities shall, henceforth, be written in English. They will for the present be accompanied by a Chinese version, but it is understood that in the event of there being any difference in meaning between the English and Chinese text, the English Government will hold the sense as expressed in the English text to be the correct sense. This provision is to apply to the Treaty now negotiated, the Chinese text of which has been carefully corrected by the English original.” Striking is the language of command used in what is supposed to be a bilateral trading agreement.29 But equally striking is that the British wanted to fix the translation “barbarian” to the character for yi (夷), while the Chinese used this character for “non-­Han people” and were taken by surprise that the British took it as a sign of disrespect. In an early response to British objections against the use of the word yi Admiral Wu Qitai quoted Mencius, saying King Shun was an east-

Introduction

19

ern yi and King Wen was a western yi and both were a virtuous model for later kings, so how could it be wrong to apply this word to the British? The issue here is not that of correct translation, since the use of the term yi has a complex history in China, just as the use of the word “barbarian” in English has a complex history. The issue here is that this term is part of a set of interactions between the Chinese authorities and the British that centered around notions of honor and respect and that culminated in the Opium Wars. It is this kind of inimical connection that Richards tries to prevent by his efforts to create possibilities of translations that bridge differences. The concept of cultural translation is, obviously, foundational for comparative analysis. In an important critique of Ernest Gellner’s view that cultural translation should not be excessively charitable (arguing basically that primitive nonsense stays primitive nonsense in translation as well), Talal Asad starts with the way the concept is used by Godfrey Lienhardt: “The problem of describing to others how members of a remote tribe think then begins to appear largely as one of translation, of making the coherence primitive thought has in the languages it really lives in, as clear as possible in our own,” but then goes on to point out that translation always happens within a history of power.30 Languages are unequal, especially in the production of desirable, universal knowledge. Cultural translation thus requires an exploration of this inequality and of the power relations that are inherent in them. This means that cultural analysis and comparison is always itself a product of power. This recognition does not lead to paralysis but perhaps to a realization of how power works. Social science is a modern discipline, originating in the West, and the translation of the way people express their way of life in social science language is one of the elements of Western cultural power. The universalization of social science language, however, also implies that this form of knowledge is applied by practitioners in Indian and China and elsewhere to understand their own societies. It is no longer the old problem of anthropologists visiting a place where people do not read or write, but

20

Chapter 1

a new situation of increased cultural contact in everyday life virtually everywhere (but primarily in the West) thanks to international migration, as well as of the development of social science disciplines in the places the West compares itself with.

The Study of Civilizations While this is a study in comparative historical sociology, it differs from the influential model, developed by Max Weber, in that it does not assume civilizations as units that can be compared, but looks at a series of interactions between Western imperial power and Indian and Chinese societies to compare historical choices and consequences. The concept of civilization is problematic because it is difficult to historicize and obscures the ways in which nationalisms have produced teleological histories of the nation as the result of civilizing processes. However, we cannot ignore the enormous influence on the study of religion of the concept of civilization especially thanks to the theoretical understanding of civilizations and their possibilities to become modern developed by Weber and his followers. Weber’s understanding of Western modernity is based on a theory about the rationalization of religion in Europe, which he compares with processes of rationalization in India and China. It has inspired a group of scholars around the late S. N. Eisenstadt to suggest a deeper history of civilizational (religious) patterns that lead to differences in their modernities. Eisenstadt argues that a disjunction (but not a split) between the transcendental and the mundane was for the first time made in a number of civilizations in roughly the same period, the first millennium before the Christian era.31 These civilizations include Ancient Israel, Ancient Greece, Early Christianity, Zoroastrian Iran, early Imperial China, and the Hindu and Buddhist civilizations. Sociologically this development assumed the emergence of intellectual elites (for example, Confucian literati, Brahmans, and Buddhist sangha) that wanted to

Introduction

21

shape the world in accordance with their transcendental vision. Moreover, Eisenstadt and his colleagues included theories by the anthropologists Tambiah and Redfield to point at a concomitant development of a galactic network of sacred centers and of a Great Tradition in them. This revolution in civilizational thought that occurred in all these civilizations in a relative short time span around 500 BCE was called “the Axial Age Breakthroughs,” using a concept developed by the philosopher Karl Jaspers, who argued that in this period a shared framework for universal historical self-­understanding emerged.32 The central idea in this theory is that in the Axial Age a new emphasis on the existence of a higher transcendental moral order was developed across civilizations as well as the concomitant emergence of the problem of salvation and immortality. How this problem is addressed differs from civilization to civilization. The philosopher and social theorist Charles Taylor calls this “the Great Disembedding,” in the sense that the Axial Religions break at least one of the ways in which religion was embedded: social order, cosmos, human good. In early religion “human agents are embedded in society, society in cosmos, and the cosmos incorporates the divine,” according to Taylor, and the Axial transformations break this chain at least at one point.33 The emergence of world renunciation in Indic religions (Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism) is, in principle, a perfect example of this disembedding, since the renouncer leaves society and in some radical versions of Nirvana even the cosmos. What one should, however, keep in mind is that every disembedding is specific. The dyad of immanent-­transcendent is configured in every civilization in specific ways and cannot be subsumed under an abstractly conceived (ideal-­typical) universal dyad. The problematic of the transcendent in India is intimately tied to the specific immanence of caste hierarchy. On the one hand we have the caste society under the aegis of the Brahman priest (and the Vedic fire-­rituals), and on the other hand we have the Axial religions (the Upanishads, Buddhism,

22

Chapter 1

Jainism) under the aegis of the renouncers. Both are inextricably connected, so that what Taylor calls disembedding gets it specific meaning from what it is disembedded from. Ultimately, what happens in India is a creative use of the notion of renunciation for all kinds of social and religious innovations that in the end do not fundamentally challenge hierarchical society, although they may challenge it. While the emergence of the renunciatory idea is certainly of great significance in world history, one needs to avoid essentializing its nature by ignoring the ways in which it is related to a particular society. Similarly, if one would like to include Confucius’s thought among the Axial Breakthroughs (as Jaspers and Eisenstadt do), one needs to see that his teachings and those of his fellow literati develop a worldview that seems to create a dyad of the transcendent Heaven and the immanent World, but at the same time emphasizes its ultimate unity and embeds the sociopolitical order in it. While in India the renouncer is different from the priest and the king, in China we do not find a renouncer, but a king-­priest who executes the Mandate of Heaven. Unfortunately, his generalization of the notion of the Axial Age Breakthrough leads Eisenstadt to suggest in a totally expected (if not cliché) manner that Hinduism and Buddhism stand for an entirely transcendental (otherworldly) approach to salvation, while Confucianism stands for an entirely this-­worldly approach.34 Jaspers and Eisenstadt’s Axial framework is the background to Charles Taylor’s work on Western modernity, which he characterizes as “a secular age” without prejudging what might have been the evolution of, for example, Chinese civilization. In this connection Taylor mentions in passing that “one often hears the judgment that Chinese imperial society was already ‘secular,’ totally ignoring the tremendous role played by the immanent/ transcendent split in the Western concept which has no analogue in China.”35 In Taylor’s view the Axial dyad of immanent-­ transcendent (these two belong to each other) was radically split

Introduction

23

in European thought from the seventeenth century onward, and that split gave rise to the possibility of seeing the immanent as all there is and to seeing the transcendent as a human invention. This-­worldly in the Chinese case then does not mean exactly the same as secular in the Western case. All these ultimately Weberian arguments, however, essentialize civilizational units that can be compared without exploring the highly fragmented and contradictory histories of these societies. They also tend to underestimate the influence of thought that does not fit easily in the immanent-­transcendent framework, such as all those religious movements in India and China that emphasize the Unity of Being and the denial of Difference. Weber’s historical sociology compares processes of rationalization in Europe, India, and China, but arrives at a conclusion that is similar to that of Hegel’s philosophy of history, according to which personal and collective rationality (Spirit) develops in the West and cannot develop in the East because of a lack of individuality in India and China. In the Hegelian argument it is in India the caste system that robs people of their individual rationality, while in China it is the overwhelming power of the state.36 It is remarkable how much of this basic conceptual scheme still informs our understanding of the differences between India and China. Let me give two recent examples. The economist Pranab Bardhan’s recent interpretation of democracy in describing issues of governance in India and China focuses on the fact that in India society can be constantly mobilized for a number of issues, while the state lacks central commanding authority, whereas in China it is the opposite. This seems to simply reiterate Hegel’s observation that China is all state and India is all society.37 The anthropologist James Watson, in his elaborate reflections on Chinese ritual, argues that the Chinese state unified the forms of Chinese ritual practice and thus created a cultural unity, and remarks that in comparison there is no unification of ritual in India. According to Watson one does not find in India a state-­regulated pantheon nor can caste ideology

24

Chapter 1

provide a unified culture.38 In short China is all state unification and India is all religious and social diversity.39 To assess these Hegelian assertions that have become common sense one would need to compare state formation in India and China. When one examines the empires that preceded the modern political formations of colonized India and republican China, it is remarkable that both are empires ruled by “outsiders” to the Hindu or Han civilizations and that the Mughals kept to Islam while the Manchu (Qing) assimilated to the Confucian worldview. There are structural tensions at the heart of these empires: Manchu-­Han and Muslim-­Hindu. When one examines contemporary society one needs to avoid interpreting the contemporary communist state as representing ancient ideas of state power in China, since it understates the fragmentary nature of premodern empires as well as the importance of the “warlord” period of half a century between the fall of the Qing and the foundation of the communist state. Similarly, to explain the weakness of the Indian state in terms of caste as the essence of Indian society underestimates the enormous transformations of caste under British rule and in postcolonial India under conditions of democratic rule. Weber, despite all his subtlety and genuine insights, offers a historical analysis of oriental deficiency or, in other words, what the East lacks to develop modernity, and in that way essentializes its differences with the Modern West. Hegel and also Marx see a historical role for Europe in transforming the East, but understand this simply as an impetus from outside to create change. A history of the interactions between East and West has to open up the fragmentary and contradictory nature of imperial encounters as well as the ways in which they produce new formations at both sides of the interaction. This is not a plea for providing more “local histories,” but a plea for doing “interactional history” of modernity. One continues to have a need to engage with the traditions that are central to societies and the ways in which they have been interpreted to form the civilizational core of national history, but one needs, at the same time,

Introduction

25

to acknowledge the contradictory and fragmentary nature of discursive traditions.

Wounded Civilizations The imperial encounter with the West has produced, to use V. S. Naipaul’s term, “wounded civilizations” in India and China.40 Of course, it is above all the military superiority of Western powers, enabled by economic growth and technological progress, that was the immediate cause of the defeat and humiliation of the powers that were prevailing in India and China. But more subtly, it is the encounter with Western modernity that has left a much more lasting wound, creating deep emotions of insignificance and backwardness, of hurt pride. Such feelings are still very much alive today long after national independence and a more recent history of spectacular economic growth. An important field of culture in which the clash with imperial modernity has created such wounds is that of artistic creation. This is a field that is in important ways interwoven with that of religion, since image, icon, imagery, and artistic representation as well as iconoclasm are central to devotional practices. As we will see in chapter 2, modern art is also deeply connected with the notion of spirituality. In discussions of the imperial encounter this cultural battlefield is seldom mentioned, possibly because the wounds are so deep. The arts of India and China, ranging from miniature paintings and calligraphy to sculpture and architecture, were not only rich but in a number of technical aspects also superior to Western art, especially in applied arts, such as textiles and porcelain. They not only had lost patronage with the decline of indigenous empires, but, more significantly, they also had lost their command over the politics of distinction and cultural power. While there is some interaction between Western and Chinese and especially Japanese art, one is struck by the ways in which Western paintings have been able to absorb oriental art, give it a place within its own overall structure without imitating it, as in Van Gogh’s Le Père Tanguy (1887), which

26

Chapter 1

features several Japanese prints that serve as the background of van Gogh’s portrait of Tanguy. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was the West that produced modern art and thus the power to give meaning to modern life, while it was the East that seemed condemned to mimic it (with all the ambivalence and instability of mimicry that produces something “that is almost the same but not quite”).41 Although there are constant attempts at creating a Chinese and Indian modern art after the decline of traditional art, these attempts have not yet succeeded in producing a space that is rooted in regional aesthetics and producing an alternative cosmopolitanism to the Western one in the way cinema has done.42 Certainly in Chinese art this seems to be quickly changing today. One way in which this change is indicated is at auctions of contemporary art, where works by artists such as Zhang Xiaogang fetch prices that continue to rise drastically and achieve international recognition. Another indication is the development of independent studio sites, like Dashanzi (Factory 798), located in disused factories in Beijing.43 The question of whether contemporary Chinese art is produced simply for international (predominantly Western) taste is deeply contested. At the same time it should be clear that typical Chinese art traditions, such as ink painting, continue to be practiced and appreciated by millions in China today.44 The transformation of Chinese and Indian conceptions of beauty and art into modern ones shows the complexity of the imperial encounter. This picture emerges also from the field of literature, in which India’s single Nobel Prize winner in literature Rabindranath Tagore rode the wave of interest in Eastern Spirituality at the beginning of the twentieth century but is almost entirely forgotten now (except in Bengal), while Gao Xingjian, who received the Nobel Prize in literature in 2000 as the single Chinese recipient for literature, is hardly recognized as an important novelist in China itself (but is recognized in Taiwan and Singapore). This situation is the more remarkable given the enormous historical

Introduction

27

depth and richness of Indian and Chinese literary traditions. To an extent it is a product of the complex relation of culture and language—which partly explains that Indian literature written directly in English is so much more appreciated all over the world than translated Indian literature, originally written in vernacular languages—and thus raises the question of the translatability of these cultures. To put it differently, it raises questions about cultural diversity and universality and therefore about modernity as a process of universal abstraction from concrete difference that we will address later. How do we understand tradition? Modernity is often seen as a break with the traditional past, and the attitude toward what is seen as “tradition” in India and China is one of the central issues in this book. Talal Asad has given the following definition of tradition: A tradition consists essentially of discourses that seek to instruct practitioners regarding the correct form and purpose of a given practice that precisely because it is established, has a history. These discourses relate conceptually to a past (when the practice was instituted, and from which the knowledge of its point and proper performance has been transmitted) and a future (how the point of that practice can best be secured in the short or long term. Or why it should be modified or abandoned), through a present (how it is linked to other practices, institutions, and social conditions).45

Central to a tradition is therefore the debate about authenticity and transgression. Traditions project themselves as timeless, transcending history, and their discursive authority lies precisely in that claim. It is thus not so much that in the modern period traditions are cast away in a process of Westernization, but that the debate about how indigenous traditions relate to the necessity to measure up against the modern power of the West becomes central.

28

Chapter 1

Themes and Perspectives The relation between spirituality, secularity, religion, and magic in Indian and Chinese modernity is the main theme of this book. The emergent form of Indian and Chinese societies in which these relations are taking shape is that of the modern nation. While both sociology and political ideology have tended to conceptualize the modern nation-­state and its democratic form of governance as secular and its emergence as dependent on a replacement of religious sentiments of community, the present study does not want to assume any given relation between nationalism and religion. Similarly, assumptions about secularization and secularism that are inherent in sociological theories of modernization and ideological views of the nature of Western modernity are not taken at face value. As Jose Casanova has shown, the democratic nation-­state can emerge and thrive in societies with public religions.46 To give a personal example, I was born in a Dutch society that was dominated by religious groups and parties but has had democratic elections from the end of the nineteenth century. There are several possible connections between democracy and secularity, but there is no necessary one. Secularity can be promoted in a society by democratic means, which was Jawaharlal Nehru’s aspiration, but it can also be promoted by authoritarian means, which happened in China under communist rule. The establishment of democratic rule is relatively independent from a process of secularization. While there are various forms of state secularity, only in Western Europe can we find some secular societies in which religion no longer plays a major role. As a form of political participation and representation, democracy is typical for the liberal modern nation-­state, a particular state formation that emerges in Europe and the Americas in the nineteenth century and has been spreading over the world ever since. Liberal secularists may demand that the state is secular and that it treats religions equally and neutrally, but they will have to acknowledge that if one allows

Introduction

29

freedom of religious expression, religion more often than not will play an important role in the democratic process. One therefore needs to distinguish between the relative secularity of the state and the relative secularity of society and make clear how one defines that secularity. Modern states like England, Holland, and the United States all have had their own specific arrangements for guaranteeing a certain secularity of the state, but these states have found their legitimation in societies in which religion plays an important public role. To give one clear example: it can be safely said that the wall of separation in the United States is a demand that has emerged not from secularists, but from religious dissenters who were persecuted in England and therefore that, at least in this case, the secularity of the state is in fact a religious demand.47 The cases of India and China are relevant for a more complex understanding of the relation between nation and religion. China has witnessed a continuous secularist attack against religion for a century but has not been secularized, while India has made religion a core element of its national culture and, at the same time, has created a secular state that attempts to take a neutral stance toward religion. None of these developments can be understood within the framework of existing theories of secularization, but their comparison can throw light on how religion and the secular relate to processes of state formation. Second, the category of religion that has been critically deconstructed in recent anthropological and historical writing as well as in religious studies is a prime example of the productive character of the imperial encounter. It is a Western category that undergoes an enormous transformation in this encounter before it can absorb and produce “religions” like Hinduism, Daoism, and Confucianism. In such a transformation not only Christian missionaries and Western orientalists have agency, but also Indian and Chinese thinkers are as much involved in creatively producing new concepts and configurations. Moreover, this is not a history of ideas and their effects only, but very much also a history of state power and institutional change. It is not pos-

30

Chapter 1

sible to see the transformation of concepts like religion as the passive reception of Western categories in the rest of the world. Indians and Chinese are actively involved in this transformation, as are Europeans and Americans. Third, the emergence of a public sphere is crucial for the problematic of nation and religion. I have argued in earlier work on religion and the nation-­state in nineteenth-­century England that the secular perception of the public sphere, as argued by authors such as Habermas, is a secularist prescription rather than a historical description.48 In fact, one can easily discern the mobilization of religious groups at the end of the eighteenth century for causes that were both religious and secular, such as the modern missionary movements that protested against East India Company support of Hindu temples in India and the anti-­ slavery movements that protested against England’s involvement in global slave trading as well as slave labor in plantations. These religious groups transformed the public sphere and made the modern nation form of society possible. An important development accompanying the rise of the modern nation-­state in England was the nationalization of religion. Religion became less a form of political identification that pitted Protestants against Catholics than an element in unifying the nation under god and in giving the state a moral purpose. In my view this also implies a major shift in the understanding of “religion.” Rather than opposing “true religion” against “false religion,” pitting all kinds of groups against each other, religion emerged as an umbrella under which different persuasions could be active without violent conflict. The emergence of the category of “world religion” as a moral category that transcends actually existing churches and religious groups as well as the emergence of “spirituality” as alternative to institutionalized religion were elements of this transformation that imply a pacification of religious conflict. At the same time, however, in the Indian colony Hindus and Muslims were pitted against each other with the rise of nationalism, while in China religion became the object of secularist persecution. The new, universal concept of religion

Introduction

31

encompassed the pacified religions of the Western nation-­states and the communalized religions of South Asia as well as the politically repressed religions under communism. Fourth, the issues in this book are connected to a history of power, primarily of the state, but also of social movements that sometimes transcend the boundaries of the state. Religions like Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism have always been formations that transcend ethnic and territorial boundaries. In the age of empire, however, this transcendence of boundaries was transformed by modern imperialism. In Europe we see in the nineteenth century an emergence of a religious concern for the heathens who came under imperial rule. This connects with the civilizing mission of empire, although in an uneasy way, since the colonial state always had to prevent being seen as a Christian state bent on converting the colonized. Despite its professed neutrality, empire had to intervene in society, already for the simple reason that it had to be largely ruled by natives and thus had to educate the natives. There is an enormous expansion of missionary activity under the umbrella of empire that focuses on education. Through the effort to produce modern Christians by converting and educating the colonized to both Christianity and modernity, the missionary societies had a lasting effect on colonized societies. This effect is less to be measured in terms of converts (relatively few in countries like India and Indonesia) than in terms of producing modern forms of Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Daoism, and Confucianism and so on as counter-­ movements against Christianity. It is these so-­called revivalist, but basically modernist movements that one encounters everywhere in the colonial and postcolonial world. What we see today as political religion in the postcolonial world is very much a product of the imperial encounter. While the nation-­state is to an extent the territorial container of much of what is discussed in this book, it is itself a product of globalization and always interacting with the global system of nation-­states.49 Many of the groups that are in an uneasy relation to state hegemony are related to worldwide movements

32

Chapter 1

of, for example, Christianity and Islam, but at the same time they operate within the framework of the globalizing effects of ideas, money, labor, and consumption. In the current phase of globalization, religion continues to connect people and societies over great distances that are now more readily connected by various new forms of communication. Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism have developed several new global missionary movements that connect to this phase of globalization. They can all be called evangelical movements. Some of these worldwide movements are connected to minorities in the nation-­ state. The nation is not only the product of its interaction with the wider world but also of the constant processes of homogenization and heterogenization that are a necessary element of nationalism. Nation, like religion and modernity, is never finished, never already there, but is produced by its contradictions and tensions. This book, then, is about the effects of universalizing categories such as spirituality, magic, and secularity on ideas of the nation in India and China. Chapter 2 shows how in the nineteenth century the category of spirituality received a global modern meaning. It became part of an alternative modernity in different places around the globe. In India and China indigenous forms of spirituality were invoked as alternatives to Western imperialism and materialism. Spiritual superiority became part of Pan-­Asianism in the writings of some Indian and Chinese intellectuals. At the same time state-­centered religious ideologies as well as nation-­centered ideologies focused on spirituality as part of national character. These ideologies are crucial even today in China, India, Taiwan, and Singapore. Chapter 3 addresses the making of oriental religion. This chapter explores the emerging field of oriental studies and comparative religion, especially the project of Sacred Books of the East, headed by Friedrich Max Müller. It builds on recent reappraisals of the Indologist Friedrich Max Müller and the Sinologist James Legge. It goes beyond the study of orientalist scholarship by examining the role of the World Parliament of

Introduction

33

Religions in Chicago in 1893. The major analytical issue is the extent to which these products of Western scholarship and imagination have produced forms of religious categorization that have had an actual impact on religious belief and practice in India and China. In chapter 4 conversion to Christianity and the impact of missionary movements in India and China are discussed. Christian missionaries have played a major role in the creation of modern vocabularies and modern attitudes in India and China. Reform movements but also popular resistance movements derive much of their discourse from Christianity. This chapter analyzes the different trajectories of Christianity in India and China. It examines the concept of conversion in relation to the discourse of modernity. Chapter 5 engages the question of “popular religion” and the relation between religion and magic in India and China. The categories of popular belief, superstition, and magic have been used by modernizers in India and China to intervene in people’s daily practices and remove obstacles to the total transformation of their communities. These attempts have developed in different ways in India and China, but in neither case have they been entirely successful. After a historical discussion of heterodoxy, messianic movements, and political protest, this chapter delineates the transformation of popular religion in India and China under the influence of liberalization of the economy and globalization. Chapter 6 takes up the discussion of anti-­superstition movements from the preceding chapter in a broader discussion of secularism as a political project with its own utopian elements. The great differences in the nature of that project in India and China are used to illustrate the historical specificity of the secular in relation to religion within different historical trajectories. In chapter 7 yoga, a system of bodily exercise and spiritual awakening, is compared with taiji (tai chi) and qi gong (bodily skills to connect to qi, or primordial force). The argument here is that these forms of movement, while connected to notions of

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health, have strong political and social implications and can be important in nationalism. This chapter discusses, among others, the Falun Gong and the Sri Sri Ravi Shankar movement. In chapter 8 the construction of minority and majority ethnicities, cultures, and religions is discussed. In the case of India this is the construction of a Hindu majority versus Muslim, Christian, and Sikh minorities, while in the case of China it is the construction of a Han majority versus a variety of recognized ethnic minorities, among whom the Hui Muslims are the most significant. The most important comparative case of a minority religion in India and China is Islam. This chapter looks at the position of Muslim minorities in India and China in relation to the nation-­state and the ways in which the majority population feels the existence of these minorities as a threat. This involves a discussion of the relation between central authority and regional minorities. In chapter 9 some of the themes woven throughout this book are recapitulated and placed in the context of current anthropological understanding of Indian and Chinese society.

Chapter 2

Spirituality in Modern Society In this chapter I show how the concept of spirituality moved from the West to India and China and how it functioned to connect different conceptual worlds. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the concept of spirituality had radical overtones, critical of imperialism and materialism, but also of established religion. This chapter begins with a discussion of the role of spirituality in the West. This includes the role of spirituality in anti-­imperialist secularism, its role in the formation of modern abstract art, and its role in critiques of materialism. The chapter then moves to a discussion of spirituality in India, focusing on figures like Gandhi and Tagore, and in China, focusing on figures like Taixu and Chen Yingning. The term “spirituality” vaguely alludes to German Geist (“spirit”) and to mysticism. It is a modern Western concept, like “religion,” “magic,” and “secularity.” There is no equivalent term either in Sanskrit or in Chinese.1 With translations in both Modern Hindi and Chinese one immediately gets in troubling confusion with the terms for “gods” and “souls” or in a mix-­up with “mind” (aatmik, maansik, lingxing灵性, jingshen精神). In the case of Chinese spirituality the translation with 中国精神, zhongguojingshen would refer to the essential characteristics of China (or indeed, the “Spirit of the Chinese Nation”). I am not able to present a genealogy of Indian and Chinese concepts, but instead I would merely point out that despite the ubiquitous reference to India and China (and indeed Asia) as “spiritual,” spirituality is a modern, Western term. This raises intricate problems about how indigenous traditions are translated into a universal category in ways similar to that of “religion,” but with different effects and connotations. In the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the term “spirituality” received a central significance in understandings

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of modernity all over the world. One can, obviously, find deep prehistories of spirituality in mysticism, gnosis, and hermeticism, and in a whole range of traditions from antiquity,2 but modern spirituality is something different that cannot be explained in terms of these complex prehistories. It is part of modernity and thus of a wide-­ranging nineteenth-­century transformation, a historical rupture. Spirituality is notoriously hard to define, and I want to suggest that its very vagueness as the opposite of materiality, as distinctive from the body, as distinctive from both the religious and the secular has made it productive as a concept that bridges many discursive traditions across the globe. My argument is that the spiritual and the secular are produced simultaneously as two connected alternatives to institutionalized religion in Euro-­American modernity. I also argue that a central contradiction in the concept of spirituality is that it is at the same time seen as universal and as tied to conceptions of national identity. Moreover, while the concept travels globally, its trajectory differs from place to place as it is inserted in different historical developments. The spiritual as a modern category emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century as part of the Great Transformation.3 As such it is part of nineteenth-­century globalization, a thoroughgoing political, economic, and cultural integration of the world. As Prasenjit Duara has convincingly argued, this integration is uneven in time and place, and occurs at different levels of society, integrating markets and political systems in a differential process. In this chapter we are dealing with an instance of what Duara calls “cognitive globalization,” which produced “unique” national formations of spirituality within a global capitalist system.4 In the following discussion I highlight several aspects of spirituality without presenting a definition that is bound to be misguiding.

The Spiritual and the Secular The spiritual and the secular were produced simultaneously and in mutual interaction. The modern categories of “religion,”

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“secularism,” and “spirituality” were universalized in the age of imperialism and produced different effects in different societies. Again, these terms themselves were not new, but they were put to new uses. The category of the secular has a genealogy in church-­world relations in European history, signifying the opposition between the “worldly” and the transcendent, but is transformed in modernity both in Europe and elsewhere. The modern transformation of the “secular” becomes clear when we look at the first use of the term “secularism” in England by George Holyoake in 1846. Holyoake attacked Christianity as an “irrelevant speculation,” and his attack was carried forward by the Secular Societies that were formed in the early 1850s. One of the interesting aspects of these societies is that they combined radical anti-­church attitudes, anti-­establishment socialism, and freethinking with spiritual experimentation. The Secular Societies had a membership that was hugely interested in connecting to the other spiritual world through do-­it-­yourself science. These practices were not considered to be anti-­rational, but rather to constitute experiments that were scientific though different from what was going on in the universities at the time. They did not need (or want) to be legitimated by a scientific establishment that was considered to be intimately intertwined with high society and the established church, as indeed Oxford and Cambridge were in this period. A good example of the combination of socialist radicalism, secularism, and spirituality is the prominent feminist Annie Besant. In the 1870s Annie Besant became a member of the Secular Society of London and began to collaborate with Charles Bradlaugh, a prominent socialist and president of the National Secular Society, in promoting birth control and other feminist issues. She combined her radical socialist views and her scientific training as the first woman graduating in science at University College, London, with a great interest in spiritual matters. She met Madame Blavatsky, the founder of the Theosophical Society, and became a leading theosophist. After going to India she even became for a short moment president of the Indian National Congress.5 Madame Blavatsky (together with Colonel H.

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S. Olcott) had launched the Theosophical Society in New York. Secular America was a rich breeding ground for varieties of spirituality, ranging from spirit-­seeking activities in the “burned-­ over district” of upstate New York to liberal Protestantism.6 Scientific experimentation and scientific rationality were fundamental to the secular age, and scientific progress was often seen to depend on the secularization of the mind.7 From our contemporary viewpoint it might seem strange that spirituality and secular science were not seen as at odds with each other in the nineteenth century. A common view of the history of science is that over time science purifies itself from such unwarranted speculation. So, for instance, while the contribution of Alfred Russel Wallace in developing evolutionary theory concurrently with that of Darwin is generally acknowledged, Wallace’s spiritual experiments are generally seen as an aberration from which science has purified itself.8 What falls outside of this teleological perspective on science as a process of progressive purification is the social and political embeddedness of both the elements from which science is purified and of purified science itself. Spiritualism was seen as a secular truth-­ seeking, experimental in nature and opposed to religious obscurantism and hierarchy. This was a truth-­seeking that was hindered by both the state and the church, two intertwined institutions in England. It is within the context of spiritualism, spirituality, and the antinomian traditions of Britain that an anti-­colonial universalism was born. Perhaps the most important element in the emergence of spirituality was that it offered an alternative to institutionalized religion. Here one sees the connectedness of secularity and spirituality, both limiting religious institutions. In the West spirituality formed an alternative to church Christianity. Together with the so-­called secularization of the mind in nineteenth-­century liberalism, socialism, as well as science (especially Darwin’s evolution theory), one can find widespread movements in different parts of the world that search for a universal spirituality that is not bound to any specific tradition. Good examples in the

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United States are the transcendentalists from Emerson to Whitman as well as Mary Baker’s Christian Science. Theosophy is another product of spirit-­searching America and Western Europe. In fact not only America was full of spirituality, or “metaphysical religion” as Catherine Albanese has called it,9 but there was a huge proliferation of this kind of movement that paralleled the spread of secularist ideologies around the world.10

Abstraction and Spirituality Spirituality should not be relegated to the fringes of modernity, as often happens, since it is located at the heart of Western modernity. The extent to which spirituality emerged as a sign of Western modernity can be best shown by its direct connection to abstract art. In December 1911 Wassily Kandinsky, a pioneer of abstract art, published his Über das Geistige in der Kunst (“On the Spiritual in Art”), one of the most influential texts by an artist in the twentieth century. Kandinsky stated that the book had as its main purpose to awaken a capacity to experience the spiritual in material and abstract things, and that it was this capacity that enabled experiences that were in the future absolutely necessary and unending. Kandinsky emphasized that he was not creating a rational theory, but that as an artist he was interested in experiences that were partially unconscious. One of the formative experiences Kandinsky describes is his encounter at a French exhibition with Claude Monet’s Haystack: And suddenly for the first time I saw an Image. That it was a “haystack” I learned from the catalogue. That I had not recognized it was painful for me. I also thought that the painter had no right to paint so unclearly. I experienced dimly that there was no object in this image. And noticed astonished and upset that the image did not only catch, but that it imprints itself indelibly in memory and floats always totally unexpected in final detail before one’s eyes.

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Abstract art is one of the most distinctive signs of European modernity. One can study its gradual development from the impressionism of Monet and others through symbolism, but it is hard to escape the sense of drastic rupture with representational art. Kandinsky connects abstraction with the spiritual. In this he is certainly not exceptional, since other leading abstract pioneers such as František Kupka, Piet Mondrian, and Kazimir Malevich similarly saw themselves as inspired by spirituality, either through the influence of theosophy and anthroposophy or otherwise.11 This may be somewhat unexpected for those who see the modern transformation of European life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Weberian terms as demystification. In modern art, one of the most pregnant expressions of modernity, the spiritual stages a comeback as the return of the repressed. The connection between art and spirituality points at the way in which art comes to stand for the transcendental interpretation of experience that is no longer the exclusive province of institutional religion. While some of the theories one encounters in this area seem to be of the crackpot variety (Mondrian especially tends to be incredibly confused and confusing in his writings), one should be careful not to dismiss them too quickly as irrelevant.12 Artists are groping for a radically new way of expressing transcendental truth and are often better in doing that in their chosen medium than in words. The transcendental and moral significance of modern art, enshrined in museums and galleries, makes ideological attacks on art seem inevitable. Such attacks acquire the status of blasphemy and iconoclastic sacrilege, as in the Nazi burning of “degenerate art.” One could legitimately argue that the spirituality of Western modernity is enshrined in art.

Materialism and the Great Transformation For religious thinkers spirituality suggests something of higher value in distinction to the baser aspects of social life, including organized religion. That is a perception that connects German

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philosophers of the early nineteenth century with the twentieth-­ century influential Harvard philosopher and poet George Santayana, who has it that “this aspiring side of religion may be called Spirituality.”13 For romantic nationalists spirituality suggests the essence of the people, their collective spirit, which calls our attention to the fertile connection of spirituality and nationalism that we will examine later in this book. Finally, spirituality suggests a transcending of the body or, alternatively, the use of the body to gain spiritual experiences. It is these oppositions of experience versus representation, of spirituality versus materialism, of the spirit of the nation versus the concrete individual, of the spirit versus the body that are salient in the term spirituality. Most importantly, spirituality is used as an oppositional term against materialism, and thus as a critique of modern, industrial capitalism. Let me briefly lay out some defining elements of the materialism that spirituality opposes. The Great Transformation of nineteenth-­century society is primarily an economic one that is perhaps best characterized by Adam Smith’s notion of the “invisible hand.” What economists and political scientists today call the “rational choice of individuals,” but what Smith called “the individual pursuit of happiness,” leads according to this view in a mechanical way to general welfare. As Alexander Pope in his Essay on Man put it: “true Self Love and Social are the same.”14 While this is the foundation of liberal capitalism, Marx’s dialectical materialism is not different in its selection of the economy as the prime mover. In this way the economy becomes the most important purpose of society. Fortunately, the economy has laws of causation, or, at least, that is what economists would like us to believe. Statistics are gathered to provide an objectified view of reality that enables social engineering. The individual and the collective are simultaneously put in an economic framework that is secular not in the sense that it is nonreligious, since individuals can rationally pursue religious ends, but in the sense that a God-­given order of society has been replaced by an order that is constantly produced by homo economicus.

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This secular framework is just as metaphysical as the religious one that preceded it. Economic power is often not directly visible and represented by monetary symbols. Money is an ultimate sign of a nation’s sovereignty, as the word “sovereignty” indicates, and as the portraits and symbols and inscriptions on money signify. Moreover, the state’s power depends on its tax base. Indeed the welfare of the nation as well as the effectiveness of the state depends on monetary value. Inflation, devaluation, revaluation, exchange value, the value of one’s labor—all are signs of the health of the polity and the trustworthiness of political leaders. The state guarantees the value of its money, and people hold a strong belief in that invisible power of the state when they hold visible coinage in their hands. The state is held accountable for the functioning of the market and this is in effect more important for people’s political judgment than most other fields of political action. Nevertheless, the value of money depends on invisible market forces that are not controlled or are only partly controlled by the nation-­state. So here again the invisible, but now foreign, hand comes in to explain sudden changes in the fortunes of the nation, and internally that foreign hand is helped by the disloyalty of marginal economic groups like Jews or Lebanese or Indians or Chinese who connect the local to the global via trade and money lending. Since money signifies exchange (often seen as the basis of society itself—for example, by Claude Levi-­Strauss), it attracts moral thought on the possibilities and limits of exchange.15 Money then is the source of evil, the province of the devil. And indeed Christian and Islamic thought, influenced by Aristotle, is focused on banking and interest. Islamic thought on usury, lending, and interest is only one instance of this. Through its fetishism and circulation, money transcends purity and opens social life up for corruption. Corruption is often regarded to be that aspect of economic action that takes place behind the scenes, in the dark, but what about the invisible hand of the market itself? This is a field of great fantasies of conspiracy and great, unfulfilled demands of transparency. And it immediately concerns the central institutions of the modern nation-­state.

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The secular metaphysics of the economy is basic to modern social science and policy-­making, but also to its rejection as materialism. Charles Taylor has pointed out that in the ancien régime the excessive pursuit of individual wealth was seen as corruption that threatened the order of society, while in the modern social imaginary the order of society is created by it.16 However, the notion that the economic perspective on society is corrupt continues in a modern form as the rejection of materialism. This rejection particularly concerns the consumption side of the economy. While gluttony and avarice have always been vices in Christianity, the rejection of limitless consumption becomes as central as consumption itself in the modern social imaginary. The old rejection of the world of money and interest is transformed in the modern period into a rejection of the foundation of modern, secular society. Spirituality informs a wide spectrum of political movements, ranging from socialism to romantic movements like nationalism and fascism, but also the reform movements in the world religions. This does not have to be regarded as a backward-­looking, rear-­guard struggle that will disappear as progress moves on. Indeed, the current financial crisis and the earlier crises make clear to us that we live in, as the former U.S. President George W. Bush put it, “faith-­based economies,” in which rational calculations and notions of progress are deeply contested. Spirituality can be a term of critique in relation to the faith in money and military capability. As we have seen, interest in spirituality in nineteenth-­century Britain is combined with a rejection of colonialism. The older critique of colonialism as threatening the values of free Britain that we find in Edmund Burke, for example, is here transformed into a critique of those very values as embodied in traditional institutions such as the church and the crown.17 Some of this spiritual critique finds its way into socialism, if it is not hampered by Marxist materialism; some finds its way into radical movements, such as theosophy; and some finds its way into scholarship, especially in the new science of comparative religion. Let me repeat that spirituality is not religion, at least not established religion. In nineteenth-­century England, as much as in the United States, it

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is a term used in the critique of religion. Although it is against secular materialism, it is not reactionary in the sense that it harks back to traditional times. The arguments for spirituality, most importantly, are presented often as essentially scientific. Science itself comes to be seen as a transcendent spirit of the time. A good illustration of the continuation of this happy marriage of science and spirituality is that on 8 November 2005, admittedly under considerable controversy, the Dalai Lama was invited as a spiritual leader to address the annual convention of the Society for Neuroscience in Washington, DC.

Global Translation In the nineteenth century the notion of the modern signified evolution and progress. The political philosophies of the twentieth century—liberalism, socialism, communism, and fascism— all depended on forms of progressivism and they all legitimized programs of colonization and development both at home and abroad. As such the idea of progress and breaking with the past, as well as comparison with other contemporaneous, but backward societies, is connected with romantic visions of loss and otherness. It is this element that is crucial in our understanding of spirituality, since the East comes to constitute a site of spirituality that is lost in the West. Like other orientalist representations this serves a function in our self-­understanding, but it is also important in the self-­understanding of those who live in the East. It is therefore impossible to reflect on the modern history of India and China without an implicit reference to both the contents and discontents of European modernity, just as it is impossible to gain a fuller insight into European modernity without reference to Europe’s interaction with India and China. The term “spirituality” has a kind of global bridge function, connecting several conceptual universes that are increasingly in contact. Connecting is different from translating in the sense that translation always strives for correctness. As I have men-

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tioned, there is no term equivalent to “spirituality” in Sanskrit or Mandarin Chinese (although, obviously, there are words for “spirit”), but this term is increasingly used to connect discursive traditions that come to be called Hinduism or Confucianism or Daoism, none of which were “isms” before the imperial encounter. Following I. A. Richards’s explorations of the translation of Chinese thought, discussed in the introduction, I would propose that an embracing, vague term like “spirituality” has been adopted precisely to make peaceful communication between different conceptual universes possible. Various forms of spirituality that go beyond established religions and sometimes quite explicitly against them were influenced by the recent “discovery” of Indian and Chinese traditions. The best example of this is the Theosophical Society, but there are many others. These engagements with oriental spirituality are often very critical of imperialism, although at another level they are enabled by it. Most importantly, they are received and creatively used in India and China to produce new interpretations of tradition.

Indian Spirituality At least from Schopenhauer (1788–1860) onward the Western image of India has been that of a spiritual nation. Schopenhauer was deeply impressed by the mysticism of the Upanishads (Indian philosophical texts) and used his reading of them to formulate his version of German idealism. While Hegel’s (1770–1831) understanding of the nature of Indian civilization was ultimately negative in the sense that India was condemned to backwardness, Schopenhauer and other major German thinkers of the early nineteenth century, such as August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845) and Schelling (1775– 1854), valued Indian metaphysical thought highly. The idealist and romanticist traditions in Germany that were basic to the great development of German philology were deeply indebted to their encounter with Indian spirituality.18 Fundamental to

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this interest in “oriental wisdom” was a growing sense in Germany, but also elsewhere in the Western world, that traditional Christianity had been dethroned by the Enlightenment and could not offer a modern spirituality. This positive ascription of spirituality to Indian culture has played a crucial role throughout contemporary history in Indian nationalism. In taking this up the nationalists adopted the orientalist perspective of European romanticism in which Hindu civilization is highly appreciated for its spiritual qualities. Hindu civilization and its offshoot Buddhism are central to what Raymond Schwab has called the “Oriental Renaissance.”19 Indian religious movements in the second half of the nineteenth century reappropriated Western discourse on “Eastern spirituality.”20 The translation of Hindu discursive traditions into “spirituality” meant a significant transformation of these traditions. This process can be closely followed by examining the way in which one of the most important reformers, Vivekananda (1863–1902), made a modern, sanitized version of the religious ideas and practices of his guru, Rama­krishna (a practitioner of tantric yoga), for a modernizing, middle class in Calcutta. Rama­krishna (1836–1886) was an illiterate priest in a temple for the Goddess Kali who regularly became possessed by the Goddess. Rama­krishna’s ideas and practices were based on a specific, highly eroticized tradition of Tantra. Rama­krishna was a particularly gifted practitioner of a tradition that is widespread in North India, and he was highly popular in Calcutta. Even leaders of the Brahmo Samaj, a movement propagating rational Hinduism, became his followers. Vivekananda, who as a member of Calcutta’s westernized elite had received a thorough Western education and had joined the Brahmo Samaj, also came under the sway of this charismatic guru and spent his life translating the guru’s beliefs and practices into “Hindu spirituality” of a sort that could be recognized by Western and westernized audiences alike. Such was not an easy task, since it entailed moving out of sight the image of the Goddess Kali, with her protruding tongue and her necklace of skulls, dancing on

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the corpse of the God Shiva, as well as hiding Rama­krishna’s tantric rituals, which for Victorian sensibilities would have been seen as outrageous, while at the same time remaining totally devoted to Kali and Rama­krishna. While we can still interpret most of Rama­krishna’s beliefs and practices in terms of Hindu discursive traditions, we enter with Vivekananda the terrain of colonial translation. This translation was so successful that even the great European orientalist Friedrich Max Müller felt inspired to write a little book about Rama­krishna, in which he reiterated Vivekananda’s interpretation of this ascetic as a saint, while, for good measure, adding in a veiled reference to what he considered to be the inauthentic appropriation of Indian masters by the Theosophical Society, that “we need not fear that the Samnyâsins of India will ever find followers or imitators in Europe, nor would it be at all desirable that they should, not even for the sake of Psychic Research, or for experiments in Physico-­ psychological Laboratories.”21 An important element in the translation of indigenous traditions into universal spirituality is apologetics against attacks from Christian missionaries. Interestingly, this apologetics would often use Western orientalist interpretations of Sanskrit texts to support claims of authenticity and deep historicity. Such neo-­Hindu reform movements could be found all over India. For example, the South Indian intellectual Nallasvami Pillai authenticated his claim that Saivism was the original (national) religion of India by using works by Friedrich Max Müller and Monier Monier-­Williams (1819–1899).22 In his arguments one finds also an interesting inflection of the Axial Age transcendent-­immanent dyad, when he argues that Siva is simultaneously immanent and transcendent.23 Like Chen Yingning and Taixu in China, Nal­ lasvami tried to formulate a Shiva religion (Saiva Siddhanta) that could compete with Western metaphysics (as well as with Vivekananda’s Advaita Vedanta) and was a universal religion like Christianity. His importance in South India has been very significant in the establishment of a Saiva Siddhanta network that remains important to the present day.

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It is the translation and sanitization as well as “embourgeoisement” of popular traditions that is central to the production of Eastern spirituality, both in India and in China. It is carried out by intellectuals and finds its audience in newly emerging middle classes. It is truly a translation in that the “original” puts certain limits on the freedom of the translator. One of the most explicit examples of this is the attempt of the leaders of the Theosophical Society, Madame Blavatsky and Colonel Olcott, to connect their theosophy with a major Hindu reform movement, the Arya Samaj, founded by Swami Dayanand. The idea of the theosophists that one could communicate with the spiritual world of the Masters of the Universe found a negative response in the Arya Samaj, whose reforms had not led them to abandon the traditional Hindu belief that spirits should not be contacted or brought back in spirit communications. The major issue here is that there are a number of modernizations and secularizations of popular beliefs under way in the imperial encounter, but that one important trajectory was to transform existing religious vocabularies into the universal discourse of spirituality. One of the major reforms propagated by the Arya Samaj was the rejection of image worship. While this reform was certainly an apologetic response to Protestant criticism of “primitive” idolatry, it also continued an old debate about image worship (nirguna bhakti, the worship of God “without qualities”—that is, without an image—that was popular especially in the Punjab, where the Arya Samaj was active), and it made this rejection of material representation available for an interpretation as a superior spirituality. While most scholarly attention has rightly gone to the social impact of reforms, such as in India the abolition of widow burning and in China the abolition of foot binding, the creative understanding and translation of tradition as spirituality has not received enough attention. Because of its direct connection to emergent nationalism, spirituality is a key term in understanding India’s modernity. Especially Vivekananda’s construction of “spirituality” has had a major impact on Hindu nationalism of all forms, but also

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on global understandings of “spirituality.” Two major figures in the history of modern India have been deeply influenced by Vivekananda’s ideas about spirituality: the great Indian political leader Mohandas K. Gandhi and the Nobel Prize–winning poet Rabindranath Tagore. The first developed the nationalist strand in the idea of spirituality, while the second developed the international strand, both showing the extent to which the national and transnational are actually interwoven.

Mahatma Gandhi Gandhi (1869–1948) was aware of the deep connection between spirituality and anti-­imperialism in British intellectual circles when he started writing on India’s struggle for independence in his book Hind Swaraj in 1910. He himself saw that struggle as primarily a spiritual one. The sources for that spiritual perspective were multiple: Hindu tradition, Tolstoy’s interpretation of Christian spirituality, Ruskin’s thoughts about industry, Nordau’s views on civilization. I would argue that Gandhi’s “experiments with truth,” as he called his political and spiritual struggle, were a product of the imperial encounter of Britain and India. The man whom Churchill dismissed as a “half-­naked faqir” was as much a product of that encounter as Churchill himself. Gandhi formulated his ideas in universalistic terms, but the idiom of universalism always comes from a particular place and history, and in his case came from the Hindu tradition in which he had been socialized. His vegetarianism derived from well-­ established traditions of the Hindu and Jain trading castes, but could be universalized as a general moral practice, connecting to theories of the connections between body and spirit that had become popular in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. His nonviolence was again a particular interaction between Hindu and Jain traditions and European repertoires of radical protest (like the boycott). The main thing in all of this is not so much a connection between Eastern and Western tradi-

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tions but a transformation of them in the context of a history of interaction. This history continued in a new direction when American blacks adopted some of Gandhi’s ideas and tactics in their own struggle for civil rights. Gandhi’s “experiments with truth” were attempts to attain a moral truth through disciplines of the body, like fasting and celibacy. At the same time such disciplines, like fasting unto death, could be used as political instruments in the struggle for India’s independence. His spirituality was not conceived as a traditional quest for religious insight or redemption, but as the opposite of the Western materialism that he saw as the basis of imperialism. Gandhi wanted economic progress for India, but saw the materialism of imperial power as one of the causes of India’s decline. Gandhi had a universalistic view of the various religious traditions in the sense that he thought they had a spiritual core in common. That was one of the reasons why he felt that one should not proselytize, like Christian missionaries were doing in India, but instead let people discover the unifying moral and spiritual essence in their own and other traditions while sticking to the one that they had been socialized in. In Gandhi’s view one did obtain truth through one’s experiments with truth (satyagraha), but this truth was a moral truth that had to be experienced and indeed shown to others through one’s example. One should not criticize those who had not realized such truth and, while criticism is already a kind of violence, one should in general avoid violently imposing truth upon others who are not convinced by one’s example. Truth then is moral, while cognitive truth is important only in helping us to realize our moral goals rather than destroy us through materialism.24 It is this emphasis on the authenticity of one’s upbringing in a tradition and the rootedness of these traditions in India that leads Gandhi to a spiritual nationalism. Unlike Tagore, he was never very excited by pan-­Asian cosmopolitanism, despite his acknowledgment that the spirituality of the West had been corrupted and that it was the task of Asia to bring the spiritual message to the world.25 At the political level it was Nehru who was interested in pan-­Asianism and in India’s spiritual leader-

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ship of the nonaligned world during the Cold War. Nehru’s efforts culminated in the Bandung Conference of 1955, but ended miserably in the Indian defeat by China in the Sino-­Indian War of 1962.

Tagore In addition to Gandhi it is the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) whose understanding of spirituality has been very influential both within India and outside it. Tagore was convinced that a unique spirituality unified Asia and in a series of lecture tours of Japan and China tried to persuade Chinese and Japanese intellectuals to create a pan-­Asian movement toward a common Asian civilization. Rabindranath was the son of Debendranath and grandson of Dwarkanath, one of the wealthiest businessmen in Calcutta. They belonged to an elite, called bhadralok in Bengal, who had absorbed Western education and were at the forefront of attempts to reform Hinduism. Debendranath had joined the Brahmo Samaj, founded by Rammohan Roy in 1828, and had become its leader. Rammohan Roy (1772–1833) had argued for a universal rational religion based on Hindu spirituality, especially the mystical Upanishads. Roy had been a Christian Unitarian for a period, but had decided to replace Christian universalism with Hindu universalism.26 The Brahmo Samaj, then, was a movement that called for the rejection of a great number of Hindu “superstitions” and social customs, while emphasizing the rational aspects of Hindu spirituality. Such a rational religion had limited appeal outside the educated elite, and in the 1860s it began to broaden its popular appeal by exploring Bengali devotionalism. As we have seen earlier, Vivekananda, who had joined the Brahmo Samaj, took the decisive step of becoming a follower of the uneducated, mystic Rama­krishna and combining the rational religion of the Brahmo Samaj with Bengali popular religion. It is this blending of rationalism and mysticism that was the spirituality that Rabindranath Tagore imbibed in his family.

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Crucial for the pan-­Asian turn that Tagore’s Bengali spirituality took is his encounter with Kakuzo Okakura (1862–1913), a leading figure in the Japanese art scene, who stayed a year in 1901 with the Tagore family in Calcutta.27 In Japan Okakura had established a national art school combining traditional art with modern techniques. Rabindranath was very interested in Okakura’s educational experiences, since he himself was starting an educational experiment in Shantiniketan (“Abode of Peace”) outside Calcutta.28 Among Okakura’s friends in Calcutta was Margaret Noble, an Englishwoman who had become a devotee of Vivekananda and went by the name Sister Nivedita. Noble helped Okakura interpret Hinduism as a source of Asian spirituality. Okakura had been trained in art history in Japan by a Harvard graduate, Ernest Fenollosa (1853–1908), who had taught him to have a new, basically orientalist understanding of Japan’s religious and artistic traditions and brought him to Europe and America. While in Calcutta Okakura wrote his first book in English, The Ideals of the East (1903), which opens with the famous line: “Asia is one.” From 1904 to 1913 Okakura was the curator of the Japanese Collection at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, then (and now) the greatest collection of Japanese art outside Japan. Like Vivekananda earlier he was a great embodiment of oriental spirituality in Boston. After Okakura’s early death his role as interpreter of oriental spirituality was taken over by Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877–1947), who became the curator of the Indian Collection at the Boston Museum in 1917. Coomaraswamy developed the connection between art and Asian spirituality further in his writings. Art and especially its symbolism became a major carrier of a spirituality that combined Indian, Chinese, and Japanese traditions with Western metaphysics and deeply influenced an entire spectrum of thinkers ranging from Heidegger to Jung. After receiving the Nobel Prize in 1913 and after the outbreak of World War I in Europe, Rabindranath Tagore felt that Asia should assume a role of spiritual leadership in the world. Three years after Okakura’s death he visited Japan and was received by

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huge crowds with unbridled enthusiasm. At Tokyo Imperial University he delivered a speech on 11 June 1916 titled: “The Message of India to Japan.” His major theme was the unity of Asia and the spiritual mission of Asia in the world. While Europe’s achievements were not denied Tagore pointed at its great materialistic pursuit of self-­interest and the need for the spiritual resources of a regenerated Asia. Japan had at that time already made a most successful transition to modernity, and certainly not by rejecting material civilization. Although they had not been colonized, the Japanese Meiji reformers had embarked on a very ambitious adoption of Western science and technology, while creating a religious nationalism (Shinto) centering on the emperor. All Asian nations looked with awe at the Japanese model and especially the Chinese nationalists tried to adopt important elements from it. The Japanese also saw themselves very much as the leaders of Asia. What, then, did the Japanese make of the Indian claim of an Asian spirituality that transcended national boundaries? While Japanese intellectuals accepted that there was a spiritual element in Japanese civilization, they tended to see it as a part of their national heritage in a way very similar to followers of Vivekananda in India, who interpreted Hindu spirituality as a part of religious nationalism. They also definitely appreciated Tagore’s denunciation of Western imperialism, but rejected Tagore’s denunciation of Japanese fledgling imperialism. Tagore’s attitude toward Japanese militant nationalism was explained as a sign of his membership of a defeated, colonized nation. His critics rightly saw that there was a contradiction between his rejection of Japanese militancy and his praise of Japanese spirituality of which that militancy was part and parcel. Tagore’s and Gandhi’s interpretation of Eastern spirituality as nonviolent ignored or rejected the militant aspects of Asia’s religious traditions. In India this rejection led to an antagonism between Gandhi’s pacifistic nationalism and the militant nationalism of the Hindu radicals who ultimately assassinated him. In Japan militancy was even more pronounced in the samurai tra-

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ditions that became foundational to Japan’s nationalism. When Japan attacked China the correspondence between Tagore and his friend the Japanese poet Yone Noguchi showed the extent to which pan-­Asianism had become a slogan (“Asia for Asia”) to justify Japanese imperialism.29 In 1924 Tagore went to China. His reception in China resembled the one in Japan. At first there was great interest in this great poet from unknown India, and in general he drew large audiences. But quite quickly his message of pan-­Asian spirituality and the revival of ancient religious traditions in China met with strong criticism, especially in Beijing, where there was considerable student activism. Tagore was received by Liang Qichao (1873–1929), one of China’s most prominent nationalist intellectuals, who supported Tagore throughout his visit, as well as by younger leading literary and intellectual figures like Hu Shih (1891–1962), who had studied at Columbia with John Dewey. Much of the opposition against Tagore was organized by communist activists who painted Tagore as a traditionalist from a weak and defeated colonized nation. But more generally, the poet’s visit was a failure because Chinese intellectuals had been leading a revolution against the Qing Empire and the traditions that supported the ancien régime. They were too much inclined to reject the past in building a modern society to be able to accept Tagore’s praise of ancient traditions.

Chinese Spirituality The Western image of China was initially almost the opposite of that of India. In the early Enlightenment there was an interest in China that was mediated by the Jesuits. Especially Leibniz (1646–1716) was impressed by the apparent parallels between his philosophy and what he gathered from the Jesuits about the rationality of Chinese thought.30 After the Jesuits were banned from China by the Emperor Kangxi in 1721, information about Chinese philosophy and religion was scant in Europe. Therefore, a partial explanation for the great difference between the

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images of India and China is that China was never colonized and that therefore colonial knowledge about its cultures was not available. Even in the Age of Empire, when Western powers were a dominant force in China, none of the Western powers created the kind of knowledge that is necessary for colonial rule, as they did in India, since China was not colonized. Imperial diplomacy and trade is the rubric under which knowledge of China was gathered and applied around the Opium Wars and after. Before the Opium Wars knowledge about China was more or less limited to what the Jesuits had gathered. Jesuits, intellectual leaders of the Counter-­Reformation, brought China to the West in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Their image of China was one of rationality and science as well as high morality—in other words, a Confucian version of Jesuit Christianity. Again, as in the German idealist understanding of India, we have a European internal debate about the nature of Christianity that is crucial to the production of a Western image of Chinese civilization. For the Jesuits it was not the difference from Christianity that was appealing, but what they considered a similar rationality that could be used for ecumenical “accommodation.” This image of rationality impressed thinkers of the early Enlightenment like Leibniz at the end of the seventeenth century, and it continues to be influential to the present day. It was only much later in the late nineteenth century that Daoist theories of the body and Chinese forms of art, such as landscape painting and calligraphy, were entering European consciousness and were being interpreted as “spiritual.” Especially the Unity of Being, with the interdependence of yin and yang, female–male, earth–sun, was a “spiritual notion” that caught the Western imagination. This spirituality was not seen as necessarily opposed to Confucian morality, but rather as depending on a certain aloofness, a form of tranquility (such as “quiet sitting’) that fit a Chinese sense of political and moral order. It took a century longer, to our time, to find attempts to construct a notion of Confucian spirituality that is

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inflected by Western notions and not confined to China but having a universal, humanistic appeal.31 Also for other reasons, internal to China, spirituality does not acquire the centrality in the translation of Chinese traditions as it has in that of India’s traditions. After the devastating Taiping and Boxer rebellions of the nineteenth century, Chinese nationalists decided that Chinese traditions were to be blamed for the backwardness of Chinese society and that in order to progress China had to adopt Western materialism, based as it was on science and secularism. In Chinese modern fiction of the first part of the twentieth century there was a strong sense that China was a society not so much endowed with a spiritual heritage but afflicted with a spiritual disease.32 Nevertheless, there were important currents of thought in China that attempted to recuperate some of the spiritual resources of the past and especially those of Buddhism and Confucianism. Liang Qichao, for example, who was Tagore’s host in the 1920s, was critical of the exclusive emphasis on science and rationality in the West and argued that the East was spiritual and that science should have a moral foundation and purpose. In his foundational work on Chinese historiography he gradually replaced evolutionary history and chains of causality with the Buddhist notion of “interdependence” (yinyuanjiebao, 因缘捷报).33 While Liang rejected Confucianism as a model, others tried to develop a modern understanding of history as a sign of the nation by referring to Confucian social ethics as the “spirit of the nation” (minzujingshen, 民族精神). This form of neo-­Confucianism as a kind of spiritual nationalism ultimately failed to take root in China, since it turned out to be too difficult to unmoor Confucianism from the now defunct imperial system and turn it into the civil religion of the modern nation-­state.34 Thus we find in some circles in China the same kind of intellectual ferment as we find in India in, for example, the Brahmo Samaj—namely, attempts to understand and connect to Western thought without losing touch with indigenous intellectual traditions. The big difference is that they were not able to dominate nationalism to the extent that the circles around Gandhi and

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Tagore could in India. Besides more or less “secular” intellectuals like Liang Qichao and Yan Fu, or Hu Shih, who are the subject of a massive intellectual historiography, we find new spiritual leaders in Buddhist and Daoist circles that have more recently been brought to scholarly attention.35 Probably the most important Chinese Buddhist reformer was the monk Taixu (1890–1947), whose significance for Chinese Buddhism can be compared to that of Vivekananda for Indian Hinduism and of Dhammapala, the Sri Lankan monk, for Theravada Buddhism.36 Taixu was traditionally educated and given his tonsure initiation in the usual fashion. The head monk of the Yuhuang (Jade Emperor) Temple near Ningbo gave him his name Taixu, meaning “supreme emptiness.” That emptiness was quickly filled with the reading of political pamphlets and radical philosophy, written or inspired by Western thinkers. An important period was his stay at the Jetavana Hermitage (Zhihuan Jingshe), founded by a layman named Yang Wenhui. Yang had met the important Sri Lankan Buddhist reformer (and former theosophist) Anagarika Dhammapala (1864–1933), who tried to create a global Buddhism.37 Dhammapala visited Japan and China after attending the World Parliament of Religions of 1893 in Chicago, which, as mentioned earlier, was also attended by Vivekananda. He wanted to gather support to revive Buddhism in the ancient sites of India. Dhammapala later became one of the most important ideologues of nationalist Sinhalese Buddhism in Sri Lanka. Taixu devoted himself primarily to two major causes. First he wanted to further the cause of monastic education that went beyond Buddhist studies to include modern subjects like history and psychology. He founded important monastic schools in Wuchang and Xiamen (South Fujian Seminary). It is from these schools that his students spread his ideas throughout China, but also far beyond in the Chinese diaspora. Second he wanted to promote the cause of Buddhism worldwide, especially in response to the challenge posed by Christian missionary expansion. In 1924 he organized the first conference of the World Buddhist Association with a threefold purpose: “first, to unite Buddhists from each province in China; second, to unite Bud-

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dhists from each country of East Asia; and, third, to transmit the truth and spirit of East Asian Buddhism to each country of Europe and to the United States so that the Federation could become in actual fact a World Buddhist federation.”38 These endeavors were hardly successful, primarily because of the dismal situation in which China found itself, torn between warlords, nationalists, communists, and Japanese aggressors. Moreover, Taixu also received considerable opposition from major monastic leaders, who saw his reformism as a deviation from the thought that total renunciation and meditation would lead to the Pure Land. In tours to Japan, the United States, France, and Germany Taixu was able to gain substantial support for his endeavors. In that way he was a predecessor of Buddhist monks of a later period, such as the Dalai Lama and the Vietnamese Thich Nhat Hanh, who use their transnational audience to further the cause of a socially and politically engaged Buddhism. The most significant difference between Taixu and someone like Vivekananda or Dhammapala (and also the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh) is that these others can connect their spirituality to the spirit of the nation, to an emergent nationalism. In China the nationalists were in principle not in favor of Buddhism, but rather in favor of Christianity. The communists had even less space for a revitalized socially active Buddhism, which forced radical Buddhists like Taixu into the nationalist camp, where they were only half-­ heartedly welcomed. After the victory of the communists and after Taixu’s death Buddhist leaders left for Taiwan, where they have staged a slow comeback following the relaxation of the Kuomintang rule in the 1980s. Some of the movements and leaders that have been instrumental in developing a civil society in Taiwan have been influenced by Taixu’s ideas. With the opening up of Mainland China these active movements have also begun to actively revitalize Buddhism there.39 In the period when Taixu tried to modernize Buddhism, Chen Yingning (1880–1969) tried to do the same with Daoism.40 A process of laicization of Daoism had already happened in the late nineteenth century and had led to the development of circles

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of learned lay practitioners of neidan (“inner alchemy”), in what came to be called wenren Daojiao (“literati Daoism”).41 In the confrontation with Western imperialism a new interest in the cultivation of the body as part of the reinvigoration of the Chinese national character (guomin genxing) emerged in ways very similar to the new interest in yoga and martial arts in India at the end of the nineteenth century. One finds here a widespread trope saying that the West had been able to conquer the East only because of a lack of masculine strength in the conquered nations. Chen Yingning was born in a gentry’s family and, as was usual in such families, studied the Confucian classics for the administrative exams, but developed an interest in Daoism that was reinforced by his failing health. He tried to find a master to teach him, but was not successful and decided to read the Daoist Canon on his own. In Shanghai he became acquainted with many Buddhist reformers, among them Taixu, and he spent years discussing and learning Buddhist doctrines and ascetic practices before he started to teach Daoism. Interestingly, one of Chen Yingning’s first students in Daoist self-­cultivation was a famous poet and women’s rights activist Lü Bicheng (1883–1943), whose interest in Daoist spirituality shows the connection between political and social feminism and spirituality that one can also find in Annie Besant. Also the tradition of spirit-­writing in Daoism reminds one of spirit séances in theosophy in the same period. The debate of the time in India, China, and Europe was one of science and its relation to spiritual phenomena. In Asia this debate was inflected by a search for authentic roots of alternative science in indigenous traditions. Such debates did not deny the authority of science. On the contrary, science was accepted as the general framework of understanding indigenous traditions. Daoism had always been experimental and focused on the body without the strong denial of reality that one finds in Buddhism, and therefore it could quite easily be connected to scientific and especially medical ideas. It was crucial for Chen Yingning and his followers to establish Daoism as the national tradition of China. They therefore had to

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counter an established Confucian understanding of Daoism as an incoherent set of practices and beliefs. For Chen Daoist self-­ cultivation could be the foundation of a national self-­renewal, grounded in Daoist scriptures. Again, it is striking how much this resembles Vivekananda’s attempts to make yoga into a nationalist pursuit. Especially the rejection of renunciation as a goal in itself was part of a transformation of the tradition in an activist nationalism. Not only Confucianism had to be debated, but even more so Buddhism, which had undergone a revival under the leadership of Taixu and others. Pure Land Buddhism’s ties with Japanese Buddhism prevented it from being regarded as nationalist, but Daoism had impeccable Chinese credentials. Moreover, there was a long history of polemics against Buddhism in the Daoist scriptures. The real issue now, however, was that of the national body, which had to be strengthened in the struggle against Western and Japanese imperialists. With the victory of the communists in 1949 historical materialism became the official ideology of the state and religion came to be seen as an aspect of the feudalism of the past that had to be removed violently. Spirituality, however, was not so easily targeted, since it could be aligned to a nationalist quest for authentic traditions. Chen’s knowledge of Chinese medicine and especially qi gong was seen as valuable by the new authorities, and he was appointed the new head of the Daoist Association. As you will see in a later chapter, qi gong continued to thrive as a lay practice of body discipline, unmoored from Daoist institutions both by a long process of laicization and by the 1950s Communist destruction of Daoist institutions. Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism, in their spiritual incarnations, continued to be developed in nationalist Taiwan and in the Chinese independent periphery, especially Hong Kong and Singapore. This is why the philosopher Tu Wei-­ming (b. 1940), as the promoter of Confucian spirituality, has emphasized a role of leadership in the revitalization of Chinese spirituality for Chinese intellectuals who live outside China. In his view the Chinese desire for material progress after the collapse of the

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Qing Empire led Chinese intellectuals to launch a frontal attack on Confucian spirituality that they saw as having caused China’s decline. This successful attack on what Tu sees as the spiritual essence of Chineseness had the marginalization of the Chinese intelligentsia as its unintended consequence. It was only after the development of Deng Xiaoping’s socialism with Chinese characteristics and especially under Jiang Zemin in the early 1990s that Chinese intellectuals could again develop neo-­Confucian spirituality both as the spirit of the nation and as a Chinese contribution to global humanism.42 The relative centrality of “spirituality” in India in comparison to China cannot be explained merely by the rise of communism in China and its relative failure in India. A better explanation is the fact that long before the communist takeover Chinese reformers generally thought that Chinese traditions had to be replaced by Western science, while India’s traditions were resources in the anti-­imperialist struggle against a material modernization that culturally and politically subjected India to Western power. Nevertheless, the distrust of material civilization was shared by intellectuals all over the world after World War I, and Chinese intellectuals were no exception. Both Indians and Chinese wanted to create alternatives to Western materialism without giving up the benefits of Western science, and in this endeavor they took recourse to indigenous spirituality.

The Spirit of the Age Gandhi, Kandinsky, Vivekananda, Tagore, Liang Qichao, Taixu, and Chen Yingning were in many ways worlds apart, but the global concept of spirituality was crucial to all of them in their response to the transformations that they were witnessing. The elusiveness and vagueness of this concept allows its use across a large variety of artists, thinkers, and political activists, from American transcendentalists like Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, to European abstract painters like Kandinsky and Mondrian, to neo-­Confucian thinkers like Tu Wei-­ming, to political

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leaders like Gandhi. Walt Whitman’s funeral, with its readings of the words of Confucius, Jesus Christ, and Gautama Buddha, is an example of this cosmopolitan spirituality, and it is not sufficient to say that its spirituality was based on wrong trans­ lations from various traditions.43 Similarly, one may interpret Gandhi’s spirituality and his “experiments with Truth” as flawed translations of Hindu discourse, but again that would imply a too narrow understanding of translation. One would rather see them as attempts to create bridges between radically different conceptual universes in order to create possibilities for non­ violence. However, this is not the full story. The concept of spirituality can also be used to burn bridges. It is nationalized or racialized to serve some version of group superiority or nationalism. The spirit of the nation or of the race signifies the essential quality of that group against, for example, the “slave mentality” of inferior groups. Nazi uses of occultism and references to esotericism as well as Germanic mythology are a perfect example of this.44 Like their Western counterparts Chinese and Indian spiritualities are situated outside organized religion; they are carried by intellectuals who might have either “right-­wing” or “left-­ wing” leanings, but are united in their attempt to refashion their traditions to fit the universal discourse of spirituality without losing sight of the specific contributions made by their own nations. It is this combination of nationalism and universalism, exemplified by figures like Tagore and Liang Qichao, that is characteristic for Asian spirituality. Around that charmed circle of intellectuals and artists there is a much broader reform of religion happening in India and China that is influenced by the discourse of spirituality. Figures like Vivekananda and Taixu are good examples of such reformist projects that result in new forms of monastic practice and “engaged” religion. They exemplify attempts to recapture some of the creative energies of modern spirituality within religious formations. In all of this the concept of spirituality is highly effective.

Chapter 3

The Making of Oriental Religion Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism are seen today as the religions of India and China. However, while they have existed as major traditions for a very long period, they were not “isms” or “religions” in the modern sense. As such they were invented or constructed in the nineteenth century.1 While this is generally accepted in religious studies the implications are not always spelled out clearly. Is religion manufactured, invented, or constructed? And if it is constructed, is religion any different from other categories in social thought, such as society or economy? These are questions that engage the current generation of students of religion who have none of the epistemological confidence of previous generations.2 This chapter sets out to examine the impact of nineteenth-­ century Western scholarship on Indian and Chinese religion. This scholarship was called oriental studies in that period, and the term “orientalist” simply referred to a scholar of Eastern cultures. Edward Said’s work on what he called “orientalism” has brought the connection between imperial power and knowledge formation into focus. In his interpretation of orientalism Said focused mainly on Western perceptions of the Arab Middle East. He did not pay much attention to ways in which orientalist understandings were constructed through interactions between Arab and Western intellectuals. However, such interactions are of crucial importance, and orientalism cannot be understood without them. It is clear that major scholars of Indian and Chinese religion, like Müller and Legge as well as their Dutch colleagues, who we will discuss in this chapter, created the new concept of “world religion” and applied it to the translation of a whole variety of traditions of India and China. This effort was opposed not only in Christian missionary circles as creating a

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false equivalence between Christianity and other religions, but also by Chinese intellectuals who, for instance, denied that Confucianism was a religion. It is this arena of interactions that transformed Indian and Chinese traditions into modern Asian religions. Since these interactions played themselves out in imperialist and anti-­imperialist moves the simultaneity in the debates in scholarly circles and among the educated lay public is important in creating a religious public. Orientalism reinforced Indian and Chinese intellectual projects of Brahmanical and Confucian reform. European understandings of evolution and rationality as well as social morality were connected to new interpretations of Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism. The modern moralization of indigenous traditions as part of attempts to create religions that are at the same time universally respected (world religions) and national religions could only be done owing to orientalist interpretations of these traditions. These newly forged religions had to simultaneously resemble Christianity and oppose Christian projects of conversion. While all of the preceding is true for both India and China the crucial difference remains that India was colonized and that therefore religious reform was a crucial part of anti-­colonial protonationalism. In China reformist intellectuals tried to harness the power of first the Qing government and later the Republican government to their attempts to make religion moral sources for the nation. In both cases we find that orientalist textualism reinforced existing prejudices against popular religions, but while in China the emphasis is on the opposition between a developmental state and a “superstitious” populace, in India popular religion is opposed because it blurs the distinctions between communities (primarily Hindus and Muslims) that could form the basis of separate nations. In this chapter we must further clarify what we mean by the category of religion and how we can study it. The main influence on recent work on this question is that of Foucault’s genealogical method.3 This method shows that a concept like religion does not have a transhistorical essence, but that the term is configured

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and transformed throughout history in relation to a conceptual field. Does one have to assume a transhistorical, transcultural essence of the concept of “religion” in order to be able to compare religions over time and across cultures? This is what many historians and anthropologists who work on religion seem to think, but others have rightly pointed out that it might be more useful to historically analyze the shifts in discursive grammar that make certain worldviews and actions possible. Another advantage of the genealogical method is that one does not have to come up with a historical narration that shows perfect closure, but instead one can focus on struggles, on the emergence of dominant meanings, on the marginalization of other meanings. By its very nature this method produces a fragmentary account instead of a contrived unified representation. Moreover, the focus on struggle implies that the definition of religion is related to a history of power. Even more than usual in the study of society the preceding perspective has to be informed by a critical understanding of one’s own historical location. Christianity can be studied by Buddhist scholars and Islam by Christian scholars, but the adherence to a particular religious point of view can obscure a clear view of the object of study. This is a difficulty that always occurs in the study of human practices, but it is very obvious and tenacious in religious studies, partly because of its institutional location in departments of theology or in divinity schools that train clergy. The solution is not to find a purely secular point of view, as some rational-­choice theorists (influential in sociology of religion) claim,4 since precisely the secular should not be taken for granted as a neutral view from nowhere. More than anything else, the secular frames our understanding of religion and needs to be analyzed itself. A sophisticated account of the researcher’s historical location is necessary in the study of religion. The encounter of Western power with Asian religions in the modern period is one that has been preceded by precolonial missionary and political encounters, but also by a long history of the expansion and spread of religious formations within the

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Asian region. The presence of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in Asia long precedes European expansion. Moreover, there is a long history of expansion and spread of Asian religions, like Buddhism and Hinduism. In fact, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all originate in West-­Asia and are Asian religions, but then we also have to ask from which period “Asia” is a meaningful category. Obviously, the encounter of Christianity with Islam is of very long standing, as Pope Benedict XVI has reminded us when he referred to hostile comments made by a fourteenth-­ century Byzantine emperor about Islam, but we also know that the encounter of Hinduism and Buddhism with Islam is just as old and as continuous.5 There is no objective reason to see Islam and Christianity as not indigenous in Asian societies as compared with the truly indigenous Buddhism and Hinduism, although there is a strong nationalist urge in India, for example, to argue for such a fundamental difference. Also in China the main trouble with Christianity and Islam is that they “do not belong”—are not indigenous. These ideological claims of authenticity and foreignness are far from harmless, as we know from the history of communalism in India as well as from the history of anti-­semitism in Europe.

Modern Orientalism However long and important the history of religious encounters in Asia may have been, the modern period of imperialism and nationalism provides a specific rupture with the past, because of the externality of imperial power and the ideological emphasis on the difference of modern society from both its own past and from other, so-­called backward societies. Comparison and an evolutionary perspective on difference became crucial in the high days of the empire. As Edward Said has argued, the new scientific knowledge of orientalism also provided the colonized with a new understanding of their traditions.6 Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism were discovered and evaluated by philologists, archeologists, and other historians, while

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traders, missionaries, and colonial officers tried to deal with the contemporary forms of these traditions. This apparatus of imperial knowledge has created an archive that is still crucial for any understanding of Asian traditions. It is this archive that needs to be understood if one wants to understand the nature of the modern transformation of religion, both in Asia and in the West. Much has been written about the “British discovery of Hinduism” in the eighteenth century and the question of what “Hinduism” stands for has been repeatedly asked.7 The common view is that “Hindu” is a term applied by people coming from outside to the inhabitants of the Indus region and their culture. These Hindus had a great variety of traditions that were systematized and unified under the name “Hinduism” by orientalist scholars in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as part of the colonization of India. It is an argument that has elicited the counterargument that these various traditions were in fact already in constant conversation and, to an extent, unified and carried by a priestly caste of Brahmans that had spread all over the subcontinent.8 In my view both arguments contain elements of truth, depending on which period is being examined. In the nineteenth century one has to account for the enormous impact of “European modernity” on the conceptualization of Asian traditions. The translation of Hindu traditions into the English-­ language category of Hinduism, being the religion of Hindus, has been of immense significance for Hindu understanding of their own traditions.

The Historicity of Tradition In our discussion of Western scholarship on Indian and Chinese religions we cannot avoid the immensely complex question of the nature of the textual traditions one bases one’s interpretation on. Western philology aims at understanding the historical development of cultures on the basis of the study of textual traditions. A central problem in understanding cultural traditions is that of the place of history or historicity within a specific tradi-

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tion. It has been a long-­standing orientalist opinion that Indian culture is inimical to history. Louis Dumont has expressed this most cogently when he opposed the Indian classical concept of yuga, the four ages of the world, to the modern concept of history, with its focus on individual people and individual events as well as causal explanations. In the Indian concept, Dumont argues, there is a conscious devaluation of time, just as in the concept of dharma there is a devaluation of the individual. Moreover, while there are only a few chronicles that deal with mundane affairs, there are many religious treatises that deal with what transcends the world. The challenge put forward by Dumont is that one should take seriously the religious valuation of time and history in Indian civilization in our writing of the history of India. In his view one should try to avoid imposing a modern historicity on texts that rebel against it.9 The problem with Dumont’s view is that it takes its interpretation of a small number of Sanskrit treatises as the basis of its understanding of the essential values of Indian civilization. One would have to write a history of ideological formations in India to be able to contextualize and interpret these seemingly timeless values about timelessness. One would need to know what these concepts are, but also what they do at a given moment in time. Central to a tradition is the debate about authenticity and transgression. Traditions project themselves as timeless, transcending history, and their discursive authority lies precisely in that claim. This explains what the Sanskritist Sheldon Pollock has called “the general absence of historical referentiality in traditional Sanskritic culture.”10 The crucial issue in traditions is not who the author is, but how that author relates personally to the authority of the tradition. An author would place himself or herself in the tradition and then go on to distinguish that individual position from contemporary authors whose claims to be in accordance with the tradition would be disputed. What one cannot expect is a historical description of Indian intellectuals writing in Sanskrit that is even vaguely reminiscent of our possibilities of historical description of contemporaneous

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thinkers in Europe like Spinoza or Descartes. The question of the historicity of Sanskrit traditions is valid. It is a question also raised in Michel de Certeau’s reflections on the writing of history, in which he argues that history writing is fundamental to modernity in that it is an act of separating present and past as well as discourse and social body. As such, modern scholarship, from Müller to today, is inevitably part of modernity in its attempt to distinguish modernity from its antecedents. A comparison between work on the history and historicity of Sanskrit traditions with European traditions, as done in the Sanskrit Knowledge Systems (SKS) project led by Sheldon Pollock, is made possible by examining two European projects.11 The question of historicity (Geschichtlichkeit) is central to the huge project, in eight volumes, on the history of German concepts (Begriffsgeschichte) that was initiated in the 1970s by Werner Conze, Otto Brunner, and Reinhart Koselleck and finished in the 1990s. This project examines a particular period (1750–1850) in which the advent of modernity transformed German political and social vocabularies. In its focus on a major transformation it has something in common with the SKS project, but it examines concepts rather than texts as integrated wholes. The assumption in the German project is that historical discontinuity can be precisely located through conceptual analysis. The history of ideas is thus replaced by a linguistic history of concepts. Koselleck holds the view that concepts vary not only according to their semantic field but also according to the temporal associations built into them. With the advent of modernity there is a different temporalization, a new intensity brought into the older concepts, like the German concepts Volk (“people”) or Stat (“state”). That new temporalization, a new sense of time and history, is a dominant aspect of modernity. It is this new sense of time and history that Dumont refers to in his cautionary note on the ideology of the text. The other scholarship that the work on Sanskrit traditions might be compared with is the work done by Quentin Skinner and John Pocock on English political discourse. These scholars

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do not focus on concepts, but on discourse. A discourse is, in Pocock’s words, “a complex structure comprising a vocabulary; a grammar; a rhetoric; and a set of usages, assumptions, and implications existing together in time and employable by a semi-­ specific community of language-­users for purposes political, interested in and extending sometimes as far as the articulation of a world-­view or ideology.”12 Central to the history of discourse is the idea that there is a multiplicity of discourses simultaneously and that these discourses have their usage and effects that can be studied to get a better knowledge of a particular Lebensform, to use Wittgenstein’s term in history. It is clear that for the kind of projects that have been developed to study the history of English and German discourse one needs a wide array of sources and a high level of understanding of the context in which these discourses and concepts are formed and transformed. Koselleck’s project has, for instance, found that Kant was the first to use the term Fortschritt (“progress”), and what a powerful concept this has become! This is innovation, but transformation is just as important. Aristotle’s political philosophy has remained important to the present day, and one has to delineate the ways in which his concepts are transformed in later usages. A crucial difference between work on Sanskrit traditions and the German and English projects, referred to earlier, is the role of colonialism. The German and English projects deal with the coming of modernity, while the Sanskrit Knowledge Systems (SKS) project deals with the coming of colonialism. In the introductory remarks to the SKS it is suggested that there is a causal relation between the coming of colonialism and the disappearance of Sanskrit systematic thought. This indicates a rupture that is far more radical than the transformations of discourse and concepts that accompany the coming of modernity in Europe. Mutatis mutandis this is also true for China at the end of the nineteenth century, when Chinese intellectuals had to answer the question of whether they wanted to redefine Confucianism as the basis of their knowledge systems or adopt Western

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conceptions of history and especially evolutionism. Chinese thinkers, like Liang Qichao (1873–1929), in the period of cultural reform at the end of the nineteenth century, referred both to Buddhist conceptions of history as interdependence, connecting Chinese history to universal history, and to neo-­Kantianism.13 In both the Indian and the Chinese case imperialism provides a regime of knowledge. It is not the case that Chinese and Indian traditions have not developed text-­historical methods to establish what is authentic and what is inauthentic, but their discussion of these matters always connects authenticity with authority. To purify a text from later accretions and misinterpretations is to establish the authority of origins rather than the history of a text. The search for origins, however, is never separated from its own history of struggle. An original saying from Confucius is “found” or “established” in disputes with other interpreters of the tradition. The search for origins in Western romanticism has much in common with this, but differs in its claim to scientific neutrality and universal comparison. Claims of authority are thus decentered from within traditions to centers of learning that are becoming gradually autonomous. In that sense is the history of the secularization of Western universities directly related to the history of comparative religion and Eastern philology. History as a professional pursuit with the pretension of neutrality and externality is thus a sign of modernity, but implicated in complex ways with the history of nationalism and imperialism. This indeed is the basis of Müller’s and Legge’s authority in relation to that of late Qing interpreters or Brahman reformers in the late nineteenth century. These claims to authority are in fact also not made in entirely separated worlds, but are integrated in the complexities of imperial encounters. Nineteenth-­ century neo-­ Confucians and Brahman reformers need to link up to the growing authority of Western science to gain advantage in their own internal debates, whereas Western orientalists cannot completely distance themselves from their own Christian traditions and contexts, while pursuing scholarly goals.

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The Reformulation of Traditions in the Imperial Encounter Rather than speaking of “the invention of Hinduism” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is preferable to note that Hindu traditions had already existed for a long time and were only reconceived and reformulated in debates in that period.14 An example of that reformulation is given by Brian Pennington, who approaches the interactional history of British missionaries and Indian thinkers through the reading of the religious newspaper Samacar Candrika of the anti-­reformist Dharma Sabha in Calcutta and the Missionary Papers of the Church Missionary Society. We can follow in detail here the construction of religion on both sides of the colonial encounter. Parts of the story are already well established, such as the way in which Protestant condemnation of Hinduism mirrored anti-­Catholicism, but Pennington rightly points out how deeply theological issues about images and worship fuel missionary anxiety and, as one could add, touch upon central elements in the conceptualization of modernity. Protestantism has, of course, always been seen as an important historical site of thinking about the reflexive subject, about unmediated access, and about agency. In Protestant conversion missionaries are concerned with the purification of improper forms of agency, a purification that is seen as liberation from false understandings of nature. These Protestant notions are paradigmatic of a wider Western and ultimately global discourse of the modern self. These are issues that are crucial in missionary projects everywhere. They raise questions about materiality and transcendence that feed into nineteenth-­century constructions of spirituality as opposed to materialism as described in the previous chapter, and into constructions of rationality and agency, as you will see in chapter 5.15 Directly related is another important issue—namely, the tendency to define Christian religion not only as universalistic, but also as rational. The idea that Christianity is not backward, but in harmony with scientific progress becomes central in later Victorian evolution-

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ism. It is the nature of modern rationality that needs to be explored further in its Protestant antecedents and secular consequences. It is not only the nature of religion that is under construction but also the nature of secularity and secularism (see chapter 6). In the later part of the nineteenth century the encounter between missionaries and heathens continued, but an important voice was added as a result of the secularization of the European mind—namely, a new discipline, called “the science of religion.” One element of the modern transformation of religion is “the invention of world religions,” as Tomoko Masuzawa calls it.16 “World religions” as a category is a product of comparative theology and the science of religion. Comparative theology begins and ends with the singularity of Christianity in comparison to other religions, while the science of religion attempts to be a science that deals with all religions evenhandedly. In addition, the science of religion derives part of its scientific status from being closely connected to historical linguistics and philology. Of special importance is the “discovery” of Buddhism as another world religion in addition to Christianity. Buddhism came to be recognized in the nineteenth century as existing in various parts of Asia and thus as transnational. In contrast to the old enemy Islam it was also regarded as an ethically high religion with universal pretensions like Christianity. Scholars like Monier Monier-­Williams, the Sanskritist at Oxford, declared that Buddhism was a philosophy or system of morality, but not a religion. This is certainly an important issue that has been debated over and over again to the present day, but in addition to such Western discussions on the essence of religion, whatever their importance, there were also crucial developments in colonized Asia. Above all, there were archeological attempts to find ancient Buddhism under layers of Hinduism in India in the same period. Major General Alexander Cunningham (1814–1893), the founder of the Indian Archeological Survey, found and explored long-­forgotten Buddhist sites in India, such as the famous Sar-

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nath. These findings were an important element in establishing ancient Indian history in which Buddhism was portrayed as the enemy of Brahmanism, and came to be destroyed by Islam and ultimately supplanted by Hinduism.17 This was essential to the grand narrative of Indian history in which Buddhism was also seen as an alternative to caste-­ridden Hinduism and taken up as such, half a century later, by egalitarian reformists like the leader of the so-­called untouchables and leading politician Ambedkar. It was this simultaneous production of Buddhism as native to India and as a world religion that could be universally respected for its modern, egalitarian message that became important in the Indian location from where it had almost entirely disappeared as a living tradition. In Sri Lanka something else happened. Here Buddhism came to be reframed first by the publication of 26,000 pages of Buddhist texts (in Roman transliteration!) by the Pali Text Society, founded in 1881 by Rhys Davids (1843– 1922), who had been a British civil servant in Sri Lanka and, as such, involved in the excavation of a famous site, the ancient city of Anuradhapura. Subsequently the theosophist Colonel Olcott (1832–1907) designed the Sri Lankan flag and created a Buddhist catechism that transformed Sri Lankan Buddhist traditions into a recognizable religion. And finally, and most importantly, the efforts of the reformist monk Anagarika Dhammapala (1864– 1933), who had been deeply influenced by theosophy, resulted in the formulation of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism that is of central importance in contemporary conflicts between Tamil Hindus and Sinhala Buddhists in Sri Lanka. It is precisely the reconfiguration of Buddhism in Western scholarship as a world religion within the imperial framework that enables it to become such an important element of religious nationalism among the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka. On the side of the metropolis Buddhism is seen as a prime example of universal spirituality, a nonreligious philosophy that fits with the unease about institutional religion that many intellectuals feel at the end of the nineteenth century. The dialectics of orientalism and nationalism is of great importance on both sides of the imperial imagination.

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Colonial Knowledge and the New Comparative Science of Religion To explain the extent to which colonial knowledge is crucial to the formation of the field of comparative religion as well as the extent to which this is also connected to the national context in which this science emerges, it is fruitful to make a short excursion into Dutch scholarship on religion in the nineteenth century. The Dutch scholar Cornelis Petrus Tiele (1830–1902) is often mentioned as a founder of the science of religion (Religionswissenschaft). The national context is important. In Dutch universities theological subjects that were to be taught by church-­ appointed professors were separated from the scientific history of religion, to be taught by a state-­appointed professor. This secular separation of state and church was directly related to a process of religious mobilization that led to a nation-­form characterized by religious consociationalism or pillarization and to the founding of special universities for Calvinists (Free University of Amsterdam) and for Catholics (first Nijmegen and later also Tilburg). Tiele was not only a founding father of the science of religion, but was perhaps also the first to use the term “world religion” as a category of “universalistic religious communities.” Masuzawa points out that Tiele was involved in a discussion about whether Islam should be included in the category of world religion, since it was argued that Islam could be regarded as particularistic instead of universalistic in comparison with Buddhism.18 The religious message of Buddhism was appreciated favorably in comparison to that of Islam. Such a comparison was definitely not a neutrally scientific one and involved not only scientists of religion in this period but also their colleagues in specific language and area departments who were working on Buddhism, Islam, and Chinese religion in the same period and at the same universities. In Holland it was the interaction between scholars with strong area expertise in the Middle East, India, Indonesia, and

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China such as Kern, Krom, Vogel, Bosch, Snouck Hurgronje, de Groot, and “scientists of religion” who were trying to develop general views on religion, like Tiele, Chantepie de la Saussaye, and Kuenen, that is important in the production of orientalist knowledge. Similar interactions could be found in universities all over the world at the time, but access to the colonies was always crucial. For the Dutch all knowledge about world religions had ultimately to support the aim of understanding and ruling Indonesia. Since Indonesian civilization was seen as having a Hindu-­Buddhist substratum as well as a more recent Islamic layer and a Chinese component, the study of Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism were seen as having significance for colonial rule and were thus financially supported by the colonial ministry. At the same time that Tiele and his colleagues were discussing whether Islam was universalistic or particularistic the Dutch Ministry of Colonies supported scholarship on Islam in Arabia with a clear view on gathering information about Muslims from Aceh who were living in Mecca. The colonial theory of pan-­ Islamism was operative then, as it is today, regardless of whether scientists of religion thought Islam to be universalistic. Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje (1857–1936) began as a student of theology at Leiden University in 1874 and went on to become one of the most prominent scholars of Islam. He stayed in Mecca in 1884–1885 and came in close contact with pilgrims from the Netherlands Indies. In 1891–1892 Snouck stayed in Aceh as an advisor to the colonial government. His analysis of local forms of insurgency led in 1898 to the bloodiest military expedition of the Dutch in the Indies—the war in Aceh that left 60,000 to 70,000 dead in a population of about 500,000. While Snouck’s work is a good illustration of Said’s arguments on orientalism,19 it is also fundamental for imperial understandings of Islam as a rather recent layer of religion that has grown on top of earlier, more harmless layers of Hindu-­Buddhism. Islam is seen as an aggressive, dangerous religion, while Javanese and Balinese culture are seen as suffused by a more quietist and mystical Hindu-­

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Buddhism. There is an uncanny relation between the Dutch colonial need for a depoliticized law and order (or Suharto’s New Order) and the interpretation of Hindu-­Buddhist culture as a deep structure of quietistic civilization in the Netherlands Indies.20 The archeological recovery of the Borobudur as a world monument of Indonesian Buddhism from under the veil of a superficial Islam signifies this colonial theory. It is within the imperial context of Dutch control of the Dutch Indies and British control of British India that knowledge—archeological, philological, ethnographic—was acquired about religions that became the subject of the science of religion. This is true in relation not only to the study of Islam, but also to the study of religions in general. An important contribution to our understanding of Chinese religion, including Chinese Buddhism, was made by the Dutch sinologist J.J.M. de Groot (1854–1921), who studied Chinese rituals in Amoy (Xiamen) in Southern China and then went on as colonial officer for “Chinese Affairs” in Borneo to advise the government on how to deal with the Chinese communities that were known in Borneo as “kongsis.” When the Dutch established control over the Malay principalities in Borneo in 1854 they destroyed most kongsis except for the Langong kongsi, which was dismantled only in 1884, when de Groot was in Borneo. When de Groot returned to the Netherlands he was internationally recognized as one of the greatest experts on Chinese religion.21 It is the productive relation between these disciplines, based on fieldwork and textual study, and the colonial challenges of rule that should be central in our understanding of the Western approach to religion in the nineteenth century. This short excursion into the Dutch case shows the importance of the national context for both the colonized and the colonizer. It demonstrates the importance of imperial knowledge for nationalist civilizational imaginings that we address in detail in chapter 8. It is an excursion since the Dutch case deals only tangentially with India and China, although one needs to realize that Dutch oriental study of Indonesia was in close con-

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versation with work on Indian and Chinese religions. More directly involved with the formation of Indian and Chinese religions were scholars in Britain, the largest world empire—we will discuss these scholars in the next section.

Friedrich Max Müller and James Legge The two most important figures in the translation of Indian and Chinese traditions into the new category of world religion were Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900) and James Legge (1815– 1897). Both have been the subject of a wide biographical and interpretive literature, and I want to limit myself to an understanding of their role in the discovery of oriental spirituality. Müller and Legge were colleagues at Oxford University, and Legge produced the Sacred Books of China for Müller’s Sacred Books of the East series, which was published in fifty volumes between 1879 and 1902. Müller was a Sanskrit scholar who had gained fame by his edition of the Rg-­Veda for the East India Company. India was of much greater interest to British scholarship than China, primarily because India had been colonized and also because India’s cultural and linguistic heritage had been shown to be deeply related to that of Europe. China had not been colonized, was not in the Indo-­European family, and seemed deeply alien to scholars. Nevertheless, Müller accepted Confucianism and Daoism into the fold of world religions and invited his colleague and friend Legge to make his translations of the classical texts of these religions available for his famous series. Legge had learned Chinese as a missionary in China for the London Missionary Society and had already begun his monumental work of translating Chinese classics in Hong Kong. When he returned to England he became the first professor of Chinese at Oxford (1876–1897). In Oxford he came more and more under the influence of Müller’s science of language and science of religion and turned from religious missionary into scientific missionary. A major element of the scientific approach,

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adopted by Müller and Legge, as different from a religious approach, is the willingness to see some essential Truth shining in all existing religions. This prevents the student of a particular religion from attacking the other religion and allows for a liberal, tolerant attitude that is clearly conducive to a scholarly approach to non-­Christian religious traditions. This attitude makes the great project of translations contained in the Sacred Books of the East feasible in the first place. It is not a secular approach, since both scholars were Protestants, but a step toward religious neutrality or spirituality. Max Müller had made his fame early in his scholarly career by editing the Rg-­Veda, a foundational Sanskrit test, an undertaking financially underwritten by the East India Company and finished in 1874. It was one of the major gifts brought to India by the Prince of Wales on his tour in 1875–1876. Müller had been rejected by Oxford as its Boden Professor of Sanskrit, because of his liberal views of religion, which had deeply disappointed him. However, it seems that Müller had found a perfect response to evangelical orthodoxy by making an arrangement with Clarendon Press for the publication of the Sacred Books of the East, dealing equally with the great religions: Brahmanism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Confucianism, Daoism, Islam. Although he was not allowed to deal with Judaism and Christianity and publish the Old and New Testaments in this universalist series, he was able to make his point in an indirect way that God’s Truth can be found in all the great traditions (“the Bibles of Humanity” as he called them in a letter to Ernest Renan).22 It is clear that the orientalist translation of the great traditions of India and China by Müller and Legge was embedded in Christian theological disputes as well as colonial knowledge. The exception granted to Judaism and Christianity was just as political as the ability to deal with the other religions. What was also political was a series of imperial gifts. First, Müller’s edition of the Rg-­Veda, commissioned by the East India Company, was given by the Prince of Wales to Indian nobles. Second, Müller gave a set of the Sacred Books to Queen Victoria. Last, a Chinese

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New Testament was given by Wang Tao (1828–1897), Legge’s Chinese collaborator in translation projects and a respected intellectual in China, to Cixi, the dowager empress in Peking.23 At the same time, the translation of the Sacred Books of the East also reshaped these traditions for the societies from which they came. A Buddhist monastery in Japan sent two pupils to Müller to learn Sanskrit and make the Sanskrit tradition of Buddhism again available in Japan. King Chulalongkorn of Siam gave a grant for the translation of three volumes of Buddhist Sanskrit texts.24 The choice of traditions to be translated was not easy and was heavily biased toward the center of gravity of orientalist scholarship, the traditions of South Asia and Iran, seen as the cradle of the Indo-­Aryan world. In comparison the traditions of the Far East were given short shrift. The choice of translators and especially convincing them to spend time on translations was another hard job. Translation was seen as much less prestigious than the philological collation of manuscripts and the interpretation of difficult passages. It was considered to be a service to the larger reading public rather than a scholarly achievement. Legge, however, was a willing collaborator, because he shared parts of Müller’s scientific and moral program. At the insistence of Müller, in addition to the Confucian texts, Legge also translated Daoist texts to give a larger picture of Chinese traditions. The most important difficulty in such a huge project, obviously, is translation itself. Müller gives the example of the untranslatable meditation-­syllable (mantra) Om that is central in the Upanishads, which had been influential in German idealist philosophy. Likewise the understanding of terms such as atman (“self”) and “Brahman” required extensive philosophical background knowledge. Müller’s interpretation of Hindu traditions had become so authoritative that he was used not only as a source of knowledge in British imperial policy as the only nonpolitical figure in the Privy Council, but also as a neutral arbiter in disputes between different Hindu reformist groups. Legge, on the other hand, was embroiled in a dispute between different

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Protestant missionary groups concerning the translation of the term Shangdi (上帝) in Confucian texts with the term “God.” The term Shangdi for God is now widely used by Protestants in China, while Catholics (following the Jesuit Matteo Ricci) commonly use the term Tianzhu (天主). The old problem of the translation of the Christian message and specifically the Bible became connected to the new, liberal, theological (“fulfillment”) position that one could also find God in the ancient Chinese texts. The latter was the position that Legge already held when he was still a missionary, but his translations in the Sacred Books would allow him to give it a scientific authority. This struggle for authority ensured that Legge’s contributions to the Sacred Books got an animated response from missionary circles. The issue is fascinating: Do the Chinese classical texts have a theology that is recognizable and comparable to Christian theology? Is there an ancient Chinese monotheism? Legge’s position was in that period a liberal and progressive one in its attempt to draw Chinese traditions into the orbit of comparative religion. His opponents objected to it from a conservative perspective that saw the Chinese traditions as immoral and certainly inferior to the Christian tradition to the extent that finding equivalences was a form of blasphemy. Legge draws on Müller’s theory of symbols and metaphors to argue that Di (帝) (also the word for “emperor”) and Shangdi (上帝) were the original names of the concept of “God” and that a word denoting “Heaven” (Tian, 天) was used as a concrete metaphor to symbolize the pure concept of God.25 These ruminations about origins and roots in language were common in German philosophy and crucial in both universal and particularistic theories of culture. Müller’s comparative religion was grounded in comparative philology. This was certainly easier in the case of a language family like the Indo-­ European languages, in which the Sanskrit Dyaus Pitar (“Father Heaven”) could by way of the Greek Zeus be connected to the Latin Jupiter. However, the Chinese case was precisely interesting because it was a different language family, whereas it was

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shown by Legge to possess comparable concepts. There is a continuous tension as well as slippage between attempts to come to a universal religion and attempts to compare differences, attempts to connect the Indo-­Aryan language to an Aryan race, and attempts to show the common origins of humankind. There is also a complex interaction between evolutionary ideas about the Aryan civilization and ideas about the Semitic origins of Christianity. Shangdi is thus not only compared to Indo-­European ideas about Heaven as a God but also to the Hebrew and Christian God. This is particularly clear from Legge’s publication of 1880, Religions of China: Confucianism and Taoism Described and Compared with Christianity. All of these comparisons ultimately lead to the evolutionary view that the religions of humankind share a basic kinship, but that they are “fulfilled” in Christianity. It is hardly possible to make a coherent summary of the conflicting arguments that result from the combination of theology and scholarship, but it is precisely their ferment that is so interesting against the backdrop of colonialism, nationalism, and secularism. Both Müller and Legge were not only leaders in an emerging field of comparative philology when translating Indian and Chinese traditions, but also had to relate themselves to traditions of interpretation of these traditions that were long-­standing within Indian and Chinese societies. In the case of the Rg-­Veda Müller relied on the fourteenth-­century authoritative commentary of Sayana. Parts of that commentarial tradition were not only philosophical, but also philological. Legge followed the authoritative commentary of the twelfth century by Zhu Xi in his translation of the Confucian tradition. Comparative philology, developed in the West, often did not fully recognize the histories of debate about correct interpretation, both philosophical and philological, that had been raging for centuries in the traditions that it explored. The relationship of philological research and textual criticism done by outsiders to “internal” debates within the tradition has not been fully explored, although owing to the work of Benjamin Ellman and others, we know that philology

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was an important part of Chinese debates and as a scholarly practice did not have to be brought from the West.26

Popular Orientalism: The World Parliament of Religions of 1893 Simultaneous and congruous with the scholarly production of cosmopolitan knowledge about Indian and Chinese traditions one finds the development of an audience for universal spirituality, as you saw in the preceding chapter. A major step in that direction is the World Parliament of Religions, held at the occasion of the Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. This event was meant to celebrate the rise of Chicago after the devastating fire of 1871, the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery” of the western hemisphere, and the superiority of a Judeo-­Christian tradition (a new amalgamation of Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism that could emerge only in comparison with the traditions of South and East Asia).27 Representatives of ten great traditions—Confucianism, Daoism, Shintoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—came together for seventeen days to discuss their religions before an audience in which there was a considerable press attendance. Despite the Unitarian and liberal Christian agenda of the World Parliament, media attention was captured by a relatively small (around twenty representatives of seven traditions) Asian delegation. Especially South Asian delegates like Swami Vivekananda and Anagarika Dhammapala became famous overnight. Thanks to their oratorical skill they were able to use the World Parliament as a platform for their anti-­ imperialist, spiritual message, which extolled the spiritual merits of Asian traditions while condemning Christian missionary aggression. The impact of their success in the American press was such that it was carried back to their home audiences and paved the way for their reformist and nationalist agendas there. The tenor of this nationalist spirituality is well exemplified by the opening speech of Swami Vivekananda, the main represen-

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tative of Hinduism at the World Parliament and an influential thinker whom we encountered in the preceding chapter: Sisters and Brothers of America, It fills my heart with joy unspeakable to rise in response to the warm and cordial welcome which you have given us. I thank you in the name of the most ancient order of monks in the world; I thank you in the name of the mother of religions; I thank you in the name of millions and millions of Hindu people of all classes and sects. My thanks, also, to some of the speakers on this platform who, referring to the delegates from the Orient, have told you that these men from far-­off nations may well claim the honor of bearing to different lands the idea of toleration. I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true. I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and nations of the earth. I am proud to tell you that we have gathered in our bosom the purest remnant of the Israelites, who came to Southern India and took refuge with us in the very year in which their holy temple was shattered to pieces by Roman tyranny. I am proud to belong to the religion which has sheltered and is still fostering the remnant of the grand Zoroastrian nation. I will quote to you, brethren, a few lines from a hymn which I remember to have repeated from my earliest boyhood, which is every day repeated by millions of human beings: “As the different streams having their sources in different places all mingle their water in the sea, sources in different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee.” The present convention, which is one of the most august assemblies ever held, is in itself a vindication, a declaration

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to the world of wonderful doctrine preached in the Gita: “Whosoever comes to Me, through whatsoever form, I reach him; all men are struggling through paths which in the end lead to me.” Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful earth. They have filled the earth with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed civilization and sent whole nations to despair. Had it not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than it is now. But their time is come; and I fervently hope that the bell that tolled this morning in honor of this convention may be the death-­knell of all fanaticism, of all persecutions with the sword or with the pen, and of all uncharitable feelings between persons wending their way to the same goal.28

Striking in this speech is the claim that Hinduism is a religion that teaches the world tolerance. No mention, obviously, was made of the growing antagonism and competition between Hindus and Muslims under imperial rule. Instead the minute minorities of Jews and Parsis are mentioned as examples of Hindu tolerance. Vivekananda was a great success at the World Parliament and in his lecture tour in the United States after it. One can truly say that he packaged Indian yoga as “spirituality” for a Western audience and brought it back to India, where it fundamentally changed traditional conceptions of “spiritual exercise.” The other South Asian who used the World Parliament to launch his campaign, but this time for World Buddhism, was Anagarika Dhammapala from Sri Lanka. Dhammapala was born in a Buddhist family as Don David Hewavitharana. When Colonel Olcott and Madame Blavatsky came to Sri Lanka he acted as their assistant. Through theosophy he became interested in the Buddhist traditions of his native land and was shocked by what he considered to be the degenerate state of Buddhism of his time. Under the influence of theosophy he set out to reform Buddhism with an emphasis on its spirituality and worldwide

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message. The irony of the history of both Vivekananda and Dhammapala is that in many of their lectures and published thoughts they set out to promote a global spirituality, but they are mainly remembered for their inspiration of Hindu nationalism and Sinhala Buddhist nationalism. Dhammapala was primarily interested in the development of World Buddhism, for which he wanted to open up the major sites of early Buddhism in India, like Bodh Gaya (where the Buddha had gained enlightenment) and Sarnath (where the Buddha began his teaching). Although he was not able to wrest control over the Bodh Gaya site from the Shaivite ascetics that had controlled it over centuries, he set a process in motion that made Bodh Gaya a major pilgrimage center for Buddhists from all over the world, with a highway from the Patna airport built by Japanese investors. Dhammapala traveled to Europe and started Buddhist monasteries in London.29 His command of English (as in the case of Vivekananda) gave him a strategic advantage in linking Asian traditions to global spirituality. He truly became anagarika, meaning “homeless,” since he traveled almost all the time and hardly ever stayed in his home country. Confucianism was represented at the World Parliament by Peng Guangyu, the First Secretary of the Chinese Legation in Washington, DC. He gave the orthodox view of scholar-­officials in the Qing dynasty that Confucianism is not a religion (zongjiao, 宗教), a modern term that was adopted from Japan at the end of the nineteenth century, but the law and the teaching (jiao) of proper human relations by the ruler and his officials. The notion that also existed for centuries in China that there were three teachings (sanjiao)—namely, Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism—assumed certain equality between these teachings that in orthodox circles of scholar-­officials was not accepted. Peng Guangyu argued that the term “religion” could be best translated in Chinese not by “teaching” (jiao) but by “shamanism” (wu, 巫). Christianity could thus be seen as a form of shamanism. Shamanism had to be controlled by the state, because they were

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superstitions, created by a clergy, which could lead to millenarian rebellions. His arguments show an uncanny connection between modern secularism and Confucian thought. In his view religion was something dangerous and primitive that should be, if not overcome, at least controlled by proper government. There is some slippage in terminology because the term for “teaching” (jiao) that was also used for Confucian teaching was already translated as “religion” by the Jesuits in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In fact, a similar slippage can be found in Western terms like “civil religion” or “political religion,” and accordingly Confucianism has sometimes been called a secular religion. In an insightful analysis of Peng Guangyu’s position, Hsi-­yuan Chen has argued that it is imperial rule, based on Confucian principles in the Qing dynasty, that sets the norms according to which religious believers in Buddhism, Daoism, or Christianity have to conform. All those religious beliefs, however, have fundamental flaws, but as long as they did not violate the political order they could be tolerated.30 When in the famous “Chinese Rites Controversy” in the eighteenth century the Vatican decided to prohibit the worship of ancestors by Chinese converts to Christianity, this decision threatened the Chinese political order with the result that Christianity was banned and deemed a teaching not suitable for China. In the aftermath of the Opium Wars the Qing government was forced to accept Christian missionaries again. Added to the doctrine of three teachings, Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, were Islam and Christianity. As Hsi-­yuan Chen argues, instead of Confucianism framing teachings, Christianity came to frame religions. To be anti-­Western came to imply that one was both anti-­Christian and anti-­religious. While Hinduism in Vivekananda’s presentation to the World Parliament of Religions carried a universal message of toleration to mankind, Confucianism in Peng Guangyu’s presentation came to present a Chinese challenge to Christian conceptualiza-

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tions of religion. Obviously these translations and conversions did not take place only in the halls of academia and the Unitarian staging of world religions. Moreover, they were the opposite of tolerant. Political reformers in India and China tried to create church-­like religions that were respectable in modern eyes and could be represented on the world stage while attempting to destroy all nonrespectable, nonmodern forms of religious life, especially local cults. In China these reformers were inspired by the Meiji-­reformers in Japan who created state-­Shinto. In India the British colonial state could not be the site of this reformism that was also an anti-­imperialist protonationalism. Peng Guangyu’s presentation at the World Parliament of Religions cannot be separated from the intellectual ferment in which Confucianism became on the one hand a world religion through the translations of Legge and on the other hand a civil religion, unmoored from imperial ritual, but attached to a moral nationalism. The transnational context in which he had to present his case was predetermined by the translation of the term “religion” into zongjiao and by the standards of morality to which comparative religion subjected “religion.” Transnational audiences, as in the World Parliament of Religions, were very important for the establishment of the status of a society and its religion in the eyes of the world. As Prasenjit Duara has pointed out, an important element in these transnational audiences were Chinese overseas communities, who were particularly interested in a respectable religion that could unify and symbolize their communities in multicultural dialogues. Confucianism became ultimately more important among them than in Mainland China.31 It is ironic that when Indonesia in the 1990s connected citizenship to religion its government asked communist China whether Confucianism should be seen as a religion. It received a negative answer with the result that the Indonesian state forced its citizens of Chinese descent to choose Christianity or Buddhism instead.32 For Vivekananda the World Parliament of Religions was crucial as a world stage for Hinduism’s claim to universal spiritual-

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ity. For Hindu thinkers there was never a question as to whether Hinduism was a religion. Hinduism was a form of spirituality that was far superior to the parochial teachings of Christianity, which was closely allied to colonialism and secular materialism. Hinduism thus became simultaneously a national religion, the basis of religious nationalism, and a universal spirituality. This implied huge transformations in the elite perspective on Hinduism in which we encounter a similar enthusiasm for science and disdain for superstition as in China. Indians constructed a religious nationalism, in which the texts reconstructed by Müller and his colleagues became foundational. Transnational audiences, and increasingly also overseas Indian communities, came to play a similar role in India as they did in China. It is in the transnational arena of comparative religion, universal spirituality, and identity politics that Indian and Chinese religions are modernized and nationalized.

Chapter 4

Conversion to Indian and Chinese Modernities One of the most important aspects of the imperial encounter was the Christian missionary project. In the nineteenth century Protestants had joined Catholics in attempts to convert the heathen, but the context of that effort was the emergence of imperial modernity. This chapter will trace the missionary project in India and China in the nineteenth century, but will emphasize the imperial and anti-­imperial aspects of it in contrast to the earlier Jesuit efforts in China and India. The main argument will be that Christian missionaries played an extraordinary role in setting things in motion in education and medicine, but most importantly in anti-­imperialist protonationalism within a range of non-­ Christian reform movements. Indians and Chinese were quite literally converted to modernity by the efforts of missionary Christianity, especially in its nineteenth-­century Protestant incarnation.1 The impact of missionary projects on education, health-­care, civil society, and international relations has been immense. This is despite the fact that missionaries often did not succeed in converting large numbers of Indians and Chinese, although they did convert a relatively small minority. More importantly (at least from a secular point of view), they brought modern ideas and techniques to these societies and managed thereby to deeply influence them. Imperialism makes new imaginations of community possible, and it is especially in the religious domain that these new imaginations take shape. In that sense conversion to another faith is part of a set of much larger transformations affecting converts, nonconverts, and the missionaries themselves. Conversion is an innovative practice that is part of the transformation of the social without being a mechanical result of it. In other words it is not simply that people convert because they want to become mod-

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ern. The reasons for conversion cannot be reduced to an abstract process of modernization, and case studies inevitably show their complexity. Importantly, however, missionaries are agents of change not only for the converts but also for those who do not convert. Moreover, missionaries and those congregations at home that support them are also deeply affected by the encounter with other cultures in the process of conversion. An important shift in the nineteenth century was that conversion of other Christians in Europe (as in the Reformation and Counter-­ Reformation) was gradually marginalized (today mainly continued by marginal groups like Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons) and that conversion of the non-­Christian, colonized world had become central. What remained important in Europe was the conversion to “civilized (bourgeois)” Christianity of “the other half,” the poor, unemployed, or otherwise marginal elements in society by movements like the Salvation Army. At the same time, the rise of missionary societies, accompanied by intensive fundraising and missionary propaganda, deeply affected Christianity “at home.” The Christian missionary project became a crucial part of the related, world-­historical phenomena of imperialism and nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.2 The colonizing state both supported and limited the activities of missionary societies, just as it did the activities of trading companies. Surely there was nothing monolithic in imperialism and the missionary project was not a simple handmaiden of imperialism. The point is rather that the missionary societies were active in the heart of both imperialism and nationalism—namely, the construction of a domain that is called “religion.” In the Age of Empire the religious traditions of the Indians and the Chinese were often portrayed as “backward,” as “obstacles to progress.” As the colonial administrator Thomas Babington Macaulay put it in the Minute on Indian Education of 1835: “These are the systems under the influence of which the people of India have become what they are. They have been weighted in the balance, and have been found wanting. To perpetuate

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them, is to perpetuate the degradation and the misery of the people. Our duty is not to teach, but to un-­teach them—not to rivet the shackles which have for ages bound down the minds of our subjects, but to allow them to drop off by the lapse of time and the progress of events.” Macaulay wanted the East India Company to stop their support for the education of the Indians in their own traditions, because, as he put it famously in the Minute: “a single shelf of a good European library is worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.”3 As an Anglicist Utilitarian he promoted the study of England and English literature against the so-­called orientalists, who supported the study of India and Indian literature. However, one should recall that he was also the son of Zachary Macaulay, who was together with William Wilberforce one of Britain’s most important slavery abolitionists. Zachary was one of the leaders of the Clapham Sect, a group that, anachronistically, might be called a “fundamentalist” Protestant sect that was very active in the development of the modern evangelical mission in the beginning of the nineteenth century.4 Utilitarians and Protestants had their disagreements about policy, but they agreed in their disdain for Indian traditions and in their support for the education of the natives in the superior cultures of a Britain that in the nineteenth century gradually came to be seen as simultaneously “Christian, Protestant, prosperous, civilized, and free.”5 As I have argued elsewhere, despite their intellectual differences, Utilitarians and Evangelicals were in the same moral universe.6 They both believed in the moral mission of imperialism, especially in the crucial fields of education and reform. This is a thoroughly modern morality in which English modernity is valued by all imperialist groups and opposed to Indian and Chinese tradition or “backwardness.” This is not to underestimate the huge conflicts and contradictions in imperialism. It is correct to say that evangelical missionaries were often at odds with colonial administrators and that missionary societies vehemently opposed certain colonial policies, such as the patronage of Hindu temples in India or the opium trade in China. A perfect

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example of a contradiction in the relation between missionary activities and imperialism is that, on the one hand, the lifting of the ban on missionary activities in China was a condition in the treaties that followed the Opium Wars (meant to allow opium trade in China), while, on the other hand, missionary societies became active in Anti-­Opium campaigns. Such conflicts and contradictions, however, are deeply embedded in the nature of a globalizing modernity. It was definitely of great importance for nineteenth-­century missionaries to believe in the superiority of Western civilization and the need to transform the East—as important as it was to see no ultimate opposition between scientific rationality, the idea of progress, and Christian doctrine, despite the debates about Darwin’s discoveries. Nevertheless, this missionary perception of the superiority of Christian civilization contained in itself a contradiction between secularity and religion as well as a constant retreat from religious claims to knowledge, especially after the Darwinian breakthrough. It is interesting to see the extent to which the Christian debate about the shifting boundaries between belief and knowledge has influenced anthropological and philosophical debates (first and foremost among Africanists) about the nature of “non-­Western” knowledge.7 As such, missionary activities are part and parcel of a broader shift in the location of Christianity in modern society. Missions in the nineteenth century are themselves modern and bring modernity to the rest of the world.

Jesuits in India and China The modernity of missionary projects in the nineteenth century is in marked opposition to earlier missionary activities, primarily of the Jesuits in India and China in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Certainly, these earlier missionaries also brought the latest products of Western science with them, especially to China, but did not have the much later notion of a clear superiority between Europe and Asia. Definitely they did think

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that Christianity was the true religion, but one of the most important issues was to introduce Christianity without emphasizing this superiority. Jesuits proceeded by focusing on the extent to which Christianity could be adopted within already existing cultural schemata. This Jesuit policy of accepting the imperial order in which they could give Christianity a place came under increasing pressure from other Catholic missionary orders, such as the Franciscans and Dominicans in the early eighteenth century, and led to the famous Chinese Rites Controversy in which the Pope forced the Jesuits to abandon their policy of accommodation. This in turn led the emperor Kangxi to expel those who did not accept his ultimate authority. The confrontation between the pope and the emperor resulted in 1721 in the banning of Christianity in China. While local Christian communities continued to exist, this effectively stopped the spread of Christianity in China, which had to be done clandestinely till the ban was partly lifted in 1846 at French insistence after the First Opium War. It is important to emphasize that civilizational superiority was not the issue in this dispute but power and especially the authority to determine ritual matters, as indeed it had been in medieval Europe. In India there had been a similar confrontation, called the Malabar Rites Controversy. Here the so-­ called adaptionist method (accommodatio) of missionization was developed by the Jesuit Roberto de Nobili (1577–1656), the founder of the Madurai Mission. De Nobili adopted a Brahmanical way of life and attitude, thereby dissociating himself from the lower castes. While the Jesuits in China adapted to the ritual hierarchies of the emperor, they adapted in India to Brahman priesthood and caste. These social discriminations were the subject of a conflict among Jesuits that ultimately led to a change in missionary policy. Since this dispute did not involve a direct conflict with political authority, it did not have the consequences that it had in China. Again, I would argue, it was not so much civilizational superiority that was at issue here, but rather a strategic difference about how to approach a deeply hierarchical society with

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an egalitarian Christian message. In an interesting way the dispute reflected as much Indian social hierarchy as European social hierarchy, as manifested in the Jesuit order.8

Caste, Tribe, and Brahmanism in India Caste continued to haunt conversion to Christianity also after the Jesuit strategy of “betting on the strong” had been terminated. Protestant as well as Catholic missionaries in the colonial period were hardly able to transcend caste. Although there was an early Syrian Christian presence in Kerala, most Indian Christians are descendants of converts made since the sixteenth century, especially in the Portuguese colony of Goa and in South India. In South India, like in China, droughts and famines caused marginalized groups first to get assistance from Christian relief organizations and later to convert. In Northern Madras Presidency a single Baptist missionary baptized 9,000 people from one single caste, the Madigas.9 Such mass conversions in times of severe dislocation caused considerable anxiety among missionaries about the genuineness of the conversion and the imminent possibility of “backsliding.” In both India and China this anxiety was expressed by calling the converts “rice Christians.” On the other hand, it is clear from the historical record that low and untouchable castes, like the South Indian Pariahs, were actively seeking baptism to enlist missionaries in their struggle against the dominant, landowning castes.10 This could also be read as materially motivated conversion as opposed to spiritually motivated, but it shows certainly that the spiritual-­ material opposition (as shown in chapter 2) hides a very complex set of agencies and structural transformations, including the vexed problem of the relation between caste and religion. It is especially striking that the debate about slavery in which nonconformists had played such an important role in the early nineteenth century was not taken up by missionaries in India in relation to the bonded labor of the untouchable castes. One of the difficulties here was that support for the plight of bonded labor-

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ers could easily be interpreted by landowning castes as part of a plot to convert these laborers to Christianity and thus as an attempt to meddle in the religious affairs of Indian society, which could not be accepted by a colonial government that saw neutrality in religious affairs as a condition of colonial rule. Moreover, as in the case of slavery, abolishing bonded labor was seen by both British officials and Indian elites as a threat to the economic relations on which colonial rule depended. Last, as Nicholas Dirks has argued, colonial rule reinforced caste divisions in society since they hindered the development of a united nationalist opposition.11 In much of the nationalist response to conversion in India the general assumption is that Indians are Hindu before they become Muslim or Christian. However, this is not as clear as it seems. Missionaries were especially successful among those groups that are today called “tribals” (or with the politically correct term adivasis, “first inhabitants”) or “untouchables” (the politically correct term today being “dalits”). Groups such as the tribal Coorgs studied by the anthropologist M. N. Srinivas may or may not be incorporated in caste society through a longue durée process of what Srinivas famously called “sanskritization” (civilizing process).12 Whatever their position outside or within the caste system one cannot simply call them Hindu and assume that they were converted from Hinduism to Christianity. Moreover, the process of adopting Islam or Christianity is certainly not only a religious conversion but a complex political transformation. The production and maintenance of social and religious boundaries is a political process that involves the categorization of people as those who belong and those who do not. It is striking in this regard that the nationalist ideology of a “Hindu majority” depends on the questionable notion that tribals and untouchables are part or “becoming” part of Hindu civilization that is putatively formed through a long process of sanskritization (adoption of a Sanskritic, Brahmanical civilization). The shaky foundation of the so-­called Hindu majority in India is

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precisely what makes conversion to other religions such a politically threatening transgression. In the second half of the nineteenth century the political context of conversion was that of colonial interventions in Indian society, Brahmanical apologetics and reform movements, and gradually the growing importance of a politics based on numbers. For Hindu nationalists the fear of losing people through conversion to the Muslim community or to the smaller Christian community became a major political issue that led to campaigns for shuddhi or purification (reconversion) of converts back into the Hindu fold.13 Brahman priests and intellectuals were the prime opponents of Christianity. In South India the missionary Robert Caldwell, who worked among the toddy-­tapping caste of Shanars, was the inventor of an anti-­Brahmanical ideology that is still very potent in South Indian politics. He argued that the Shanars were not Aryans but Dravidians, the original inhabitants of the land, who had nothing to do with Brahmanical ideas and practices. By demonstrating that the words for local gods were all Tamil and the words for higher gods were all Sanskrit, he wanted to show not only that the Shanars had a separate language and religion but also that they had nothing in common with Brahmanism, so that Brahman priests could be easily discarded as a step toward conversion to Christianity. Modern science—linguistics and ethnology—was in this way applied to assist conversion, but in fact it had a more lasting effect in creating an anti-­Brahmanical movement that produced simultaneously a linguistic separatism centering on the language Tamil and an anti-­clerical rationalism centering on the rejection of Hinduism.14 The colonial state had great difficulties in dealing with the vague boundaries of identity that were shown up by conversion. Since the state had chosen to apply Hindu and Islamic personal codes to matters of inheritance, marriage, and divorce conversion posed significant conceptual problems. According to these legal codes converts were lost to the society they “originally”

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belonged to and most certainly lost their right to property and inheritance. Hindu society could respond to conversion by completely cutting civil ties with those who “lost caste.” Conversion as an individual was therefore hardly possible, since only mass conversion could create the possibility of social bonds and community. Conversion thus showed up a considerable ambiguity in liberal government that severely limited individual acts of conscience like conversion.15 These attitudes and procedures were part of a colonial policy of indirect rule, meant to demonstrate the “neutrality” of the secular state, which was seen as essential for the survival of colonial rule after the “religious” Mutiny of 1857. This “neutrality,” however, did not prevent the state from intervening in society to further certain developments and hinder others. The postcolonial state, however, inherited and compounded the colonial legal framework by prohibiting proselytization and especially “foreign” proselytization, financed and/or enacted by organizations based outside of India. Today such hostility toward proselytization and conversion has led the U.S. Commission on Religious Freedom to put India on its “watch list” of countries of particular concern in regard of religious freedom.16 Another major effect of conversion to Christianity was the emergence of a self-­conscious apologetics and reform. A number of reform movements led by Brahmans, such as the Brahmo Samaj in Bengal and the Arya Samaj in the Punjab, adopted the organizational form of the Christian missions and even tried to show that Hinduism was in fact monotheistic and thus as respectable as Christianity. At the same time they ferociously defended their religion against Christianity by showing that the attacks were based on misunderstandings of the sacred texts, but also by proposing to reform disputed practices such as child marriage, caste hierarchy, and so-­called magical practices. Their response to missionary criticism is a major element in reshaping Hinduism first as a recognizable religion and second as a religion that can be seen as being in tune with modern times.

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As you will see in chapter 5, nineteenth-­century Christianity brought a distinction between magic and religion to India and China that was on the one hand thoroughly modern in its understanding of modern science and rationality, while on the other hand deeply embedded in older oppositions such as folk religion versus literate religion and of course Catholicism versus Protestantism.17 In India and China nineteenth-­century Christianity revitalized and translated existing oppositions between shastrik and laukik (“based on sacred law” versus “worldly,” or “literate” versus “local”) and Confucian state ritual (li) versus “shamanistic ritual” (wu) that bear resemblance to the European ones. This translation, however, took place in a completely new context of imperial power and modern science, most directly through the medium of education, “a mask of conquest” as Gauri Viswanathan describes it, but indirectly and pervasively through the reorganization of the entire field of what came to be called religion: dharma in the Indian case and zongjiao in the Chinese case.18 The religious reform movements in India and China were the conduits of this conversion to modernity, and this entailed a complete repudiation of those practices and beliefs that were central to these religions but were now deemed “magic” and “superstition.” Conversion to Christianity has to be understood as a deeply political phenomenon that is an index of wider changes in the power balances that characterize both colonial and postcolonial society. In India missionary activities and Hindu responses to it have challenged the nature of the hierarchical relations between “lower” and “higher” practices that are embedded in the caste system by invoking the new distinction between rational and moral religion that can be the basis of national identity and magic that is to be repudiated. On the other hand it is this new emphasis on national unity and identity that places Christianity outside the nation rather than inside as one religious option among others. The reemergence of Hindu nationalism as a major political force in postcolonial India after a long period of relatively neutral secular rule by the Congress Party began with a

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campaign against the mass conversion to Islam of untouchables in Meenakshipuram in South India in 1981.19 Killings of Christian missionaries and Christian villagers in tribal areas today show the continuing controversy about conversion in India.20

Christianity and Opium in China In China we do not find colonial attempts to construe an all-­ encompassing social system, like caste, that were underpinned by religion. While there were significant and unequal interactions between the Qing court and foreign empires, there was no colonial rule and colonial law that attempted to transform notions of societal hierarchy into a fixed and rigid system of control. What one does find in China are lineages and clans (surname groups) that spread widely over the territory that was integrated into the Qing Empire. Filial piety and ancestor worship (including notions of patriarchal hierarchy) are main elements of this kinship system. While they do receive a legitimation in Confucian thought, they do not depend on that, nor do they depend on the state. The flexibility of this “system” was certainly as extensive as that of the “caste system.” Kenneth Dean has recently argued on the basis of his fieldwork in Putian in Southern China that the intrinsic cultural hybridity of the villages of South and Southeast China, combined with their openness to transnational trade and cultural contact, well-­ established by the Song, and the highly flexible associational forms developed throughout these networks to respond to continually changing conditions at home and abroad, suggest that we conceive of the villages of this region not primarily in terms of how they identified with the imperial center, but rather how they grew to recognize and work with their own differences from that central model, by developing and fostering trans-­local social spaces and networks, and creating a consciously hybrid set of distinct cultures which only appear to be local and regional and earthbound from the imperial

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perspective, but in fact were always already hybrid, translocal, transnational, and continuously transforming.21

Flexible and “invented” lineage ties were an intrinsic part of these networks. Christianity in China did not attack lineage and clan as it did attack caste in India, although it did attack clan solidarity by not allowing Christians to participate in and contribute to communal feasts. It also did not particularly focus on non-­Han minorities, although it turned out to be attractive to some, like the Hakka in South China. It did attack gender inequality by condemning foot-­binding practices and by providing women’s education. Especially in the medical field it allowed for considerable upward mobility for Chinese women. However, the great assault on Chinese social structure did not come from Christianity but from the communist determination to destroy “feudalism.” A major element in Christian conversion in China was the rejection of opium. It is ironic that imperial military campaigns to further opium trade from India into China led to the opening up of China for Christianity, while Christian missionaries later made it their objective to oppose the colonial opium trade and get opium banned and in that way in fact supported Qing policies. In Fuzhou (South China), one of the five Chinese ports opened under the conditions of the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, for instance, the Anti-­Opium Society, founded in 1906, counted many important converts among its members.22 The agitation connected the closing of opium dens in Fuzhou as well as the stamping out of poppy cultivation with political pressure from Methodists and others on the British government in London. Anti-­imperialism was thus not only a nationalist response but also an instance of global interactions facilitated by Christian networks. Opium was seen in Christian propaganda as a devil in disguise. The campaign against it reminds one of the anti-­slavery campaigns a century earlier, because opium addiction was seen as mental slavery or, as the missionary Windsor put it, “one of

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the devil’s agents to bind people to himself,” “keeping hundreds of millions of people bound in absolute slavery”23 However, as Frank Dikötter has provocatively argued, opium use was moderate, civilized, and a necessary panacea in eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century England and China. It was made into a pernicious threat to health and social hygiene by the combined efforts of the newly developed profession of modern physicians and moral crusaders like missionaries in the wake of imperial expansion. Late Qing anti-­opium discourse arises in combination with a discourse of social weakness used as explanation for the incapability of the Qing Empire to resist imperial expansion. Opium became a metaphor for slavery and weakness, resulting from internal failures as well as from outside pressure.

Religious Anti-­Imperialism Anti-­opium agitation was anti-­imperialist, and in Fuzhou it followed an earlier boycott of American goods in protest against racial exclusion laws, which prohibited Chinese “coolies” from entering the United States.24 Fujianese had been and continue to be to today prominent among Chinese overseas migrants and were thus directly affected by the new anti-­Chinese immigration sentiments and laws in the United States in the early twentieth century. It was not only Chinese, however, who were affected by the regulation of nonwhite immigration in the United States as well as Canada in the first decade of the twentieth century. The immigration of Indians and especially Sikhs was also severely restricted and led to patriotic agitation, as it did in China. In India, however, the main target was not the American or Canadian government, but the British Empire that did nothing to protect their Indian subjects from discrimination and humiliation. The discrimination that Indian migrants faced in Canada and California was widely publicized in India with quotations from the Canadian press such as: The smoke-­ colored Hindu, exotic, unmixable, picturesque, a languid worker and a refuge for fleas, we will always have with

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us, but we do not want any more of him. We don’t want any Hindu women. We don’t want any Hindu children. It’s nonsense to talk about Hindu assimilation. The Sikh may be of Aryan stock, [but] I always thought he was of Jewish extraction. He may be near-­white though he does not look like it. British Columbia cannot allow any more of the dark meat of the world to come to this province.25

The humiliation of Indian migrants was a major factor in the rise of anti-­imperialist nationalism in India, led by Sikh, Hindu, and Muslim organizations.26 While it was less significant in China, it contributed also there to nationalism. Interesting in China, however, at least in the case of Fuzhou, is the prominent role of Protestants rather than of Buddhists or Daoists in these agitations. Since American missionary societies were very active here, it led to some animosity and sometimes even rifts between American missionaries, who were against the exclusion laws but at the same time felt a need to defend their country, and Chinese converts, who showed their disappointment with America very clearly.27 There is a tension between Protestantism as a global project and Protestantism as a crucial component of anti-­imperialist nationalism. While in the anti-­ opium agitation both Chinese converts and British and American missionaries could collaborate in fighting imperialism, in the American goods boycott the cause was more complex and divisive. It signified the capacity of Protestantism to be part of the conversion to a global modernity that was simultaneously nationalist and imperialist.

Christian Education The most obvious way in which Christianity (first Protestantism, although Catholicism was soon to follow) was converting Indians and Chinese to modernity was education. It is hard to overestimate the importance of Christian missions in the spread of modern education. While the spread of the Christian message was the stated objective in the foundation of schools and col-

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leges, it was in fact a much broader package of modern knowledge that was spread, including modern ideas of literature, history, and science. This can be readily seen not only in Macaulay’s statement, quoted earlier in this chapter, but also in the establishment in 1834 of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, which distributed books on Western culture in Chinese, and in the fact that missionary periodicals were filled with science and mathematics in addition to edifying Christian messages. It was this kind of knowledge that was necessary for the creation of a modern nation-­state, repudiating the kinds of knowledge necessary to sustain the Mughal or Qing empires. Through conversion one gained further access to a modernity that was deeply desired in face of the failures of the ancien régime. In China Protestants were pioneers in early nationalism. This is in marked opposition to India, where Hindu and Muslim reform movements were the basis of nationalism. Not surprisingly Sun Yat Sen and some of his colleagues in the Republican cabinet of 1912 were baptized Protestants. Chiang Kai-­shek, the leader of the nationalists, converted to Methodism. Institutions like the YMCA played an important role in creating the leadership in the early anti-­Qing revolution. As Ryan Dunch points out, some influential Protestant converts firmly believed that Christianity could be the national, moral religion that would unite the modern Chinese nation. They had an idealism that was in some respects similar to that of late-­Qing intellectuals like Kang Youwei who hoped to make Confucianism the national religion of China. These hopes turned sour already in the late 1920s, when Confucianism was shown to lack a mass following and was later portrayed as a form of traditionalism rather than a modern religion. Catholicism and Protestantism did not lack grassroots support but were portrayed in the same period as a “foreign religion” and thus as part of imperialism. In fact, one could argue that Christianity in China, more than in India, contributed substantially to nationalism. However, Mao’s famous statement in 1949 that U.S. imperialism in comparison to other imperialisms emphasized spir-

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itual aggression sealed off, at least for a number of decades, the possibility that China could become a Protestant nation.28 In addition to pioneering modern education and health care Chinese Christians began or participated in a number of reformist institutions and movements, such as the already mentioned Anti-­Opium Movement, that became an integral part of Chinese modernity. Such reformist movements were crucial in their ideological critique of traditional Chinese society and culture. Foot-­ binding, wearing the queue, and Chinese traditional dress, as well as forms of art, like music, all came under attack, not to speak of popular religion. Christianity and communism were partners in attacking Chinese traditions and could well be interpreted as alternative pathways to modernity, explaining the anxieties of contemporary Chinese leaders regarding Christianity.

Christian Associations While the ideological critique was certainly of great importance Christian reformism also had a very significant impact on the organizational forms adopted by non-­Christian religious orders, such as the Buddhists and the Daoists. To show that they were modern and as such could be part of a modern nation-­state the Buddhists and Daoists started to imitate the organizational model of Christian churches. Instead of churches they formed associations that became part of a legal framework of state recognition that has framed religious life in the People’s Republic of China and in Taiwan to today. Already in 1912 Buddhism and Daoism became part of a list of five state-­recognized religions in addition to Catholicism, Protestantism, and Islam. Christian churches were able to run hospitals, orphanages, schools and universities, publishing houses—in short, they were the paradigm of modernity. Small wonder that Buddhist and Daoist reformers looked at them for inspiration not only out of a sudden desire for reform, but also because of the desire to be part of a new, modern China. The task at hand, however, was considerable. Religious orders had monastic hierarchies, partly based on

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spiritual charisma, and depended on a rather undefined laity that was only partly organized in devotional congregations. Together they had to be transformed into associations of people who elected to be a community of believers based on individual choice. This process of transformations was helped along owing to the gradual laicization of clerical traditions. Vincent Goossaert has shown that in the nineteenth century some of the most important Daoist masters were not monks but laymen who were married and led a secular life.29 They were intellectuals interested in combining Western science and Daoism, retaining the idea that Daoism was spiritually superior to Western materialism. The growing centrality of laymen and lay communities became central to the project of building religious associations. Such communities had already started to organize civil society at the local level. The real challenge was to bring this to a national scale, which proved to be very difficult in loosely organized religions that were, especially Daoism, tied to local cults. While all religions wanted to be “national religion” or “state religion” (guojiao, 国教), like Shinto in Japan, none of them were actually able to make that transformation from the local to the national, and from there to the global, like Christianity. Confucian leaders were perhaps the most successful in emulating Christianity’s model, especially under the energetic and radical guidance of Kang Youwei, but it remained an elite project and failed to become a form of religious nationalism. Ultimately, the project of forming associations was not very successful because of serious doubts about modernist interpretations of religion by major religious leaders, although it succeeded at the level of state recognition and thus state control. Instead of national religions, these religions became state-­controlled religions. The trajectory of such associations can be followed in some detail in the case of Nanputuo, a major Buddhist temple from the Tang period in the South Chinese port of Xiamen (Amoy). In 1927 Nanputuo established the Minnan Buddhist Academy for the education of monks, and Taixu (1890–1947), a leading reformist monk whose pioneering work was discussed in chapter

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2, was put at its head. Taixu was committed to a modern Buddhism that emphasized social work in hospitals and schools as well as missionary activities, following the Christian example. Very important for the success of the temple and the academy was its support from Southeast Asian Chinese, which is true to today for all the major cultural and religious enterprises in Fujian. With the Communist Revolution the temple fell in decline partly because its Southeast Asian support was cut off and partly because of the fact that local patronage and land fell away. In 1953 the various Buddhist associations that had failed to unite were brought together into the China Buddhist Association, which became the official representative of Buddhism in dealing with the Religious Affairs Bureau, set up by the Communist Party. This period of decline culminated in violent attacks on Nanputuo during the Cultural Revolution, which also saw the demise of the China Buddhist Association. However, since 1979 Nanputuo has been growing again and boasts 1,000 monks and nuns at present, showing the immediate effect of the change in political climate. The Buddhist Association that manages Nanputuo was revived in 1979. From the outside it looks like a perfect vehicle of state control and indeed in my interviews with monks and nuns they showed a greater awareness of Marxist-­Leninist philosophy than of Buddhist philosophy. Nevertheless, as David Wank and Yoshiko Ashiwa show, the association constantly negotiates its space for maneuver with the local and national Religious Affairs Bureau. It is primarily the management of economic resources, which are considerable, with the growth of lay support and tourism that is at stake. As such the story of religious associations is probably not much different from that of other cultural institutions in the Chinese bureaucratic state.30

Christian Polemics and Native Responses That Christianity became a model to be imitated is ironic when we consider that Christian missionaries had been attacking Chi-

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nese religions for a long time. A particularly telling object of criticism for Protestants especially was the outward sign of devotion, the devotional ritual of obeisance (guibai, 跪拜). Protestants already had a long history of attacking Catholic genuflections and prostrations in Europe, which they continued in their attacks on Chinese and Indian religions. In China this was further connected to the limits Europeans wanted to impose on their showing of respect to the emperor. This is borne out by the famous refusal of Lord Macartney in the late eighteenth century to bow deeper for the emperor Qianlong than he would do for King George III of England, whose emissary he was.31 There was a deep Protestantism in this objection to ritualistic submission. It is precisely the supposed lack of reason, liberty, and civilized masculinity in these rituals that made Protestant Englishmen so much averse to obeisance. Chinese culture in particular came to characterize a culture full of “mummery,” “meaningless and hypocritical ritual,” a far cry from the respect that Jesuits and Leibniz had shown for it. At the level of doctrine missionaries found fault in basic tenets of Buddhism, such as the notion that it is meritorious to be vegetarian.32 Buddhist vegetarianism is underpinned by doctrinal notions about the transmigration of souls and originated itself out of an opposition to Hindu animal sacrifice in India. In China vegetarianism spread to Dao and Confucian teachings. It seems that in China like in India bovines were the most prestigious sacrificial victims and that a beef taboo arose and became general in relation to changes in sacrificial practice, again as in India.33 By attacking the refusal to eat meat the missionaries attacked Chinese religious practices and doctrines as such. This was part of a larger assault on religious beliefs and customs including the worship of images, the Buddhist custom to let “vegetarian ladies” chant mantras for money and transfer the merit to their patrons, as well as the more general Chinese belief in spirit-­money. The open spaces in front of Daoist and Buddhist temples were used to spread tracts. But, as some missionaries noticed, few of the tracts and Bibles distributed could be found

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again after some time. In one hilarious story the American Baptist missionary M. T. Yates went to search for them and found that they were brought to a Buddhist temple in the early morning and burned: “These loads of books were to be burned before the idol, and some of the ashes distributed on the waters of the canals and rivers, to furnish the spirits of the departed with reading matter, and the balance, mixed with oil, would be used to make the paste of which the smooth surfaces of sign boards and lacquered ware are made.”34 Chinese Buddhists and Daoists were not helpless in confronting missionary assaults, as shown by the appropriation of the religious materials of Christian missionaries for their own purposes.

Christian Utopias and Millenarianism Another side to mutual appropriation of competing religious doctrines and practices is the return of the repressed. First, it is striking that especially those who are not indifferent to religion and actually practicing Daoism, Buddhism, or any other cult are primary targets for conversion. When converted they bring their knowledge of the rejected religion with them in interpreting Christianity and indeed are haunted by their rejection of deeply ingrained religious habits and thoughts, especially concerning death and ancestors. What is often called “syncretism,” a coming together of religious practices and beliefs from various traditions, happens not only at the level of doctrines, but is also performed at the level of individual life. Conversion gives a special intensity to devotion since it requires the repression of earlier devotional attitudes that are part of one’s socialization. It is thus not surprising that not only were missionaries trying to connect to local practice and local practitioners, but that the converted continued to be in touch with their earlier life. This is an extraordinarily fertile ground for religious innovation and in China especially for forms of millenarianism. This is the context in which movements developed that could hardly be recognized as straightforwardly Christian, but were

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nevertheless clearly products of Christianity, such as the Taiping movement, which resulted in what is probably the bloodiest civil war in human history, with at least 20 million dead.35 Hong Xiuquan, the Heavenly King, was a Hakka peasant in Guandong who had failed the civil service examinations and thus belonged to the, in China, important class of “lumpen-­ intellectuals.” In 1836 he met Liang A-­fa, the first Chinese Protestant evangelist, who gave him a book with translations from the Bible and from missionary sermons. In 1837, after again failing his exams, he had a dream in which his heart was purified by a divine Mother whose Son he was. This vision he later interpreted with the help of his understanding of Christianity to mean that he was the Younger Brother of Heavenly Elder Brother Jesus. Important for him was the Protestant rejection of the worship of images, and he removed Confucian tablets from the school he was teaching in and also refused to further participate in village festivals. When these actions isolated him and his small group of followers from their village community, they moved to Guangxi, an area of mixed ethnicities and breakdown of central authority after the Opium Wars. In Guangxi Hong and his followers met with considerable success and further forged their ideology. His worldview that provided the ideology of the Taiping movement was a mixture of Chinese millenarianism and Christian ideas, based on the Bible and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. The success of the ideology in converting people was primarily based on Hong’s ability to cure illness and to humiliate and destroy other gods without retaliation. Direct attacks on other temples became a central part of the movement’s strategy. Spirit possession and curing through a medium became another crucial element. This was, obviously, derived more from Chinese popular religion than from Christianity. The millenarian part came out in a rebellion against the emperor and the establishment of the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace: Taiping Tianguo. Nanjing was taken by the movement and renamed the New Jerusalem. The movement ended with the suicide of Hong Xiuquan and the sacking of Nanjing by the Qing army in 1864.

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Although Christian missionaries were of the opinion that the Taiping movement was a travesty, many Chinese saw it as one of the Christian movements and after its defeat denounced the Protestant worshippers of Shangdi, the One True God, and the Catholic worshippers of Tianzhu (天主), the Lord of Heaven. Some anti-­Christian pamphlets made this into Tianzhu (天猪), the Pig of Heaven, with woodcuts showing the secret worship of a crucified Pig (zhu for pig and zhu for Lord sounds similar in Chinese but is written with different characters).36 This anti-­Christian sentiment led in the late 1890s to the Boxer revolt against foreigners and especially missionaries. The Boxers (yihetuan, 义和团), or Righteous Harmony Society, were a secret society of spirit mediums of Gods like Guandi, the God of War, and as such invulnerable. They were, more or less, supported by factions in the Qing court that were deeply anti-­foreign and hoped for the expulsion of Christian missionaries. The Boxer revolt was quickly suppressed by imperial forces but not until after the massacres of missionaries and converts especially in Shanxi and Shandong. Nevertheless, it had shown how deep the resentment against foreign conversion (and especially the refusal to pay taxes for the upkeep of local religion, including operas) ran as well as how strong the need for the indigenization or nationalization of Christianity was. The Taiping movement is the best-­known form of syncretism between Christianity and Chinese popular religion, but Chinese modern history is full of lesser-­known examples. For instance, a much less-­known offshoot of Christianity and much closer to it in spirit was the movement started by Pastor Xi Liaozhi, a man of good family who had passed the Xiucai examination and who had been previously a follower of Jindan Jiao, the Religion of the Golden Elixir, a Daoist sect specializing in breathing techniques and inner alchemy (nei-­dan, 内丹).37 Xi Liaoxi had been addicted to opium when a great famine struck Shanxi and claimed five million victims. Missionaries were very active in famine relief and consequently made many converts. Xi Liaoxi’s conversion by the Protestant China Inland Mission was, however, after the famine and accompanied by the breaking of his

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opium addiction. As we have seen, opium was one of the main targets of evangelical activism, like alcohol in the metropolis. Xi Liaoxi had a heavenly vision of the Holy Spirit descending and filling his heart with light and took a new and rather telling name: Xi Shengmo 席勝魔, “Conqueror of Demons.” He established a large number of anti-­opium refuges, called Heavenly Invitation Offices, in which addicts were treated with the new drug morphine, but he also acquired a great reputation as an exorcist and healer. Certainly, exorcism and faith healing had deep biblical roots, but they were slowly discarded by mainstream nineteenth-­century Protestants, who came to regard them as magic rather than religion, although Catholics continued to be open to “miracles” and miraculous healing (at least if accepted by biomedical screening).38 Despite Pastor Xi’s trespassing of this precious boundary his charisma and authority were even accepted by white missionaries, including the famous Cambridge Seven, students and sportsmen from Cambridge University who were born-­again Christians and worked under Pastor Xi, after joining the China Inland Mission in 1884–1885. Their choice of the China Inland mission catapulted this organization from relative obscurity into fame. They connected, as also the missionary exemplar Livingstone had done, sportsmanship and adventure with the mission, but also scholarship and science with biblical enthusiasm that was fully in tune with Pastor Xi’s vision. However much one could attempt to integrate Pastor Xi’s methods into the Bible’s sayings it is still ironic to see that his opium refuges were in fact profitable businesses selling anti-­ opium pills (morphine) in addition to other pills for health and long life, in this way continuing the practices of the Daoist sect of the Golden Pill. Morphine was a substitute for opium to be used in decreasing doses, but like all substitutes is an addictive substance itself. In Pastor Xi’s sect there was a curious mix of Mandarin authoritarianism, spiritualism and spirit conquest, and Chinese conceptions of medicine combined with efficacious morphine as well as Protestant hymn singing. Xi’s visions had

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probably to be related to opium and its aftermath. Marx’s dictum “religion is the opium of the people” could in China be taken literally. While health care was also a prime element in the missionization of India, opium, though produced in India, did not play an important role. Alcohol did, however, especially in targeting tribals and untouchables, the lower strata of Indian social hierarchy. It recalls the common attack on lower-­class drinking habits in the various Protestant respectability movements in Britain. The Irish, both Catholic and given to heavy drinking, seem to have provided a fruitful comparison for understanding low-­caste and tribal Indians. While opium signified the weakness of Chinese civilization as such, alcohol did not stand for the depravity of Hindu civilization, but for that of its lower classes. Especially the Salvation Army, in many ways very similar to the China Inland Mission, was engaged in a civilizing mission both in Britain and in India. They followed General William Booth’s adage: “Go for souls and go for the worst.” In India they became part of the colonial project by being enlisted in the reformation of so-­called criminal tribes, criminality being racially and occupationally connected to the caste system. In the end the Salvation Army even functioned as prison subcontractors in the colonial justice system until in the 1920s rising nationalism made this impossible.39 Despite its direct links with colonialism, however, the extent to which this civilizational project of Christianity overlaps with the Brahmanical vegetarian, anti-­alcohol project is striking.

Chinese Millenarianism and Indian Caste While much of Christian conversion to modernity in India and China follows similar paths, especially in education and health care, the differences are also striking. In China Protestantism could play a significant role in the creation of nationalism and civil society, a role that was played in India by Hindu and Muslim reform movements. The latter were influenced by Christian-

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ity, but developed their own brands of religious nationalism. In China Buddhist and Daoist movements also followed the Christian example, but were never able to assert their modernity sufficiently to win over the elites in power, whether they were nationalists or communists. In China Christianity deeply influenced the largest millenarian movement in Chinese history, the Taiping movement. Something similar cannot be found in India. The Mutiny that took place in roughly the same period as the Taiping movement resembles more the Boxer movement in its anti-­imperialist attempt to restore the ancien régime. One did have sporadic millenarian movements in India, but without much Christian influence. Christianity in China could be inserted in a long tradition of radical utopianism and millenarianism that belongs to the core of Chinese civilization, while in India millenarianism was tribal and limited in its regional spread. In both India and China these movements were often connected to rebellions caused by famine or increase of taxation and other forms of governance that were felt as unjust, and in Marxist historiography often understood as peasant rebellions without attention to their ideological content.40 In India Christian conversion was generally limited to tribal groups and untouchable castes. As such it could just be ignored by the elites of society. However, education in Christian schools and reformist apologetics against missionary attacks deeply influenced Indian modernity. In South India missionary critiques of Brahmanism became an important element of Dravidian nationalism. In China Christianity was seen by influential members of the elite as a potential answer to the quest for a national morality that was compatible with modern science. Ultimately, it was its “foreignness” and its threat to communist hegemony that limited its nationalist appeal.

Chapter 5

Secularism’s Magic In this chapter I focus on the hidden “third” in discussions of the interaction between religion and secularism—namely, magic. The nineteenth-­century Western distinction between religion and magic purports to “purify” religion from a large category of beliefs and practices that are seen as contrary to scientific knowledge. Religion becomes in that way a source of morality (individual, national, universal) that is in no way competing with scientific progress or hindering it. Magic, then, is a rest-­category that is supposed to gradually disappear from secular modernity owing to literacy and general education. However, this story of “disenchantment” is constantly challenged by “re-­enchantment” of modern life, be it in the realm of finance or in the realm of self-­fashioning. The opposition between religion and magic is used in Western understandings of India and China and is mapped onto older indigenous distinctions between “higher” and “lower” religious practices. In India there is a range of beliefs and practices that deal with ghosts or spirits (bhut, pret) as well as illness-­goddesses (like smallpox) in the form of spirit possession. It also has a substantial range of popular beliefs and practices that constitute oracular and ecstatic possession.1 In China the category onto which magic is mapped is what Peng Guangyu, the representative of Confucianism at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago called wu (巫). In the Western scholarly discussion wu is mostly translated as “shaman” or, alternatively, as “spirit-­ medium,” a relatively neutral term for spirit-­religion, but in Chinese scholarly discussion it refers to an early substratum of truly primitive belief that has been overcome in imperial ritual.2 In contemporary usage it refers to ancient forms of shamanism or to surviving forms of magic, witchcraft, sorcery, and so on.3 It is

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really Chinese popular religion, the religion of the illiterate masses that Peng refers to and, as such, to the very widespread and substantial folk traditions of which, in Kristofer Schipper’s interpretation, Daoism is the textual tradition.4 As you saw in chapter 3, to identify Christianity with this shamanistic tradition rather than with Confucianism, as Peng did, was a fascinating discursive move. Peng Guangyu’s discussion of Chinese traditions relates directly to the opposition made between magic and religion that is made in nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century Western thought. This opposition is an important aspect of secularism. It is central to ideas of science, rationality, and secular progress. It is therefore curious to not even find the term “magic” as an entry in Charles Taylor’s recent huge tome on the secular age.5 Taylor does not seem to want to make a distinction between magic and religion, but prefers to speak of the “disembedding” of religion. As we have seen, for Taylor there are two major transformations in history—first the Axial Age and then in the West the splitting of the transcendent-­immanent dyad—that have resulted in the “disembedding” of religion or the secular age of Western Christendom. What Taylor does not really consider are cases where religion is transformed not by a gradual disembedding (very close to Weber’s notion of Entzauberung, or disenchantment), but by the force of anti-­magic movements. In short, he does not think of this process in terms of power. In nineteenth-­century Europe the opposition between “magic” and “religion” was projected onto the opposition between the modern West and the traditional or backward East. In evolutionary anthropology magic and religion signify stages of societal or cultural evolution.6 This is why Peng’s comment on the magical nature of Christianity at the World Parliament was ironic, because he inverted the usual equation East = Magic with West = Magic. One of the flaws of theories of our secular age is that imperialism and the interactions it has made possible are not taken as a fundamental element of that age. It is striking that in reflections on secularism the West European experience (and

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sometimes the American experience) is taken as the paradigmatic model for the modern transformation, but in splendid isolation from the rest of the world. For example, in his recent reflections on the work of William James, titled Varieties of Religion Today, Charles Taylor observes that “it would be churlish, even absurd, to hold against him that his discussion didn’t relate very closely to the practice of Hindus in contemporary India” and continues by saying that “in order to focus the discussion, I intend to follow James and concentrate on the North Atlantic World.”7 In fact, one can hardly conceptualize varieties of religion and secularity in James’s time and today without taking the expansion and indeed the very invention of “world religions” into account. The connection between Christianity and imperial expansion has produced new varieties of religious experience at home, just as it has transformed the religions in the colonized areas. These interactions are productive and central also to “religion as we know it in our culture,” as Taylor puts it. The definite shift of the center of gravity in Christendom from the North to the South today and its repercussions for Christianity as a religion is only one of the aspects of modernity and its colonial history that are elided in Taylor’s understanding of Western culture.8 The transformation of other religious traditions in the imperial encounter is another important aspect. A crucial product of the interactional history between imperial powers and colonized societies is precisely the opposition between religion and magic that to an important extent defines the secular age. The operative term in this opposition is “rationality,” or “science.” It is the demands of science that are the main subject of William James’s explorations, in which the concept of “miracle” is replaced by that of “religious hypothesis.”9

Weberian Disenchantment One incarnation of the opposition between religion and magic is to be found in nineteenth-­century evolutionist theory, which

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features magic as a failed science that is gradually replaced by real science and by religion as a form of morality. As we have seen, in nineteenth-­century Religionswissenschaft the term “world religion” is coined to allow for other religions besides Christianity to be viewed as sources of universal morality. Religions that present themselves as sources of morality can shed any pretense to scientific knowledge, since their claim to authority has shifted. It allows for a search for the moral core in a religion like Confucianism while one can dismiss the rest (claims to knowledge about nature) as irrelevant. This line of evolutionary thought has been immensely influential both in the understanding of modern Christianity and in the understanding of other religions. It finds a famous expression in Weber’s sociology. Although Weber is often seen as a theorist of secularization (Entgötterung), he is in fact a theorist of disenchantment (Entzauberung). Weber coined the phrase in 1917 when he stated in his famous lecture “Science as a Profession” that our historical condition is characterized by intellectualization and rationalization and, above all, by the “disenchantment of the world”: “Not anymore, like the Savages, for whom there were such (uncontrollable) Powers does one have to resort to magical means to control the Spirits or to supplicate them. But technical means and calculation can do this. Above all, this implies intellectualization as such.”10 Ironically, this lecture was delivered during the savage (can one say “irrational”?) massacre of World War I. Weber’s suggestion that magic is now replaced by the machine is close to what futurists and other artists were sensing in this period. Weber’s understanding is that the Protestant ethic originates in a development from magic to morality, a disenchantment that is at the heart of a rationalized modernity. For nineteenth-­century understandings of society, but also for our present understanding of secularism, the opposition of magic and religion is crucial. It makes its appearance in Chinese discussions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and has immense political consequences for the nature of religion and secularism in China. It is the opposition between religion and

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magic that generates the pogroms against popular religion in China as well as the desire for a nationalized religion as source of collective morality. Magic as a category is just as complicated as the categories of religion and secularism. A major element in the nineteenth-­ century understanding is Frazer’s and Tylor’s argument that magic is a false science.11 This emphasizes that in magic it is its instrumentality and efficacy that counts for the performers. With the rise of “real” science (or what Weber calls “intellectualization”), this efficacy becomes problematic. Another important element in the understanding of magic is to see it as the central element in “popular religion,” in which efficacy is more important than theology.

Popular Religion What is “popular religion” in India and China? A major aspect of it is indeed that it is “popular,” belonging to the “people,” to the “folk,” to commoners. Another aspect is that elites have a complicated relation to the social and emotional energies that are unleashed by the popular. One possibility is that elites reject these practices; another is that they want to control their energies and sublimate them by using their authority (that is partly based on the command of reading and writing and thus the interpretation of the canon).12 I think that this is the case for a whole range of popular practices that are confronted by or incorporated in the “great traditions,” to use Robert Redfield’s term. One should try to not exaggerate Redfield’s opposition of these great traditions to little traditions in terms of local versus regional, national, or even universal.13 This opposition is often part of the ideology of these traditions themselves, according to which they want to portray themselves as higher as well as more universal than the traditions they consider lower and limited in scope. The issue is really what the political and cultural economy and thus the catchment area of a cult is and to what extent its limits are set by a centralized religious authority. That issue can

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never be settled in a dichotomous, structural fashion, but has to be understood in relation to shifting political configurations. A cult that can at one time spread over large regions can at another time be swept away by central authority. Popular cults like the Mazu cult in coastal South China or the Dragon King cult in Northwest China or the Aiyappan cult in Kerala or the many Devi cults in Himachal Pradesh attract tens of thousands of pilgrims at festivals and depend on elaborate temple arrangements organized by temple associations and on rituals that mostly have something to do with healing and bringing good luck of various kinds.14 They are, in short, places of magical efficacy (ling, 灵, as it called in Chinese; shakti as it is often referred to in Sanskritic Indian language; barakat in Islamic idiom). The practices that are connected to these places (that are more often than not “out of the way’) involve ecstasy, spirit possession, amulets, excess in penance and joy. It is this excess that creates unease among elites and authorities. Nevertheless, there is an important ambivalence in their attitudes, since they also tend to participate if they need the blessings of the god, of the saint, of the place. The main problem for political authority is that these places provide alternative networks of power and allegiance that can develop a challenge to state authority. In India we find arguments against some forms of popular practice that can be mapped onto the nineteenth-­century Western opposition of religion and magic in a way that resembles Chinese reasoning. Brahmanism can be fruitfully compared to Confucianism if we bear in mind that both terms are not more than ideal-­typical constructions of immensely complex and divergent discursive traditions. Both are elitist traditions carried by scholars connecting power and knowledge. Brahmanical practice upholds the world order (dharma) and is thus the ritual framework for both society and nature. Non-­Brahmanical practices are acceptable as long as they do not disturb the dharmic order. There is a hierarchical ordering at work here that also underpins caste. Non-­Brahmanical practices do not have to be

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eradicated since they can be given a place in the hierarchy as lower practices that cater for beings that are lower in nature, such as lower castes, but also lower animals and demons. Such hierarchical thinking pervades all practices: vegetarianism is higher than consumption of meat, wearing of silk is higher than wearing of cotton, brick houses are higher than mud huts, and abstinence is higher than consumption of alcohol and tobacco. It is most significant in marriage practices and commensality. Striking is the sense of a hierarchical inclusivism, which is sometimes mistakenly understood as tolerance of other faiths.15 This is a worldview that does not reject but instead assigns a ranking. A quite common opposition at the ideological level is that between shastrik (that is, based on the scriptures) and laukik (that is, based on local, popular practice). Practices that are laukik are not condemned as wrong, but they are considered to be lower, more limited in scope.16 Such hierarchical thinking even pervades attitudes toward religious practices that are not so much laukik, but definitely “other,” like Islamic practices. In fieldwork in the 1980s in Surat, West India, I found that Sufi forms of spirit exorcism were widely accepted and sought after by the Hindu population, precisely because Muslims were seen to be closer to demons and spirits in nature and thus had a greater chance to control them.17 This hierarchical worldview is a major reason why Brahmanical elitism does not lead to attempts to eradicate popular, magical religion as it does in the Confucian case. The relations between Brahman literati and the state are much less determined by imperial power than in China. Although Brahmans played a central role in many Hindu kingdoms, such as Vijayanagar in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and Jaipur in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these were kingdoms, not empires. The Mughal empire between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries was ideologically legitimated by Muslim theologians, not by Brahmans.18 In Islam we find a thorough debate about orthodoxy and heterodoxy, centering on the Shi’a–Sunni dichotomy, but also including intricate arguments about saint worship, as for example in the work of the fifteenth-­

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century theologian Sirhindi and that of the eighteenth-­century theologian Shah Wali Allah.19 While these debates to an extent influenced state policies toward religion and the Mughal emperors did intervene in both Islamic and Hindu practices in a variety of ways (generally not in a repressive way, as is imagined by Hindu nationalists today), one cannot see anything resembling the control of local cults by imperial authority that one can see in China. Certainly, when religious movements were aligned with regional resistance to imperial power, as in the case of the Sikhs in the Punjab, one finds Mughal attempts to repress the movement. In the case of the Sikhs imperial power was not really successful and produced a history of martyrdom and resistance against the central state that continues to today, as witnessed by the Khalistani movement for an independent Punjab in the 1980s. The Sikh case is an exceptional example of religious state formation in which a religious movement becomes a state. What the Mughal state could not possibly do is incorporate the various Hindu traditions of the Indian population into an imperial cult, although the Mughal emperor Akbar did make an attempt in this direction with his syncretic imperial cult, called Din-­i-­Ilahi. Popular religion in China was simultaneously more in tune with the imperial cult (often hierarchically subordinated in the divine-­imperial bureaucracy) and a more potent threat to it than popular religion in India.20 The extent to which Confucian literati have been incorporated in the Qing Empire, primarily through the examination system, is remarkably different from the Indian case. Popular religion in China was regarded by these literati as superstitious and worthy of contempt, but they also feared popular cults as alternative ideologies that could pose a threat to the state. There is a long tradition of state repression of “dangerous cults” in China. The catchall term for these cults or secret societies is White Lotus Teaching (白蓮教), with a focus on the Maitreya Buddha and the millenarian “turning of the kalpa (eon),” but, as usual in histories of repression, we know about these cults, movements, and societies mainly from reading the imperial archive. It is thus the

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language of the state that is used, and we have often no independent account that brings us closer to the lived reality of these movements.21 While we thus find cultural attitudes and practices that are quite similar between the Indian and Chinese elites, the ways they are embedded in state projects are quite different. In the late nineteenth century these state projects focus on progress and modernization as well as on creating a national culture. In both the Indian and the Chinese case the older concerns with popular practices turn at this juncture into an obsession with reforming and educating “the people” in the name of national morality and science.

Rational Religion In the nineteenth century two major Brahmanical reform movements in Northern and Eastern India, characteristically called Brahmo Samaj (Gathering of Brahmans) and Arya Samaj (Gathering of Aryans), took over Christian missionary rhetoric in condemning some Hindu practices as backward, irrational, and superstitious, and demanded the removal of these magical accretions that had been added later in history to a pristine rational faith that could still be found in the Vedas and the philosophical texts at the end of the Vedas, called the Vedanta. It is important to note that this was an attack not only on popular religion, seen as magic, but also more broadly on an entire range of practices that were dominated by both Brahman and non-­ Brahman priests. There is something quite extraordinary in the claim that a pristine faith was to be found in the Vedas, because these ancient texts could only be hypothetically referred to, since they were not codified or readily available outside of very particularistic Brahmanical circles of oral transmission. It is only with Orientalist philological attempts to constitute these texts, starting with Friedrich Max Müller’s constitution of the Rg-­Veda, that they become available for reference to Hindu reform movements. As in the Chinese case the Western opposition to religion and magic was useful in distinguishing the moral core of na-

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tional civilization from the cultural practices that had caused its decline. The Arya Samaj went as far as to imitate the Protestant attack against image worship, but in doing so could also rely on traditional theologies distinguishing between nirguna (without qualities and thus without representation) devotion and saguna (with qualities and thus with representation) devotion. Traditions provide a repertoire that arguments for modernity can tap and apply for new purposes. Hindu reformism was quite successfully resisted by Brahmanical counter-­movements that wanted to keep up the older hierarchical system (sanatana dharma), in which practices were assigned their place instead of being attacked and eradicated. One might perhaps suggest that by and large reformism was assimilated as part of the hierarchical system and as a form of Brahmanism itself. Popular religion with or without Brahmanical sanction continues to thrive in India, and beliefs in magical powers, such as those of the miracle producing Sai Baba in South India, are widespread and supported by Indian elites, both within India and abroad.22 Reformism, however, was much more successful in the separation of Hindu practices from non-­Hindu ones, by placing non-­Hindu practices outside the hierarchical system or defining them as an ultimate threat to the Hindu dharma. Especially the Arya Samaj was instrumental in North India in literally “cleaning up” (shuddhi) those who practiced mixtures of Islamic and Hindu culture and religion. Those who were not ritually cleansed of mistaken practices were ethnically cleansed. At the same time these reformist practices of boundary creation and maintenance can also be found among Muslims and Sikhs in this region. What one can say is that everyone was busy cutting off the multiple, interlocking strands of religious life and replacing them with clear anti-­syncretic orthodoxies and religious-­political identities. This process that started at the end of the nineteenth century was part of a process of nation formation that culminated in the partition of India and Pakistan. Surely it is the connection between modern political forces, the politics of numbers especially, and the opposition between true

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and false religion that created pogroms persecuting those who had the wrong beliefs and practices and therefore were the wrong people. In China this process of creating a modern, national religion was not ethnically inflected or connected to religious majority-­ religious minority equations, but rather based on a deeply ingrained opposition between literate elites and illiterate, popular masses. One of the perceived tasks for modernizers in late-­ nineteenth-­century China was to remove traditional obstacles for progress. Religion as such was not to be removed but only those elements that were deemed superstition (mixin, 迷信). In the second half of the twentieth century the Communist Party continued this campaign against popular beliefs, despite its claim that it was the champion of the popular masses. The stated objective of reformers in Qing and the early republic was to repress superstition, but this was countered by an efflorescence of what Prasenjit Duara has called “redemptive societies.” In these societies one could find the millenarian beliefs and “magical” practices that the Chinese reformers were so opposed to. There were thousands of them, such as the Daodehui (Morality Society), the Hongwanzihui (Red Swastika Society), and the Yiguandao (Way of Penetrating Unity) to name only a few. As Duara argues, redemptive societies: “clearly emerged out of the Chinese historical tradition of sectarianism and syncretism.”23 These societies were repressed in China, while in the puppet-­state of Manchukuo they often sought patronage from the Japanese (who were more open to them than the Chinese authorities).24 After the war and with the emergence of a unified (communist) state in Mainland China the repression of these redemptive societies was brutal. In Kuomintang-­dominated Taiwan they were also banned.

Missionary Attacks on Native Religion Paradoxically, missionary Christianity was in India a major source for defining orthodoxy and authenticity of Hinduism

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under modern conditions. This is never a straightforward borrowing and imitation, since Christianity itself was modernizing and in a constant process of redefinition. Moreover, there was the complicated relation between Protestantism and Catholicism in relation to rituals, worship of images, as well as the acceptance of miracles. In India it was first the “barbarous” custom of sati, or widow burning, that was attacked by British missionaries and officials alike and ultimately banned in 1829. As Lata Mani has argued, the debate around sati focused on the “free will” of women to choose to step on the funeral pyre of their deceased husband. The argumentation around sati concentrated on scriptural authority, on the extent to which Brahmanical scripture sanctioned the practice. It is Brahmanical scripture that becomes the basis on which the practice can be condemned by Hindu reformers and colonial authorities alike. It is only the colonial state that has the power to make the Brahmanical scriptural tradition authoritative and the basis of law as well as the basis to ban un-­Brahmanical “magical” practices.25 The universalized opposition between religion and magic is mapped onto the elevation of Brahmanical scriptures to the status of religion and the condemnation of some Hindu practices as “irrational” and “immoral.” Not only sati was coming under scrutiny and criticism, but also such practices as hook swinging to propitiate the Goddess in South India, where again missionaries, colonial officers, and Brahman elites colluded in condemning the practice.26 While in China the Confucian elites informed the state in deciding which practices are allowed and which should be discarded, in India Brahman elites informed the colonial state which practices were authorized by Brahmanical tradition and which not. When the missions were again allowed to enter China after the Opium Wars, missionaries attacked all the signs of backwardness, but were also deeply involved in discovering the “moral core” of Chinese traditions that would be able to serve as a bridge to Christianity’s fulfillment of that incipient morality. This is very clear from the reconstruction of Confucian thought in the work of the missionary-­scholar James Legge, whose work

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on The Sacred Books of the East we discussed in chapter 2. Legge’s theories were part of Western historical philology, but also of Chinese thought. Chinese thinkers argued that Confucius had transformed and rationalized wu (巫) into history or shi (史) and ritual or li (礼). This entailed a rationalization of wu into the inner morality or ren (仁), primarily of the emperor.27 Following the philosopher J. L. Austin’s work on performative utterances Herbert Fingarette has argued that Confucian philosophy is about the magical power of ritual gestures (li) to produce human virtue (ren).28 While Weber’s theories of a teleological development from magic to religion (morality) are based on Schleiermacher’s nineteenth-­century interpretation of Protestantism as inner piety, Confucian thought focuses on court ritual and the exemplary role of the emperor.29 Protestantism has, of course, always been seen as an important historical site of thinking about rationality, about the reflexive subject, about unmediated access, and about free agency. In Protestant conversion missionaries are concerned with the purification of improper forms of agency, a purification that is seen as liberation from false understandings of nature—in other words, from magic.30 Scientific discovery therefore plays a central role in the constant redefinition of religious truth. This accelerated in the nineteenth century, especially after Darwin’s findings, and was simultaneously fundamental to Protestant reinterpretations of theology and to atheism and agnosticism. At the level of individual belief Calvinist notions of sincerity, interiority, and agency in full consciousness have been paradigmatic of a wider Western and ultimately global discourse of the modern self from Locke to Foucault, in which disciplinary self-­ inspection and the reform of desire by an evaluating self are crucial. Morality and rejection of magic (that is, false attributions of efficacy) are connected in Protestant conversion, and this deeply influences Indian and Chinese movements against popular magic. Conversion both to another religion or to a different, demystified and moral form of the same religion, or in fact also to

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secularism, requires some thought and action about the past in relation to social memory.31 The theme of loss, nostalgia, repression, and recuperation is central in the story of conversion. But, as we know, this is also the theme of sublimation and the return of the repressed. Religion can never be entirely purified from magic and indeed efficacy in healing, belief in miracles, and possession by the Spirit are among the most remarkable elements of contemporary Christianity both in its Protestant Pentecostal manifestations and in its Catholic Charismatic ones.

Magic and Modernity While many of the rationalizations of being modern try to purify thought and action from irrational, popular beliefs, it should be clear that in the heart of modernity, in media, in consumption patterns, in the very idea of the constant remaking of the reflexive self, in money and financial markets, those elements are resurfacing in a very prominent way. The modern recuperation of the past and of tradition in contemporary India and China is interesting in its material manifestation as patterns of consumption, but also in the ways in which this recuperation is a reworking of tradition. In India the televised epics of Ramayana and Mahabharata reworked traditions and transformed these into nationalist soap operas for large groups of viewers.32 In China there is a stream of historical soap operas that both entertain and provide viewers with a national perspective on the past. The later work of the celebrated filmmaker Zhang Yimou exemplifies this genre. The constant remaking of the story of the Boxer uprising is a good illustration of this recuperation and transformation.33 Enchantment is at the heart of modern secular entertainment. The North Indian Goddess Santoshi Ma was virtually unknown until she was catapulted in widespread devotional popularity by a 1975 movie, Jai Santoshi Ma. Audiences entered the cinema barefoot as if they were in a temple and worshipped the Goddess in the movie. Symbolically, there was nothing that distinguished this new arrival in the Hindu pantheon from other Mother God-

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desses, but it was a movie that made the stellar rise in popularity possible.34 In South India there is a straight connection between divine imagery, movie stardom, and populist political careers. Major South Indian politicians, like M. G. Ramachandra and Jayalalitha, have made their career in the movies first and then became more and more divine characters in the eyes of their supporters.35 From the lithograph to modern poster art and especially the movies, it is visual imagery that connects religion and media in India.36 The term for magic in the context of modern, urban culture, as found in Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s, is moshu (魔术, literally, the technique of evil spirit), already indicating the extent to which the modern is infused with the magic of the past.37 Modern magic is illustrated in the popular Chinese film genre of martial arts–gods and spirit films (wuxia-­shenguai, 武侠 神怪). In the 1920s and 1930s film spectators burned incense in the theater and sometimes went to become disciples of martial arts and Daoist masters.38 It is precisely at the moment that modern entertainment is invested with magic that the nationalists have their campaigns against popular religion. For instance, in 1934 the nationalist government issued a nationwide ban of the Ghost Festival. As usual the festival in which the hungry ghosts are fed is a combination of Buddhist, Daoist, and shamanistic elements, putting the efforts to divorce popular religion from recognized religion in a quandary.39 However, ambivalences and ambiguities are not solved in secular modernity. Famines and war in the 1930s caused many people to die, and their hungry ghosts became more and more objects of ritual action for nationalist soldiers themselves.40 There is no straightforward disenchantment, but a constant dialectic of disenchantment and reenchantment. The Chinese secularist destruction of huge numbers of sacred places, images, and ritual paraphernalia, including sacred manuscripts and prayer rolls, may have had the contradictory effect of invoking and staging the very magical power that it sought to destruct. Sacrifice has precisely this double meaning of destruc-

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tion and making something sacred. One needs to ask what happens when one defiles, defaces, and destroys objects that have been held sacred for generations, if not several centuries. First of all, as a Freudian would say, they come back to haunt you as specters of the past, literally revenants. And, indeed, the anthropologist Erik Mueggler found exactly that in his ethnographic research on the Yi, a minority in Southwest China. Utopian Maoism absorbed quite a lot of the social energy that was available in popular religion by organizing large-­scale campaigns like “The Four Cleanups” and “The Great Cultural Revolution,” but cleaning up popular religion would in the long run backfire to haunt and even kill the enthusiasts who had been involved in them. One of Mueggler’s informants told him that a woman activist who was menstruating had been sitting on the reliquary box that held the bones of the collective ancestor and that later she was possessed: “She ran around screaming. ‘Why did you sit on me? Now do you know my power? Your body was unclean, your buttocks had blood, now do you know my power?’ Six months later she died.”41 It is not so much that Utopian Marxism destroyed and replaced magic, but it entered into a complex negotiation with it that differed from place to place according to local differences in popular religion. The campaigns against magical superstition definitely had effects, but their insertion in local contexts did not lead to the victory of positivist rationality, but rather to complex transformations of local understandings of historical change and supernatural agency.42 To be possessed by Mao and Maoist thought during the Great Cultural Revolution did not do much to eradicate magic from popular religion.

The Magical “Thing” Our understanding of the categories of magic and religion needs some theoretical exploration that goes beyond the concrete Indian and Chinese cases to the nature of modernity within market economies. Central to debates about magic and religion is the

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question of materiality and materialism, and the nature of money. The great division between secular rationality and magical thought dissolves quickly when one inquires into the nature of the market economy. This involves “the social life of things” as well as “the morality of exchange,” studied by scholars ranging from political economists starting with Karl Marx to anthropologists starting with Marcel Mauss.43 Since money signifies exchange and thus the basis of society itself it attracts moral thought on the possibilities and limits of exchange. The transcendence of the state and the metaphysics of the market are foundational to modern society. It is precisely in the heart of society (markets and the state) that Bezauberung (mystification) takes place. The term “virtuality” describes best our contemporary moment of societal transformation. We have virtual money, virtual communication. In what sense would that be secular? According to William James religion is founded on the subjective experience of an invisible presence. We have only access to that subjective experience through the mediation of concrete practices. Crucial in that mediation is the relative invisibility, the abstractness of the supernatural or, perhaps better, its virtuality. Uncertainty is essential to religion, but also to markets and money. Here another element in Weber’s sociology might be more useful than his evolutionist notion of Entzauberung. His analysis of the Protestant ethic as a source of methodical capitalism turned on his analysis of the Calvinist doctrine of the certainty of salvation in the face of the radical uncertainty about who was already one of God’s elect. While entrepreneurial activities and financial operations invariably involve risk-­taking and, if successful, are narrativized as heroic adventures, social life (markets and the state) involves metaphysical uncertainty. It is uncertainty and virtuality that characterizes both religion and society, making Taylor’s notion of a secular age problematic. Durkheim’s sociology of religion might be useful to get at the metaphysics of money and market. The power and attraction of goods that leads us to purchase them does not lie in the goods

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themselves but in the value we ascribe to them. Purchasing of goods not only positions the buyer in society but also in a way produces society itself. This ideational value of goods is to an extent fetishistic, as in Marx’s commodity fetishism, which locates value in the production process, but it is also totemic, as in Durkheim’s understanding of the power attributed to an object by society. As Mauss has pointed out, it is in the exchange itself that the power of the object is created. Through the ritual theatre of advertising the passions are produced that make us participate in the acts of market exchange. It is not possession as such that is at issue but imaginative value. Money is a perfect illustration of this, since it is a complete abstraction without any of the concrete characteristics of a good. While in the art, car, computer, and cellphone markets symbolic value is created by groups of believers, it is especially in the market of gambling and lottery that we get closer to the religious nature of society. The wager may show the metaphysics of society and religion best. As Pascal argued, since God’s existence cannot be proven by reason, one might wager that he exists. It is interesting that Pascal’s wager underlies decision theory, which is fundamental to economics. One can perhaps say that the mathematical sophistication of decision theory and game theory may have been further developed, but that the fundamental uncertainty that pertains to religious and financial transactions cannot be taken away. The anthropologist Steven Kemper has described Sri Lankan national lotteries as combining self-­interested wager and selfless acts of charity, since the profits of these lotteries are tied to development goals.44 One can interpret this as a special case of the general phenomenon that citizens are summoned to save or spend or wager as part of their belief in the nation. It is through these acts of citizenship, enforced or encouraged by the state, that the economy works. This was well expressed in the eighteenth century by the saying that public interest derives from private vice. The ways in which citizens are produced by being identified as consumers has been well illustrated recently in the

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offer made to the Indian state by the new boss of Master Card, Ajay Banga, that his company could help conduct the campaign to give identification numbers to all Indian citizens. Betting and consuming are part of the circulation of money that constitutes society in ways that remind one of the redistribution of “honors” in the South Asian temple. What is most striking is the moral language in which these transactions are couched. This is not a fixed language. The morality of exchange is constantly negotiated, since what is at one point celebrated as entrepreneurial risk-­taking is at another point in time vilified as anti-­social profiteering. While it is tempting to see modern capitalism as an all-­ encompassing break with the past of human society, the virtuality of the circulation of money, the very transcendence and abstraction of money, shows that the ways in which we break up the religious and the sacred from the secular and the profane does not help us to provide better understanding of the disjunctures and differences that constitute social life. An anthropological contribution to the understanding of the great abstraction that is “money” continues to be the study of the ways in which people are drawn into monetary interaction by consuming, betting, saving, participating in the stock market, speculating on house prices, and so on in the context of real-­life situations.

Materialism and Consumerism The struggle against Western imperialism in India and China is fueled by an argument that portrays imperialism as a form of immoral materialism. The moral understanding of money and trade, but also more generally market exchange itself, is ancient in all the traditions we are dealing with here, including Western thought at least since Aristotle. Both Mao and Gandhi stand in an ancient, Western tradition. Certainly, they also are heirs to more positive ways of thinking about material life in their utopian views of better forms of productivity and exchange that would enable the formation of morally superior social life. Marx

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and Engels’s critique of capitalism was imbued with nostalgia for primitive communism and, as such, inherited by Mao, who extolled the virtues of peasant life. Chinese communists, while having a materialist ideology, rejected capitalist consumer culture as illusionary or indeed fetishistic in the Marxian sense. Shanghai’s prewar cosmopolitan modernity, for instance, was seen as both not authentically Chinese and immoral. Therefore it was violently repressed after the communist takeover in the 1950s. Striking in this repression is the extent to which Marxist materialism that understands itself as a rational theory of historical determination is unable to disconnect things from persons, and lends itself to an anthropological analysis as outlined in Marcel Mauss’s work on gift exchange.45 Capitalists and feudal landlords not only play a role in historical processes, but they also are portrayed as morally evil in their very essence to the extent that even their children and grandchildren cannot absolve themselves from this taint and thus are precluded from going to the university and having government jobs. In an interesting twist, therefore, Chinese today often see Maoist materialism as a battle against the magical attractions of religion and consumption, but as at the same time full of another kind of enchantment and collective illusion. Leaders like Mao could inspire and mobilize masses for collective, ascetic rejection of urban and consumerist values by imbuing peasant values with a kind of magical efficacy in creating a Great Leap Forward, and even after the terrible failure of this attempt to increase productivity by educating urban youth in peasant values during the Great Cultural Revolution. In the Indian case materialism in both the capitalist and communist form were rejected by the Gandhian movement in the name of Indian spirituality. Gandhi and others claimed to follow spiritual disciplines to make themselves into spiritual exemplars, providing the charisma of leadership. Ascetic refusal of all kinds of consumption thus became part of nationalist politics. Hunger strikes as an extreme form of fasting became a political weapon. Gandhi decided to discard English dress and wear only home-

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spun cotton (khadi) and ultimately went as far as wearing only a loincloth, signifying asceticism and solidarity with the toiling poor as well as a rejection of capitalist materialism that he saw as basic to India’s impoverishment. The Gandhian dress came to stand for political service to the nation just as the Maoist peasant dress did in China. Both signify a rejection of urban consumerism, but also a potential hypocrisy of the political class. It is the great disillusion with the Maoist and Gandhian utopias of frugal self-­reliance that enhanced the consumer revolution in the wake of the liberalization of Indian and Chinese economies. Ironically, Gandhi and Mao have now become “brands” for the advertising industry, applying their charisma to the allure of various consumer products.46 The consumer revolution has promoted individual opportunity and greater inequality, celebrated in shopping malls for the newly affluent middle class as well as in “liberated” sexual openness for the urban youth.47 At the same time it has also elicited a great interest in “good luck” (yuan fen, 缘分) that is promoted in a myriad ways by shows like Kaun banega crorepati (Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?) on Indian television and by widespread legal and illegal lotteries as well as popular participation in the stock market both in India and China. The casinos in Macau already have a five times higher turnover than the casinos in Las Vegas.

Magical Healing In addition to the continuity of magical illusion in modern entertainment and consumption patterns as well as in the rejection thereof, one can find another important continuity in the relation between magic and science. As you will see in greater detail in chapter 7, this continuity can especially be found between materialist science, as promoted by the Communist Party after 1949, and conceptions of health. It is part of the state-­promoted “traditional” Chinese medicine and even more illustrative, in breathing exercises (qi gong, 气功) that originate in Daoist self-­ cultivation techniques. These body techniques were separated

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from their “feudal and religious origins” and put into the service of the health of the masses. Qi is “cosmic breath” and gong is “exercise,” so breathing techniques are basic to qi gong. Besides acupuncture and herbal medicine qi gong became part of the complex of Chinese traditional medicine that was promoted by the Chinese Communist Party. Not only medical science but also physics and biology produced experiments focusing on the existence of qi. The main obstacle for the spread of qi gong was opposition by scientists who did not accept the scientific claims made for it. The claim that qi was a measurable physical substance both gave strong support to qi gong as a science rather than a religion, atheism and scientism being the core ideology of the communists, but also made it very vulnerable to scientific skepticism. Research into the paranormal effects of qi gong practice was enthusiastically supported by leading scientists like Qian Xuesen, the father of China’s nuclear program, but vehemently attacked by some Marxist philosophers and scientists. These debates were directly related to power struggles in the party leadership. During the Cultural Revolution, the qi gong movement was strongly repressed, but in the 1980s it again began to receive party patronage.48 Outside the control of the state was the spontaneous qi gong craze of the 1980s in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. People started to do qi exercises everywhere, and to some extent this can be read as setting the body free from the constraints imposed by the state and signifying a transition to greater individual freedom and interaction. The state tried to channel this spontaneous outburst of qi gong activities into qi gong institutions and movements, but some of them, most notably the Falun Gong or Falun Dafa, as it is called later, turned out to be a real challenge for state control. In India it is yoga and ayurvedic (as well as unani) medicine that find support from the postcolonial state with claims of an “Indian science” that are remarkably similar to those of a “Chinese science.” These alternative methods of healing are often connected to religious movements around charismatic leaders,

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resembling the qi gong movements in China. In India one finds also attempts to harness popular energies to utopian projects. This ranges from the peculiar charisma of Gandhi and his ascetic attempts to transform the modern arena of politics, requiring certain embodied lifestyles for himself and his followers, to the symbolic mobilizations by the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Hindu Nationalist Party that has dominated Indian politics for more than a decade. Hindu nationalist campaigns to liberate the God Rama from the chains in which he had been held by Muslim rulers who put a mosque on his birthplace make use of performative traditions that for centuries have vividly enacted the banishment of Rama to the jungle and his victorious return to Ayodhya.49 Here, it is the exorcism of the Muslim and Christian Other that is central to political witchcraft. But, again, as in the Chinese case, it is the insertion of state campaigns into local settings that produces new forms of magical belief. As Durkheim indicated, modern magic can be found, first and foremost, at the level of the state. With Durkheim (as with Hubert and Mauss and later Lévi-­Strauss) there is a sense that magic is an empty signifier, a vague power like mana that manifests itself in a collective effervescence. It is ultimately the state that escapes signification and is the empty power above and beyond society. Magic, far from being absent in modern society that locates morality in religion or humanism and knowledge in science, is to be found in the enigmatic transcendence of the state. It would be wrong to read the stories of India and China as examples of the transitory nature of modernizing societies that have not yet fulfilled the requirements of enlightened, secular modernity. The spectacularly fast development of consumer markets in India and China have also given rise to wild speculation in real estate, stock markets, futures, and, especially in China, casinos. None of this is particular for Asia, as the parallel political careers of Thaksin in Thailand and Berlusconi in Italy show. Some of this is tied to older forms of conspicuous consumption, like the dowry prestations in Indian marriages (deeply

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tied to economic developments) and the always blooming industry of conspicuous dining in Chinese guanxi (关系) that has further developed into conspicuous singing in Karaoke bars.50 Some of it is tied to a widening scope of consumption of experiences in leisure activity—for instance, combining older forms of pilgrimage to contemporary tourism. In all these new opportunities for consumption one finds a combination of enticements and anxieties that give a wide berth to desires of magical control. Especially the volatility and flexibility of the market that cannot be rationally controlled or predicted and the decline of the great moral narratives of communism and Gandhianism urge people to either help themselves in self-­fashioned understandings of the world or to enter into alternative communities of spirituality and bodily control under the guidance of leaders who claim to have access to ancient, magical wisdom to control the future.

Indian and Chinese Alternatives to Western Science Magic and religion are nineteenth-­century terms that enable the conception of religion as a moral resource for the nation from which knowledge-­claims that could bring it into collision with science are removed. While even today there are still skirmishes around evolution theory, especially in the United States, this does not affect science as a powerful agent of modern development that shapes our world in myriad ways. Within the field of morality religion can be seen as an important apparatus of the state to discipline subjects and promote orderly conduct. At the same time religion is also an important site for challenging the morality of the state. The knowledge-­claims that formerly were in the province of religion have not disappeared, but have been categorized as magic, “false knowledge,” or superstition. The boundaries between religion and magic are continuously shifting, since what is knowledge at one time can become false knowledge at another time. Central to magic is efficacious practice, actions that have effects in the real world, like healing or fortune-­telling or forms

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of control over natural phenomena. To call some practice magic can be decided by external state agents that will not allow certain practices. At the same time there is a lively debate within traditions about the correctness or incorrectness of certain practices. The place of miracles in the Christian tradition, for instance, has a long history of debate, especially in the opposition between Catholicism and Protestantism, but also within these opposed traditions. The opposition between magic and religion is an instance of the opposition between false and true religion, but given a new twist with the growing importance of empirical science in the nineteenth century. Both in China and in India we see a nationalist interpretation of traditional healing that is an alternative to biomedical science or “Western medicine.” There are attempts to remove references to religion in these alternative national sciences, to make them look “scientific” rather than magical, but that is often hard to do. While we have here religious challenges to universal science that would otherwise be branded as magical, they are portrayed as coming out of national heritage rather than religious tradition. They are considered not to be magical at least until the moment that they challenge the authority of the state, as in the case of the Falun Gong. Magic as false science is seen as an obstacle to national progress. Communism builds on Marx’s Enlightenment understanding of human evolution and sees magic as an important tool for the ruling elites to keep the masses ignorant. The removal of magic is thus necessary for the liberation of the people. That the people themselves do not want to be liberated is the result of “false consciousness.” Communism bears a striking resemblance to Calvinism’s strictures against magic. Indian nationalism is more concerned with the blurring of boundaries between religious communities in the field of syncretistic, magical practice than with the purification of religion from magical elements. While communism offers a scientific worldview in historical materialism, Indian nationalism accommodates science within a secularism that allows for a plurality of religious viewpoints.

Chapter 6

“Smash Temples, Build Schools”: Comparing Secularism in India and China The concept of secularism is not less elusive than that of religion, or spirituality, or magic, with which it forms a syntagmatic chain. Often it is unclear what is meant by “the secular.” At one level the term refers to the separation of state and church. This makes sense only in the West, where one has the Christian church. Even in the West, however, this separation takes different shapes in the United States, in Britain, in France, in Holland. In Asia religions are not organized in churches, and that simple fact already creates confusion about what is meant by “the secular.” At another level it refers to the marginalization of religion in society. Again, this seems to be occurring in some societies in Europe, but certainly not in the United States. There is therefore also not a clear causal connection between level 1 and level 2. Finally, there is a third level, which is that of the growing irrelevance of religion as a source of knowledge. This refers to the growing importance of scientific knowledge that is not constrained by religious authority. Religion is sometimes taken to be an obstacle for scientific progress and secularism demands its removal for the benefit of societal development that is guided by scientific discovery and technological innovation. Much sociological attention and imagination has gone into first the development of the secularization thesis and more recently in its dismantling. Secularization was seen by sociologists as an intrinsic and inescapable part of the modernization of Western society, with the assumption that this was something all societies had to go through.1 Jose Casanova has been at the forefront of the dismantling of this thesis with his important book Public Religions.2 He has argued that the three propositions of the secularization thesis—namely, the decline of religious beliefs, the

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privatization of religion, and the differentiation of secular spheres and their emancipation from religion—should be looked at separately in a comparative analysis. Most of the research on secularization is focused on an opposition of Western Europe and the United States. Casanova argues that comparative historical analysis allows one to get away from the dominant stereotypes about the United States and Europe and to open a space for further sociological inquiry into multiple patterns of fusion and differentiation of the religious and the secular across societies and religions. This means moving away from teleological understandings of modernization. Or perhaps better, it means a questioning of that telos by recognizing its multiplicity and its contradictions. Casanova’s intervention can be understood as building on the Weberian project of comparative and historical sociology, but going beyond it by avoiding the examination of civilizations and focusing instead on nation-­states. He shows that religions can play a major role in mass mobilization around political issues in modern polities that have a legal separation of state and church. The political significance of religion is enduring in large parts of Europe, Latin America, and certainly also in the United States. In India one finds a secular separation of religion and state, but at the same time politics is full of religion. In China one finds a communist regime that is bent on removing religion from the political arena, but is now faced with revival of religion at all levels of society. Post-­Weberian comparative sociology approaches the vast array of secularisms from a historical study of the trajectories of nation-­states. An alternative to post-­Weberian arguments in sociology about religion and secularity is offered by theories that emphasize individual, rational choice in religious markets.3 Market theories of religion have developed in the United States, because of the dominance of market ideology in that country. Moreover, they seem to fit the historical development of secularism in the United States. The United States has erected “a wall of separation” between state and church, according to which arrangement the state is secularized, but is required to uphold religious freedom.

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Historically, especially proselytizing Protestant groups have thrived in the United States, and they have set an example that is followed by other denominations. Their competition is made possible by the noninterference of the state and what is sometimes called the “free marketplace of ideas.” European modernization theorists have often mentioned the United States as an exception to the rule of secularization, while American market theorists have argued that Europe was the exception to the rule, since established religions (state religions) in Europe monopolized the religious economy and took market incentives away. However, both Poland and Ireland are Catholic monopolies and at the same time are hardly secularized. One can learn from the debate between these sociologists that one should not strive for universal models but develop meaningful comparative analysis. Besides the fact that market theories of religion run into some empirical problems in societies outside the United States—for instance, in Europe—they have some further theoretical difficulties. Market theories assume that individuals make a certain kind of “rational choice” and that they have stable preferences. This allows for description and prediction. The problem, obviously, is how to demarcate rational and irrational choices. This demarcation problem is discussed in detail by an influential Swiss sociologist of religion, Jürgen Stolz.4 He argues that also choices that are seen by the majority in a society as irrational can still be considered rational, if people have good reasons to believe in their choice given the information that they have.5 However, one may object that if we equate rationality with understandability, we effectively replace the actor’s rationality with the sociologist’s rationality, which reconstructs the “good reasons” that people may have for their beliefs. Moreover, what if people just perform certain religious acts without putting any emphasis on believing, or do not in general give the concept of belief central importance in their religious activities?6 The problem sociologists who follow the economic model of “rational choice” run into is that their definition of rationality is too one-­dimensional to be useful

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for the interpretation of much social behavior. When they realize this and try to expand the definition of rationality the concept loses its value for prediction. These problems are not new. In the 1970s they were hotly debated by Peter Winch, Steven Lukes, Martin Hollis, Ernest Gellner, and others. This debate was largely based on Evans-­Pritchard’s ethnographic work. In his classical study of witchcraft and magic among the Azande Evans-­ Pritchard showed that seemingly irrational magic, as a set of concepts, practices, and techniques, has to be understood within a wider range of moral understandings.7 Stolz wants to reintroduce a Weberian concept of value rationality, but, as we have seen in the previous chapter, the problem with that is precisely that it makes a distinction between religious morality (value rationality that can be found in world religions) on the one hand and irrational magic on the other. This is in Weber’s case (and in that of modernization theory) connected with an evolutionary view of the disenchantment of the world. It is these assumptions that have become part of ideologies of modernizing elites and have important social consequences that need to be critically analyzed by sociologists rather than being taken as the guiding models for studying religion. The market cannot be understood purely in terms of rational choice. Our current understanding of actors in financial markets complicates rationality and places more emphasis on greed, on herd behavior, and on the interaction between actors and electronically embedded models.8 If this is already the case for financial markets, a central aspect of the economy, it might be more useful to closely examine the specific understandings of rationality and desire and personhood that are produced in religious movements rather than assume that we know already what the individual as a rational human being is. Moreover, there are other aspects of the market that may be helpful in our analysis of religion, such as advertising in various media, the creation of social imaginaries (to use Charles Taylor’s term), and fantasies that lead to particular consumption patterns, branding, and lifestyle, which are neglected by the market theorists. In principle

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attempts to connect different spheres of social life, such as the market and religious affiliation, are to be applauded, but to reduce the richness of social life to a narrow definition of rational behavior is not necessary. The rejection of market theories of religion that depend on universalistic assumptions of rational choice brings us to a cultural approach of secularism. The comparison between secularism in India and China depends on the following steps. The first is that the project of European modernity should be understood as part of what I have called “interactional history.”9 That is to say that the project of modernity with all its revolutionary ideas of nation, equality, citizenship, democracy, and rights is developed not only in Atlantic interactions between the United States and Europe but also in interactions with Asian and African societies that are coming within the orbit of imperial expansion. Instead of the oft-­assumed universalism of the Enlightenment one needs to look at the universalization of ideas that emerge from a history of interactions. Enlightened notions of rationality and progress are not simply invented in Europe and accepted elsewhere, but are both produced and universally spread in the expansion of European power. This entails a close attention to the pathways of imperial universalization. Examining secularism in India and China uncovers some of the peculiarities of this universalization by showing how it is inserted in different historical trajectories in these societies. The second is that with all the attention to secularization as a historical process, there is not enough attention to secularism as historical project. Casanova has in his recent writings rightly drawn attention to the importance in Europe of secularism as an ideological critique of religion, carried out by a number of social movements.10 Secularism as an ideology offers a teleology of religious decline and can function as a self-­fulfilling prophecy. It is important to examine the role of intellectuals in furthering this understanding of history, but also their relation to sources of power: state apparatuses (prominently the law) and social movements. Secularism frames religion. As Talal Asad observes,

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“the space that religion may properly occupy in society has to be continually redefined in society by the law because the reproduction of social life within and beyond the nation-­state continually affects the discursive clarity of that space.”11 Secularism is a forceful ideology when carried by political movements that capture both the imagination and the means to mobilize social energies. It is important to attend to the utopian and indeed religious elements in secularist projects in order to understand why many of these movements seem to tap into traditional and modern sources of witchcraft, millenarianism, and charisma. Much of this is omitted from discussions of secularization, but the cases of India and China show us how essential this is for understanding the dynamics of religion and the secular. It is imperialism that brings Indians and Chinese to interpret their traditions in terms of the category of “religion” and its opposition to “the secular.” While there are multiple histories involved here, it is the imperial context that produces a remarkably similar trajectory that essentializes Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, Daoism, and even Confucianism into comparable entities, subjects of the new, secular discipline of comparative religion or science of religion that attempts to emancipate itself from Christian theology. One also has to look carefully at ways in which European notions of science and its opposite, of progress and backwardness, capture the imagination of Indian and Chinese intellectuals and how this relates to the creation of the modern state. In the following I will first deal with secularism in China and then with secularism in India in order to show what kind of problems secularist projects attempt to address and what kind of violence their interventions entail.

Secularism in China “Smash temples, build schools” (huimiao, banxue, 毁庙办学) is a particularly telling slogan that was used in a campaign against temple cults and religious specialists during reforms in late Ching at the end of the nineteenth century.12 According to the reform-

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ists, led by Kang Youwei (1858–1927) and supported by the emperor, China had to modernize quickly and this had to be done by promoting education and by getting rid of religious superstition. These two elements belonged together, since education should train people in modern, rational thought, while superstition and magical thought should be discouraged. Education is central to the development of the modern nation-­state. It demands that its subjects be disciplined and educated in a national curriculum. That curriculum contains the basic elements of modern science, required for educating an adequate workforce, but also basic elements of national culture, such as language and history. Religion can be regarded as part of national culture, but in secularist states students are taught to reject that part of culture, see it as a historical aberration, and become atheist. Education is also central to religion. To be able to send, receive, and interpret the religious message one needs to be educated. Despite the Deist claim that religion is natural, it is in fact culturally acquired.13 One could perhaps compare learning a religion with learning a language, and indeed ritual communication has often been studied as a form of language. Many religions have ritual manuals about what to do when and for what purpose, and this practical knowledge may be more important than the content of what people believe, or their “inner states,” although some religions, especially Protestantism, do put a lot of emphasis on interiority. The education in sacred truth, in sacred rituals, in correct behavior is an indispensable element of religions. If we think of the ways in which we are socialized to understand symbols (religious and nonreligious) and their relation to practice, it is clear that we have to study not only religions but also how religious symbols become authoritative in relation to other representations and discourses.14 For example, if one becomes a Buddhist in a secular state Buddhist symbols are discursively constructed and understood in relation to the dominant discourse of secularism. Outside the family, the temple and the monastery are throughout history sites of education. In Europe it is relatively recent

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that they have been rivaled or overtaken by state-­sponsored schools. It was only in the late nineteenth century that the old universities of Oxford and Cambridge were loosening their ties with the state church. Still, many of the arrangements in these universities (and elsewhere in Europe) recall the religious nature of higher learning. In China Buddhist and Daoist temples and monasteries were also sites of learning, but primarily for religious education. It is state Confucianism that is central to the state curriculum. The state required officials to be educated in interpretations of the classical canon that were tied up with an imperial ritual system and a Confucian cosmology. The centralization of the examination system has been one of the major features of the development of the bureaucracy in China and looked at with admiration from outside of China. Nevertheless, it does not seem to be correct to see this as an entirely secular system, since it partly promoted what one could call a Confucian mind-­set, a kind of moral and political theory, as well as a ritual complex that legitimated the sacred nature of the imperial system, but it was located outside temples and monasteries.15 Kang Youwei, who started the campaign for the destruction of temples and the building of schools, wanted to have the worship of Confucius as part of the school program.16 What had to be destroyed then was not religion as such, but sites of popular religion, and what had to be promoted was Confucian secularism. Before the communist victory in 1949 a number of campaigns, first in late imperial China and afterward in the republic, destroyed or “secularized” (in the medieval European sense of being taken out of the church and integrated in the world), according to one estimate, half a million existing temples.17 What the communists did after 1949 was, to a very great extent, a continuation of these campaigns. The nationalists in Taiwan with their Confucian nationalism did not develop a fundamentally different policy toward religion than the communists (except for their support of Christianity), but continued Confucian secularism. Until the late 1960s the Taiwanese nationalists kept religious activities under a very tight control. All these campaigns

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against religion should have produced a secular China, but the contrary is true. In Taiwan religious activities are to be witnessed everywhere, and with the loosening of the tight controls over religion in the People’s Republic of China we see religious activity also flourishing everywhere. This paradox can be understood by closely examining the nature of these secularist campaigns. Secularism as an ideology and as a practice in China is in the first place an anti-­clericalism. Anti-­clericalism has deep roots in Chinese history, but at the end of the nineteenth century it gained the attention both of the popular media and of intellectuals who grappled with modern, Western ideas. Intellectuals, like Liang Qichao (1873–1929) and Zhang Binglin (1869–1936) and Chen Yinke (1890–1969) separated Buddhism and Daoism from their clerical roots and made them into national moralities that could serve the modernization of China. Buddhist leaders such as Taixu (1890–1947) and Daoist modernists like Chen Yingning (1890–1969) made great efforts to bring their religions under the rubric of secular nationalism. The popular press was also not opposed to religion as such, but to Buddhist and Daoist clerics who were described not only as ignorant buffoons, but also as criminals, drunkards, gluttons, and, foremost, as sexually debauched. Temples and monasteries were described in the emergent press in the late Qing period as dungeons for sexual debauchery, places of great pornographic potentiality. Clerics were portrayed in stories as visiting houses of pleasure. The main theme here was in fact that monastic celibacy and techniques of self-­improvement were a disguise for a lawless, unbridled sexuality.18 This theme of sexual scandal was certainly crucial in the emergence of the popular press in the nineteenth century everywhere, but the Chinese focus on clerics recalls especially the pornography that was printed in the Netherlands but distributed in revolutionary circles in France in the decades before the French Revolution. Here we see a genealogy of laïcité in the underbelly of the Enlightenment that connects religion with sexuality in ways that are never made explicit, but

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that are also behind the social energy in anti-­Islamic gestures today in France.19 Clerics in China were also seen as inherently violent, since their ascetic disciplines and martial arts that inflict violence on their own bodies can be turned against others for criminal of rebellious purposes. This theme obviously gained prominence because of the failed Boxer rebellion in the late nineteenth century. Clerics were able to organize secret societies that threatened the state monopoly of violence. They combined fighting techniques with magic that made the believers think they were invincible and thus extremely dangerous. The failure of the Boxer rebellion, however, showed Chinese intellectuals that there was no future in using magical means to defeat the imperial powers. Again, the theme of delusion and disguise is combined with the notion that the illiterate masses are led into meaningless and ultimately fruitless violence by cunning clerics. Besides a form of anticlericalism Chinese secularism is a form of scientism and rationalism. From a nineteenth-­century enlightened and evolutionary perspective it pitches scientific rationality against magical superstition. Secularism is thus a battle against the misconceptions of natural processes that keeps the illiterate masses in the dark and in the clutches of feudal rulers and clerics. The term for superstition (mixin, 迷信) comes from Japanese, as do many other terms that are employed in the discourse of modernity, like indeed the term “religion” (zongjiao, 宗教) itself. In using these neologisms it makes a distinction between religion that contributes to the morality of the state and superstition that is detrimental to modern progress. These views are shared by intellectuals of all persuasions, including the nationalists and the communists, but also by many reformist religious thinkers. This is both a discursive and an institutional shift as an aspect of the transition from the ancien régime of the Qing empire to the modern republic. The traditional system of three teachings (sanjiao), Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist, in which Confucian state ritual defined the framework for the other two, was

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transformed in the republic by the notion that there were five acceptable world religions: Buddhism, Daoism, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Islam. Confucianism was kept outside this arrangement, because it was considered to be both national instead of global and in essence secular rather than religious. Confucian intellectuals did try to turn it into a secular civil religion, but this met with little success outside the nationalist elite. The religions that are officially recognized as religions today are being organized along the model of Christianity in nation-­wide associations that are ultimately controlled by the state. What remains outside of this arrangement is what is often called popular belief (minjian xinyang, 民间信仰)—namely, all those cults that are in fact closely connected to Buddhist and Daoist ideas and practices but are not part of these associations. Moreover, many of the Buddhist and Daoist local cults are hard to transform into nation-­wide associations. Especially Daoism had been deeply intertwined with local cults. The opposition between officially approved associational religion and local forms of superstition gives authorities a great space for controlling and repressing all kinds of religious expressions. Anti-­clericalism and scientism together were deeply connected to Western, enlightened ideas about progress, in which magic had to be replaced by scientific rationality and by moral religion as basis of national identity. Major currents of Western thought, like social Darwinism, neo-­Kantianism, and Marxism, were absorbed in China. Not only prescriptive thought about society came to stand in the light of rationality, but also descriptive social science, such as sociology and anthropology. The social sciences lost their ability to describe the effects of these ideologies on society since they could not distance themselves from them. Space for critical social thought became extremely limited when communism came to power. Intellectuals played an important role in the secularist projects of nationalizing and rationalizing religion and, crucially, they were part and parcel of large-­scale state interventions to produce a modern, national identity. While Buddhism and Daoism were to some extent sources for the cre-

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ation of national religion, Confucianism was itself being considered as already both national and rational. The attempts to transform Confucian traditions into a civil, national religion were extremely interesting as a form of social engineering, but ultimately failed, largely because Confucian teachings could encompass Daoist and Buddhist teachings but not the social energy that local Daoist and Buddhist cults could mobilize. Secularism in China is, to a large extent, the sordid history of state persecution of clerics and destruction of temples both before and during communist rule. Under communism the anti-­ superstition and anti-­clerical campaigns were combined with anti-­feudalism campaigns. The 1950s not only saw the brutal elimination of millenarian movements like Yiguandao (一贯道), but also the destruction of feudalism and thus the redistribution of temple land and temple property—secularization in its original sense.20 Mao, as a good Marxist, predicted the decline of religion as part of the creation of a socialist China in the following words: “The gods were erected by peasants. When the right time comes, the peasants themselves will throw away these gods with their own hands.”21 But, as a matter of fact, Mao and the party did everything to destroy the gods, but the peasants did everything to rescue them. One of the great puzzles of China today is not that it proves the secularization thesis wrong, because that thesis is proven wrong almost everywhere, but that despite a century of secularist attacks religion has not been destroyed. In fact we see everywhere in China a more open engagement with the gods. This raises a number of issues. First, if we accept the theoretical premise that the secular and the religious are produced simultaneously what has happened to the religious under secularist attack? What is the nature of Chinese religion today? Has it been hiding and does it now come out of the closet and what does that mean? Second, how can we explain that secularism has not been able to fulfill its world-­historical task? Third, what may be the future of secularism in China under the current conditions of religious expansion?

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First, then, what is the nature of Chinese religion and secularity today? On the one hand we find a general acceptance in China of the idea that religion is not important to the Chinese, that the Chinese have always been rational and secular, and with modernization even more so. This view is prevalent not only among intellectuals, but is also more generally held. And on the other hand, there is a widespread interest in religious practices, in visiting shrines especially during tourist trips, in religious forms of healing. Both in cities and in the countryside communities are rebuilding their temples and have started awkward negotiations with the authorities to perform their ceremonies again. Religious activity seems to be embedded in a fully secular life, in which job insecurities, health, and desire for success and profit create a demand for divine support. With the decline of the iron rice bowl of the state this demand has only increased. The same intellectuals who deny the importance of religion pray for their family’s welfare wherever they can. The chain of memory, to use Hervieu-­Leger’s term, however, seems to have been broken and needs to be patched up.22 Often people who engage in religious activities are not very knowledgeable about them, but in China this lack of knowledge is taken to an extreme. This is enhanced by the fact that the clergy has been largely exterminated or so much brought under control of the party that they have lost their liturgical bearings. This situation in itself gives a lot of space for new religious movements in which lay people play an important role, but also cobble them together from various elements like the many qi gong movements. Second, how do we explain the failure of a century of systematic destruction of Chinese religious life? One answer lies in the millenarian nature of Maoism itself. The party absorbed quite a lot of the social energy that is available in religious movements. Yiguandao was a huge movement with millions of followers, at the moment of the communist takeover, but it was destroyed quickly after the killing and torturing of its leadership without inciting huge rebellions. One of the reasons was that the communists, like the Yiguandao, also promised paradise on earth

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and seemed to have a better go at it. Mass mobilization (qunzhong yundong, 群众运动) for the transformation of self and society has a central place both in Chinese religion and in Maoism. Studying and especially reciting Mao’s writings again recall religious chanting. The finding and expelling of class enemies and traitors follow quite precisely the trappings of Chinese witchcraft beliefs and exorcism, even in the giving of black hoods as symbols of evil to the accused.23 The practice of public confession likewise continues religious practice. Third, what is the future of secularism in China? As I already indicated secularity is well established in China in daily life as well as in people’s self-­understanding. Secularism as repression of religion is also widely tolerated if a movement, like the Falun Gong, appears to threaten the social and political order. It is much less tolerated when local authorities try to intervene with local manifestations of popular religion. In fact, in many cases today the authorities are pleased with religious activities that draw outside money.24 Secularism is also certainly still the frame in which clerics have to operate. The Buddhist and Daoist associations are largely controlled by the state. Recently, the sociologist Fenggang Yang has attempted to apply market theory to the study of Chinese religions. However, he admits that there is no “free market” with free choices, since in the Chinese case religion is heavily regulated. He argues that this results in a division of the market into a red market that comprises all officially permitted religious organizations, believers, and religious activities; a black market that comprises all officially banned religious organizations, and so on; and a gray market that comprises all religious and spiritual organizations, practitioners, and activities with ambiguous legal status. In the gray market one finds illegal practices of legally existing religious groups and religious and spiritual practices that manifest in culture instead of religion.25 He further advances the proposition that “increased religious regulation will lead not to reduction of religion per se, but to a triple religious market.” Much of this is reminiscent of the long-­standing sociological discussion

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of the “informal sector or informal economy.” Sociologists working on so-­called developing economies are at least since the 1970s aware that official statistics about economic performance do not take large sectors of the economy into account. The scholarship on this inspires a dynamic understanding of the relation between the state and the market. The state is not monolithic, and state actors often work at different levels and in contradictory ways. David Palmer has shown, for instance, how much qi gong activities were not repressed, but were actually supported by the party at various levels.26 The same is true for Chinese medicine. After the liberalization of the economy local, regional, and national authorities work in different ways in their relations to religious activity.27 Labor sociologists have pointed out how interconnected the formal and the informal are and speak of processes of formalization and informalization.28 A general point made in these studies is how unreliable statistics are in assessing economic activity. This is a fortiori true for the religious market, and this raises doubts about the usefulness of American sociological models that are so heavily dependent on statistics for the Chinese situation. More, in general, however, one needs to reflect on the conceptual difficulties in distinguishing different sectors of social life through the use of categories like state, market, and religion. We are already aware that the category of religion has a complex genealogy in Western history and has been applied to China (and elsewhere) not to empirically describe but to conceptually produce a particular social field. Sociologists of religion may learn from their colleagues working on Chinese entrepreneurship and small businesses after liberalization who repeatedly caution for sharp demarcations of the boundaries of the state and the (free) market. Yang’s structural distinction of red, black, and gray markets does not pay attention to the processes of (in) formalization that are part of the dynamic of a range of actors including state actors. Yang also insists on the importance of reviving Confucianism as a moral resource. He suggests that “at this critical moment of

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historical development of Confucianism, we must think over carefully which direction it should take in order to avoid going onto the wrong path and to provide security to the people and make the country prosperous.”29 The right path is, according to Yang, to make it into a civil religion, like American civil religion, as described by Robert Bellah.30 Moreover, those who want to promote Confucianism should stress “the notion of the transcendental Tian and to affirm the inclusive spirit in the history of China.” Finally, instead of seeing Christianity as an antagonistic rival, Yang argues that one should see it as an important resource from which one can learn, since Christianity is also a resource for national morality. Confucian tradition has it that intellectuals and academics in China are close to the state. Also those academics who work outside China but would like to have some influence in China try to find ways to network with government advisors and state projects. Since China does not have an open public sphere it is difficult to play a role in informing a reading public. While in the past intellectuals worked within Marxist ideology, today there is a burgeoning effort by intellectuals inside and outside China to promote Confucianism as an alternative to stagnant Marxist ideology. The so-­called Boston Confucianists, inspired by the Harvard–Beijing University philosopher Tu Wei-­ming, also try to promote Confucianism on the Chinese market, both in and outside Mainland China. For instance, the political philosopher Daniel Bell, who teaches at Tsinghua University in Beijing, relates ideas developed in the context of communitarianism to Confucian traditions and sees some positive social morality coming out of these traditions for contemporary Chinese society.31 Since Confucianism is often seen as a form of secularism one needs to ask the question, what is Confucianism today? Let us examine briefly the widespread idea that China is a Confucian society.32 In the context of an assumed worldwide religious revival we seem witness to what many observers call “the revival of Confucianism.” President Hu Jintao and other Chinese leaders

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have reevaluated the Confucian tradition. After a long period in which the Communist Party attacked Confucianism as part of feudal society, which came to a head in the Cultural Revolution, it now claims that harmony is the central value of Confucian teachings and that it is something to be cherished. Worrying about growing economic disparities amid rapid economic growth, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) focuses on Confucian harmony as a form of societal consensus and solidarity. For the first time in 66 years the party organized a lavish worship ceremony at Tianjin’s Confucius Temple in November 2004. In the town of Qufu, the birthplace of Confucius, the official ceremony of commemorating his birthday has since 2004 become an important public ritual, broadcast live on state television. The Ministry of Education is encouraging numerous courses in Confucian culture by establishing Confucius Institutes all over the world following the model of the Goethe Institute or the British Council.33 But what is being revived and whether it is secular or religious remains very unclear. Political attempts to make Confucianism the secular morality of Chinese civilization today are historically similar to debates at the end of the Qing Empire to make Confucianism a national religion (guojiao). Both state officials and major intellectuals were involved in this project, but it is precisely the intellectualism and distance from popular belief that has prevented making Confucianism into something akin to Japanese state Shintoism before World War II. The attempts to transform Confucian traditions into a civil, national religion were interesting as a form of social engineering, but ultimately failed, largely because Confucian teachings could encompass Daoist and Buddhist teachings but not the social energy that local Daoist and Buddhist cults could mobilize. Although Confucianism can provide a legitimating ideology for state authoritarianism that enforces social harmony— as one sees, for example, in Singapore—its proponents face great difficulties in making it into a national religion. The current position of the Communist Party toward Confucianism is quite a departure from its long-­term secularist project.

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To be accused of being a Confucian was to be branded a reactionary feudalist and very dangerous in the early 1970s, and this was used against various leaders, including Lin Biao, Zhou Enlai, and Deng Xiaoping.34 But Confucianism with its civilizational morality has always been close to state reason. As such, it is much more palatable for communists than Buddhism and Daoism, to say nothing of the wide-­ranging category of popular religion. The liberalization of China from 1978 onward has also brought a liberalization of the religious field. It is very hard to assess the direction of developments today, since a century of persecution has severed the chains of oral and ritual transmission in many parts of the country and destroyed the lives and livelihood of clergy and therefore much of the infrastructure of religion. Building this up requires economic support that is mainly coming from tourism, since many of the shrines are in places of touristic interest. The rebuilding of religious infrastructure is thus related to new forms of consumption and will be closely dependent on them. In that sense the market is, obviously, an important aspect of religious change in China. At the same time, an analysis of the nature of the nation-­state and the support of the intellectual class for its promotion of national identity continues to be of primary importance when one tries to determine how secularism frames religion in China today.

Secularism in India Secularism in India has a number of elements in common with Chinese secularism, but the nature of caste hierarchy and of interethnic and intercommunal relations alters the meaning of these elements decidedly. In Hinduism Brahmans are the most important clerics, but anti-­clericalism has deep roots in Brahmanical thought itself. Priests who perform a religious service to the community and are paid for that in gifts are looked down upon by Brahmans who devote themselves to studying the Vedas. This strand of anti-­clericalism fueled many of the reforms of the large temples in South India in the twentieth century, in which powerful middle-­class laymen who had had an English

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education came to see their priests as ignorant and to demand that they be reeducated to learn proper Sanskrit and ritual performances.35 The Brahman caste as a whole had come under attack in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the rise of explicitly secularist movements, especially in South and West India. Jyotirao Phule (1827–1890) began a movement in Maharashtra against the alleged exploitation of low castes by Brahmans.36 E. V. Ramaswamy Naicker (1879–1973), also known as Periyar, founded a social respect movement in Tamil Nadu that became the basis of an anti-­Brahman Tamil nationalism. He connected his anti-­clericalism with a theatrical atheism that was expressed in publicly burning sacred books, such as the Sanskrit Ramayana. The sources of this anti-­clericalism that evolved in the case of Periyar into atheism were twofold: Christian missionaries had for a long time vilified Brahman priests for their rapacity and ignorance while trying to convert especially tribals and low castes to Christianity and away from Hindu culture, to which they were already marginal.37 This rhetoric was taken over by the anti-­Brahman movements, which were seeking a non-­ Brahman following. It was combined with racial and linguistic theories, developed by among others Max Müller, which distinguished the Aryan invaders from the indigenous low castes. Brahmans were then shown to be racially different from the Dravidian population of South India and were portrayed as exploiters of the indigenous peoples. Indian anti-­clericalism is different from Chinese anti-­clericalism because of the connection between the Brahman caste and Hinduism. It was the Brahman caste that came under attack, and Brahman priests were taken to be the symbols of that caste. Religious activities in Brahman temples that excluded other groups were no longer accepted as part of traditional hierarchy, but seen as forms of oppression. But both in China and in India the main issue was the introduction of modern egalitarianism in a hierarchical society and thus the connection between feudalism and religion. Scientism and rationalism in India are as much an element of secularism as in China. However, already in the nineteenth cen-

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tury Indian intellectuals did not emphasize the opposition between science and religion, but instead emphasized the scientific nature of indigenous traditions. Secularist attacks on traditional religion were rare, although attempts to purify religion from so-­ called superstition and to show the scientific foundations of religion were taken up by reformers in a number of protonationalist and nationalist movements. Rational religion, as a major current in these reform movements, offered a home to intellectuals who wanted to reflect on developments in science from Hindu traditions. A good example is J. C. Bose (1853–1937), a renowned physicist and plant physiologist, whose work on electrical waves and on plant consciousness was animated by attempts to understand the unity of nature from the perspective of the Hindu philosophical school of Advaita Vedanta, in which Bengali intellectuals had been trained.38 The social network formed by such scientists and Hindu reformers like Swami Vivekananda shows how the development of scientific and religious thought was interwoven. Philosophers like Henri Bergson and Aurobindo embraced Bose’s vitalistic science eagerly. While Chinese intellectuals also found rationality and science in some religious traditions, especially in the field of medicine, there is a much stronger sense than in India that progress can be made only by separating science from magic and by destroying magic. While secularism as a political project in India is of limited importance, secularity of the state is central. The colonial state was professedly neutral toward religious divisions in society. The British in India were deeply concerned with projecting an image of transcendent neutrality in order to be able to rule. At least partially they were successful in doing this, since Indians today often see dharma-­nirapeksata, the indigenous term indicating the neutrality of the state as a distinctive character of Indian civilization rather than a colonial invention. Sometimes, for example by Gandhi, this neutrality is more positively interpreted as dharmasamabhava, the equal flourishing of religion under the state’s neutrality. After the Mutiny of 1857 the British were afraid to be seen interfering with the religious activities and sensibilities of

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their Indian subjects. This implied that the state had to hide its modernizing and secularizing interventions in society under a cloak of neutrality because it derived its legitimacy not from India but from a democratic process in Britain. This neutrality, however, is interpreted by Indian nationalists as forms of divide-­ and-­rule, especially in the area of Hindu-­Muslim relations. The state is thus condemned as pseudo-­secular, an argument that is later revived by Hindu nationalists against the postcolonial government. The postcolonial state derives its legitimacy from democratic elections in India and is thus even less able than its predecessor, the colonial state, to cover up its interventions in society and religion, such as the Temple Entry Acts (opening Brahman temples for untouchables) and the abolition of untouchability, as neutral. Since the colonial state is secular in the sense of being neutral toward religion, this gives wide scope to connecting religion with anti-­colonial nationalism. Religion is relatively free from state control and thus an arena from which the state can be attacked. Anti-­colonial nationalism in India draws deeply from religious sources, both ideological and organizationally. One can distinguish between a moderate, pluralist vision of the Indian nation and a radical vision that wants to promote a singular religion as the core of national identity. The pluralist vision is the ideological foundation of India as a secular state. It is opposed to the radical vision of Muslims separatists who founded Pakistan as a “homeland for Muslims” as well as from the radical vision of Hindu nationalists who continue to fight for a Hindu India. The moderate vision has been always part of the secular ideology of the Congress Party, a party that ruled India for the larger part of postindependence history.39 The Congress Party found itself confronted with two major problems. First, Hindu-­Muslim antagonism was a major threat to the creation of an Indian nation. This problem became more and more crucial in the struggle for independence, and secularism was conceived as the answer to it. Second, Indian society was marked by one of the most pervasive systems of inequality

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in the world, and which was religiously sanctioned by Hindu traditions. Again, secularism was conceived as an answer to this. While state interventions were recognized as crucial to the transformation of Indian society into a modern nation, Congress leaders agreed that large-­scale violence should be avoided. A major argument in developing Indian secularism was made by Gandhi when he made a plea for nonviolence and tolerance. However, except for a brief period, Gandhi was not officially a member of Congress leadership, but a moral exemplar outside of party politics. Gandhi’s moral example could be an element in producing secular tolerance, but such an example is not enough for the daily business of regulating social life. After independence the modern state could not refrain from intervening in society.40 Critics of Congress secularism today, such as T. N. Madan and Ashis Nandy, have understood the rise of communalism in India as a backlash against a long-­term campaign of an interventionist state to impose secularism on a fundamentally religious society.41 While their emphasis on state power is correct, their criticism of Nehru’s secularism is fundamentally mistaken. Nehru’s position was that the state should not attempt to make India a mono-­ cultural society in which the minorities would feel alienated. Pragmatically Congress adopted the role of neutral arbiter of religious difference, just as colonial administrators had done. Separate civil codes for Hindus and Muslims that had developed in the colonial period were continued in secular India. Potential sources of violent conflict, such as the disputed site of Babar’s Mosque in Ayodhya, had to be controlled and managed, rather than fundamentally solved. In fact it is this policy to which Hindu Nationalist parties like the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP; Indian People’s Party) today objects. It does not claim that an anti-­religious secularism has dominated Indian society, but that it has been a pseudo-­secularism that has given religious minorities special benefits in order to get their votes. So it does not argue that secularists had launched an attack on the religious traditions of Indian society, but that it had left minority tradi-

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tions intact for electoral reasons. The BJP claims to be secular, but it has launched campaigns to destroy mosques that had been built on Hindu sites and rebuilt Hindu temples, claiming that the only traditions that had to be dealt with by the secular state were those of the minorities. Nehru’s cautious but sometimes ambivalent policies toward multiculturalism and the ways they came to be challenged in the 1970s and 1990s show the importance of the state.42 The limitations of a secular Congress that tries to avoid violence in its interventions in society are clear from the failure to get rid of untouchability and caste hierarchies. Ambedkar, one of the great untouchable leaders of Congress and architect of India’s secular constitution, came to the conclusion that the secular, liberal state could not solve the problems of untouchability that were deeply embedded in codes of honor and respect. While early in his career he demonstrated his stance against Hinduism by burning Hindu law books in public, at the end of his life he decided to convert to Buddhism in order to escape from the Hindu caste system.43 In a very original manner he came to grips with the dualism of redistribution (class) and recognition (caste). His conversion shows that religious conversion can address these issues sometimes better than conversion to secular ideologies like socialism or liberalism.

Chinese Atheism and Indian Secularism While sociologists have attempted (with little success) to apply American market theories to the study of Chinese religion and secularism, this has not been tried in the Indian case. The fact that Indian society has not been secularized cannot be explained by market incentives. While in India religion is ubiquitous and not declining, anti-­religious secularism is rare. Although there is antagonistic competition between religious communities (Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, and Christians primarily), this is not about “market share” in a religious market. Different from the United States the secular state and communal legal arrangements make

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religion not a matter of rational choice in a free market, but a matter of socialization. Conversion to another religion in India is highly problematic and proselytization strictly circumscribed. The sensitivity of conversion is the effect of a colonial history of Christian missionization, but has been extended to Muslim conversion.44 Secularisms in India and China are products of the imperial encounter. Certainly, there are precolonial traditions of anti-­ clericalism and anti-­superstition in India and China. These do not disappear, but they are transformed into secularisms by the imperial encounter. In China the state has always been suspicious of popular religious movements that might threaten state control, but it has also constantly pacified and incorporated local cults within state-­sanctioned practices by giving imperial titles to local gods.45 Popular religious movements could exhibit millenarian features, especially in response to famines or upheavals in society. A recent example is the Taiping movement in the mid-­nineteenth century, which was a major challenge to the Qing and could be suppressed only with great effort. Chinese secularism in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries is a continuation of the long history of state attempts to control popular religion, but only becomes secularism by the new focus on progress, development, and rationality. The difference is that the modern state does not wait to respond to challenges by popular movements, but intends to proactively remove superstition from society and control the morality of recognized religions. The secularist destruction of the infrastructure of religion in China during the 1950s and 1960s, especially the taking away of landed property from temples and monasteries and the disbanding of clergy, has had long-­term effects on the reproduction of religious life that are only now being studied. In many parts of China temples and shrines are being rebuilt, but it is unclear how religious traditions are being studied and developed. Much of the communist efforts in the field of religion today go into the control of unregulated Christian house churches. Some ideologues feel that Buddhism and Daoism, as Chinese religion,

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should be promoted as a bulwark against especially evangelical Protestantism.46 At the central level of national policy Confucianism is being promoted as a civil religion that supports social harmony in the face of growing social and economic inequality. As long as there is no grassroots support for such a project it is unclear how Confucianism can fulfill the role of civil religion, and the history of these attempts shows the likelihood of its failure. Secularism as a political project to remove religion from society or to marginalize it can hardly be found in India. The anti-­Brahman movements are not against religion per se, although there have been some atheists in the leadership. These movements are against the cultural hegemony of Brahmans in Indian society. While the communist movement has been strong in parts of India, especially Bengal and Kerala, it has never had the power to attack religious institutions. Anti-­ religious secularism in India is marginal, but secularity of the state is central and supported by a form of secularism that wants to support inter-­religious tolerance. In India the colonial state had to perform secular neutrality toward religion for fear of widespread rebellion. Certainly, one could argue that secularity always implies neutrality, as in the separation of state and church. However, colonial neutrality is different to the extent that the colonial state places itself outside the political process in the colony, while being legitimated by the political process in the metropolis. Indian secularity is a colonial secularity in the first place. It avoids an outright attack on the beliefs and customs of the natives, while masking its fundamental interventions in society by cloaking them in neutrality and by seeking scriptural legitimation in the classical traditions of India. In doing so, the colonial authorities received the support from native elite intellectuals who were vigorously debating the scriptural authorization of local practices. The postcolonial state inherits the institutionalized forms of secular neutrality from the colonial state (for example, in the judiciary), but had to derive its legitimacy from the political pro-

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cess in Indian society. India’s diversity in terms of caste and religious community (primarily the new political categories of Hindu and Muslim) produced a certain kind of neutrality of the postcolonial state that is constantly suspected of favoritism for one group or the other and is thus under scrutiny of opposing groups. Charles Taylor addresses this diversity by referring to Rawls’s famous concept of “overlapping consensus” and by emphasizing the importance of secularism for democracy in internally diverse societies.47 However, historically, it is the political process that led to independent India’s democracy that has pitted religious communities against each other. Secularity in postcolonial India cannot simply be understood as “overlapping consensus,” but rather as a variety of responses to this political process of religious mobilization for political gains. One of those responses is a specifically Indian form of secularism that is a movement not to destroy religion but to promote toleration. In China reformers within the Qing dynasty and later in the republic do not have to perform neutrality toward religion while introducing Western notions and calling upon the state to enforce them in society. The fact that Chinese reformers can call for the destruction of temples and that this is actually carried out is almost unimaginable in India. An exception is the so-­called Babri Masjid, a mosque built by the Mughal emperor Babar in the sixteenth century in Ayodhya in North India, which was destroyed by a Hindu nationalist movement in 1992 because it had allegedly been built on the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama. This destruction led to widespread fighting between Hindus and Muslims and a great loss of life. It was not a secularist attack on religion, but a communalist attack on Muslims that could happen only because of deliberate inaction of a state that was more and more under electoral pressure from Hindu nationalists. It has been the single most important political event in Indian politics since the 1980s, which shows how much this iconoclasm differs from the wholesale assault on religion in China.48

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While the call for open access to temples for untouchables in the so-­called Temple Entry Agitation in the 1920s and 1930s did create political unrest and was of importance in challenging caste hierarchy, it was access to religion rather than destruction of it that was the issue. In India religion becomes the basis of resistance to the colonial state, and it has to be reformed and modernized in order to make it part of the morality of the modern nation-­state. The Indian discussion then is primarily about reforming Indian traditions, not about destroying them. In fact Indian nationalists want to defend their religious traditions, since they suspect that the Christian British want to destroy them. The Indian reformers who wanted to destroy Brahmanism as a form of oppression were certainly important but they did not play a central role in the nationalist movement. In fact their political position derives precisely from their social marginality as untouchables, as in the case of Ambedkar, or from their regional marginality, as in the case of the Tamil leader Periyar. They may burn sacred texts but certainly not temples. Secularisms are emancipatory projects and as such can be violent. The transition to modernity is obviously violent—it does violence to traditional arrangements and therefore the relation of secularism to violence is crucial. The secularist mobilization of social energies in China is very violent, discursively and practically. Ironically, the Maoist secular utopia was strikingly millenarian and thus reintroduced the traditional elements that it wanted to eradicate, but in another configuration. In India the secularist utopia, as is clearest in Gandhi’s campaigns, is almost the opposite. The democratization that the nationalist movement demanded not only asked for the removal of colonial rule, but also created a growing political antagonism between Hindus and Muslims. Nonviolence was the center of Gandhi’s attempts to create a secular India. It was not only the emancipation from the colonial oppressor that had to be nonviolent, but even more the emancipation from inequality and communal opposition that had to be nonviolent.

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The Chinese and Indian cases show us that secularism is not simply anti-­religious in these societies, although there are anti-­ religious elements in it, but that it attempts to transform religions into moral sources of citizenship and national belonging. The masses have to be reeducated to realize their emancipatory potential, and religions can be used as state apparatuses to perform this reeducation. One does not have to smash temples to build schools; one can also use temples to educate the people, as was traditionally the case in most societies. Secularity frames religions that are nationalized and modernized. While religion is an important element in the production of national imaginaries, it can never be entirely contained by the secularist frame. It may produce linkages outside the nation-­state, as world religions do; it may produce alternative visions of the moral state and thus become dangerous for secularist control, as in millenarian movements, such as the Falun Gong, that have emerged in China after the demise of Maoism. Precisely because secularism is a project and not a process it is bound to be incomplete and to produce contradictions, such as religious utopianism in movements that aim at the destruction of religion.

Chapter 7

The Spiritual Body In the current phase of globalization there is a fast spread of forms of evangelical and charismatic Christianity as well as pietistic Islam. While much attention is given to the rise of these so-­called fundamentalist forms of world religion, the globalization of Asian forms of spirituality has escaped analytical scrutiny. One reason for this is the false assumption that the spiritual is not political. Eastern spirituality is often perceived to transcend secular reality as well as the problems of institutionalized religion. In this chapter I will discuss a few Indian and Chinese instances of spirituality that are clearly political. In most places in the world one can follow courses in yoga and qi gong (气功). These forms of Indian and Chinese spirituality have gone global, but they are still connected to national identities. In fact, there is no contradiction between the global and the national, since the national is directly connected to a global system of nation-­states. They are often described in the literature that accompanies such training courses as the Indian or Chinese “gifts to the world,” but that does not mean that the givers have given them away and thus lost them. They are complex products of the national construction of “civilization” and are at the same time aspects of cosmopolitan modernity. However transcendent they claim to be as forms of spirituality, they are deeply embedded in political and economic history. Historically, yoga is an ancient system of breathing and body exercises that was reformulated at the end of the nineteenth century as part of Hindu nationalism, but simultaneously as a form of Eastern spirituality that was alternative to Western, colonial materialism. Today it is embedded in global ideas of health and good living, but also in modern management practices and corporate culture. Historically, in China there are several forms of exercise, including

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breathing, that are called qi gong, and that develop skills (gong) to use the vital energy (qi) present in the body and connect it to the natural world of which the body is a part. Like yoga, they are part of ancient systems of thought and practice, but have been reformulated in recent history and made part of national heritage. Whatever the connections of these exercises in yoga or qi gong with theologies, cosmologies, and broader discursive traditions the central issue for those who participate in them is to learn what the exact practice is and what the benefits of that practice are. Much of the study of such practices, like Eliade’s classical treatise, is devoted to their phenomenology and historical connection to textual traditions.1 Especially the focus of these traditions on breathing as a life-­force connects them, in a phenomenological sense, to an even wider range of cultural practices and ideas, such as those surrounding pneuma (Greek for “breath”) in the Christian traditions where breath and spirit are connected. The breathing exercises of yoga and qi gong are paradigmatically spiritual if one comes at them from a Christian tradition, as phenomenologists invariably do. What the spirit is, however, depends on hermeneutic traditions that are not easily translatable in a universal language. One can, for example, point out that there is an etymological connection between the Sanskrit concept atman and the German word for breathing, atmen, but that does not mean that Germans understand breathing as connected to atman. Also one cannot assume that there is a direct translatability of atman into (Christian) “soul,” although this is the common translation. However, it is clear that Hindu, Buddhist, Daoist, Christian, and also Muslim (especially Sufi) traditions have developed techniques of the body that center on breathing and that these traditions have elaborate theories about how these techniques can produce forms of understanding (enlightenment) and of improved living. The similarities and differences between breathing techniques and their mental and physical effects are also the subject of much debate among the different schools that propagate certain styles of yoga and qi gong. Practitioners of these schools are adamant

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about the significance of such differences in terms of their efficacy. Neither the phenomenological approach nor the practitioner’s perspective (the native or often not so native, but transnational point of view) are crucial to the problem I want to address. I want to compare yoga and qi gong not in the first place as breathing techniques or spiritual exercises, but as historical and political phenomena that are intimately related to the construction of modernity. I do not claim, however, that one can just sidestep theories of agency that are embedded in these techniques and exercises, since indeed they are fundamental not only to their mental and bodily efficacy, but also to their social efficacy. It is precisely the importance of these techniques in religious traditions that makes them central in social and political history. The operative term here is “power,” since these traditions claim that these techniques provide the practitioner with knowledge, but also with power to act on the world, both in terms of visible and invisible forces. That power also endows founders and leaders of communities that teach these techniques with a charisma that enables them to attract followers. It is that power, however ideologically understood, that gives access to the social and political efficacy of these techniques and the movements of practitioners. The fact that religious movements, dealing with spiritual matters and body exercises—in short, with spiritual transcendence attained through the body—are a central part of modern political and economic history may confound those who believe in a sharp division between the religious and the secular. Such a secular view of modernity can be found in India and China as much as in other parts of the world. For example, in January 2001 I saw in one of India’s English-­language newspapers a photograph of an Indian holy man who had taken a bath in the sacred confluence of Yamuna and Ganges at Allahabad during the Kumbh Mela, a bathing festival occurring once in twelve years and attracting more than 20 million pilgrims. The caption read: “This sadhu has taken his bath at the Kumbh and now he is off again to the Himalayas.” At one level this can be taken to express

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the essence of renunciation—namely, that its proper place is outside of normal society, in a cave in the Himalayas. At another level one can take this also to express the normative view of modern, English-­reading Indians, that renouncers do not belong to modern, secular society and thus should be confined to their Himalayan caves. These oppositions between the world and the transcendent also haunt the sociological theory of renunciation. Louis Dumont in his influential essay on world renunciation posits the caste society of the householder as a holistic universe squarely opposite to the world of the renouncer who is conceived as the individual outside of society.2 Of course, Max Weber emphasizes a transition from tradition to modernity when, in his analysis of the emergence of Protestant modernity, he makes a famous distinction between inner-­worldly asceticism and outer-­worldly asceticism.3 The latter belongs to the grand religious systems of ancient civilizations, like Hinduism and Buddhism, while the former is central to the emergence of capitalist modernity. In contrast to these views that focus on the internal development of these civilizations and their essential differences I argue throughout this book for an interactional perspective, focusing on the interaction of Indian and Chinese nationalisms with imperial modernity. These great traditions of renunciation and spiritual exercise in India and China are transformed and reformulated in various political, economic, and cultural encounters with Western powers. Such interactions are a major element in the formulation of global and national modernities in Asia and Europe that simultaneously both resemble and differ from each other. Basic to these imaginaries is the opposition between Eastern spirituality and Western materialism. This opposition is part of exceptionalism on both sides of the equation. It explains the exceptional material success of Western modernity and the material defeat of the colonized societies in the East as well as the philosophical shallowness of that success in face of the exceptional richness of Eastern traditions. Ideological movements like anti-­imperialism, nationalism, pan-­Asianism, spiritualism, but

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also scholarly developments like orientalist philology and comparative religions all partook in this basic opposition. It is within this broad context that the place of Indian and Chinese spiritual movements in global and national modernity can be understood. As argued in chapter 2 this entails awareness that terms like “religion” and “spirituality” are not simple categories that can be innocently used for translating Indian and Chinese terms but are deeply embedded in the genealogies of modernity that one is trying to grasp. It is precisely spirituality’s participation in secular, modernist culture that produces its aura of traditional authenticity. In this chapter I illustrate these arguments by comparing contemporary Indian and Chinese spiritual movements.

Spiritual Nationalism Yoga has a long history and a foundational Sanskrit source in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, which were probably composed around the fifth century CE. Breathing techniques as well as other bodily exercises were developed as part of religious disciplines that also entailed image worship and asceticism. These religious disciplines were taught by spiritual masters or gurus who, more often than not, had taken a vow of celibacy and were connected to spiritual lineages in which knowledge was transmitted. Celibacy in connection with other forms of renunciation has a number of sociological consequences. Celibacy replaces ideas of natural kinship and reproduction with those of spiritual kinship and reproduction. This is immediately apparent in the case of the Ramanandi ascetics, among whom I have done fieldwork in the 1980s, and who use kinship terms like parivar (family) and bhai (brother) to refer to the ties between celibate initiates of one guru. They refer to the initiation-­formula as the seed-­mantra (bija-­mantra), mimicking natural reproduction rather closely.4 In such a way an alternative social network emerges that can be used for all kinds of purposes. Such a network is a reasonable conduit for pooling resources over a longer period of time,

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which explains the active role of Hindu ascetics in money-­ lending over a long historical period. Since the status considerations that are central to marriage practices in hierarchical societies are of less relevance to the ascetic networks, they tend to be more open, more mobile, both spatially and socially, and thus quite amenable to particular economic activities, such as long-­distance trading and soldiering, in which a sedentarized, agrarian population finds it more difficult to engage. The opportunities for Hindu ascetics to engage in long-­distance trade, money-­lending, and soldiering declined drastically during the eighteenth century owing to to the transformations brought by the colonial regime.5 The Sannyasi rebellions at the end of the eighteenth century, immortalized by the famous nineteenth-­ century novel Anandamath (1882) by one of Bengal’s greatest thinkers, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, are a clear expression of this changing landscape. In precolonial India military groups of ascetics developed ascetic practices, techniques of breathing, as well as fighting techniques. The colonial state banished all marauding groups that could challenge its monopoly of violence, and consequently warrior asceticism came to an end, especially after the defeat of the Sikhs in the Punjab.6 Ascetic violence has never been totally eradicated from the Indian religious scene, as shown by the Khalistan movement in the Punjab for example, but it has definitely become more marginal to it in the colonial period. In nineteenth-­ century urban religiosity a number of new elements came into play. First, there was the challenge of Christian missionaries, who claimed that Christianity is not only the true religion, but also argued that Hinduism is a backward religion. A number of movements responded to this challenge by arguing that Hinduism is not only spiritually more true than Christianity, but also modern (as opposed to backward), though in dire need of reform. It is in this context that traditional practices such as yoga and martial arts became part of an urban religious lifestyle. Western discourse on “Eastern spirituality” was appropriated by Indian religious movements in the second half of the nineteenth

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century. To be useful in the contestation of Christian colonialism the translation of Hindu discursive traditions into “spirituality” meant a significant transformation of these traditions. Yoga was embedded in a range of ascetic practices that were discursively understood in a variety of competing theologies or metaphysical arguments. An important part of this discursive universe was called “tantric.” Tantra is said to contain right-­hand techniques of worship of the Mother Goddess and left-­hand techniques that go beyond societal norms of correct behavior, such as ritualized sexual intercourse and the use of intoxicants. Since these are esoteric (secret) practices, it is hard to assess what is really done and what is only suggested. A major practitioner of tantric yoga and worship of the Mother Goddess was Rama­ krishna, a priest at the Dakshineshwar Kali Temple in Calcutta. Rama­krishna, rather typically for a Bengali ascetic, experimented with Tantra as well as with Vaishnava bhakti (devotion) and would get into trance when possessed by the Mother Goddess. He had an unconsummated marriage with Sarada Devi, who he saw as an incarnation of the Divine Mother. Rama­ krishna became famous in the English speaking middle class of Calcutta when he converted the leading intellectual Keshab Chandra Sen from Christianity to his form of Hindu syncretism. After the publication of a biography of Rama­krishna (1879) by Pratap Chandra Mukherjee (who attended the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago as the representative of the Brahmo Samaj), Western scholars of Hinduism like Max Müller and Romain Rolland spread his fame as an “authentic Indian saint” to the West. During his study of Western philosophy at Calcutta University Narendranath Dutta (later known as the sadhu, or “holy man,” Vivekananda) came to know of Rama­krishna, visited him, and became his disciple.7 A major step toward the modern understanding of Hindu beliefs and practices was Swami Vivekananda’s creation of yoga as the Indian science of supra-­consciousness. Yoga was now made into the unifying sign of the Indian nation and that not only for national consumption, but for the entire world to con-

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sume. This was a new doctrine, although Vivekananda emphasized that it was ancient “wisdom.” The newness of it is immediately clear from his use of the term raja-­yoga as denoting the classical yoga of kings, a term that is nowhere found in the texts attributed to Patanjali.8 It is an understanding of yoga that focuses on meditation or spirituality rather than on the body and disciplines to acquire these powers, as I encountered them in my fieldwork among the Ramanandis. What I find important in Vivekananda’s construction of yoga as the core of Hindu “spirituality” is that it is devoid of any specific devotional or ascetic content that would involve, for example, temple worship or ascetic exercises that create supernatural powers (siddhis) and thus imply a theological and ritual position in sectarian debates. It is also cleaned of any reference to sexuality or so-­called tantric experiments, although Vivekananda’s teacher Rama­krishna was using them. The success of this purification for devotees of Rama­krishna in his Vivekananda translation is shown by the great controversy in Bengal around Jeffrey Kripal’s psychoanalytical study of Rama­krishna’s alleged homoeroticism.9 This very vagueness together with “modern Indian puritanism” makes Rama­krishna’s tantrism available as a universalized “spirituality.” Vivekananda’s puritanism was a direct product of Victorian morality and an attempt to show that Hindu traditional practices were not “immoral.” Today’s Indian responses to psychoanalytical writings on Hinduism seem to show a continuous sensitivity for “the world’s opinion” about the morality of Hinduism. This is quite understandable as in continuity with reactions to missionary attacks on Hinduism, but it also serves a nationalist misreading of Hindu traditions that deal with the great theme of asceticism and eroticism. What Vivekananda tried to create is an unsexed spiritual body. His emphasis was persistently on devotion and asceticism with a total denial of possession by the female deity and the gendered practices of both Vaishnava emotionalism and tantric experimentation. It is the philosophical texts of the Vedanta that inspired him in his search to realize the divine. All this fitted per-

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fectly with Victorian morality. In some parts of the British imagination India stood for uncontrolled and overwhelming eroticism, of which one can hear echoes in E. M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India (1924). Vivekananda tried his hardest to present a completely desexualized picture of the Indian spiritual body to satisfy both his foreign audience and the desire for respectability among the Bengali middle classes. The authenticity of Rama­krishna as an Indian spiritual leader was established when Friedrich Max Müller wrote an essay about him, “A Real Mahatman,” in the periodical Nineteenth Century (1896). Max Müller was of course supportive of Vivekananda’s project to make Rama­krishna the saint of Indian Vedanta philosophy, despite the fact that Rama­krishna had very little to do with that philosophy. He went on to publish a short book Rama­krishna: His Life and Sayings in 1898, two years before his death, based on the sanitized materials provided by Vivekananda. Müller seems to have gone to this length of authenticating Vivekananda’s project mainly to combat the attempts of Madame Blavatsky’s theosophy to claim access to “real Mahatmans.” What we have here is a co-­production of Indian and British moral writing that attempts to marginalize the sexed body in Indian spirituality, a fascinating (though flawed) endeavor. Another major project in universalizing yoga was quite different in that it involved an emphasis not on meditation and spirituality, but on bodily postures (asanas) in what came to be called hatha-­yoga (“forceful yoga”), but again devoid of the traditional emphasis on supernatural powers. Joseph Alter comments on this shift away from meditation that it “slips past spirituality and intellectual philosophy.”10 However, it is precisely in its scientific claims that this bodily practice follows a common trajectory of spirituality—namely, an alternative way of expressing the relation between body and spirit. The laboratory experiments of Swami Kuvalayananda, on which Alter focuses in his study, make us think of the scientific experiments with qi gong that we will examine later. Such experimentations assume an alternative, “Eastern” science that is rooted in bodily disciplines. The claim

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of being scientific was of central importance to nationalist interpretations of yoga, while the transnational adaptations of yoga have a different genealogy. International posture-­based yoga was first interpreted in the West as a form of entertainment in line with the fascination with contortionism and the tricks of magicians (miracle-­workers). This may be one of the reasons why Vivekananda deemed hatha yoga as unspiritual and not conducive to spiritual growth.11 Hatha yoga was packaged for Western audiences by figures like B.K.S. Iyengar, one of the most influential transnational yoga teachers from the 1950s onward. In its emphasis on the physical rather than the spiritual it became more and more part of alternative medicine within health systems that were dominated by biomedicine. Since an exponentially growing proportion of health issues have to do with a vaguely defined field of psychosomatic disease and the available treatments in biomedicine are problematic, there is wide scope for alternative medicine as well as alternative bodily disciplines and lifestyles.12 In the link with alternative medicine posture-­ based yoga in the West has moved from acrobatics to alternative science. In India, however, from the late nineteenth century yoga had been part of the nationalist response to attacks by colonial critics, including missionaries, on Indian physical culture and Indian (especially Bengali) physical weakness. While in Britain public schools promoted new sports and connected them to imperial superiority, including “muscular Christianity,” Indian nationalists needed to respond and bring physical culture out of the ascetic tradition of wrestling gymnasiums (akhada) and other ascetic practices into modern sports, but also into modern yoga that is both spiritual and physical. There was a new sense of physical and spiritual health under colonial rule. It is the health of the nation rather than the health of the individual that is central to Indian concerns. In India it is only with the rise of middle class consumption in the 1990s that individual psychological trouble and its treatment gained a growing audience. Before that there is little scope

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for Western understandings and treatments of psychosomatic disease. Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy are marginal fields in India, although they are available. The real development is in all kinds and forms of “Indian medicine,” such as Ayurveda and Unani, as well as in the common understanding that yoga is good for the mind and the body. Indian medicine is seen as belonging to the nation, which is currently reinforced by the possibility to patent it as Indian heritage, following international trends of trademarking and patenting.13 While Iyengar was the transnational prophet of posture yoga, Swami Sivananda (1887–1973), perhaps the most significant yoga guru in the twentieth century, put less emphasis on bodily discipline through hatha yoga, and was more of a follower of Vivekananda’s spirituality. His Divine Life Society, which he founded in 1936, has been one of the most important transnational spiritual movements, spreading yoga over the world. This was done by sending prominent disciples to various parts of the world and by publishing books in English that became best sellers.14 Lise McKean has shown the extent to which the idea of spirituality is even used in promoting national products, such as Indian handlooms and handicrafts.15 There seems to be no escape from the relentless marketing of India’s spirituality. Today yoga is a global phenomenon. It also increasingly finds followers in China, possibly because it lacks the political possibilities that the currently repressed qi gong was shown to have in the 1990s. A particularly interesting development in yoga is its alignment with the development of global capital. Since yoga was never seen as subversive by the state it became a recognized element in middle-­class religiosity. As such it followed the trajectories of this class that became more and more transnational in its orientation during the 1960s. Its older connection with nationalism was not thereby forgotten or marginalized but utilized in identity politics in the countries of immigration, especially the United States. Indian spirituality is something to be proud of since many non-­Indians are also attracted to it. The global reach of yoga can be best understood by the fact that its origins lie in

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an imperial modernity, mediated by the English language. From the English-­speaking world, with 13 million practitioners in the United States, however, yoga has spread to the rest of the world, making for 4 million yoga practitioners in Germany.16 In the 1960s yoga became part of the youth revolution that shook Western culture. Promoted by popular-­music groups like the Beatles Indian spirituality became a lifestyle element that could be commoditized and marketed in a variety of ways. In the West it became part of a complex of alternative therapies based on lifestyle and bodily exercise. In light of the therapeutic worldview that is part of contemporary global capitalism it has now also come back to India inflected by the new perceptions the urban middle class of Indian tradition. Because of the opening up of the market for Eastern spirituality not only yoga has benefited, but also a variety of Chinese spiritual exercises such as tai chi (taiji quan, 太极拳) and qi gong have gained a transnational market. A lack of religious specificity together with the claim to be scientific is crucial for both the nationalist and the transnational appeal of Vivekananda’s message. From Vivekananda’s viewpoint religion is based on reason, not belief. Yoga is legitimized as a scientific tradition in terms of rational criteria. An offshoot of this is that health issues could be addressed in terms of a national science of yoga. I would suggest that Vivekananda has developed a translation of Hindu traditions in terms that derive from the global production of “spirituality.” Vivekananda’s construction of “spirituality” and its relation with nationalism has had enormous impact on a whole range of thinkers and movements. It has influenced thinkers on India as different as Savarkar, Aurobindo, Gandhi, and Nehru, but it also had a huge impact on a great variety of Western “spiritual” movements, including the current New Age movement. It is a construction crucial to Hindu nationalism as well as global spirituality. That China does not have a cultural translator like Vivekananda can be at least partly explained by the fact that English language and literature was not a “mask of conquest” as it was

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in British India.17 But there are interesting parallels between the transformation of yoga and that of qi gong in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Qi gong (气功) are skills to exercise qi (气), to “cultivate and temper mind and body along their paths to enlightenment.” Qi is a central concept and can be translated as “breath,” a vital energy that animates both the body and the macro-­cosmos. It is close to the Indian concept of shakti. These bodily exercises are connected to conceptions of cosmology, of bodily health, of concentration of the mind, of meditation and quietness. Together they form part of traditions that date back at least to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, or the middle of the Ming dynasty. As in the case of yoga these traditions are variable and flexible. In fact one can say that we have here traditions of bodily exercise that can be connected to all kinds of understandings of spirituality and cosmic order. Like in India these understandings do not dichotomize mind and body and seek a transcendence of mortality. They also seek a balance of the male and the female principle (yin and yang) in the cosmos. In the Chinese case there is more emphasis on alchemical metaphors and experimentation with mineral substances than in India, but the idea that the body is a micro-­cosmos reflecting the macro-­cosmos is similar. Moreover, again as in yoga, there is a direct connection with health. Traditional Chinese medicine, a new production out of ancient traditions, has been strongly promoted by the state since the 1950s.18 Partly this promotion of Chinese medicine belonged to schemes to improve rural health with limited state resources, such as the “barefoot doctors,” integrating Western and Chinese medicine. But “traditional medicine” was also promoted in cities and among biomedical trained professionals. For instance, in 1959 the Shanghai College of Traditional Chinese Medicine was founded.19 It is remarkable that, as in the case of qi gong, the party-­state was not out to destroy these elements of “traditional China,” because they were seen as exemplifying “Chinese science.” As Judith Farquhar has pointed out, there are striking similarities between Chinese medical theory and methodology and “Chairman Mao thought,” for exam-

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ple in yin and yang theory on the one hand and dialectical reasoning on the other.20 Chinese traditional medicine has become far more successful in the rest of the world than Indian traditional medicine. Especially acupuncture and herbal medicine have found a large transnational audience that is also legally recognized in many states. It is especially the incorporation of Chinese medicine within “alternative medicine” that one can find today all over the world. In 1987 the World Federation of Acupuncture and Moxibustion Societies was established in Beijing with a total membership of more than fifty thousand physicians, and, as Volker Scheid reports, Beijing University of Chinese Medicine has an accredited five-­year degree program with Middlesex University in England.21 Such an incorporation of “traditional medicine” in modern medical systems, especially with the purpose of integrating Chinese and Western medicine, obviously greatly alter the traditional nature of medical expertise, treatment, and research. Breath control exercises were practiced in the name of a religion, a school of medicine or martial arts. That is why these exercises were developed and passed on by religious specialists who, like in the Indian case, were organized in religious networks of training and socialization, as in monasteries and other religious institutions. Again, as in India, these networks also developed martial arts and the bodily exercises were part of “internal boxing” that was seen as excellent preparation for “external boxing.” Kung fu (功夫) or wushu (武术) are forms of martial arts that have been developed in Buddhist and Daoist monasteries, such as Shaolin and Wudang. Taijiquan (太极拳) is the name of a form of internal (or shadow) boxing and is now commonly associated with qi gong. Spiritual and bodily exercises belonged to groups that in their very organization could be seen as militant. However, it seems that in China the imperial state regarded them much more as a threat to state control than in India. At least the official documents of the Chinese state refer to them as “heterodox cults” and forms of “White Lotus” (bailianjiao, 白蓮 教) opposition. There is therefore a long Chinese tradition to see

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these activities as threatening the order imposed by the state and its heavenly mandate. Historically, White Lotus was the name of a set of folk Buddhists lay practices that date back to the Song dynasty.22 They entailed certain breathing practices that often went with meditation and magical means to cure illness and to maintain health. This is connected with notions of universal salvation, the idea that most people, if not everyone, should be saved. Groups that sometimes rebelled against felt injustices perpetrated by central authority or landowners carried these traditions forward, and such protest tended to be messianic in nature. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there were dozens of such groups. There were probably millions if not tens of millions of people enrolled at one time or another in these sorts of religions. In some instances in the republican period they borrowed from the White Lotus complex the idea of the end of the world, the idea of universal salvation. Some of these groups became what Prasenjit Duara has called “redemptive societies” and added to their practices all sorts of charity works, famine relief, education, opium-­addiction cures, and women’s education.23 While these movements were earlier part of peasant culture, in the nineteenth century we find a growing middle-­class participation in these groups with the rise of the bourgeoisie. Martial arts became part of the response to the defeat of the Qing by the imperial powers. Being earlier part of monastic traditions they became now national heritage. The best example is the Boxer uprising (also known as the Righteous and Harmonious Militia, Yihetuan, 義和團, 1898–1901), which responded violently against the expansion of Christianity and imperialism. In the Boxer uprising, which was secretly supported by the Qing, secret societies were involved that used their martial techniques in attacks on Christian converts. Christian missionaries were seen as agents of imperialism. The Boxers saw themselves as defending Chinese civilization against the West. The failure of these religious movements to transform Chinese society and expel the foreign powers may have helped pave the

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way for the strongly secularist movements that followed them. On the other hand these movements have continued to fuel the nationalist imagination in many ways, including the 2004 movie House of Flying Daggers about the “Red Lanterns,” the female counterparts of the Boxers, by the famous director Zhang Yimou.24 The movie Fearless (2006), in which Jet Li plays the historical martial arts practitioner Huo Yuanjia, is also a deeply patriotic play on the heroism of Chinese martial traditions in the face of imperialist force (including that of Japan). Both in China and in India nationalism was partly a response to an aggressive Christian missionary project, but in India that project was, however indirectly, supported by a central colonial state, while in China imperialism, however important in the Opium Wars and in the dismantling of the Qing dynasty, was never fully in control of the state. Nationalists in India felt that within the colonial state they had to defend their religious institutions through reform. This produced the nationalization of yoga or the making of yoga into a national symbol of true Indian-­ness. In China intellectuals, building on the long statist distrust of folk traditions, chose to become truly secular nationalists. This is borne out by the May Fourth movement and by the attacks on religious institutions and practices during the republican period. Being truly secular did not prevent intellectuals from searching for authentic Chinese contributions to biomedicine. At the same time, as Rebecca Nedostup shows, the period of attacks on superstition is also the period of great upheaval, war, and uncertainty, producing death and ghosts in ways reminiscent of the upsurge in spirit beliefs during the American Civil War and World War I in Europe.25

Political Spirituality In China both in the republican period and in the communist regime that followed it science was the sign under which the nation and modernity were conceived. Although in 1917 Mao had written negatively about qi exercises as promoting tranquil-

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ity and passivity, arguing that he wanted to promote activity as essential for the survival of China, qi exercises did survive the attacks on traditionalism and feudalism by being aligned to science.26 In the 1950s qi exercises were more and more part of a state-­sanctioned medical science. In this way qi exercises came to be practiced by acknowledged physicians rather than by spiritual masters. Qi gong therapy was thus taken out of the realm of superstition into the realm of scientific clinics. Not only medical science but also physics and biology produced experiments focusing on the existence of qi. However, this scientific sanctification and purification of qi gong did not result in total state control. This is partly inherent in the fact that traditional Chinese medicine, while claiming to be “scientific,” simultaneously claims to transcend the limitations of “Western” evidence-­based science. At the same time it is a nationalist claim of a superiority of “Chineseness” that is difficult to attack by a state that promotes socialism with Chinese characteristics, as Deng Xiaopeng called it. Beyond the control of the state was the spontaneous qi gong craze of the 1980s in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. People started to do qi exercises everywhere, and to some extent this can be read as setting the body free from the constraints imposed by the state and signifying a transition to greater individual freedom and interaction. The state tried to channel this spontaneous outburst of qi gong activities into qi gong institutions and movements, but some of them, most notably the Falun Gong or Falun Dafa, as it was called later, turned out to be a real challenge for state control. On 25 April 1999, more than ten thousand Falun Gong adherents from all over China gathered around Zhongnanhai, the capital’s political heart, setting the stage for the most serious political upheaval since the Tiananmen prodemocracy student demonstrations of 1989. The reason for this gathering was to request from the government the official recognition of the Falun Dafa Research Association, the lifting of the ban on Li Hongzhi’s latest publications, and the release of Falun Gong practitioners detained during previous demonstrations. According to

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the People’s Daily (15 June 2000) the government never had forbidden the practice of normal exercises: “people have the freedom to believe in and practice any kind of qigong method, unless when people . . . use the banner of exercises . . . to spread superstition, create chaos and organize large scale gatherings which disturb social order and influence social stability.” Three months after the demonstration in Beijing, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China issued a circular that forbade members of the Communist Party to practice the Falun Dafa. Three days later, on July 22, the Ministry of Civil Affairs issued the decision to outlaw the Falun Dafa Research Association.27 What is the Falun Gong? It was founded by a man with the name Li Hongzhi, who was born, according to the authorities, on 7 July 1952, but according to his own autobiography, on 13 May 1951, which would be the date of birth of Sakyamuni, the Buddha, and which allows him to claim that he is a reincarnation of the Buddha. In 1991 he joined qi gong activities. In 1992 he started giving lectures to a growing audience, and in the following years he registered his Falun Gong association with the official China Society for Research on Qigong Science. This association is quite typical in its claim to be scientific, and connected to health, but it seems to go further in its moral teachings and connection to Buddhist and Daoist cosmology. It connects to the ancient idea that through physical qi exercises one also cultivates one’s moral character. There is a messianic streak in the teachings of Li Hongzhi with an emphasis on all kinds of evils that threaten the world (after the ban including the Communist Party) and the position of Li Hongzhi as savior. When the state cracked down on the Falun Gong it claimed that it had outnumbered the 55-­million-­strong Communist Party in April, but this was revised down to a mere 2 million in November of 1999. It is impossible to say how many followers have gone underground, but it is probably substantial. Moreover, the Falun Gong has become very active transnationally among diasporic Chinese communities, especially since its founder has fled China and

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lives in New York. In China the authorities attempted to stop most qi gong activities. Before that at least one in five urban Chinese had had direct exposure to qi gong in the 1990s (in an estimate by David Palmer), and it is difficult to imagine that it has disappeared without a trace. The rise in popularity of yoga in urban China may have to do with the disappearance of qi gong from the public eye. In India yoga and other spiritual disciplines of the body were part of embodied nationalism. Secular nationalists like Jawaharlal Nehru, after independence the prime minister of India, were convinced that the spirit of science had to be harnessed to the project of reindustrializing India. However, they did not see techno-­science as in itself solving the basic needs of life. It could only do so if supported by a morality superior to that available in colonialism. In The Discovery of India (1946) Nehru argued that Indian civilization possessed great moral resources that could help it to appropriate modern science for the common good.28 However, for him personally this did not translate itself in bodily practice of spirituality. Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi (1917– 1984; prime minister of India after her father’s death), however, had a yoga guru, Dhirendra Brahmachari (1924–1994), who is also supposed to have influenced her political decisions and was involved in shady arms trade transactions. The most important and impressive representative of modern spirituality in India (and arguably in the world) was Mahatma Gandhi, India’s political and spiritual leader in the struggle for independence. In his Hind Swaraj (1908) Gandhi launched a fundamental critique of modern civilization. In Gandhi’s view India could only be truly—that is, spiritually—independent if it would reject the violence of techno-­science and would locate “industry” within the tradition of artisanship. A strong element in this was the notion of “inner-­worldly” asceticism, a spiritual rejection of the materialism of Western (colonial) civilization. It is not that we do not have such voices in China, but they are quite marginal. Gandhi called himself a karmayogi, a man who practices the yoga of activity, in this way combining Mao’s rev-

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olutionary spirit and the ancient spiritual tradition of inner tranquility. Gandhi modernized and nationalized yoga by calling it “experiments with Truth.” Gandhi was also quite obsessed with public hygiene and public health as signs of national morality. In this he is as much influenced by Hindu bio-­moral thought about food (hot and cold) and its effect on one’s nature and actions as by Western bio-­moral thought on the benefits of vegetarianism as well as the effects of bathing.29 With Gandhi we truly have body politics in the sense that he was using his body as field of experimentation and as an exemplar for society to follow. From Vivekananda’s pioneering work in the nineteenth century many offshoots have emerged. One clear direction is the same as taken by the Chinese—namely, yoga mainly as a physical exercise (hatha yoga) and a health practice that can be experimented with by medical science. Yoga is seen to be extremely healthy for the body and for the mind. Another clear direction is the creation of a healthy, strong masculinity for the Hindu nation. This is primarily the field of martial arts, originally practiced in akhadas, which were originally the camping grounds of warrior ascetics. Like kung fu and wushu in China, wrestling (mallayuddha, pahalwani) developed out of ascetic practice into a national(ist) sport.30 Militant bodily discipline became a signature practice for the nationalist organization Rasthriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which was founded in 1925 by K. B. Hedgewar. The volunteers in this fiercely nationalist and anti-­Muslim organization were clad in khaki shorts and white shirts, resembling Baden-­Powell’s Boy Scouts. Atal Behari Vajpayee, prime minister of India and leader of the right-­wing Bharatiya Janata Party, was proud to be a member of the organization and remained a bachelor (in fact a celibate ascetic, sannyasin) in order to devote himself entirely to the service of the nation.31 The organization was banned in 1949 when a former member, Nathuram Godse, assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, because Gandhi had allegedly weakened the Hindu nation by “pampering” the Muslim population. The

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body politics that Gandhi had developed in order to unify the nation was rejected by the strongly masculinist, militant body politics of the extremely anti-­Muslim Hindu nationalists. The RSS and the related Vishwa Hindu Parishad have been organizing various spiritual leaders and their movements under a common nationalist platform. Politically, they are front-­ organizations of a nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, that had been able to rule India for ten years until the elections of 2004, when they were narrowly defeated. Clearly, the democratic system in India is able to give a wide berth to nationalist movements that promote traditional practices together with a political agenda. At the same time one needs to observe that such Hindu nationalist movements strive for an Indian utopia that leaves little space for Muslims and Christians and are deeply involved in widespread violence against minorities. It is this kind of violence in civil society that the Communist Party in general has been able to control by repression.

Indian and Chinese Body Politics The transformation of ancient disciplines of the body or disciplines of the self, as Marcel Mauss and Michel Foucault have called them, in Asia under the influence of the imperial encounter has made yoga and qi gong into signs of Indian and Chinese national tradition and modernity. One element of this complex story is that enlightened secular reason in the form of universal science is engaged by nationalism in various ways. Attacks on religious traditions that are the discursive foundations of disciplines of the self have been mounted with varying success both in India and in China. However, the idea that these traditions should conform to science as the authorizing discourse has had an enduring influence on them. Nevertheless, in both India and China a politics of civilizational difference has emerged that asserts a historical pride in one’s national civilization as an engagement with imperial projects. The claim that traditions were forms of superstition and signs of backwardness and that moder-

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nity had to be scientific could be responded to by a counter-­ claim that these traditions were in fact scientific when brought down to their very essence and purified from unnecessary (inauthentic) accretions. Especially in the human encounter with the frailties of the flesh like disease and death, medical science clearly has its limitations. It is thus particularly in concern for health that these practices come to compete with other forms of medicine, and are an alternative to Western medicine. Since such discomfort with medical bioscience is also a strong undercurrent in the Western world, claims to provide an alternative medicine, based on other traditions, is acceptable for many people in the world. In both India and China movements that propagate religious traditions and especially alternative utopias can have a political impact. While in India such movements became part of an in principle legitimate nationalist project, although some offshoots were delegitimized as “extremist” in the context of Hindu-­ Muslim violence during the partition, in China such movements were under constant attack from both the Kuomintang and the communists. The reason for this significant divergence can perhaps be found in precolonial and colonial histories of the Chinese and Indian polities. The Chinese imperial state had constantly fought peasant rebellions that were inspired by a religious cosmology, and Chinese intellectuals were socialized in a tradition of Confucian distrust of popular religion. The failure and bloodshed of two major religious rebellions in the nineteenth century further promoted the rejection of religion and the idea of secular science (Mr. Science, in the May Fourth movement’s personification of science) as an answer to China’s backwardness.32 In India, on the other hand, religious movements became gradually part of a spiritual resistance against imperial power and, as such, a major element in the formulation of anti-­colonial nationalism. It was in the 1980s during the liberalization of the Indian and Chinese economies under the impact of global capitalism that the energies of spiritual movements with an emphasis on the

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body were employed in galvanizing society. This is very clear in the Chinese case where liberalization first gave space to a spontaneous qi gong re (fever) and later to the rise of movements like Falun Gong that connect qi gong to older ideas of a moral and political nature. In India one can see the rise of a Hindu nationalism that rejects an earlier secular and multicultural project of the state by emphasizing Hindu spirituality and masculinity as the basis of Indian civilization, thereby excluding religious minorities. It is especially a new-­fangled urban religiosity that is interested both in yoga and in a strong nationalism that is respected in the world that supports this kind of politics. Indian spirituality was formulated by Vivekananda during a trip to Chicago and has been further developed in constant interaction with the rest of the world. When, starting after the United States opened up for immigration of professionals and students in 1965, highly educated members of the Indian middle class (especially doctors and engineers) migrated to the United States for medical and engineering jobs, they were confronted with a quite spectacular marketing of Indian spirituality in a market for health, physical exercise, and management practices to which their American environment asks them to respond. The most successful example of such marketing on the American market has been the work of the physician Deepak Chopra, who after having been trained in medicine in India and the United States became a follower of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s transcendental meditation. The new forms of spirituality, combining American self-­help and Indian wisdom, were brought back to India, where especially successful new movements like the Bangalore-­based Art of Living with Guru Sri Sri Ravi Shankar cater to a mobile, transnational class of business entrepreneurs. Especially interesting is the connection between qi gong and yoga (and other “spiritual practices”) on the one hand and management techniques and corporate human resource management on the other. As David Palmer points out, the internal administration of one of the most popular movements in the 1990s, the Zhonggong movement, was quite closely based on modern man-

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agement theory.33 Something similar is true for Sri Sri Ravi Shankar’s Art of Living yoga movement. One may note here that already at the end of the nineteenth century the theosophical movement had a philosophy and organization closely mapped on colonial bureaucracy with Masters of the Universe and a hierarchy of access for requests and petitions. While there is a need for organizational rationality also in charismatic movements that are based on the charisma of the leader, there is a deeper desire for hierarchical authority and order of command expressed in these spiritual movements. Most important, however, are the “technologies of the self,” including so-­called soft skills, that are developed in the information-­based “new economies” in correspondence with ideas and practices developed in spiritual movements. Such soft skills are required for managerial and entrepreneurial activities that are now characteristic for the professional class in the global workplace. They are different from the technical diploma-­based skills of the older industries in that they emphasize constant innovation and self-­improvement in an unstable and unpredictable global workplace. The stress that is related to the constant transformation of the workplace is addressed in these new disciplines of the self. Work itself is conceptualized as a form of self-­realization.34 But instead of seeing the world as something that has to be renounced to gain self-­ realization, the world has to be embraced and spiritual techniques of the body can be acquired to be able to do that. There is significant overlap between the managerial and human resources literature (mainly originating from the United States) and self-­help books that are an amalgam of “Eastern” spirituality, New Age, and psychotherapy. The new forms of global capitalism seem to connect seamlessly to the new forms of spirituality that are based on a set of translations of much older practices. It is not that capitalism creates these forms of consciousness and practice, but it is striking how spirituality is embedded in imperial and nationalist political movements, but at the same time is flexible enough to attach itself to the culture of new capitalism as well as to the culture of new communism.

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There can be little doubt that the “opening up” of China for global capital and the dismissal of a large number of institutions that were connected to state socialism was connected to the spectacular rise of qi gong activities, a veritable qi gong re (fever). Similarly, in India the success of a Bangalore-­based movement like the Art of Living is closely connected to the emergence of the information technology (IT) industry as one of the vital elements of India’s “opening up” for the world market. China’s isolation between 1950 and 1980 has ensured a belated entry of Chinese spirituality on this market, but nevertheless it is quickly catching up with products like tai chi and qi gong. In the Chinese case there is a stronger connection with sports and especially martial arts, which are also promoted by Hong Kong and mainland movies. In both India and China one finds a similar appropriation of spiritual traditions to cater to the newly emerging middle classes. These newly manufactured spiritualities have a tenuous relationship with textual traditions, guarded by centers of learning and spiritual masters. They are creative in their response to new opportunities and anxieties produced by globalization.

Chapter 8

Muslims in India and China The situation of Muslims in India is almost entirely different from that of Muslims in China. The idea that today prevails especially among students of international relations and politicians after the publication of Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations is that Islam as a civilization creates a unity in the history and sociology of Muslims all over the world.1 The history of nationalist warfare between Muslim nations and that of endemic conflicts within Muslim nations defies such a notion. One of the best examples is the breaking away of Bangladesh from the Muslim nation of Pakistan in 1971 on grounds of linguistic and ethnic difference. Nevertheless, the notion of Islamic unity remains popular. Huntington has a particularistic understanding of “civilization” that emphasizes the irreducible differences between civilizations. However, one has to point out that Islam, like any other world religion, is widely variable in doctrine and practice and is only one, though significant, element in people’s cultural life. This criticism could be answered by the followers of Huntington by referring to Weber’s ideal-­type methodology. Therefore, more important theoretically is that Huntington does not take into account the connection between the emergence of the notion of civilization and that of national consciousness that has been studied by Norbert Elias.2 Not only is the specific history of Muslims in India very different from that of Muslims in China, it is also precisely the relation to national Indian or Chinese civilization that has little to do with Islamic civilization, but much to do with the creation of national majorities and minorities. As is often the case with the construction of Muslim minorities the national question is directly related to international relations, since Islam is a world religion. This chapter attempts to disentangle some of the elements of the “minoritization” of Muslims in India and China.

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Indian Muslims have a history that gives them a centrality in processes of state formation in India, as exemplified by the Mughal Empire, but also by the postcolonial formation of Pakistan and Bangladesh, which cannot be found in the history of Chinese Muslims. Muslims in Xinjiang have been independent from Chinese empires for a very long time, but they have not taken over the center. The political sociology of Indian Muslims in the twentieth century is deeply connected to the breaking up of British India, where Muslims were about a quarter of the population, into India, Pakistan (157 million), and Bangladesh (120 million), forming a large majority in the latter two states, while remaining a sizable minority of 149 million, or almost 15 percent, in India. If one imagines that India had not gone through the partition, Muslims would constitute around a third of India’s population today. Again, this is entirely different from China, which has not broken up along communal lines and in which Muslims are a relatively small minority of 19 million, or 1.5 percent of the population. In the comparison between India and China I want to highlight that despite the differences in numerical strength it is the transformation of Muslims from a variety of different groups into a “minority” that in both cases require scrutiny in relation to the construction of a national majority. There are three issues that are interesting in such a comparison: First, Muslims in both India and China problematize nationalist projects that are based on the unified civilizational spirit of the nation. In general I want to argue that the conceptualization and political treatment of a minority sheds light on the construction of the national majority. The comparison therefore is not so much of Muslims in India and China but of the place of Muslims and Islam in Indian and Chinese national imaginaries. The case of Muslims can be used to analyze political configurations in both societies. Second, Muslim populations are central to minority politics, since they are not only a minority, but also belong to a global community that has a strong political presence in the region. In that sense they are

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different from Christians whose geopolitical significance lies in their ties outside the region. Specifically Kashmiri and Uyghur separatism are quite comparable. Third, as I have been arguing throughout this book, one of the most important differences between Indian and Chinese nationalism seems to be the place of religion in it. Chinese nationalism (and that includes both Kuomintang and communists) appears to be radically secular in the sense that it takes science as the core of its ideology, while Indian nationalism has taken religion (alternatively in the form of plurality and in the form of singularity) as the core of its civilization ideology. To compare the impact of these different forms of nationalism on the position of Muslims can help us to better understand the differences between Indian and Chinese secularism and nationalism. The construction of a “religious and ethnic minority” is directly tied to the construction of a civilizational or national majority.

Islamic Expansion in Asia One of the major elements in the notion of a national civilization is that it is assumed to be rooted in the people and in the soil. It is important for nationalism to show that civilization does not come “from elsewhere,” but that it is the product of a particular region and its population. Indeed, there are continuities and sometimes really deep histories. First, protonationalist formations in ethnicity, language, or religion provide the material of nationalism. National traditions can be “invented” and nations are “imagined,” but this is not done from scratch. Moreover, they do not form a seamless whole, a monolithic culture, but rather a discourse in which different versions compete with each other in social debate and conflict. But, deeper than protonationalism that precedes nationalism, there are ancient understandings of linguistic, religious, and ethnic unity, coupled with notions of territorial sovereignty that can be found among the ancient Hebrews, Greeks, Indians, and Chinese, for instance.3 These ancient understandings of sacred geographies together with sacred

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histories of particular peoples provide much of the material used in nationalist imagination. All of this material has to be transformed to serve the nationalist cause. Religion thus has to be nationalized in the modern period. In plural societies where religions can be pitted against each other religions have to be either cleaned of their divisive potential by being encapsulated in national civilization or made into something totally different, located outside of national civilization—in other words, potentially into another nation. They have to be made part and parcel of national identity, and histories of religious conflict have to be tailored to fit a tale of national unity or they have to be excluded from the nation. Even when processes of homogenization and assimilation are dominant, they are never entirely successful, because nationalism not only unifies but also diversifies by sprouting alternative nationalisms or regional identities. Since in modern nation-­states a politics of numbers, producing majorities and minorities, is important, religion can be used as the foundation of majority nationalism as well as the foundation of minority identities. Islam in India and China is seen as “coming from outside,” as not entirely belonging to national civilization. To an extent Indian and Chinese Muslims concur with this opinion by valorizing connections with the Arabic heartland, and especially the Hejaz, the holy region where Mecca and Medina are located. While this valorization is intrinsic to Islam, it has gained in significance through the expansion in popular participation in the hajj in the nineteenth century.4 Historically, it is obvious that Islam was brought into India “from elsewhere,” but something similar could be said about Brahmanism that was brought by Indo-­European peoples that wandered into India. The externality of Brahmanism, however, is not valorized, and Brahmanism is regarded as indigenous in opposition to Islam, although Indians would not deny the connections of Sanskrit and Brahmanical culture with Indo-­European languages and cultures and are generally proud of them. It is British scholarship that discovered these connections in the eighteenth century, and they are not

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part of common understandings of Brahmanism and Hinduism. In China we find a strong civilizational discourse emphasizing the unity of the Han ethnic majority and the continuity of its civilization. Minorities are recognized and seen as dependent on Han civilization as well as tributary to the Chinese imperial state. Uyghur Muslims form only one of these ethnicities that had a regional autonomy. The extent to which Uyghur Muslims stress their connection with Central Asia and Turkey is directly related to political relations with Beijing. Hui Muslims are dispersed throughout China and generally do not constitute sizable groups in any given region. Clearly, also for Chinese Muslims the reference to the Hejaz is important. Historically, saints, traders, and soldiers were the agents of Islamic expansion in South Asia. These three categories are sometimes difficult to distinguish. Sufi centers were at the same time centers of religion, trade, and political power. In the coastal areas Arab traders from the Persian Gulf were the first to introduce Islam, while Turkish armies brought Islam to the North. Sufi brotherhoods and their tombs were central to this expansion and continued to be central in South Asian Islam till the Islamic reform movements of the late nineteenth century. Sufi saints played a crucial part in converting South Asians to Islam. Given that Sufi practices are syncretistic in the sense that they include rather than exclude people from it, devotees of a particular saint did not have to distance themselves too much from nondevotees. When Sufi cults became more central to tribal arrangements and to control of land and people, such cults gradually made Islamic identity a more central part of social life in what amounts to really long-­term processes of several centuries. This entails that a great number of practices—for instance, of purity and hierarchy—that are typical for Indian society and therefore often interpreted as Indic (or, if you like, Hindu), continued to be practiced by Muslims unto the twentieth century and by some of them to today. The forms of boundary maintenance connected to Islamic identity have differed greatly from place to place in South Asian history, but one may justifiably

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argue that it is only in the twentieth century in the process of nationalist struggle that they have become more unified and politicized. In that sense its development is closely related to that of its significant other, Hindu identity. Turkic, Afghan, Irani, and Mongol nomadic groups have over centuries constantly expanded into the South Asian subcontinent. Although ethnically different and often in conflict with each other, they brought their Sunni and Shi’a beliefs with them and developed them both in relation to the centers of learning in the Islamic heartland as well as in interaction with Hindu beliefs and practices. The great variety of Indo-­Islamic practices is probably best understood if one pays attention to art and poetry that developed under the patronage of Muslim rulers. Most significant, obviously, is the Mughal Empire, if one acknowledges that this was not a monolithic modern state, but rather, following Tambiah, a galactic state with a number of different centers of political and economic power.5 Whatever the attempts of Muslim rulers to spread Islam over the subcontinent—and obviously there is a lot of nationalist debate about that—the main conclusion is that most people did not become Muslim, although many people went and still go to Sufi shrines, and, second, that Islam was Islam of Indian converts and thus was deeply influenced by Indian practices. Turning to China, some basic elements of the South Asian story return. Central Asian nomads with various ethnic identities wandered into the vast area which is now Xinjiang (one-­sixth of the current territorial space of the People’s Republic of China). Arab traders sailed to the coastal areas and connected China to a vast maritime trading network. Tombs of ancestors and Sufi saints play a central role in Chinese Muslim identity. Given that lineage and ancestors are generally quite central in Chinese society the tomb is a marker of difference that is recognized in the wider society, in which ancestor worship is dominant. Sufi lineages of Qadariya and Naqsbandiyya have spread over China, and from the nineteenth century one finds the usual debates about the place of saint worship in Islam that one also finds in India.6

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A major difference between India and China is that Muslim groups have never captured the central state in China. The state was captured by a Manchu group that came “from outside” like the Moghuls, but the difference was that the Manchu were not Muslims. The Manchu Qing dynasty spent great efforts to show that they had become fully civilized by adopting and promoting Confucian values. Their ethnicity, however, continued to play a role and was responded to in recurrent anti-­Manchu uprisings, until the end of the Qing dynasty. The complexities of Manchu history in China are a good illustration of how the so-­called unity of Chinese civilization covers up the enduring significance of ethnic difference.7 It was only Xinjiang, the Far West, that was controlled by a Turkic-­speaking Muslim majority of Uyghur (a generic name proposed in the diaspora at Tashkent in 1921). Dongans or Hui Muslims dominated Gansu and Shaanxi. Many of the other Muslims lived as Hui minority thinly spread in the vast expanse of the Chinese empire. Muslims in China therefore cannot claim the centrality to political imagination that Indian Muslims can. Also in the rise of nationalism there is nothing quite similar to the political challenge posed by the Muslim League in India with its demand for Pakistan. This also means that Muslims are less important as the threatening Other in homogenizing nationalist imaginaries in China. The place of Turkic Uyghur in Xinjiang in the Chinese imagination is perhaps more comparable to that of the Pathans of the Northwest Frontier in India who are romanticized in Kipling’s work. It is the romantic image of the tribal robber in Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Quite similar to the Northwest Frontier Xinjiang has been a region difficult to control in the past as well as in the present, resisting centralizing projects of the Chinese state.8 Chinese-­speaking Han Muslims are known as Hui. As such they are seen as a religious group following the teachings of Islam, Hui Jiao (回教), and in communist China the cultural or religious definition is taken as the basis of declaring the Hui an ethnic or national minority, Hui Min (回民). The most recognizable feature of an authentic follower of Islamic precepts is that

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he refrains from eating pork. Those people who have genealogical claims of descent from Arab traders, for instance, are not recognized by the state as Hui, when they do not follow Islamic precepts. To that extent the state actually promotes identification with Islam as a basis for recognition as a nationality, an ethnic minority. Moreover, by its politics of recognition the state transforms what often have been localized Hui identities to a national Hui identity. Being part of a recognized minority carries some benefits, such as preferential treatment in schooling. The spatial distribution of the Hui makes it difficult to see them as a national minority. In Gansu, however, they constitute a majority of the population. The greatest Muslim rebellion against the Qing government did not come from the Uyghur in Xinjiang, but from the Dongan or Hui of Gansu in 1862, and it spread over a wide region. The rebellion had an ethnoreligious element to the extent that rumors were spread that the Han and Manchu Chinese wanted to kill off all the Muslims, triggering the inverse when the Muslim rebellion succeeded. The rebellion solidified under the leadership of Yakub Beg, who declared himself king in 1866 and ruled until 1877, when he was routed by an imperial army. The rebellion is often invoked today to show a legacy of independence from the People’s Republic of China by Muslim nationalists. The great obstacle for any potential Muslim separatism is that Muslim groups are ethnically different and live quite dispersed. The only way to unite them might be to use Islam in a Muslim majority region, as Yakub Beg in the 1850s did by imposing the shari’a in the region he controlled and Syed Ahmed Barelvi in the 1830s did with the Pathans in the Northwest Frontier of India. In that way the Western Frontier of China resembles the political situation of Afghanistan and Central Asia in which ethnic divisions can—at least momentarily—be overcome by reference to a unifying Islam, as the Taliban are trying to do today in Afghanistan. Yakub Beg’s revolt coincides more or less with the Mutiny in India of 1857, and this reminds us of the geopolitical situation in the second half of the nineteenth century. The British were involved in a Great Game (as Rudyard

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Kipling called it) to control India, to weaken the Qing government further after the Opium Wars, to keep the French out of Southwest China and the Russians at bay in Afghanistan and Central Asia. Despite the obvious differences between the two rebellions there is a global history of British imperialism that undermines the political hegemony of both the Mughal and the Qing empires.

Muslims in India and China Today The partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 put Muslims in large parts of India into a situation in which they had the choice to stay on in secular India or to leave as muhajirs for Pakistan, the newly created homeland for Muslims. Radical Muslim leaders, such as Maududi, the leader of the Jama’at-­i-­Islami, had been against the idea of Pakistan (a homeland for Muslims) promoted by the Muslim League and its leader Jinnah, but found themselves forced to choose for Muslim-­majority Pakistan. The Jama’at-­i-­Islami branch that stayed on in India gradually discovered that Muslims wanted to participate in democratic elections and not stay away from them as they had proposed. The Jama’at in India therefore changed its strategy and chose for India’s secular democracy, since it saw this as the strongest bulwark against majoritarian Hindu nationalism.9 The majority of Muslims in India, however, does not vote for an Islamist political party, but for the Congress Party that has in general ruled India after independence and has been somewhat protective of the Muslim minority. In doing so they follow the example of Maulana Azad, a Muslim scholar who was born in Mecca in 1888 and became one of the central politicians in the Congress Party. It is secular Muslim elites who have been instrumental in building Muslim educational institutions, like Jamia Millia Islamia University in Delhi, and who are fully participating in Indian political and cultural life. Radical political Islam is found among students who were inspired by the Iranian Revolution and founded small revolu-

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tionary cells very much in the way their leftist fellow-­students were doing in the wake of the Maoist movement in China. In terms of numbers these radical groups are tiny. The really important movement among Indian Muslims is the avowedly apolitical Tablighi Jama’at, which is ultra-­conservative in its pietism. The Tabligh is a transnational movement of great consequence, and it penetrates in previously Sufi dominated spaces at the grassroots level. Its ijtema (prayer-­days) draw millions of devotees, and its view of a worldwide Umma (community of believers) is of far greater importance for many Indian Muslims than national Indian politics in which they have only marginal influence.10 For the majority of Muslims in India (though not for its secular elites that are active in the Congress Party), withdrawal from politics seems the preferred position. This is exacerbated by the fact that Indian politics does not do much to improve the social and economic backwardness in which the majority of Indian Muslims find themselves. Muslims do not constitute a caste, but a religious community. Moreover, Islam’s strong egalitarian ideology cannot acknowledge the existence of castes or at least caste-­like groups within their community, although in fact they do exist.11 This means that Muslims cannot be assisted by general Indian government policies of positive discrimination of untouchables and other backward castes. Muslims in India today are among the poorest groups in society, despite the constant sloganeering by Hindu nationalists that Muslims are a “pampered minority.” The conditions of poor Muslims, specializing in declining industries and crafts, in terms of literacy and health are abysmal.12 However, the nature of Hindu-­Muslim relations in India is such that the government is severely hampered in its outreach to the Muslim community by Hindu nationalist agitation. One of the most intractable issues that confronts the Indian state is that of the independence struggle in Muslim-­majority Kashmir. This is one of the unsolved legacies of partition. The Hindu Maharaja of Kashmir signed a treaty of accession to India in 1947, despite the fact that the vast majority of the population of Kashmir is Muslim. Currently Pakistan holds possession over

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northwest Kashmir (Azad, or Free Kashmir) and disputes Indian rule over the central and northern part. The Indo-­Pakistani wars of 1947 and 1965 were fought partly over this issue.13 China is also active in the region through its control over Tibet, part of Ladakh, and the so-­called Aksai Chin (阿克赛钦) region, which is largely an uninhabitable salt desert through which the Chinese have made a road that connects Xinjiang and Western Tibet. Chinese activity and Indian response to it led to the Sino-­ Indian War of 1962 that had far-­reaching consequences for the relations between the two countries continuing to the present day. The military superiority of the Chinese army has been felt as a deep national humiliation by the Indians and hampers their confidence in dealing with China despite the fast-­growing economic ties between the countries. The arbitrary nature of the border in this Himalayan area leads to constant conflicts. A good example of this is the Kargil conflict in 1999. India and Pakistan share a 740 kilometer line of control along the Jammu-­Srinagar, Srinagar-­Leh roads in the Kashmir region. This is an uninhabitable area of ice and snow. There are a number of outposts that become snowbound and have to be “abandoned” by both sides until the snow melts. This leads to a game in which one party or the other tries to seize an “unoccupied” post. In 1999 Pakistan infiltrated across a 100 kilometer or so frontier in the Kargil area. In reply the Indian army conducted what it called “one of the biggest anti-­militancy operations in recent years.” Highly successful air strikes by India were followed by the shooting down of two Indian jet fighters and an armed helicopter. An open war seemed unavoidable, but Pakistan decided after a number of skirmishes to withdraw. The struggle over this uninhabitable swath of mountainous land was closely followed by the media and threw the Indian nation into a patriotic frenzy that was amazing considering that the stakes seemed so low. It showed, however, how sacred territorial sovereignty is for the modern nation-­state. Since the 1990s there has been a growing militancy of Muslim activists in Kashmir who have responded to a series of human rights abuses by the Indian army by seeking the independence

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of Kashmir. This issue is primarily one of regional separatism, but religion, as it often does, plays a role in connecting militants with Pakistani and other outside funders and activism, while providing them with an anti-­Indian, anti-­Hindu ideology. The question of regional separatism combined with Islam makes it interesting to compare the Kashmir issue in India with the Xinjiang issue in China. Again, the identity of the inhabitants of Xinjiang, like that of the inhabitants of Kashmir, is not primarily Muslim, but ethnic: Turkic Uyghur and Kirghiz and Kazakhs. Xinjiang is crucial to the Chinese state for its mineral wealth in terms of gas and oil and coal, but also because of its location as gateway to Central Asia, where even more mineral wealth may be tapped. Like American geopolitics, Chinese geopolitics is often driven by energy demands, and the repression of Uyghur and the flooding of Xinjiang by Han Chinese immigrants is directly related to this. Both the Kashmir and the Xinjiang issue are regional issues in which regional and ethnoreligious identities are central to movements for independence or autonomy that are squashed by the central state. In Kashmir an important role is played by neighboring Pakistan, and the geopolitical considerations of Delhi have more to do with the relation with Pakistan than with the potential contribution of Kashmir to India’s economy. This is all very different in the case of Xinjiang, where mineral resources are of major importance to Beijing and where one does not have an international conflict with a neighboring state. However, even if Xinjiang did not have rich resources, China would still assert its political power. As the case of the Kargil conflict shows nation-­states tend to assert their territorial sovereignty even when there are no economic interests. When the national map has been established there is a paramount desire to maintain its integrity. Both the Kashmir and the Xinjiang issue involve Muslim populations that are not fully integrated in the national story of civilizational unity. Although ethnicity and regional identity are the dominant elements in the response to state power Islam does

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play a role in establishing ideas of martyrdom, holy war, and connections with Muslim insurgency elsewhere. In these regions there are connections with transnational militancy, connecting Chechnya, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir, and Xinjiang. Like global trading networks they have a flexibility that allows them access to resources and opportunities that are difficult to control by singular nation-­states. Especially the cult of martyrdom, mainly inspired by Shi’a traditions but easily appropriated for national and transnational causes, connects them to global Islamic discourse.14 Much of this militancy has hardly anything to do with the Muslim populations that live outside these conflict-­ridden regions, but the currently pervasive language of “national security” means that they are often suspected by the central authority as being ideologically (religiously) connected. Nevertheless, Muslims have also suffered from the extreme secularist attacks by the Maoist state against their religious institutions, especially during the Cultural Revolution, when Buddhist, Daoist, and Muslim shrines were destroyed. What we see in China is very similar to what we see in India: a process of ethnic identification with a religion that is intimately tied up with state policies and the political process. Many Hui were hardly conversant with Islam and had blended in almost seamlessly with their non-­Muslim neighbors except for some culinary peculiarities, such as their special noodles. In contrast to India Muslims in China did not have to confront the construction of a majority religion through the political process, but instead they had to relate to the construction of an ethnic majority, the Han. In fact Muslims did not differ much from followers of other religions in being confronted with an aggressive secularism and were perhaps somewhat better off, since they could derive some protection from their minority status. In some cases Islamic heritage was seen by the authorities as a regional asset. To highlight the presence of Muslims and Islamic heritage has been a local and provincial state policy in Fujian, for instance, making it possible to invite Kuwaiti businessmen to witness the age-­old

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legacy of Arab traders as a step toward funding large-­scale projects in the province.

Muslims as Outsiders In his major work on the civilizing process Norbert Elias connects the emergence of the concept of “civilization” to the rise of national consciousness in Europe.15 The concept of civilization emerges when the social and political significance of the ancien régime had declined in the process of the making of nation-­states. This makes it immediately clear that narratives of nationalism that extol the superiority of national civilization refer to civilization as the essence of the nation, the transcendent spirit that moves history. This is clear in Hegel, and it greatly influences Marx and Weber. Muslims are considered to be outside the civilizational core in both Indian and Chinese forms of nationalism. Indian civilization contains a host of religious and philosophical traditions that were “discovered” in the eighteenth century by the British and named Hinduism. These traditions are local, regional, and sometimes understood and practiced over the entire subcontinent. The most widely spread traditions are carried by Brahman priests, use Sanskrit as sacred language, and are sometimes collectively called Brahmanism. As I have argued earlier, Brahmanism is connected to caste hierarchy, in which some racial elements, like Aryan versus non-­Aryan, can be either encompassed in a hierarchical fashion or used for political mobilization. Particular Brahmanical traditions, such as those centering around the God-­King Rama, may have been used in order to resist the Muslim Other.16 Hinduism and especially the Brahmanical variant of it are identified as the “traditional order” of India by the British and later by social scientists like Max Weber and Louis Dumont.17 Nationalism similarly addresses Hinduism as Indian civilization while at the same time using it as a source for resisting Western civilization. There is a concern among intellectuals that Hinduism is not modern enough to be nationalized, but

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this is seen as a problem that can be solved through reform. Hinduism is portrayed by some of the nationalists as superior to the secular West because of its spirituality but in need of reform for its backward magic and ritualism. In this kind of imperialist and nationalist thought about Hinduism, “other” religious traditions, such as tribal and untouchable traditions as well as Islam, are branded as essentially “foreign” to Indian civilization. This reasoning has been influential in Muslim separatism and anti-­Muslim nationalism, and it continues to be important in majority-­minority relations today. After independence by far the most important movement that has pitted Hindus and Muslims against each other in India has been the movement to remove a sixteenth-­century mosque built by the Mughal emperor Babar in the North India pilgrimage center Ayodhya and replace it with a temple for the god Rama, who was allegedly born on the spot on which the mosque had been built. This movement was, to an extent, successful in 1992, when it was able to destroy the mosque but not (yet) replace it with a temple. The destruction of the mosque was followed by widespread rioting in India, in which thousands of people have died (the majority of whom were Muslims). The failure of the central government that in 1992 was under the control of the secular Congress Party to protect the mosque has deeply alienated Muslims and at the same time led Hindu chauvinists like Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat, into power. The state of Gujarat combines, in an interesting way, high foreign investment and neo-­liberal development while discriminating against Muslims and even leading pogroms against them. The political party BJP, which is behind the anti-­Muslim movement, has led a coalition government at the union level from 1999 to 2004. The destruction of the Babar mosque in Ayodhya and its violent aftermath has led in cities like Mumbai to an anti-­Muslim atmosphere that in turn has been responded to by bomb attacks, allegedly by Muslim gangsters in the city, on strategic locations in the city. If this was not enough to exacerbate relations be-

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tween Hindus and Muslims, a state-­led pogrom against Muslims in the Western Indian state of Gujarat left more than a thousand Muslims dead. Finally, in 1998 the world was shocked to witness an attack in Mumbai on 5-­star hotels and other locations in the city by the Pakistan-­based Lashkar-­e-­Taiba, a movement that is primarily connected to the struggle for independence in Kashmir. The retaliations following anti-­Muslim violence in the aftermath of the destruction of the Babar mosque and the attacks on the Indian state (including on the Indian Parliament in 2001), engineered by Pakistan-­supported Kashmiri militants, are now in the general opinion inextricably intertwined as “Muslim violence.” A further development in this regard is the recent arrest of a Hindu sadhu (“holy man”), Swami Asimanand, who has admitted that his group was behind some of the bombings in India that were earlier seen as part of “Muslim violence.” In short, the general atmosphere of Hindu-­Muslim relations in India continues to deteriorate. Nothing on this scale has happened in China, but the position of Muslims in Xinjiang has deteriorated since strivings for autonomy have led to bomb attacks both in Xinjiang and in Beijing, widespread unrest before the opening of the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008, culminating in days of violent attacks by Uyghur on Han Chinese as well as retaliations for them in 2009. While the government wanted to use the games as a sign of China’s new rise to world power, and largely succeeded, both in Tibet and in Xinjiang activists saw this moment of global attention as offering a good platform for their grievances. In a recent monograph on Muslims and ethnic minorities in China Dru Gladney has argued that Chinese scholarship is so committed to the idea of an integrated Han society that it faces problems in questioning the category of the “Han majority” in ways that would be common in Indian scholarship on the “Hindu majority.”18 Indeed, the construction of majority and minority is part of the nationalization of culture. Like the religious-­ethnic construction of “the Hindu majority” in India the civilizational-­ethnic construction of “the Han majority” needs to be examined. The Han majority is thought to make up

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more than 90 percent of the Chinese population. Linguistically there is an enormous diversity among the Han. There are eight mutually unintelligible language groups: Mandarin, Wu, Yue, Xiang, Hakka, Gan, Southern Min, and Northern Min, but even within these language groups there are subdivisions whose speakers are mutually unintelligible.19 Mandarin (called Hanyu, or language of the Han, or Putonghua, common language) is the North Chinese dialect that has been made into the national language and imposed by the state through education. It is in fact not the spoken language but a state-­promoted script that has created a unity all over China over a long period of history. The unifying function of the script, however, has to be understood as limited as literacy was until the 1950s. Linguistic criteria therefore cannot be easily used to distinguish majority from minority. When in the People’s Republic of China minorities had to be officially identified more than 440 groups applied for minority status and 41 were recognized. At this moment there are 56 officially recognized nationalities, including the Han majority. The term “nationalities” is used to translate minzu, in accordance with the Soviet Russian term “natsionalnost” and generally following Stalin’s definition of it: a group with four common characteristics: language, territory, economy, and psychological nature manifested in culture.20 Many groups continue to petition for recognition as minority (shaoshu minzu), since that recognition gives them privileged access to such state resources as education. This aspiration, however, is ambivalent, since civilizational quality and modern progress are identified with the Han majority. Gladney argues that, while the notion of the Han person had been around for many centuries, the notion of Han nationality (minzu) as national majority originated with Sun Zhongshan (Sun Yat-­Sen), the leader of the nationalists in the early twentieth century.21 The notion of Han majority is thus connected to Chinese nationalism in ways rather similar to the notion of Hindu nationalism in India. The main difference between the construction of a Han majority and the construction of a Hindu majority is that the first is based on ethnicity and the second on religion. Muslims in India

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are primarily seen as a religious minority, while in China they are primarily seen as an ethnic category. There are no sharp and definite boundaries between religion and ethnicity, and one can point at processes that ethnicize religious identity or make ethnic identity more determined by religion, as one sees in minority formations in Europe today. In such processes of identity formation larger political developments play a significant role, and that is clearly the case with Muslims both in India and China. Clearly, the proportion of the Muslim population before and also after independence to the total population is also an important factor in identity formation. Islam could be used as a major basis for political mobilization in the anti-­colonial freedom struggle in India and in gaining a separate homeland for Muslims. Again, this is significantly different in China, where Muslims are only one of many relatively small minorities. In addition to the Muslim minority we have both in India and in China another major religious minority, the Christians. Christianity had considerable success in China, but to today remains seen essentially as “foreign” and “imperialist,” in the sense that it is seen to be connected to outside power, primarily the United States. After 1949, since it could not be expelled (although missionaries were expelled) or eradicated, it needed to be brought under control. This is very similar to the Indian case, where Christian proselytization is forbidden by law and where missionaries are seen as “foreign agents” and subject to attacks. Christians, however, are not seen as an ethnic group in either India or China. In some areas in India there are, however, connections between Christianity and ethnicity. For example, the Nagas in Nagaland (East India) have been in majority converted to Christianity and are now in conflict with the Indian state about demands ranging from autonomy to independence. Islam, as the religion of one of the five great Chinese ethnicities (Han, Mongol, Manchu, Hui, Tibetan) and of 10 of the 56 recognized nationalities in the People’s Republic of China, was always more a subject of political colonization and internal orientalism than a constituting element of China’s civilizational

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essence. A major difference with the Indian case is that Chinese nationalism did not focus on religious identity and difference as its main marker. Both the nationalists and the communists have reinforced the notion that China is inhabited by a large Han majority and that minorities, such as Muslims and Tibetans, are gradually civilized and incorporated into Chinese civilization. The communist state has not singled out Muslims for attack, but rather it has continued a long-­term effort to assimilate them from foreignness into Chineseness. These efforts had the paradoxical effect of reinforcing the sense of being an ethnically and religiously different community. Together with global processes of Islamization that are not leaving Chinese Muslims untouched the state-­efforts to address the Hui as a separate nationality through policies of positive discrimination make the Muslim identity of the Hui in particular more prominent.

Muslims as Outsiders in India and China Both Indian and Chinese nationalisms see Muslims as external to their civilizational core. Despite centuries of interaction and Muslim contributions to common history, such as in the case of the Muslim Chinese admiral Zheng He, who sailed to Africa long before the European era of expansion and has recently become a culture hero, Muslims are “foreign” and need to be as­ sim­ilated. Assimilation, however, is a contradictory process, since Muslims have to be first identified as “foreign” before they can be targeted by state policies of assimilation. In China the Hui are seen as having a distinctive religion and thus are recognized as a minority with certain privileges. This induces some Hui who do not practice Islam to become more Muslim than they were before. This concerns particularly those merchants and restaurant owners who live dispersed in China’s cities. It concerns less those Hui who live in larger communities in particular provinces. The efforts of the government to make Islam the marker of this ethnic minority are also contradictory in the sense that Islam has to be brought more firmly under state con-

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trol. Muslim imams are constantly monitored, and there is a fear of fundamentalist influences among the Hui. This fear is enhanced by the perceived possibility that the Hui link up with Uyghur separatism in Xinjiang. However remote this possibility may be, one should not underestimate self-­fulfilling prophecies in state policy. The creation of Pakistan has made it possible in India to further propagate a civilizational core from which Muslims are excluded. This has been successful to the extent that Bengali intellectuals today are sometimes not even aware that Bengal had a majority Muslim population before partition. Much history writing about Bengal excludes the Muslims altogether. Secularist India has recognized religious difference and sometimes politically reinforced it—for example, by creating separate civil codes. The main purpose of secularist policy has been to prevent civil strife, and this has been quite successful until the rise of Hindu nationalism in the 1980s. Muslims who have chosen to stay in India are considered to be “foreign” and perhaps more so than in China, because of their often-­alleged links with Pakistan. As in China with the Uyghur and the Hui there is always a suspicion in India that Kashmiri Muslims will find allies among Indian Muslims in threatening India’s sovereignty. The narrative of civilizational assimilation is quite similar in the Indian and Chinese cases, but in India it is punctuated with the fear that the signs might be turned around and Hindus would be assimilated to Islam. In the end the construction of minorities is logically connected to the construction of majorities. The case of the Muslim minorities in India and China reminds us forcefully of the always unfinished business of creating Hindu or Han majorities. The arbitrariness of the religious identification of Indians as Hindus and of the construction of Hinduism as the majority religion and thus the basis of national identity is paralleled by the arbitrariness of the ethnic identification of the Chinese nation as Han. Who is a Hindu or who is a Han is a question that is produced not only through state policies of identification, however impor-

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tant, but also through popular mobilization around religious or ethnic signifiers. It is remarkable that these signifiers of religious or ethnic identity, Hindu or Han, acquired their contemporary significance through relatively recent political processes. That is definitely not to say that they did not have significance in earlier periods before the imperial encounter, but that these identifications of Hindu versus Muslim or Han versus Muslims (or more significantly versus Manchu) are transformed into something quite new and different in the modern period. More than any other minority Muslims show up the process through which the nation creates its civilization and its civilizational Others. This is because Islam provides its believers with a global utopia that cannot be contained by any nation. Moreover, the actual location of its believers in India and China is the result of forms of expansion that are not only very old but have also resulted in concentrations in geographically marginal regions that have become politically (and sometimes economically, in the case of natural resources) central to notions of sovereignty in China and India. While some of these elements are reminiscent of the spread of Buddhism and Christianity, it is the combination of them—a people of the book without a church, strong concepts of “just war” connected to nomadic groups, strong egalitarianism combined with statecraft and legalism—that makes Islam specially fit to challenge the confines of the nation-­state.

Chapter 9

Conclusion This book has made a case for the comparison of the social location of religion, spirituality, magic, and secularity in India and China. Such a comparison shows the differential impact of Western imperialism on India and China. Of course Indian and Chinese societies have deep histories, and these histories have resulted in fundamental differences, but in both cases modernity has been mediated by imperialism. In these two cases the nature of imperial interactions was quite different. India was colonized for a century, while China was under imperial pressure but not made into a colony. Being run by a British state that has its center thousands of miles away is quite different from being pressured (though not taken over) by a number of competing foreign powers, including neighboring Japan. Even when we consider that India was perforce governed mostly by Indians, it remained a colony. This difference in the nature of imperial interactions can be conceptualized as a difference in state formation and in what Foucault calls “governmentality.” India’s postcolonial state emerges from the crucible of the British colonial state, while China’s contested republic succeeded a traditional empire and, after Japanese occupation and civil war, was made into a communist state following World War II. The role of the state in producing a modern society cannot be overestimated. However, while state formation is a crucial historical process, one cannot simply see cultural processes as straightforwardly resulting from state formation. Or, rather, one’s interpretation depends on one’s conception of the state.1 My understanding of the state is close to the Foucauldian concept of “governmentality,” with its emphasis on the connection between techniques of the self (governing the self) and techniques of domination (governing others).2 This allows one to broaden the understanding

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of power beyond the arbitrary confines of the state. Religious tradition, religious organizations, and religious discourses and practices have a relative autonomy from the state, but are all part of governmentality. Religious movements like those of the Sikhs in India and the Taiping movement in China even attempt to create their own states, showing the arbitrary nature of sharp definitional boundaries between state and religion. Moreover, traditional states like those of the Mughal and the Qing are, at least partly, ritual theaters in which, as Clifford Geertz has argued, “power serves pomp.”3 The concept of governmentality allows one to see the state not as a unified actor (abstracted from social life), but rather as a set of arrangements, apparatuses, and institutions that are often contradictory and are active at different levels of centralization. It is remarkable how much the discussion on China is on the one hand dominated by awe of a unified, dictatorial state and, on the other hand, by an awareness of considerable regional and local decentralization as well as informalization. Especially, the Chinese economy is characterized by a large number of informal arrangements and transactions that are not controlled by the state and involve actors that are often not recognized as economic actors, including religious actors.4 Capitalism is not a rigid system that makes everything the same everywhere, but rather a flexible set of economic and political arrangements that attempt to open up markets for production and consumption. The opening up of China for global capitalism has had immense impact on Chinese society, not by destroying but by redeploying Chinese patterns of interaction and expectation. Mayfair Yang has, for instance, described the importance of gift relationships (guanxi) in the communist state economy.5 More recently, she has argued for the resilience and transformation of such practices in the newly opened up market economy that still depends on close interaction with party officials.6 Similarly, it is remarkable how resilient the institutions of the postcolonial state in India have been despite much anxiety in 1950s scholarship about the potential falling apart of India.7 The

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state has dealt with considerable challenges by separatist movements, such as the Sikh Khalistanis. Except for a relatively brief state of emergency in the 1970s the state is legitimized by regular elections. Nevertheless, despite all of this, much of political action in India is extra-­parliamentary, basically following a pattern set by Gandhi’s political performances (Salt March, hunger strikes). While Gandhi opposed the British, current political activists challenge an elected Indian government. Gandhi operated largely from outside of the Congress Party, projecting himself as a moral examplar above politics. Major recent examples of such extra-­parliamentary action are the campaign to remove the Babar mosque in Ayodhya in the 1980s and 1990s as well as the more recent Anti-­Corruption movement led by Anna Hazare, another charismatic imitation of Gandhi. The latter also shows the extent to which business transactions involve state officials and are not controlled by public debate in Parliament. Both in India and in China there is a lively debate about corruption and a regular exposing of “scandals,” which seem to indicate that the boundary between political power and economic entrepreneurship is constantly shifting. Since this book focuses on religion as a problematic of Chinese and Indian modernity I have avoided assuming that there are fundamental structures, such as kinship, that can explain Indian and Chinese societies. That is not to say that caste and surname group are not important in India and China. One can broadly define caste as a closed (endogamous) status group, like the Chinese surname group, but perhaps a distinctive Indian element is the wide application of a principle of hierarchy, loosely based on notions of pollution, that governs the relations between and within castes. In various ways and at various points in history caste and hierarchy have been important and still are today, although not amounting to an overarching “system.” Today caste has assumed a political form that makes it resemble ethnicity with as its paramount feature the competition for scarce resources in a democratic political system. While one can argue that caste as ritual hierarchy and social interdependence was

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more important in precolonial and colonial India, now caste is more about electoral politics. The specificity of caste and its transformation does not imply that India cannot be compared to China.8 In a broad theoretical argument Louis Dumont has compared the traditional Indian homo hierarchicus with the modern homo equalis, the egalitarian ideology of modern Western society, and has argued that traditional societies more generally show forms of hierarchical thinking that inform their societal arrangements.9 This is certainly also true for traditional China, but research has more focused on fictive kinship and territorial spread. In the Indian case caste has been frozen as part of colonial governmentality, and this has been inherited in postcolonial political formations.10 While India’s nationalists have been united in their determination to bring the caste system to an end, in the electoral process they have succeeded only in modernizing and ethnicizing caste. On the other hand the Chinese communists have had considerable success in destroying the large surname groups through land reform and a series of campaigns against feudalism in large parts of China, although in parts of China one can still find ritual systems in which surname groups play a significant role.11 Moreover, it is in the diaspora that surname groups seem to continue to thrive.12 The general point, however, is that the study of caste and surname groups does not give us the key to understanding the problematic of religion and nationalism in Indian and Chinese societies. Discussions on civilization in comparative historical sociology are another way to suggest fundamental structures that offer an encompassing interpretive framework. The concept of civilization has to be taken seriously, despite all the conceptual confusion often surrounding it. For example, in the discussions on the European constitution the question of civilization has loomed large. Christian Democrats have pointed out that Europe was founded on a Christian civilization, while liberals and socialist have pointed to the secular-­liberal foundations of Europe. Both arguments were also used against the inclusion of Muslim Turkey as a member of the European Union. The fact that there

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were already millions of Turks (as well as other Muslims) in Europe seemed to have no bearing on the question of whether Europe was Christian or secular-­liberal. Also the fact that Turkey has a secular state and a secularism that resembles most French laïcité also did not have a bearing on the discussion of the inclusion of Muslim Turkey. This civilizational debate shows the extent to which Muslims are defined as strangers in Europe. The Bharatiya Janata Party in India constantly points to the Hindu civilization that is foundational to India (to be an Indian is to be a Hindu), while the secular Congress Party has a more inclusive, but still quite Hindu, understanding of Indian civilization, as laid out in Jawaharlal Nehru’s book, The Discovery of India. As in Europe the Muslim is the significant stranger, despite the presence of Islam in South Asia for almost as long as Islam has existed. In China the communists have rediscovered Confucianism as the basis of Chinese civilization. Following an old pattern of thinking different religions should submit to the harmonious order controlled by the state. Here the strangers are both Uyghur Muslims and Christians, routinely seen as “foreign.” One of the more disturbing recent theoretical applications of the concept of civilization has been Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, in which he argues that global conflict arises out of the clash of civilizations that culturally divide the world. These civilizations are (1) Western; (2) Latin American; (3) Islamic; (4) Sinic (Chinese); (5) Hindu; (6) Orthodox; (7) Japanese; and (8) African. The core of these civilizations is formed by religious traditions. If we look at India and China this theory of international relations does not sound very convincing. Pakistan and Bangladesh were together because of shared religion but split later because of ethnicity; China and Vietnam had a recent war despite their common civilization. The Irish fight each other as Catholics and Protestants within the same civilization. The only case that seems to fit the civilizational theory is that of Al Qaeda fighting Western civilization. Al Qaeda itself, however, is a terrorist group, not a civilization. Huntington’s theory is only partly about international relations, pleading for

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peaceful coexistence between civilizations (much as in Cold War containment policies), but it is mainly about the need for civilizational unity in the West (and especially the United States). It is here that the problematic of the stranger who threatens the unity of a civilization comes into the foreground in thinking about civilization. While European intellectuals are worried about Muslim demographics in their societies, Huntington is worried about the Hispanic demographics in the United States. Cultural relativism abroad and cultural homogeneity at home seem to be the message of his last book, Who Are We? The Challenges to American Identity.”13 The attention that is given to Huntington’s theory shows that the concept of civilization is very much alive in the study of international relations. Recently, Peter Katzenstein has been arguing that “civilizations are social and operate at the broadest level of cultural identity in world politics. Because they are culturally integrated, civilizations can assume a reified identity when encountering other civilizations.” Following the socio­ logist Randall Collins he sees civilizations as “zones of prestige that have one or several cultural centers.” In Katzenstein’s view India and China, as well as the United States, are civilizational states. Religious traditions are central to their identity and to their civilizing projects of Indicization, Sinicization, and Americanization.14 As I have argued in this book a major impetus in thinking about civilization is finding deep structures or even essences. The late S. N. Eisenstadt has suggested a deep history of civilizational (religious) patterns that lead to differences in their modernities. According to Eisenstadt, a major revolution in civilizational thought occurred in a relatively short time span around 500 BCE. He called it “the Axial Age Breakthroughs,” using a concept developed by the philosopher Karl Jaspers, who argued that in this period a shared framework for universal historical self-­understanding emerged. Jaspers and Eisenstadt’s Axial framework is the background to Charles Taylor’s work on Western modernity, which he characterizes as “a secular age.”

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In my view we need to avoid essentializations of civilizations without denying the deep histories of especially religious traditions and processes of state formation that connect people over vast territories. Of great importance is to avoid the felt necessity to narrativize unity. Traditions project themselves as timeless, transcending history, and their discursive authority lies precisely in that claim of unity over time. It is thus not so much that in the modern period traditions are cast away in a process of westernization, but that the debate about how indigenous traditions relate to the necessity to measure up against the modern power of the West becomes central. When we examine nationalism and modernity in India, China, and Europe we should not simply see this as a break with the traditional past but as a reworking and transformation of traditions that are now portrayed as constituting the essence of national identity or as its civilization. As Norbert Elias has pointed out, the term civilisation in French identifies the national characterics of the French, while the German Zivilisation stands for outward, material civilization and is inferior to Kultur, which is purely spiritual (rein geistig) and much less connected to politics. In the second half of the nineteenth century these concepts also come to stand for essential differences between the French and the Germans. The concept of civilization is used in the modern period to essentialize national unity in civilizational states like India and China. In India the concept of civilization can be translated as sankriti, but this is an ideal of perfection that is carried by Brahman groups, not a unity at all. Since the sixteenth century state formation has been largely carried out by Muslim groups that formed the Mughal Empire and a number of sultanates. The idea of a Hindu civilization unifying India becomes the founding myth of Hindu nationalism and is used not only to unify castes, linguistic groups, religious movements over the territory governed by the British, but also to keep the Muslims out, since they belonged to a foreign Islamic civilization. In China the concept of civilization can be translated as wenming, which stands opposite to “the uncivilized” or “barbarians.”

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A cognate concept wenhua can be translated as the process of civilizing others, assimilating them into Chinese civilization (whether they want to or not). The character wen (文) stands for language and especially writing, signifying the importance of script and the literary tradition in Chinese conceptions of civilization. Confucian morality and statecraft is an important element of that civilization, but again this is a set of ideals that only partly unify China. Since the sixteenth century state formation was largely carried out by a Manchu (barbarian) dynasty that took over Confucian ideals of civilization and tried to implement them. It is only in the republican period that a connection was made between a Han (ethnic) civilization with a Confucian morality and national unity. This was adopted by the communists, who replaced Confucian with communist and are now trying to combine communism and Confucianism, as in Deng Xiaoping’s combination of two civilizations (liange wenming): wuzhi wenming (material civilization) and jingshen wenming (spiritual civilization). While one cannot say that Chinese conceptions of civilization have as their main function to keep the Muslims out, there is a strong sense that Uyghur Muslims do not belong to Chinese civilization and that even Hui Muslims (who are Han) do not belong. Whenever I would ask during my research in Shanghai whether Muslims should be seen as belonging to the city if they had resided in it for several generations, the answer would always be: of course not. While other minorities are more and more integrated in Chinese society and their cultures are seen as a charming folkloristic addition to Chinese civilization, Muslims continue to be seen as threateningly Other. This is exacerbated by the geographical location of Xinjiang, which resembles that of Kashmir in India as being majority Muslim and at the edge of national territory. In Europe the reference to the ancient civilization of Athens and Rome is mostly made in providing the founding myth of Europe’s modernity (its liberty, ideals of citizenship, rationality, and so on). In the imperial and nation-­building period Europe’s civilizational modernity (as described in Taylor’s work) is mainly

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used to explain Europe’s ascendancy as well as its right to rule and educate others who have backward civilizations. Civilization is thus not only used to create national unity and class hegemony but also to see modern progress as developing from European civilization and as a measuring rod to judge the development of other civilizations. In response Indians and Chinese had to extol the comparative merits of their civilizations. Especially the notion of a pan-­Asian spirituality was a major element of that response. Concepts close to that of civilization are civility and civil society, which are generally understood as essential aspects of modern civilization. In accounts by Norbert Elias and Roger Chartier civility is the code of behavior that is required in the new, free spaces of communication of citizens, those who belong to the political community.15 Civil society refers to voluntary associations outside of state control and thus the possibility of the free exchange of ideas that constitutes the public sphere. Theorists like Habermas, Rawls, and Taylor have all attempted to describe the nature of civil society and also to prescribe the nature of communication in civil society. Since the 1980s much of the critique of the twin concepts of civil society–public sphere has focused on who have been excluded from it—women, blacks, and so on. A major element of the arguments of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas has been that the public sphere had to be completely secular to be neutrally accessible to all. These are arguments not about the content of the debate but about procedures of conducting a rational debate and creating an overlapping consensus, but still they depend on the secular as the frame of any debate. This is even true for later reformulations of their position. Rawls argues that religious arguments could have a place in the debate as long as they were translatable in secular terms. Habermas argues that they are permissible and can even be helpful as long as there is no direct appeal to a transcendent notion of ultimate truth. Taylor has responded to this by putting forward that Habermas’s own demand for complete rationality is in fact a claim to a transcendent value.16

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The mainstream theoretical debate about civil society does not look outside the West. The sociologist Eiko Ikegami has argued that Japan in the Tokugawa period had civility without civil society.17 About communist China we can say that it does have various spheres of civility in commercial society, as for example in guanxixue, but no civil society. There is a Marxist understanding of civil society (taking the German term bürgerliche Gesellschaft) that argues that the bourgeoisie, as the social locus of civil society, should be destroyed in order to achieve an equal and just society. What we now have in China seems to be commercial civility and the rise of a bourgeoisie without civil society. Again, in China religious voluntary organizations are not allowed to play the role that they have played in Europe (and in Taiwan) to shape civil society.18 This is particularly true for those voluntary organizations that are placed outside the common civilization— namely, Christians and Muslims. In India one has a robust civil society and public sphere in which religious organizations play a significant role. The civility of that civil society, however, is quite doubtful. Pogroms against Muslims and to a lesser extent Christians have been a major part of political democratization in India. This book has argued that it is imperial interactions that have had a major impact on the formation of Indian and Chinese modernities. It is instructive to look at a formative moment in the 1850s. The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom movement in China (1850–1864) and the Mutiny in India of 1857 occurred almost simultaneously after a period of deep penetration of Western imperialist power in these societies. The Opium Wars in China had made clear how immensely vulnerable the Qing dynasty was in the face of imperialist pressure. The gradual colonization of India by the British was completed with the suppression of the Mutiny. In this era of rupture with the past desires for restoration fought with passions for innovation. One cannot overestimate the deep resentments that were the result of the encounter with Western imperial power and that are felt even today in postcolonial India and China. Taiping as well as the later Boxer

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uprising and the Mutiny can be taken as major events that mark a transition from premodern arrangements into imperial modernity. It is interesting to note that this transition was marked by what imperial modernity would signify as “magical” and “irrational.” In the case of the Mutiny one of the events that sparked it was the rumor that the British had greased the bullets that the Indian soldiers had to bite open with beef (abhorrent to Hindus) or with pork (abhorrent to Muslims). In the case of Taiping (and the Boxers) it is the belief in miraculous weapons and invincibility that made the rebels such a formidable force. The anxiety about imperial Christianity is expressed in Taiping in the fascinating translation of Christianity into indigenous millenarianism, while it is expressed in the Mutiny as a revolt against a greasy form of conversion. The radical nature of this imperial transition with its violence and iconoclasm makes it impossible to take at face value what appears to be continuity with the past in terms of, for example, language and cultural traditions. There is a strong tendency, especially in the study of China, and less so in the study of India, to emphasize continuities despite the enormous upheavals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In my view, the imperial moment in the case of both China and India has indeed been a rupture and so much so that I would suggest that the global context is at least as important in understanding the cultural transformations of the late nineteenth century and twentieth century as premodern history. If this is correct, comparative sociology has an important role to play in furthering our understanding of contemporary India and China, since it can interpret this global context better than national historiography. Imperial modernity to a large extent constitutes this global context, but certainly there are other channels than those provided by imperial forces through which modernity has come to India and China. Later in the twentieth century Western modernity was also carried by the United States and increasingly so during the twentieth century. The consumer revolution was part of Woodrow Wilson’s “market empire” and conquered Europe after the

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United States.19 In India and China it engendered first a long period of resistance against it, guided by Gandhian thought or by communism, and after the opening up of Indian and Chinese markets, a near total surrender to it. As such the consumer revolution and its discontents have been crucial to the formation of Indian and Chinese modernity.20 Conversely, Gandhi’s notions of nonviolent political resistance have been fundamental to the Civil Rights Movement and thus to the shaping of contemporary race relations in the United States.21 An important channel of imperial interactions, especially with China, has been Japan. As we have seen the vocabulary of modernity in China derived from the West, but was in general filtered through Japanese translation. Chinese traditions have also often reached the West through Japanese filters. The first exhibition of Chinese paintings in Boston in 1894 was organized by Ernest Fenollosa (1853–1908), an American who had taught philosophy at Tokyo University and had converted to Buddhism in Japan. Chinese poetry reached the American and British audience through translations by Ezra Pound, who based them on unpublished notes by Fenollosa. Japan became the beacon of modernity for Asia especially after the Japanese defeated Russia (a Western power) in 1905, but Japanese modernity turned out to be as aggressive as Western imperial modernity. Despite the experiences of the war with Japan (1937–1945) and the negative views of Japan that dominate Chinese public opinion to today, Japanese experiments with modern nation-­building politics and social engineering in Manchuria have been very influential in China.22 India’s relation to the West did not have to be mediated by Japan. From the early nineteenth century India was in constant conversation with England. It was not merely derivative or mimetic of English modernity. In fact it was the laboratory for the development of a curriculum of English language and literature that was brought back to England, where it replaced the classical curriculum, constituting a major step to English modernity.23 English today in India is not a foreign language, underlining

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again the depth of the imperial encounter as compared to China. Despite Japan’s marginal role as a translator of Western modernity in India, its rapid emergence as a modern society did draw Indian attention. In Hind Swaraj Gandhi argues forcefully: “As is Japan, so must India be. We must own our navy, our army, and we must have our own splendor, and then will India’s voice ring through the world.”24 While Gandhi refers to the military independence that Japan had acquired at a time that India was a voiceless colony, Tagore tries to establish a common spirituality that connects India and Japan with India in a leading role. For Tagore this common spirituality went beyond military independence. He was interested in pan-­Asianism, focusing on Asia, a category in fact originating as an outsider’s perspective, a Western concept of the area that was now being employed to create an alternative to Asian modernity. It is perhaps interesting that the move from Gandhi to Tagore is also a move from politics to poetry, from political action to aesthetics. Tagore’s interlocutor Okakura Tenshin became a curator connected to the Boston Museum’s Asian Collection, which was begun by his mentor, Fenollosa. However, Okakura’s interest in Asia turned out to be primarily nationalist and second imperialist.25 Both Gandhi and Tagore, obviously, were taken aback by the development of Japanese militarism and the quite different conception of pan-­ Asianism that came to be propagated by Japan. This book has argued that the syntagmatic chain of religion-­ magic-­secularity-­spirituality has been of crucial importance in the formation of Indian and Chinese modernities. The term “syntagmatic chain” is used here to indicate that these different conceptualizations of social practices as religious, spiritual, magical, or secular are in fact connected by empire. Imperial interactions deeply shape the ways in which this syntagmatic chain is conceptualized. It is not so much the case anymore that magic within Western society is put in opposition to religion, but that the traditions of the colonized are conceptualized as largely magical and superstitious. They are not merely false religion, but also false science. This categorization is, obviously, deeply contested

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by Indians and Chinese intellectuals, as, for example, in Peng Guangyu’s’s ironic subversion by placing Christianity in the category of shamanism. Spirituality, as an alternative to institutionalized religion, is conceptualized in direct conversation with “oriental wisdom.” The secular is not a product of a process of gradual rationalization, but is historically articulated in colonial and postcolonial India as “neutral” and in nationalist and communist China as “atheist.” This conceptual development is not derivative of developments occurring in a self-­contained Western Christian world, but has to be thought of as being shaped by imperial interactions. China and India are not only important social arenas for the application of these concepts, but they have been crucial to their development. While imperial interactions have shaped the modernities of India and China, the problematic of religion and nationalism is not receding with the emergence of a postcolonial world. After the defeat of Japan by the Western Allies India, Pakistan, China, and Taiwan became independent nation-­states. They were independent, but poor, and underdeveloped nations that were part of a new Great Game, that of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. In this period India continued to project an image of spiritual leadership in the nonaligned movement, showing an alternative way beyond capitalism and communism, while China gradually broke away from Russian hegemony. Their economic weakness, however, limited the ability of these nations to play a central role in the international arena. India and China were both very much occupied with themselves and their immediate geopolitical environment. It is only with the economic rise of a transformed anti-­militarist Japan in the 1960s and especially the rise of the four Asian tigers (Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea) that a new form of Asian modernity has come up. Suddenly, again, it was widely claimed that an alternative modernity had originated from Asia with Japanese business skills and corporate values as well as “authentically” Japanese aesthetics and food culture. The economic success led to a new self-­confidence that Asia could again be a leader in the

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world with another form of society, based on other values than one could find in the modern West. Singapore became the model for lifting a society out of third-­world backwardness into a new future that could also show the way for other Asian societies. When Deng Xiaoping announced that China could learn from Singapore and sent Chinese officials to be educated in Singapore, at least for the East Asian cultural sphere the possibility was opened of an authoritarian (though with democratic elections) rule (not necessarily a communist one) combined with free-­market entrepreneurship and a full embracing of modern culture without too much individual and civil freedom. This notion of an East Asian modernity providing an alternative to the West in the current phase of globalization was primarily a political and economic one, but it was accompanied by the promoting of a neo-­Confucian social philosophy. To an important extent this East Asian modernity depended on the notion of a Greater Cultural China. The economic linkages that were forged between Japan, Korea, Mainland China, Taiwan, and Singapore were accompanied by the Harvard philosopher Tu Wei-­ming’s vision that the Confucian values that were banished from communist China had lived on outside the mainland in diaspora communities.26 In the 1980s and 1990s such notions found a remarkable resonance in Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, but (less overtly) also in Mainland China. Tu Wei-­ming had his Confucian moment when he, as a scholar, provided the polity with a social ethic and principles of governmentality. What had motivated leaders like Gandhi and Nehru— namely, the successful modernization of the economy coupled with the safeguarding of cultural authenticity, was now again being aspired to, although based on another system of values than Hindu spirituality (and its accompanying Hindu rate of growth). It was now East Asia that had to show South Asia the way to alternative modernity, but while the roles were reversed from Tagore’s time to today, the reluctance to follow the example of the Other Asia was the same. Indians were quick to point out that the work ethic in East Asia reduced workers to slaves

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and that Indian democracy represented superior political values to East Asian authoritarianism. After the Asian financial crisis of 1997 Asian values as a concept to explain the region’s success have been devalued. Instead a more diversified sense of an East Asian popular culture has emerged that connects populations through images, consumption patterns, and aesthetic sensibilities, but it is indeed more or less East Asian.27 However, if one notices the popularity of yoga and Bollywood soaps in China and the popularity of Hong Kong gangster movies in India, the boundaries between South and East Asia are perhaps slowly changing. It is the growing connectivity of the region and the similarities in the transition from economic autarchy to liberalization of the markets that may lead to an increase of interactions that are no longer mediated by Western power. Studies of popular culture are often deeply secular in their definition of culture, but if one broadens the inquiry of popular culture to religious networks and notions of spirituality that are not predicated on the idea of a national religion, one may see even more border crossings, as for example in Tibetan Buddhism, in the Bangalore-­based Guru Sri Sri Ravi Shankar’s Art of Living, in Taiwan’s Ciji Compassion Relief movement. The Buddhist interactions of two millennia ago are not being “revived,” but new inspirations under new economic regimes have come about in a world in which the West is decentered. Those inspirations continue to work along the syntagmatic chain of religion-­magic-­secularity-­spirituality in an increasingly interconnected world.

Notes

Chapter 1 Introduction   1.  In an important overview of the field of historical sociology, the topic of religion is absent from the index and interpretive approaches are discarded in favor of the search for macro-­causalities; see James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschemeyer, eds., Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003).   2.  See “Étienne Balibar, The Nation Form: History and Ideology: Review,” Fernand Braudel Center 13, no. 3 (1990): 329–361.   3.  See my review of Aviel Roshwald, The Endurance of Nationalism: Ancient Roots and Modern Dilemmas, in The American Historical Review 113, no. 4 (2009), 208–210.   4.  This term is used by Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller in the context of studies of transnational migration and by Ulrich Beck in the context of studies of border-­crossing risks, but I would claim that, more fundamentally, modern social sciences and their problems and methods are deeply rooted in national society and national traditions; see Wimmer and Glick Schiller, “Methodological Nationalism and Beyond: Nation-­State-­Building, Migration and the Social Sciences,” Global Networks 2, 4 (2002), 301–334; Ulrich Beck, “The Cosmopolitan Perspective: Sociology of the Second Age of Modernity,” British Journal of Sociology 51 (2000): 79–105.   5.  Robert Hymes, “Some Thoughts on Asad, Geertz, ‘Belief,’ and Xin,” in “Religion in China: Rethinking Indigenous and Imported Categories of Thought,” paper presented at Fairbank East Asian Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 21–22 May 2005.  6. Tansen Sen, Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade: The Realignment of Sino-­ Indian Relations, 600–1400 (Delhi: Manohar, 2003).  7. Alexander Woodside, Lost Modernities: China, Vietnam, Korea, and the Hazards of World History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).  8. Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).  9. Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680, Vol. I: The Lands below the Winds (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), and Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680, Vol. II: Expansion and Crisis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).

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10.  Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2009). 11.  For an economic comparison of India and China, see Pranab Bardhan, Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay: Assessing the Rise of China and India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). 12.  Emanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, 4 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974–2011); Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 13.  Lynn Hunt, Margaret C. Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt, The Book That Changed Europa: Picart and Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 14.  Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 15.  A good example is C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780– 1914 (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2004). 16.  Ashis Nandy, “An Anti-­Secularist Manifesto,” India International Quarterly 22, 1 (Spring 1995), 35–64; T. N. Madan, Modern Myths, Locked Minds: Secularism and Fundamentalism in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997). 17.  Louis Dumont and David Pocock, “For a Sociology of India,” Contributions to Indian Sociology 1 (1957): 1–64. 18.  Arjun Appadurai, “Putting Hierarchy in Its Place,” Cultural Anthropology 3, no. 1 (1992): 36–49. 19.  There is some work on secularism in India, but hardly on secularism in China; see Donald E. Smith, India as a Secular State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), and Rajeev Bhargava, ed., Secularism and Its Critics (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). 20.  Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 21.  Shmuel Eisenstadt, ed., Multiple Modernities (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002). 22.  David Mungello, The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–1800 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009). 23.  Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon, 1970), xv. 24.  Haun Saussy, “Always Multiple Translation, or, How the Chinese Language Lost Its Grammar,” in Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations, ed. Lydia Liu (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 107–127. 25.  Cited in Haun Saussy, “Always Multiple Translation,” 115. 26.  Rodney Koeneke, Empires of the Mind: I. A. Richards and Basic English in China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).

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27.  I. A. Richards, Mencius on the Mind: Experiments in Multiple Definition (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1932). 28.  This passage is based on Lydia H. Liu, The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 29.  See B. S. Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987). 30.  Godfrey Lienhardt, “Modes of Thought,” in The Institutions of Primitive Society, ed. E. Evans-­Pritchard (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1954), 97, cited in Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 172. 31.  S. N. Eisenstadt, ed., The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986). 32.  Karl Jaspers, Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1955), 14. 33.  Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, UK: Harvard University Press, 2008), 152. 34. Eisenstadt, Origins and Diversity, 16. 35.  Charles Taylor, “Western Secularity,” in Rethinking Secularism, ed. Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, Jonathan VanAntwerpen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 31–54. 36.  Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 37.  Pranab Bardhan, “India and China: Governance Issues and Development,” Journal of Asian Studies 68, no. 2 (2009): 347–357. 38.  James Watson, “Rites or Beliefs: The Construction of a Unified Culture in Late Imperial China,” in China’s Quest for National Identity, ed. Lowell Dittmer and Samuel Kim (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 80–104. 39.  For a nuanced critique of Watson’s state standardization in China thesis, see Donald Sutton et al., “Ritual, Cultural Standardization, and Orthopraxy in China: Reconsidering James L. Watson’s Ideas,” Modern China 1 (2007): 33. 40.  V. S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization (London: Andre Deutsch, 1977). 41.  Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 86. 42.  For a fascinating illustration of this dilemma, see Anita Chung, ed., Chinese Art in an Age of Revolution: Fu Baoshi (1904–1965), catalogue of an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 21 January–15 April 2012. 43.  Puay-­peng Ho, “Consuming Art in Middle Class China,” in Patterns of

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Middle Class Consumption in India and China, ed. Christophe Jaffrelot and Peter van der Veer (Delhi: Sage, 2008), 277–299. 44.  Jerome Silbergeld, “Modernization, Periodization, and Canonization in Twentieth-­Century Chinese Painting,” in Writing Modern Chinese Art, ed. Josh Yiu (Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, 2007), 9–15. 45.  Talal Asad, “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam,” Occasional Paper Series, Georgetown University Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, March 1986. 46.  Jose Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 47.  Daniel L. Dreisbach, Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation between Church and State (New York: New York University Press, 2003). 48.  Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1962; trans. 1989); Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 49.  Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein, “The Nation Form: History and Ideology,” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991), 86–106.

Chapter 2 Spirituality in Modern Society   1.  Despite the absence of the concept of spirituality in Sanskrit, I found A Sanskrit Dictionary of Spirituality (Sydney: Sarbatoare Publications, 2009).  2. W. J.Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1996; Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998).  3. K. Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York: Reinhart, 1944).  4. Prasenjit Duara, The Global and Regional in China`s Nation-­Formation (London: Routledge, 2009), 5–7.   5.  Arthur H. Nethercot, The First Five Lives of Annie Besant (London: Hart-­Davis, 1961), and The Last Four Lives of Annie Besant (London: Hart-­ Davis, 1963).   6.  Leigh Eric Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (San Francisco: Harper, 2005).  7. Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990).   8.  Peter Pels, “Spirits of Modernity Alfred Wallace, Edward Tylor, and the Visual Politics of Fact,” in Magic and Modernity, ed. Birgit Meyer and Peter Pels (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).  9. Catherine Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007).

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10.  Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004). 11.  See the exhibition catalogue Maurice Tuchman, Judi Freeman, and Carel Blotkamp, The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985 (New York: Abbeville Press, 1986). 12.  Marty Bax, Complete Mondrian (Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, VT: Lund Humphries, 2001). 13.  Cited in Leigh Eric Schmidt, Restless Souls; The Making of American Spirituality (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2005). 14.  Cited in Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 76. 15.  J. P. Parry and M. Bloch, Money and the Morality of Exchange (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 16.  Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 76. 17.  N. B. Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 18.  Wilhelm Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (New York: SUNY Press, 1988). 19.  Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East,1680–1880 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). 20.  For a more detailed analysis, see the third chapter of my Imperial Encounters (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 21.  F. Max Müller, Ramakrishna, His Life and Sayings (London: Longmans, 1898), v. 22.  Michael Bergunder, “Saiva Siddhanta as a Universal Religion: J. M. Nallasvami Pillai (1864–1920) and Hinduism in Colonial India,” in Ritual, Caste, and Religion in Colonial South India, ed. Michael Bergunder, Heiko Frese, and Ulrike Schröder (Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen zu Halle, 2010), 30–86. 23.  Ibid., 40. 24.  Akeel Bilgrami, “Gandhi’s Integrity: The Philosophy behind the Politics,” Postcolonial Studies 5, no. 1 (2002): 79–93. 25.  Carolien Stolte and Harald Fischer-­Tiné, “Imagining Asia in India: Nationalism and Internationalism (ca. 1905–1940),” Comparative Studies in Society and History 54, no. 1 (2012): 65–92. 26.  Unitarianism is a liberal form of Protestant Christianity that has always been open for the possibility that other religions had “spiritual elements” in common with other religions. This impelled them to organize the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. 27.  Much of the following description of the encounter of Tagore with Japan and China is based on the groundbreaking work by Stephen Hay, Asian Ideas of East and West: Tagore and His Critics in Japan, China, and India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).

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28.  Shantiniketan developed later into a university. Famous Bengali intellectuals like the Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen and the celebrated filmmaker Satyajit Ray are among its graduates. 29.  Rabindranath Tagore and Yone Noguchi, Correspondence on Japanese Aggression (Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, 1938). 30.  David Mungello, Leibniz and Confucianism: The Search for Accord (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1977). 31.  Tu Wei-­ming and Mary Evelyn Tucker, eds. Confucian Spirituality, 2 vols. (New York: Crossroads, 2003–2004). 32.  Merle Goldman and Leo Ou-­Fan Lee, eds. An Intellectual History of Modern China (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 142. 33.  Axel Schneider, “China and the Crisis of Modernity,” Inaugural Lecture, 16 November 2001 (Leiden University, 2001), 8. 34.  Ya-­Pei Kuo, “Redeploying Confucius: The Imperial State Dreams of the Nation, 1902–1911,” in Chinese Religiosities: Afflictions of Modernity and State Formation, ed. Mayfair Yang (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 65–84. 35.  Benjamin Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964); Joseph Levinson, Liang Ch’i-­Ch’ao and the Mind of Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953); Wang Hui, Xiandai zhongguo sixiang de xingqi現代中國思想的 興起 (The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought), 4 vols. (Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2004). 36.  Taixu has been the subject of a major biography: Don Pittman, Toward a Modern Chinese Buddism: Taixu’s Reforms (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001). 37.  Ibid., 70. 38.  Cited in ibid., 107. 39.  Richard Madsen, Democracy’s Dharma: Religious Renaissance and Political Development in Taiwan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 40.  His life and works are the subject of a recent monograph by Xun Liu: Daoist Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 41.  Vincent Goossaert, The Taoists of Peking, 1800–1949 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 42.  Tu Wei-­ming, “Cultural China: The Periphery as the Center,” Daedalus 120, no. 2 (2005): 145–167; Tu Wei-­ming and Mary Evelyn Tucker, eds., Confucian Spirituality, 2 vols. (New York: Crossroads, 2003–2004). 43.  Leigh Eric Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (San Francisco: Harper, 2005). 44.  Nicholas Goodrick-­Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism (New York: New York University Press, 1992), and Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2003).

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Chapter 3 The Making of Oriental Religion   1.  Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Vasudha Dalmia and Heinrich von Stietencron, eds., Representing Hinduism: The Construction of Religious Traditions and National Identity (Delhi: Sage, 1995).   2.  Derek Peterson and Darren Walhof, eds., The Invention of Religion (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002).   3.  Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1991), 76–100; Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).   4.  Rodney Stark and William Bainbridge, A Theory of Religion (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987).   5.  Lecture given by Pope Benedict XVI at the University of Regensburg on 12 September 2006.  6. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).   7.  Peter Marshall, ed., The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1970); David Lorenzen, “Who Invented Hinduism?” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41 (1999): 630–659.   8.  For an argument about the spread of Sanskritic traditions over the Indian subcontinent, see Sheldon Pollock, Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).  9. Louis Dumont, La Civilisation Indienne et Nous (Paris: Arman Colin, 1975), 38. 10.  Sheldon Pollock, “Mimamsa and the Problem of History in Traditional India,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 109, no. 4 (1989): 607. 11.  Available at www.columbia.edu/sanskrit. 12.  J.G.A. Pocock, “Concepts and Discourses: A Difference in Culture?” Occasional Paper No. 15, in The Meaning of Historical Terms and Concepts, ed. Hartmut Lehmann and Melvin Richter (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 1996), 47. 13.  Alex Schneider, “China and the Crisis of Modernity,” Inaugural Lecture in Modern China Studies at Leiden University, 16 November 2001. 14.  Brian Pennington, Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians and the Colonial Construction of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 15.  Webb Keane, Christian Modern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 16.  Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

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17.  On this theory of “historical stages” and its fallacies, see Romila Thapar, Harbans Mukhia, and Bipan Chandra, Communalism and the Writing of Indian History (Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1969). 18. Masuzawa, Invention of World Religions, 109, 111, 113. 19.  Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 72. 20.  John Pemberton, On the Subject of “Java” (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). 21.  Arie L. Molendijk, The Emergence of the Science of Religion in the Netherlands (Leiden: Brill, 2005). 22.  Quoted in Lourens van den Bosch, Friedrich Max Müller (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 134. 23.  Norman Girardot, The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge’s Oriental Pilgrimage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 351. 24.  van den Bosch, Friedrich Max Müller, 133ff. 25.  Norman Girardot, Victorian Translation of China, 281. 26.  Benjamin Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Social and Intellectual Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China, 2nd rev. ed., UCLA Asian Pacific Monograph Series (Los Angeles: University of California at Los Angeles, 2001). 27.  R. H. Seager, The World’s Parliament of Religions: The East/West Encounter, 1893 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). 28.  The recording of the original speech was accessed on YouTube on 30 August 2008. 29.  Steven Kemper, “Dharmapala’s Buddhisms,” in The Anthropologist and the Native: Essays for Gananath Obeyesekere, ed. H. L. Seneviratne (Florence: Societa Editrice Fiorentina, 2009), 203–221. 30.  Hsi-­yuan Chen, “At the Threshold of the Pantheon of Religions: Confucianism and the Emerging Religious Discourse at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” paper presented at the Conference on Chinese Religiosities, Santa Barbara, CA, 2005. 31.  See Prasenjit Duara, “Religion and Citizenship in China and the Diaspora,” in Chinese Modernities, ed. Mayfair Yang (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 43–65. 32.  Personal communication with the author by Tu Wei-­ming, 17 June 2011.

Chapter 4 Conversion to Indian and Chinese Modernities   1.  Peter van der Veer, Conversion to Modernities. The Globalization of Christianity (New York: Routledge, 1996).   2.  Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution,

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Vol. I: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1991), and Of Revelation and Revolution, Vol II: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Susan Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-­Century England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Jeffrey Cox, Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818–1940 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).   3.  H. Sharp, ed., Bureau of Education: Selections from Educational Records, Part I (1781–1839) (Calcutta: Superintendent, Government Printing, 1920; reprint Delhi: National Archives of India, 1965) , 107–117.   4.  Catherine Hall, “An Empire of God or of Man: The Macaulays, Father and Son,” in Empire of Religion, ed. Hilary M. Carey (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).   5.  Hugh McLeod, “Protestantism and British National Identity, 1815– 1945,” in Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia, ed. Peter van der Veer and Hartmut Lehmann, eds. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 46.   6.  Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 42.   7.  The classical text is E. Evans-­Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937; reprint, 1976). See also Igor Kopytoff, “Knowledge and Belief in Suku Thought,” Africa 51 (1981): 709–723; Peter Winch, “Understanding a Primitive Society,” American Philosophical Quarterly 1, no. 4 (Oct. 1964): 307–324; Steven Lukes and Martin Hollis, Rationality and Relativism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982).   8.  Ines G. Zupanov, “Aristocratic Analogies and Demotic Descriptions in the Seventeenth-­Century Madurai Mission,” Representations 41 (Winter 1993): 123–148, and Disputed Mission: Jesuit Experiments and Brahmanical Knowledge in Seventeenth-­Century India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999).   9.  Eliza Kent, “Mass Movements in South India, 1877–1936,” in Converting Cultures: Religion, Ideology and Transformations of Modernity, ed. Kevin Reinhart and Dennis Washburn (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 372. 10.  Rupa Viswanath, “Spiritual Slavery, Material Malaise: ‘Untouchables’ and Religious Neutrality in Colonial South India,” Historical Research 83, no. 219 (2010): 124–145. 11.  N. B. Dirks, Castes of Mind (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 12.  M. N. Srinivas, “A Note on Sanskritization and Westernization,” Far Eastern Quarterly XV (1956): 481–496. See the critique by N. B. Dirks, Castes of Mind (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 252–254.

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13.  Shail Mayaram, Resisting Regimes: Myth, Memory, and the Shaping of a Muslim Identity (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997). 14.  Nicholas B. Dirks, “The Conversion of Caste: Location, Translation, and Appropriation,” in Conversion to Modernities, ed. Peter van der Veer (New York: Routledge, 1996), 115–137. 15.  Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). 16.  Available at www.uscirf.gov, accessed 8 July 2011. 17.  Ellen Badone, Religious Orthodoxy and Popular Faith in European Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). 18.  Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Studies and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). 19.  Mumtaz Ali Khan, “A Brief Summary of the Study on Mass Conversions of Meenakshipuram: A Sociological Enquiry,” Religion and Society XXVIII, no. 4 (1981): 37–57. 20.  One of the most gruesome incidents was the killing of the Australian-­ born missionary Graham Staines with his two young sons in 1999. The man had been heading a leprosy hospital for twenty years. 21.  Kenneth Dean, “Ritual Revolutions: Temple and Trust Networks Linking Putian and Southeast Asia,” in The Globalization of Religious Networks, special issue Encounters, ed. Peter van der Veer (London: I. B. Tauris; New York: MacMillan, 2012), 121–134. 22.  Ryan Dunch, Fuzhou Protestants and the Making of a Modern China 1857–1927 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 49–55. 23.  Cited in Frank Dikötter, “ ‘Patient Zero’: China and the Myth of the ‘Opium Plague,’ ” Inaugural Lecture given by Professor Frank Dikötter, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Friday, 24 October 2003. 24. Dunch, Fuzhou Protestants, 49–55. 25.  The Aryan, March–April 1912, quoted in Rajiv Kapur, Sikh Separatism: The Politics of Faith (London: Allen & Unwin, 1984), 55. 26.  Peter van der Veer, ed., Nation and Migration (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995). On nationalist reponses to the ways in which Indian coolies were treated in Fiji, see John Kelly, A Politics of Virtue: Hinduism, Sexuality, and Countercolonial Discourse in Fiji (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 27. Dunch, Fuzhou Protestants, 60. 28.  Mao Zedong, “Friendship or Aggression,” in Selected Works of Mao Tse-­ Tung, vol. 4 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1961), 447–450. 29.  Vincent Goossaert, The Taoists of Peking, 1800–1949: A Social History of Urban Clerics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 30.  Based on fieldwork notes in 2005 in Xiamen and on Yoshiko Ashiwa

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and David Wank, “The Politics of a Reviving a Buddhist Temple,” Journal of Asian Studies 65, no. 2 (2006): 337–359. 31.  Eric Reinders, “The Iconoclasm of Obeisance: Protestant Images of Chinese Religion and the Catholic Church,” Numen 44 (1997): 296–322; James L. Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). 32.  Eric Reinders, “Blessed Are the Meat Eaters: Christian Antivegetarianism and the Missionary Encounter with Chinese Buddhism,” Positions 12, no. 2 (2004): 509–537. 33.  Vincent Goossaert, “The Beef Taboo and the Sacrificial Structure of Late Imperial Chinese Society,” in Of Tripod and Palate: Food, Politics, and Religion in Traditional China, ed. Roel Sterckx (New York: Palgrave), 237– 248. 34.  M. T. Yates, Records of the General Conference of the Protestant Missionaries of China, Held at Shanghai, May 10–24, 1877 (Shanghai: Presbyterian Mission Press, 1879), 112, cited in Eric Reinders, “The Economies of Temple Chanting and Conversion in China,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 31, no. 4 (2007): 192. 35.  There is a huge literature on the Taiping Movement. An anthropological perspective is offered by Robert Weller, Resistance, Chaos and Control in China; Taiping Rebels, Taiwanese Ghosts, and Tiananmen (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994). 36.  Alvyn Austin, China’s Millions: The China Inland Mission and Late Qing Society, 1832–1905 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), 116. 37.  This account of Pastor Xi’s movement is based on Alvyn Austin’s book, cited in the previous footnote. 38.  Henrietta Harrison, “Rethinking Missionaries and Medicine in China: The Miracles of Assunta Pallotta, 1905–2005,” Journal of Asian Studies, 71, no. 1 (2012): 127–148. 39.  Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters, 150–155. 40.  For a more sophisticated analysis, see Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983); David Hardiman, The Coming of the Devi: Adivasi Assertion in Western India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987).

Chapter 5 Secularism’s Magic   1.  Frederick M. Smith, The Self Possessed: Deity and Spirit Possession in South Asian Literature and Civilization (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).   2.  Donald S. Sutton, “From Credulity to Scorn: Confucians Confront

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the Spirit Mediums in Late Imperial China,” Late Imperial China 21, no. 2 (2000): 1–39.   3.  Lothar von Falkenhausen, “Reflections of the Political Role of Spirit Mediums in Early China: The Wu Officials in the Zhou Li,” Early China 20 (1995): 279–300.  4. Kristofer Schipper, The Taoist Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 6.  5. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).   6.  George W. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987).  7. Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religious Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 20–21.  8. Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Rise of Global Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).   9.  David Hollinger, “Damned for God’s Glory: William James and the Scientific Vindication of Protestant Culture,” in Re-­Experiencing Varieties: William James and a Science of Religion, ed. Wayne Proudfoot (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 9–30. 10.  Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, vol. 1 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1925). 11.  See the discussion in Stanley Tambiah, Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality, Henry Lewis Morgan Lectures, 1984 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990). For the development of this line of thought, see George W. Stocking Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987). 12.  For Christian Italy, see the fascinating story of the worldview of a sixteenth-­century miller in Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-­Century Miller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). 13.  Robert Redfield, The Little Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956). 14.  Mayfair Yang, “Goddess across the Taiwan Strait: Matrifocal Ritual Space, Nation-­State, and Satellite Television Footprints,” Public Culture 16, no. 2 (2004): 209–238; Adam Chau, Miraculous Response: Doing Popular Religion in Contemporary China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); Valentine Daniel, Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); William Sax, Mountain Goddess: Gender and Politics in a Central Himalayan Pilgrimage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 15.  Wilhelm Halbfass, ed., Philology and Confrontation: Paul Hacker on Traditional and Modern Vedanta (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 11. 16.  Jonathan Parry, “The Brahmanical Tradition and the Technology of

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the Intellect,” in Reason and Morality, ed. Joanna Overing (London: Routledge, 1985), 204. 17.  Peter van der Veer, “Playing or Praying: A Saint’s Day in Surat,” Journal of Asian Studies 51, no. 3 (1992): 545–564. 18.  Muzaffar Alam, The Languages of Political Islam in India: ca. 1200–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 19.  Yohanan Friedmann, Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi: An Outline of His Thought and a Study of His Image in the Eyes of Posterity (Montreal: McGill University, Institute of Islamic Studies, 1971); J.M.S. Baljon, Religion and Thought of Shah Wali Allah Dihlawi (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1986). 20.  Stephan Feuchtwang, Popular Religion in China: The Imperial Metaphor (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2001). 21.  Barend Ter Haar, The White Lotus Teachings in Chinese Religious History (Leiden: Brill, 1992). 22.  Tulasi Srinivas, Winged Faith: Rethinking Globalization and Religious Pluralism through the Sathya Sai Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); Smriti Srinivas, In the Presence of Sai Baba: Body, City, and Memory in a Global Religious Movement (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2008). 23.  Prasenjit Duara, “Panasianism and the Discourse of Civilization,” Journal of World History 12, no. 1 (2001): 118. 24.  Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Boston: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004). 25.  Lata Mani, “Contentious Traditions: The Debate around Sati in Colonial India,” in Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 88–126. 26.  N. B. Dirks, “The Policing of Tradition: Colonialism and Anthropology in Southern India,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 39, no. 1 (1997): 182–212. 27.  J. L. Duyvendak, “The Philosophy of Wu Wei,” Etudes Asiatiques 3/4 (1947): 81–102. 28.  Herbert Fingarette, Confucius: The Secular as Sacred (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 1998), 6. 29.  Peter van Rooden, “Friedrich Schleiermachers Reden über die Religion en de historische bestudering van Godsdienst,” Theoretische Geschiedenis 23 (1996): 419–438. 30.  Keane Webb, Christian Moderns (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 31.  Daniele Hervieu-­Leger, Religion as a Chain of Memory (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000). 32.  Arvind Rajagopal, Politics after Television: Religious Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

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33.  Paul Cohen, History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 34.  John Stratton Hawley, “The Goddess in India: One Goddess and Many, New and Old,” in John Stratton Hawley and Donna Marie Wulff, Devī: Goddesses of India (Delhi: Banarsidass, 1998), 1–29. 35.  Sarah Dickey, Cinema and the Urban Poor in South India (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 36.  Lawrence A. Babb and Susan Wadley, eds., Media and the Transformation of Religion in South Asia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995). 37.  Laikwan Pang, “Magic and Modernity in China,” Positions 12, no. 2 (2004): 299–327. 38.  Zhen Zhang, “Bodies in the Air: The Magic of Science and the Fate of the Early ‘Martial Arts’ Film in China,” Postscript 20, no. 2–3 (2001): 44. 39.  Rebecca Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. 40.  This is reminiscent of the great flourishing of spirit cults after the Civil War in the United States and after the World War I in Britain. 41.  Erik Mueggler, “Spectral Subversions: Rival Tactics of Time and Agency in Southwest China,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no. 3 (1999): 467. 42.  Richard Madsen, Morality and Power in a Chinese Village (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 43.  Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press 1988); Jonathan Parry and Maurice Bloch, Money and the Morality of Exchange (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 44.  Steven Kemper, Buying and Believing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 45.  Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (London: Cohen and West, 1966). 46.  William Mazzarella, “Branding the Mahatma: The Untimely Provocation of Gandhian Publicity,” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 1 (2010): 1–39. 47.  James Farrer, Opening Up: Youth Sex Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 48.  David A. Palmer, Qigong Fever: Body, Science and Utopia in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 49.  Peter van der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 50.  Mayfair Yang, Gifts, Favors, and Banquets: The Art of Social Relationships in China (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). Xun Zhou, “Eat, Drink and Sing, and Be Modern and Global: Food, Karaoke and ‘Middle

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Class’ Consumers in China,” in Patterns of Middle Class Consumption in India and China, ed. Christophe Jaffrelot and Peter van der Veer (Delhi: Sage, 2008), 170–186.

Chapter 6 “Smash Temples, Build Schools”: Comparing Secularism in India and China A version of this chapter previously appeared as Peter van der Veer, “Smash Temples, Burn Books: Comparing Secularist Projects in India and China,” in Rethinking Secularism, ed. Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). By permission of Oxford University Press, USA.   1.  B. R. Wilson, Religion in Secular Society (London: Penguin, 1969), and Religion in a Sociological Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982); Steve Bruce, God Is Dead: Secularization in the West (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002).  2. Jose Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).   3.  Rodney Stark and Roger Finke, Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). For a critique, see Steve Bruce, Choice and Religion: A Critique of Rational Choice Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).   4.  For example, J. Stolz, “Salvation Goods and Religious Markets: Integrating Rational Choice and Weberian Perspectives,” Social Compass, 53, no. 1 (2006): 13–32, and “Secularization Theory and Rational Choice: An Integration of Micro-­and Macro-­theories of Secularization Using the Example of Switzerland,” in The Role of Religion in Modern Societies, ed. D. Pollack and D.V.A. Olson (New York: Routledge) 249–270.   5.  J. Stolz, “Gods and Social Mechanisms: New Perspectives for an Explanatory Sociology of Religion,” in Raymond Boudon: A Life in Sociology, ed. M. Cherkaoui and P. Hamilton (London: Bardwell Press, 2009), 5.  6. Rodney Needham, Belief, Language and Experience (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972).   7.  For a summary of this debate, see Steven Lukes and Martin Hollis, eds., Rationality and Relativism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982).   8.  Daniel Beunza, and David Stark, “Models, Reflexivity, and Systemic Risk: A Critique of Behavioral Finance,” 19 April 2010. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1285054.   9.  Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters: Nation and Religion in India and Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 10.  Jose Casanova, “Religion, Secular Identities, and European Integration,” Transit 27 (2004): 1–14.

246

Notes to Chapter 6

11.  Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 201. 12.  Vincent Goossaert, “The Beginning of the End for Chinese Religion?” Journal of Asian Studies 65, no. 2 (May 2006): 307–336. 13.  On Deism, see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 14.  Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 31–32. 15.  Benjamin Elman and Alexander Woodside, eds., Education and Society in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 16.  Ya-­Pei Kuo, “Redeploying Confucius: The Imperial State Dreams of the Nation, 1902–1911,” in Chinese Religiosities: Afflictions of Modernity and State Formation, ed. Mayfair Yang (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 65–84. 17.  Vincent Goossaert, “The Beginning of the End for Chinese Religion?” Journal of Asian Studies 65, no. 2 (May 2006): 307–336. 18.  Vincent Goossaert, “L’anti-­clericalisme en Chine,” Extreme-­Orient/ Extreme-­Occident 24, special issue (2002). 19.  Joan Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 20.  David Ownby, “Imperial Fantasies: The Chinese Communists and Peasant Rebellions,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 43 (2001): 65–91. 21.  Cited in Thomas Dubois, The Sacred Village: Social Change and Religious Life in Rural North China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005). 22.  Daniele Hervieu-­Leger, Religion as a Chain of Memory (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000). 23.  Barend J. ter Haar, “China’s Inner Demons: The Political Impact of the Demonological Paradigm,” in China’s Great Proletarian Revolution: Master Narratives and Post-­Mao Counternarratives, ed. W. L. Chong (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 27–46, and Telling Stories: Witchcraft and Scapegoating in Chinese History (Leiden: Brill, 2006). 24.  Kenneth Dean, Taoist Ritual and Popular Cults of Southeast China (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 25.  Fenggang Yang, “The Red, Black, and Gray Markets of Religion in China,” Sociological Quarterly 47 (2006): 93–122, esp. 97. 26.  David Palmer, Qigong Fever: Body, Science, and Utopia in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 27.  Yoshiko Ashiwa and David L. Wank, eds., Making Religion, Making the State: The Politics of Religion in Modern China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). 28.  Karen Tranberg Hansen, “Informal Sector,” in International Encyclope-

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dia of the Social and Behavioural Sciences, vol. 12 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2001), 7450–7453. 29.  Paper presented at the “Beijing Summit on Chinese Spirituality and Society” at Beijing University in October 2008. 30.  Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96, no. 1 (1967): 1–21. 31.  Daniel Bell, China’s New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 32.  Peter Katzenstein with Il Hyun Cho, “In the Service of State and Nation: Religion in East Asia,” in Religion and International Relations Theory, ed. Jack Snyder (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), pp. 168–199. 33.  For an overview of this multifaceted revival of Confucianism, see the special issue on “Religious Reconfigurations in the People’s Republic of China,” China Perspectives 4 (2009). 34.  Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 35.  C. J. Fuller, Servants of the Goddess (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 36.  Rosalind O’Hanlon, Caste, Conflict and Ideology: Mahatma Jotirao Phule and Low Caste Protest in Nineteenth-­Century Western India (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 37.  N. B. Dirks, “The Conversion of Caste: Location, Translation, and Appropriation,” in Conversion to Modernities, ed. Peter van der Veer (New York: Routledge, 1996) 115–137. 38.  Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 39.  Peter van der Veer, Religious Nationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 40.  J. C. Heesterman, The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kinship, and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 41.  T. N. Madan, Modern Myths, Locked Minds. Secularism and Fundamentalism in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997); Ashis Nandy, “An Anti-­Secularist Manifesto,” India International Quarterly 22, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 35–64. 42.  Peter van der Veer, “The Ruined Center: Religion and Mass Politics in India,” Journal of International Affairs 50, no. 1 (1996): 254–277. 43.  Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 44. Ibid. 45.  Stephan Feuchtwang, The Imperial Metaphor: Popular Religion in China (London: Routledge, 1992). 46.  Interviews at the Forum of Religion, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, December 2011.

248

Notes to Chapter 7

47.  Charles Taylor, “Modes of Secularism,” in Rajeev Bhargava, Secularism and Its Critics (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), 31–53. 48.  Peter van der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

Chapter 7 The Spiritual Body A version of this chapter previously appeared as Peter van der Veer, “Global Breathing: Religious Utopias in India and China,” in Transnational Transcendence: Essays on Religion and Globalization. © 2009 by Thomas J. Csordas. Reprinted by permission of the University of California Press.  1. Mircea Eliade, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958).  2. Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 324–350.  3. Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, vol. 1 (Tubingen: Mohr, 1925).   4.  Peter van der Veer, Gods on Earth (London: Athlone [LSE Monographs]), 1989.  5. Ibid.  6. William Pinch, Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006).  7. Shamita Basu, Religious Revivalism as Nationalist Discourse: Swami Vivekananda and New Hinduism in Nineteenth-­Century Bengal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002).  8. Swami Vivekananda, Raja Yoga or Conquering the Internal Nature (Calcutta: Advaita Ashram, 1896).  9. Jeffrey Kripal, Kali’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 10.  Joseph Alter, Yoga in Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 28. 11.  Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 71. 12.  Mental illness has assumed epidemic proportions in the Western world, and the shift to using more and more drugs even for young children with such new diseases as ADHD has increased. See Marcia Angell in the New York Review of Books: “The Illusions of Psychiatry,” 24 July 2011, and “The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why?” 23 June 2011. 13.  “Yoga Is Part of Indian heritage,” Economic Times (India), 17 May 2007. 14.  Sarah Strauss, Positioning Yoga (Oxford: Berg, 2005). 15.  Lise McKean, Divine Enterprise: Gurus and the Hindu Nationalist Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

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16. Strauss, Positioning Yoga. 17.  Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). 18.  Mei Zhan, Other-­Wordly (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 36. 19.  Ibid., 145. 20.  Judith Farquhar, “Problems of Knowledge in Contemporary Chinese Medical Discourse,” Social Science and Medicine 24, no. 12 (1987): 1013–1021. 21.  Volker Scheid, Chinese Medicine in Contemporary China (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 18. 22.  Barend ter Haar, The White Lotus Teachings in Chinese Religious History (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992). 23.  Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern, State and Society in East Asia Series (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). 24.  Paul Cohen: “The Contested Past: The Boxers as History and Myth,” Journal of Asian Studies 51, no. 1 (1992): 82–113. 25.  Rebecca Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 26.  Jian Xu, “Body, Discourse and the Cultural Politics of Contemporary Qigong,” Journal of Asian Studies 58, no. 3 (1999): 972. 27.  Maria Hsia Chang, Falungong, secte Chinoise. Un defi au pouvoir (Paris: Editions Autrement, 2004). 28.  I take here Gyan Prakash’s reading of this text in his Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 213. 29.  Joseph S. Alter, “Gandhi’s Body, Gandhi’s Truth: Nonviolence and the Biomoral Imperative of Public Health,” Journal of Asian Studies 55 (1996): 301–322. 30.  Joseph S. Alter, The Wrestler’s Body: Identity and Ideology in North India (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992). 31.  Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Autobiographical essay, 19 January 2012. Available at http://samvada.org/2012/news/the-sangh-rss-is-my-soul-writes-atal -behari-vajpayee/; accessed 17 March 2012. 32.  Wang Hui, “The Fate of ‘Mr. Science’ in China: The Concept of Science and Its Application in Modern Chinese Thought,” Positions 3, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 1–68. 33.  David Palmer, “Religious Innovation in Post-­Mao China: The Case of Zhonggong,” in Religion in Contemporary China: Revitalization and Innovation, ed. Adam Chau (London: Routledge, 2010). 34.  Nicholas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London: Routledge, 1989).

250

Notes to Chapter 8

Chapter 8 Muslims in India and China  1. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).  2. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).  3. Aviel Roshwald, The Endurance of Nationalism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006); see my review essay “Ancient Roots and Modern Dilemmas,” American Historical Review 113, no. 4 (2009): 1100–1101.   4.  Dale Eickelman and James Piscatori, Muslim Travelers: Pilgrimage, Migration, and the Religious Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).  5. Stanley Tambiah, World Conqueror and World Renouncer (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976). See also J. C. Heesterman, The Inner Conflict of Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).   6.  Dru Gladney, “Muslim Tombs and Ethnic Folklore: Charters for Hui Identity,” Journal of Asian Studies 46, no. 3 (Aug. 1987): 495–532. Peter van der Veer, “Playing or Praying? A Saint’s Day in Surat,” Journal of Asian Studies 51, no. 3 (1992): 545–564.  7. Pamela Crossley, The Manchus (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997).  8. James Millward, Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).   9.  See Irfan Ahmad, Islamism and Democracy in India: The Transformation of Jamaat-­e-­Islami (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 10.  Khalid Masud, ed., Travellers in Faith: Studies of the Tablīghī Jamāʿat as a Transnational Islamic Movement for Faith Renewal (Leiden: Brill, 2000). 11.  Charles Lindholm, “Caste in Islam: The Problem of Deviant Systems: A Critique of Recent Theory,” Contributions of Indian Sociology, n.s., 20, no. 1 (1986): 61–73. 12.  The social, economic, and educational status of the Indian Muslim community has been extensively investigated by a high-­powered committee under the chairmanship of Justice Rajinder Sachar that submitted its report to the Indian Parliament in 2006. 13.  Mridu Rai, Hindu Ruler, Muslim Subjects: Islam and the History of Kashmir (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 14.  Mohammad Tavakoli-­Targhi, “Frontline Mysticism and Eastern Spirtuality,” ISIM Newsletter 9 (January 2002), 13 and 38. 15.  Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); originally published as Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation, 2 vols. (Basel: Verlag Haus zum Falken, 1939). 16.  Sheldon Pollock, “Ramayana and Political Imagination in India,” Journal of Asian Studies 52 no. 2 (1993): 261–297.

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17.  Peter van der Veer, “The Foreign Hand,” in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 23–45. 18.  Dru Gladney, Dislocating China: Muslims, Minorities, and Other Subaltern Subjects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 19.  Ibid., 7. 20.  Steven Harrell, Ways of Being Ethnic in Southwest China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001, 39 21. Gladney, Dislocating China, 14.

Chapter 9 Conclusion   1.  Timothy Mitchell, “Society, Economy, and the State Effect,” in State/ Culture, ed. George Steinmetz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 76–97.   2.  See the lucid exposé of Foucault’s notion of governmentality in Thomas Lemke, Eine Kritik der politischen Vernunft—Foucaults Analyse der modernen Gouvernementalität (Berlin/Hamburg: Argument, 1997).  3. Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre-­State in Nineteenth Century Bali (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981).   4.  Kellee S. Tsai, Back-­Alley Banking: Private Entrepreneurs in China (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).  5. Mayfair Yang, Gifts, Favors and Banquets (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).   6.  Mayfair Yang, “The Resilience of Guanxi and Its New Deployments: A Critique of Some New Guanxi Scholarship,” China Quarterly 170 (June 2002): 459–476.  7. Selig Harrison, India: The Most Dangerous Decades (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960).   8.  A classical account is Francis Hsu, Clan, Caste, and Club (New York: Van Nostrum, 1963).  9. Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), and Essays on Individualism. Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 10.  N. B. Dirks, Castes of Mind and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 11.  Kenneth Dean, Lord of the Three in One: The Spread of a Cult in Southeast China (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). 12.  James Watson, Emigration and the Chinese Lineage: The Mans in Hong Kong and London (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).

252

Notes to Chapter 9

13.  Samuel Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to American Identity (New York. Simon & Schuster, 2004). 14.  Peter Katzenstein, “Civilizational States, Secularisms, and Religions,” in Rethinking Secularism, ed. Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 145–165. 15.  Rogier Chartier, On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language, and Practices (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1997). 16.  See the discussion of Habermas, Rawls, and Taylor in Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, eds., Varieties of Secularism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 17.  Eiko Ikegami, Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 18.  Richard Madsen, Democracy’s Dharma (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 19.  Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 20.  Christophe Jaffrelot and Peter van der Veer, eds., Patterns of Middle Class Consumption in India and China (Delhi: Sage, 2008). 21.  Sean Chabot, “Transnational Diffusion and the African American Reinvention of Gandhian Repertoire,” Mobilization 5, no. 2 (2000): 201–216. 22.  Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, IL: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). 23.  Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 24.  Mohandas K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule (n.p., 1908), 26. 25.  Rustom Bharucha, Another Asia: Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Tenshin (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006). 26.  Tu Wei-­ming, “Cultural China: The Periphery as Center,” Daedalus 120, no. 2 (2005): 145–167. 27.  Chua Beng Huat, “Conceptualizing an East Asian Popular Culture,” Inter-­Asia Cultural Studies 5, no. 2 (2004): 200–221.

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Index

abstract art, 39–40 Aceh, 77 acupuncture, 181 Advaita Vedanta, 47, 159 Afghanistan, 200 Aiyappan cult, 120 Akbar, Emperor, 122 Aksai Chin region, 203 Albanese, Catherine, 39 alcohol, 113 Alter, Joseph, 176 alternative medicine, 177–78, 181, 189. See also traditional medicine Ambedkar, B. R., 74, 162, 166 anthroposophy, 40 anti-clericalism: in China, 148–51; in India, 97, 157–58 Anti-Opium campaigns, 93, 101–2, 105, 112 Anti-Opium Society, 101 Aristotle, 42, 70, 133 art: Asian spirituality and, 52; imperial modernity and, 25–26; spirituality and abstraction in, 39–40 Art of Living with Guru Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, 190–92, 229 Aryan people, 17, 82 Arya Samaj, 48, 98, 123–24 Asad, Talal, 19, 27, 144–45 asceticism, 171, 186, 187 ascetic networks, 172–73 Ashiwa, Yoshiko, 107 Asia and the East: financial crisis in, 229; Islamic expansion in, 195–201; magic-religion relationship in, 116– 17; modernity arising from, 227–28; pan-Asianism, 50–54; spirituality of, 44–45, 48, 62, 168–92; theory of civilizations on, 23–24; the West in relation to, 15–16. See also Asian religions Asian religions: construction of, in im­

perial encounter, 63–89; Western criticisms of, 91–92. See also specific religions Asian tigers, 227 Asian values, 15 Asimanand, Swami, 208 assimilation, 211, 212 atheism, 136, 146, 158, 164, 227 atman, 169 Aurobindo, 159, 179 Austin, J. L., 127 authority, 71 Axial Age, 21–22, 47, 116, 219 ayurvedic medicine, 136, 178 Azad, Maulana, 201 Babar’s Mosque (Babri Masjid), Ayodhya, 161, 165, 207, 216 Baden-Powell, Robert, 187 Baker, Mary, 39 Banga, Ajay, 133 Bangladesh, 194, 219 Bardhan, Pranab, 23 barefoot doctors, 180 Barelvi, Syed Ahmed, 200 Basic English, 17–18 Beatles, 179 Beijing Olympics (2008), 208 Beijing University of Chinese Medicine, 181 belief, concept of, 3 Bell, Daniel, 155 Bellah, Robert, 1, 155 Benedict XVI, Pope, 66 Bergson, Henri, 159 Berlusconi, Silvio, 137 Bernard, Jean-Frédéric, Religious Ceremonies of the World, 7 Besant, Annie, 37, 59 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 137, 161– 62, 187–88, 207, 218 Bible, 110 Blavatsky, Madame, 37–38, 48, 85, 176

272 Bodh Gaya, 86 the body, 168–92; and breathing, 169; in Chinese culture, 59; Gandhi and, 187; imperial modernity and, 170–71; nationalism and, 177; qi gong and, 135– 36; spirituality and, 41, 175–76; yoga and, 136–37 bonded labor, 95–96 Booth, William, 113 Borges, Jorge Luis, 16 Borneo, 77 Borobudur, 77 Bosch, F.D.K, 76 Bose, J. C., 159 Boston Confucianists, 155 Boxer uprising, 56, 111, 149, 182, 223–24 Bradlaugh, Charles, 37 Brahmachari, Dhirendra, 186 Brahmanism, 97–98, 120–21, 123, 126, 157–58, 166, 196–97, 206 Brahmo Samaj, 46, 51, 98, 123, 174 breathing exercises, 135–36, 168–69, 181. See also qi gong; yoga Britain: Chinese relations with, 18–19; colonial neutrality as policy of, 96, 98, 159–60, 164; imperial fronts of, 201 Brunner, Otto, 69 Buddhism: associations established within, 105–7; in China, 57–58; China-India interaction over, 2–3; Chinese modernity and, 150–51; Daoism vs., 60; Hinduism vs., 74; Islam vs., 74; key concepts of, 56; modernization of, 57–58, 107; Pure Land, 58, 60; revival of, in nineteenth century, 73–74, 85–86; Sinhalese, 57, 74; Tibetan, 229; and White Lotus, 182; at World Parliament, 85–86; worldwide, 57–58, 85–86 Bunyan, John, Pilgrim’s Progress, 110 Burke, Edmund, 43 Bush, George W., 43 business. See economics and business Caldwell, Robert, 97 Calvinism, 127 Cambridge Seven, 112 Cambridge University, 147 Canada, 102–3

Index capitalism: in China, 215; criticisms of, 41, 134; inner asceticism and, 171; magic and, 133; Protestantism and, 131; spirituality and, 191–92; yoga and, 178–79 Casanova, Jose, 28, 140–41, 144 caste, 11, 95–100, 113, 157–58, 162, 202, 216–17 Central Asia, 200 Certeau, Michel de, 69 Chantepie de la Saussaye, P. D., 76 Chartier, Roger, 222 Chatterjee, Bankim Chandra, Anandamath, 173 Chen, Hsi-yuan, 87 Chen Yingning, 47, 58–60, 148 Chen Yinke, 148 Chiang Kai-shek, 104 China: anti-clericalism in, 148–51; art in, 26; British relations with, 18–19; centralization and decentralization in, 215; Christianity in, 87, 93–94, 100– 113, 182, 210; concept of civilization in, 220–21; current form of, 5; economic development of, 5–6; government of, 5; health movements in, 135– 36; immanence-transcendence in, 22–23; India compared to, 4–6, 14–15, 23, 61, 113–14, 162–67, 189–201, 223; India’s interaction with, 2–4, 229; Legge’s scholarship on, 78–82; literature in, 26–27; and materialism, 134; millenarianism in, 109–14, 122, 151, 152–53; minority status in, 209; Muslims in, 193–200, 204–5, 208–13; nationalism and religion in, 8–10, 29; official religions in, 87, 105–7, 150; popular religion in, 64, 88, 110, 121– 22, 125, 129–30, 150, 157, 163; religious practice in contemporary, 152– 57, 163–64; religious reform in, 88; Republic of China (1912–1949), 4; science in, 56, 59, 149–50, 183–84; secularity in, 145–57, 162–67; and spirituality, 35, 54–61; state and society in, 23–24; Tagore in, 54; Western thought in, 150. See also Chinese modernity; Chinese nationalism China Buddhist Association, 107

Index China Inland Mission, 111–12 China Society for Research on Qigong Science, 185 Chinese communism, 134, 152–53, 156–57 Chinese language, 16 Chinese modernity, 4; anti-religious sentiment in, 145–53, 165; art and, 26; education in, 146–47; Japanese influence on, 225; and progress, 125; religion-nationalism relationship and, 9, 89; science and, 183–84 Chinese nationalism: arbitrariness of, 212; and Daoism, 59–60; Han majority and, 209; and Japanese nationalism, 53; Muslims and, 194; popular religion opposed by, 129–30; Protestantism and, 104–5; and religion, 8–10, 29, 194; and Western culture, 56, 58 Chinese Rites Controversy, 87, 94 Chopra, Deepak, 190 Christianity: Asian origins of, 66; associations influenced by, 105–7; in China, 87, 93–94, 100–113, 182, 210; Chinese traditions in relation to, 81– 82; countermovements to, 31, 47; Hindu nationalist opposition to, 137; in India, 94–100, 210; as minority in India and China, 210, 218; missionary activity of, 31; on money and economics, 42; rationality of, 72–73; superiority of, 93–94. See also conversion, to Christianity; missionary project Christian Science, 39 Chulalongkorn, King, 80 Churchill, Winston, 49 Church Missionary Society, 72 church-state separation, 140 Ciji Compassion Relief movement, 229 civility, 222–23 civilization: China and concept of, 220– 21; concept of, 20, 193, 206, 217–22; essentialization of, 23, 219–20; immanence-transcendence in, 21–23; India and concept of, 220–21; nationalism and concept of, 206, 220; scholarship on, 20–25; wounded, 25–27 civil religion, 56, 87, 88, 150, 155, 164

273 Civil Rights Movement, 225 civil society, 222–23 Cixi, Empress Dowager, 80 Clapham Sect, 92 Cold War, 227 Collins, Randall, 219 colonialism: Asian traditions affected by, 70–71; conversion as problem for, 97– 98; criticisms of, 43; religion studies shaped by, 75–83. See also imperial modernity; postcolonialism Columbian Exposition (Chicago, 1893), 83 commodity fetishism, 132 communalism, 161, 165 comparative historical sociology, 1 comparative religion, 73, 75–83 comparative sociology, issues in, 10–20 concepts, study of German, 69 Confucianism: Brahmanism compared to, 120–21; category of, 45; current status of, 155–57; Daoism vs., 60; and education, 147; and morality, 126–27, 154–57; national status of, 56, 61, 104, 106, 151, 155–56, 155–57, 164, 218, 221; neo-Confucianism, 56, 61, 228; religious status of, 64, 86–88, 150; and secularism, 147, 150, 155–57; and spirituality, 55–56, 61; Western understanding of, 55; at World Parliament, 86–88 Confucius, 22, 62, 156 Confucius Institutes, 156 Congress Party, 99, 160–61, 201, 202, 207, 216, 218 conspicuous consumption, 137–38 consumerism, 132–35, 137–38, 224–25 conversion: in India, 163; to Islam, 100 conversion, to Christianity: in China, 87; in Europe, 91; in India, 95–98; mass, 95; modernity and, 90–91, 99; obstacles to, 97–98; and return of the repressed, 109. See also missionary project Conze, Werner, 69 Coomaraswamy, Ananda, 52 Coorgs, 96 corruption, 216 cosmopolitanism. See universalism

274 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (film), 199 Cultural Revolution, 5, 107, 130, 134, 136, 205 culture, translation involving, 17–19 Cunningham, Alexander, 73 Dalai Lama, 44, 58 dalits. See untouchables Daodehui (Morality Society), 125 Daoism: associations established within, 105–7; Buddhism vs., 60; category of, 45; Chinese modernity and, 150–51; and Chinese tradition, 59–60; Confucianism vs., 60; local basis of, 106, 150; modernization of, 58–60; nineteenthcentury developments in, 106 Daoist Association, 60 Darwin, Charles, 38, 93 Dashanzi (Factory 798), 26 Davids, Rhys, 74 Dayanand, Swami, 48 Dean, Kenneth, 100–101 decision theory, 132 degenerate art, 40 de Groot, J.J.M., 76, 77 Deism, 146 democracy, 28–29 demystification, modernity as, 40 Deng Xiaoping, 61, 157, 184, 221, 228 de Nobili, Roberto, 94 Devi, Sarada, 174 Devi cults, 120 Dewey, John, 54 Dhammapala, Anagarika, 57, 74, 83, 85–86 Dharma Sabha, 72 Dikötter, Frank, 102 Din-i-Ilahi, 122 discourse, study of, 69–70 disenchantment, in modern life, 115–19. See also enchantment, entertainment and Divine Life Society, 178 Dominicans, 94 Dongan. See Hui Muslims Dragon King cult, 120 Dravidians, 97, 158 Duara, Prasenjit, 36, 88, 125, 182 Dumont, Louis, 11, 68, 69, 171, 206, 217 Dunch, Ryan, 104

Index Durkheim, Emile, 131–32, 137 Dutch comparative religion, 75–77 the East. See Asia and the East Eastern religions. See Asian religions East India Company, 30, 79, 92 economic development: of China and India, 5–6; scholarly emphasis on, 9 economics and business: corruption in, 216; criticisms of, 42–43; as foundational, 41–43; magic and, 130–33; morality and, 133–34; spiritual practices and, 190–91; and spread of Islam, 197; state in relation to, 42; U.S. hegemony and, 224–25 education: Chinese promotion of, 146– 47; contexts of, 146–47; of Indians, 92, 99; missionary project of, 103–5; modern conceptions imparted through, 104; in religion, 146 Eisenstadt, S. N., 1, 20–22, 219 Eliade, Mircea, 169 Elias, Norbert, 193, 206, 220, 222 Eliot, T. S., 18 Ellman, Benjamin, 82 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 39, 61 enchantment, entertainment and, 128– 29. See also disenchantment, in modern life Engels, Friedrich, 134 English language, 17–18 Enlightenment, 54, 55, 139, 144, 148 entertainment, and enchantment, 128–29 eroticism. See sexuality and eroticism Europe, and concept of civilization, 217– 18, 221–22 European Union, 217 Evangelicals, 92 Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 143 evolutionary theory, 38, 82, 93, 117–18 exorcism, 112 faith-healing, 112 Falun Dafa Research Association, 184–85 Falun Gong (Falun Dafa), 136, 139, 153, 167, 184–85, 190 Farquhar, Judith, 180 fascism, 43 Fearless (film), 183 Fenollosa, Ernest, 52, 225, 226

Index feudalism, 151 films, 128–29 Fingarette, Herbert, 127 foot-binding, 15, 48, 101 Forster, E. M., A Passage to India, 176 Foucault, Michel, 16, 64, 127, 188, 214 Four Cleanups, 130 France, 220 Franciscans, 94 Frazer, James, 119 gambling, 132–33, 135 game theory, 132 Gandhi, Indira, 186 Gandhi, Mohandas K., 49–50, 53, 62, 133, 134–35, 137, 159, 161, 166, 179, 186–88, 216, 225, 226 Gao Xingjian, 26 Gautama Buddha, 62 Geertz, Clifford, 1, 215 Gellner, Ernest, 19, 143 gender inequality, 101 genealogical method, 64–65 geography, nationalism and, 195–96 George III, King, 108 German idealism, 45, 80 Germany, 220 Ghost Festival, 129 ghosts, 115 gift relationships, 215 Gladney, Dru, 208–9 globalization: comparative sociology and, 12; religion and, 31–32; spirituality and, 36 Goa, 95 God, Chinese translations of, 81–82 Godse, Nathuram, 187 Goossaert, Vincent, 106 governmentality, 214–15 Great Cultural Revolution. See Cultural Revolution Great Leap Forward, 5, 134 Great Transformation, 36, 41–44 Habermas, Jürgen, 30, 222 Han civilization, 18, 24, 34, 197, 205, 208–9, 211, 212, 221 hatha yoga, 176–78, 187 Hazare, Anna, 216 health care: alternative medicine, 177–78,

275 181, 189; magic and, 135–38; missionary project of, 112–13; qi gong and, 184; traditional medicine, 135–36, 180–81, 184 Hedgewar, K. B., 187 Hegel, G.W.F., 23–24, 45, 206 Heidegger, Martin, 52 Hejaz, 196–97 herbal medicine, 181 Hervieu-Leger, Danièle, 152 Hinduism: Buddhism vs., 74; category of, 45, 67; construction of, 67, 72, 125– 26, 206; Islam vs., 160–62, 206–8, 220; natives outside tradition of, 96–97; reform movements in, 47, 51, 98, 123– 24, 126, 159, 173–74, 206–7 (see also Brahmanism); and spirituality, 46–47; and universalism, 51; at World Parliament, 84–85, 89 Hindu nationalism, 89, 206; arbitrariness of, 212; and concept of civilization, 220; conversion as threat to, 97, 99– 100; ideology of, 160; and Muslims, 161–62, 165, 187–88, 202; Muslims opposed by, 137, 194; and religion, 8–10, 29, 137, 161–62, 165, 194; and spirituality, 48–49, 53 history: Indian culture and, 68–69; modernity and, 69; tradition in relation to, 67–71 Hollis, Martin, 143 Holyoake, George, 37 Hong Kong, 60, 227–28 Hongwanzihui (Red Swastika Society), 125 Hong Xiuquan, 110 House of Flying Daggers (film), 183 Hubert, Henri, 137 Hui Muslims, 34, 197, 199–200, 205, 211– 12, 221 Hu Jintao, 155 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 16 Huntington, Samuel: Clash of Civilizations, 193, 218–19; Who Are We?, 219 Huo Yuanjia, 183 Hu Shih, 54, 57 idealism, 45 Ikegami, Eiko, 223 image worship, 110, 124

276 immanence and transcendence, 21–23, 47, 116 imperial modernity, 8–9; art affected by, 25–26; and the body, 170–71; defined, 1; Eastern religions in, 63–89; effects of, 25–27, 223–24, 226–29; Hinduism and, 125–26; magic and, 224; missionary project and, 90–114; nationalism in response to, 188–89; and orientalism, 66–67; qi gong and, 170–71, 190, 192; religion and, 31, 117, 145; as rupture, 223–24; secularity and, 145; and spirituality, 48; and state formation, 214; tradition affected by, 72–74; universalization of, 144; yoga and, 170–71 India: anti-clericalism in, 97, 157–58; Buddhism in, 74; China compared to, 4–6, 14–15, 23, 61, 113–14, 162–67, 189–201, 223; China’s interaction with, 2–4, 229; Christianity in, 94–100, 210; concept of civilization in, 220; current form of, 5; economic development of, 5–6; government of, 5; health movements in, 136–37; hierarchy in, 216– 17; history of, 68–69; immanence-transcendence in, 21–22; literature in, 26–27; and materialism, 134–35; Muslims in, 193–213; nationalism and religion in, 8–10, 29; popular religion in, 64, 88, 120–21, 123–24; postcolonial, 215–16; religious reform in, 88; science in, 158–59, 186; secularity in, 157–67, 212; and spirituality, 45–54, 61; state and society in, 23–24. See also Hindu nationalism; Indian modernity Indian Archaeological Survey, 73 Indian modernity, 4; art and, 26; Japanese influence on, 226; postcolonialism and, 215–16; religion-nationalism relationship and, 9, 89 Indonesia, 3, 76–77, 88 Indo-Pakistani wars (1947, 1965), 203 interactional history, 144 invisible hand, 41–42 Ireland, 142, 219 Islam and Muslims, 193–213; Asian origins of, 66; boundary maintenance by, 197–98; Buddhism vs., 74; in China, 193–200, 204–5, 208–13; contemporary situation of, 201–6; Dutch schol-

Index arship on, 75–77; expansion of, 195– 201; Hinduism vs., 137, 160–62, 165, 187–88, 202, 206–8, 220; in India, 193– 213; minoritization of, 193–94, 206– 13; on money and economics, 42; orthodoxy and heterodoxy in, 121–22; as outsiders, 196, 206–13, 218, 221; and Pakistan, 160; radical political, 201–2; Turkey and, 217–18; unity and variety in, 193, 200. See also Hui Muslims; Uyghur Muslims Iyengar, B.K.S., 177 Jai Santoshi Ma (film), 128–29 Jama’at-i-Islami, 201 James, William, 117, 131 Japan, 3, 53–54, 223, 225–26 Jaspers, Karl, 21, 22, 219 Jayalalitha, 129 Jesuits, 54–55, 87, 93–95 Jesus, 62 Jetavana Hermitage, 57 Jiang Zemin, 61 Jindan Jiao, 111 Jinnah, Muhammad Ali, 201 Judeo-Christian tradition, 83 Jung, C. G., 52 Kali, Goddess, 46–47 Kandinsky, Wassily, 39–40, 61 Kangxi, Emperor, 54, 94 Kang Youwei, 104, 106, 146, 147 Kant, Immanuel, 70 Kargil conflict (1999), 203 Kashmir, 194, 202–4, 208, 212, 221 Katzenstein, Peter, 219 Kaun banega crorepati (Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?) [television show], 135 Kazakhs, 204 Kemper, Steven, 132 Kern, Hendrik, 76 Khalistan movement, 173 kinship system, in China, 100–101 Kipling, Rudyard, 16, 199, 201 Kirghiz, 204 Korea, 3, 227–28 Koselleck, Reinhart, 69, 70 Kripal, Jeffrey, 175 Krom, N.J., 76 Kuenen, Abraham, 76

Index kung fu, 181 Kuomintang, 58, 125, 189 Kupka, František, 40 Kuvalayananda, Swami, 176 Ladakh, 203 language, 16–19, 81–82, 209. See also philology Lashkar-e-Taiba, 208 Lee, Ang, 199 Legge, James, 32, 63, 71, 78–82, 88, 126–27 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 54, 55 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 42, 137 Liang A-fa, 110 Liang Qichao, 54, 56–57, 62, 71, 148 Lienhardt, Godfrey, 19 Li Hongzhi, 184–85 Lin Biao, 157 literature, imperial modernity and, 26–27 Liu, Lydia, 18 Livingstone, David, 112 Locke, John, 127 lotteries, 132, 135 Lü Bicheng, 59 Lukes, Steven, 143 Macartney, Lord, 108 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 91–92, 104 Macaulay, Zachary, 92 Madan, T. N., 10, 161 magic, 115–39; in China, 115–16, 118–19, 130, 149; concepts related to, 9; as false science, 119; and health, 135–38; imperial modernity and, 224, 226–27; in India, 115, 159; and materialism, 130–33; missionary project and, 99; modernity and, 128–30; popular religion and, 115–16, 120–23; religion in relation to, 115–16, 123–24, 126, 138– 39. See also superstition Maitreya Buddha, 122 Malabar Rites Controversy, 94 Malaysia, 3 Malevich, Kazimir, 40 management theory, 190–91 Manchu, 4, 24, 199, 213, 221 Manchukuo, 125 Mandarin, 209

277 Mani, Lata, 126 Maoism, 130, 152–53, 166 Mao Zedong, 104, 133–34, 151, 180, 183–84 market economy, 130–33, 224–25 market theory of religion, 141–44, 153– 54, 157, 162 martial arts, 129, 181–83, 187 Marx, Karl, 24, 113, 131–34, 139, 206 Marxism, 150, 155, 223 Master Card, 133 Masuzawa, Tomoko, 73, 75 materialism: in China, 56, 60; China and, 134; consumerism and, 133–35; economics as form of, 41–43; historical, 60; imperialism as form of, 50; India and, 134–35; magic and, 130–33; spirituality vs., 41–44, 171 Maududi, Syed Abu-Ala’, 201 Mauss, Marcel, 131, 132, 134, 137, 188 May Fourth movement, 183, 189 Mazu cult, 120 McKean, Lise, 178 medicine: alternative, 177–78, 181, 189; herbal, 181; traditional, 135–36, 180– 81, 184 Mencius, 17–18 messianism, 182, 185 Middlesex University, 181 militancy, 53–54, 187–88, 205 millenarianism, 109–14, 122, 151, 152–53 Ministry of Education (China), 156 Minnan Buddhist Academy, 106–7 Missionary Papers (Church Missionary Society), 72 missionary project, 31, 90–114; in China, 94–95, 100–113; Christian critiques, 105, 107–9, 158; conflicts of, with imperial project, 92–93; conversions achieved by, 90; defenses against, 47, 98, 109, 111; education as aspect of, 92, 99, 103–5; effects of, 90–91; health care as aspect of, 112– 13; and Hinduism, 72; in India, 95– 100; Jesuits and, 93–95; and millenarianism, 109–14; native religion attacked in, 125–28; and religious associations, 105–7; and translations of Chinese texts, 81. See also conversion, to Christianity

278 modernity: art and, 25–26; Asian, 227– 28; concept and characteristics of, 1, 13; conversion and, 90–91, 99; as demystification, 40; disenchantment in, 115–19; and history, 69; literature and, 26–27; magic and, 128–30; spirituality and, 35–36, 39–40; tradition in relation to, 27, 220; Weberian theory of, 20. See also Chinese modernity; imperial modernity; Indian modernity modernization theory, 11–13, 15, 28, 142–43 Modi, Narendra, 207 Mondrian, Piet, 40, 61 Monet, Claude, 39 money, 42–43, 131–33 Monier-Williams, Monier, 47, 73 morality: Confucianism and, 126–27, 154–57; economic exchange and, 133– 34; religion in relation to, 115, 118; science and, 186; Victorian, 47, 175–76 morphine, 112 Mother Goddess, 174 Mueggler, Erik, 130 Mughal Empire, 4, 104, 121–22, 194, 198, 215, 220 Mukherjee, Pratap Chandra, 174 Müller, Friedrich Max, 32, 47, 63, 71, 78– 82, 89, 123, 158, 174, 176 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 52 Muslim League, 199, 201 Muslims. See Islam and Muslims Mutiny (India, 1857), 114, 159, 200, 223–24 Nagas, 210 Naipaul, V. S., 25 Nandy, Ashis, 10, 161 Nanputuo, 106–7 nationalism: anti-colonial, 160; anti-imperialist, 102–3; and the body, 177; components of, 195; and concept of civilization, 206, 220; imperial modernity and, 188–89; Japanese, 53–54; religion in relation to, 8–10, 160, 183, 196, 227; spirituality in relation to, 41, 43, 48–49, 62, 83–84, 86, 172–83; and unity, 196–97; yoga and, 174–75, 177– 79, 186, 190. See also Chinese nationalism; Hindu nationalism

Index natural religion, 7, 146 Nazism, 40 Nedostup, Rebecca, 183 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 28, 50–51, 161–62, 179, 186, 218 neo-Confucianism, 56, 61, 228 neo-Kantianism, 150 Nobel Prize, 26 Noble, Margaret (Sister Nivedita), 52 Noguchi, Yone, 54 Nordau, Max, 49 Northwest Frontier, India, 199, 200 obeisance, 108 Ogden, C. K., 17 Okakura, Kakuzo, 52, 226 Olcott, H. S., 37–38, 48, 74, 85 Opium Wars, 4, 19, 87, 93, 94, 223. See also Anti-Opium campaigns orientalism, 15, 44, 63–64, 66–74, 76 oriental religion. See Asian religions oriental studies, 63 Otherness, 15–17, 137, 199, 206, 213, 221 overlapping consensus, 165 Oxford University, 147 Pakistan, 5, 124, 160, 193, 194, 199, 201– 4, 208, 212, 219, 227 Pali Text Society, 74 Palmer, David, 154, 186, 190 pan-Asianism, 50–54, 222, 226 pan-Islamism, 76 Pascal, Blaise, 132 Patanjali, Yoga Sutras, 172, 175 Pathans, 199, 200 Peng Guangyu, 86–88, 115–16, 227 Pennington, Brian, 72 Periyar (E. V. Ramaswamy Naicker), 158, 166 philology, 45, 67, 81–83 Phule, Jyotirao, 158 Picart, Bernard, Religious Ceremonies of the World, 7 Pillai, Nallasvami, 47 pluralism, 160 Pocock, David, 11 Pocock, John, 69–70 Poland, 142 politics of spirituality and the body, 170–92

Index Pollock, Sheldon, 68, 69 Pope, Alexander, 41 popular culture, 229 popular religion: characteristics of, 119; in China, 64, 88, 110, 121–22, 125, 129–30, 150, 157, 163; elites in relation to, 120; in India, 64, 88, 120–21, 123– 24; magic and, 115–16, 120–23; missionary attacks on, 125–28; prejudices against, 64, 88; World Parliament of Religions and, 83–89 postcolonialism: and conversion, 98; in India, 215–16; and religion, 31, 160 Pound, Ezra, 225 power, 19, 31, 170 progress, 44, 70 Protestant ethic, 131 Protestantism: and Chinese nationalism, 104–5; and conflicts with Chinese, 103, 108; and inner asceticism, 171; notions of self in, 72, 127; and rationality, 127 protonationalism, 195 psychological health and theories, 177–78 public sphere, 30, 222 Pure Land Buddhism, 58, 60 Al Qaeda, 218 qi, 180 Qianlong, Emperor, 108 Qian Zuesen, 136 qi gong, 180–83; global and national profiles of, 168; government opposition to, 184–86; historical background of, 168–69, 180; imperial modernity and, 170–71, 190, 192; magic and science in, 135–36; and martial arts, 181–83; official attitude toward, 154; persistence of, 60; and power, 170; science and, 183–85; study of, 169; as threat to government, 181–82; yoga compared to, 169–70 Qing dynasty: anti-clericalism in, 148; anti-foreign sentiment in, 111; and Confucianism, 86–87, 122, 156, 199; fall of, 4, 104, 182–83; governmentality in, 215; Manchu and, 4; and opium, 100–102, 223; opposition to, 54, 163, 200; reform of, 64, 125, 165

279 race, 17, 82 raja-yoga, 175 Rama, 137, 165, 206 Ramachandra, M. G., 129, 137 Ramakrishna, 46–47, 51, 174, 175–76 Ramanandi ascetics, 172, 175 Ramayana, 158 Rasthriya Swayamsevak Sangh, 187–88 rational choice theories, 41, 65, 142–44 rationality: in Chinese civilization, 55; Christianity and, 72–73; Protestantism and, 127; rational religion, 123–25; Weber on, 118 rational religion, 7, 123–25, 159 Rawls, John, 165, 222 redemptive societies, 125, 182 Redfield, Robert, 21, 119 Red Lanterns, 183 religion: anti-clericalism and, 148; Chinese nationalism and, 8–10, 29, 194; church-state separation, 140; civil, 56, 87, 88, 150, 155, 164; colonial influences on study of, 75–83; comparative, 73, 75–83; concept of, 7, 29–30, 172; concepts related to, 9; countermovements to, 38–39, 40, 43–44; democracy in relation to, 28–29; gambling and, 132; globalization and, 31–32; and governmentality, 215; Hindu nationalism and, 8–10, 29, 137, 161–62, 165, 194; imperial modernity and, 31, 117, 145; instruction in, 146; magic in relation to, 115–16, 123–24, 126, 138–39; market theory of, 141–44, 153–54, 157, 162; methods of studying, 64–65; morality in relation to, 115, 118; nationalism in relation to, 8–10, 160, 183, 196, 227; nationalization of, 30; natural, 7, 146; postcolonialism and, 31; and the public sphere, 30; rational, 7, 123–25, 159; rationalization of, 20; science in relation to, 140, 159; science of religion, 73, 75–83; secularity and, 7–8, 141, 144–45, 162–67; spirituality in relation to, 30, 38, 43–44; state in relation to, 215; world religions, 30, 63, 73–75, 117. See also Asian religions; specific religions Religious Affairs Bureau (China), 107 Renan, Ernest, 79

280 renunciation, 170–71 return of the repressed, 40, 109, 128, 130 Rg-Veda, 78, 79, 82, 123 Ricci, Matteo, 81 rice Christians, 95 Richards, I. A., 17–19, 45 Rockefeller Foundation, 18 Rolland, Romain, 174 romanticism, 45–46 Roy, Rammohan, 51 Ruskin, John, 49 Russell, Bertrand, 18 Russia, 225 Sacred Books of the East series, 32, 78–81 sacrifice, 129–30 Sai Baba, 124 Said, Edward, 63, 66, 76 Saivism, 47 Sakyamuni (Buddha), 185 salvation, universal, 182. See also redemptive societies Salvation Army, 113 Samacar Candrika (newspaper), 72 Sannyasi rebellions, 173 Sanskrit, 16–17, 68–69 Sanskrit Knowledge Systems (SKS) project, 69, 70 Santayana, George, 41 Santoshi Ma, 128–29 Sarnath, 86 sati. See widow-burning Saussure, Ferdinand de, 9 Savarkar, 179 Sayana, 82 Scheid, Volker, 181 Schipper, Kristofer, 116 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 45 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 127 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 45 Schwab, Raymond, 46 science: alternatives to Western, 139; in China, 56, 59, 149–50, 183–84; and health, 135–36; in India, 158–59, 186; magic as false, 119; morality and, 186; qi gong and, 183–85; religion in relation to, 140, 159; spirituality and, 37– 38, 44; Weber on, 118; yoga and, 176– 77, 179 science of religion, 73, 75–83. See also world religions

Index secularity: category of, 37–38, 140–41; in China, 145–57, 162–67; concepts related to, 9; democracy in relation to, 28; ideology of, 144–45; imperial modernity and, 145; in India, 157–67, 212; magic vs. religion in, 116, 118–19; and the public sphere, 222; religion and, 7–8, 141, 144–45, 162–67; scholarly assumptions about, 28; spirituality in relation to, 36–39; of state vs. society, 29; violence of, 166 Secular Societies, 37 self: Protestant notion of, 72, 127; spiritual practices and, 191 Sen, Keshab Chandra, 174 sexuality and eroticism, 46–47, 148, 174, 175–76 Shah Wali Allah, 122 shamanism, 86–87, 115 Shanars, 97 Shanghai College of Traditional Chinese Medicine, 180 Shankar, Sri Sri Ravi, 190–91, 229 Shelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 45 Shi’a Islam, 198, 205 Shinto, 53, 88, 156 Shiva religion, 47 Sikhs, 102–3, 122, 173, 215, 216 Singapore, 60, 227–28 Sinhalese Buddhism, 57, 74 Sino-Indian War (1962), 203 Sirhindi, 122 Sivananda, Swami, 178 Skinner, Quentin, 69–70 Smith, Adam, 41 Snouck Hurgronje, Christiaan, 76 social Darwinism, 150 socialism, 37, 43 Society for Neuroscience, 44 Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 104 South Asia, Islamic expansion to, 197– 98, 218 South India, 95, 97, 129, 158 Soviet Union, 209, 227 spirit possession, 115 spirits, 115 spirit séances, 59 spirituality, 6–8, 35–62; abstract art and, 39–40; and the body, 41, 175–76; and business world, 190–91; capitalism

Index and, 191–92; category of, 7, 35–36, 45, 61–62, 172; China and, 35, 54–61; concepts related to, 9; critiques based on, 43–44; East considered a site of, 44– 45, 48; Eastern, 168–92; Gandhi and, 49–50, 134, 186; globalization and, 36; India and, 45–54, 61; materialism vs., 41–44, 171; modernity and, 35–36, 39– 40; nationalism in relation to, 41, 43, 48–49, 62, 83–84, 86, 172–83; politics of, 170–92; religion in relation to, 30, 38, 43–44; science and, 37–38, 44; secularity in relation to, 36–39; Tagore and, 51–54; and universalism, 38–39, 48, 62; Vivekananda and, 46–49, 85– 86, 89, 175–79, 190; World Parliament of Religions and, 83–89; yoga and, 175, 178–79 spirit-writing, 59 Sri Lanka, 57, 74 Srivinas, M. N., 96 Stalin, Joseph, 209 state: church-state separation, 140; economics in relation to, 42; formation of, 214; religion in relation to, 215; secularity of, 29 Stolz, Jürgen, 142–43 Sufism, 121, 197, 198, 202 Suharto, 77 Sunni Islam, 198 Sun Yat Sen, 104 Sun Zhongshan (Sun Yat-Sen), 209 superstition, 51, 64, 87, 122, 125, 149. See also magic surname groups, 216–17 syncretism, 109, 111, 122, 125, 174, 197 syntagmatic chain, 9, 140, 226 Tablighi Jama’at, 202 Tagore, Rabindranath, 26, 51–54, 62, 226 taijiquan, 181 Taiping movement, 56, 110–11, 163, 215, 223–24 Taiwan: Buddhism in, 58; popular religion in, 229; postwar, 227; religion and secularity in, 105, 125, 147–48; spirituality in, 60 Taixu, 47, 57–60, 62, 106–7, 148 Taliban, 200 Tambiah, Stanley, 21, 198 Tamil Hindus, 74, 158

281 Tantra, 46–47, 174, 175 Taylor, Charles, 21, 43, 116–17, 131, 143, 165, 219, 222 Temple Entry Acts, 160, 166 textual traditions, 67 Thaksin Shinawatra, 137 Theosophical Society, 37–38, 45, 47, 48 theosophy, 37–40, 43, 74, 85, 191 Thith Nhat Hanh, 58 Thoreau, Henry David, 61 Tibet, 203, 208 Tibetan Buddhism, 229 Tiele, Cornelis Petrus, 75 Tolstoy, Leo, 49 tourism, 157 trade, and spread of Islam, 197 tradition: attacks on Chinese, 105, 108; defined, 27; historicity of, 67–71; modernity in relation to, 27, 220; reformulation of, 72–74, 128–29, 174; spirituality and, 48 traditional medicine, 135–36, 180–81, 184. See also alternative medicine transcendence and immanence, 21–23, 47, 116 transcendentalism, 39, 61 translation: cultural, 16–20; of religious texts, 80–81; reputation of, 80; of spirituality, 44–45, 48, 62 Treaty of Tianjin (1858), 18 tribals, 96–97, 113 truth, Gandhi and, 49–50, 187 Turkey, 217–18 Tu Wei-ming, 60–61, 155, 228 Tylor, Edward Burnett, 119 Unani medicine, 178 uncertainty, 131–32 Unitarianism, 83, 235n26 United States: anti-immigration laws in, 102–3; Indian spirituality in, 190; modernity advanced by, 224; race relations in, 225; religion and secularity in, 29, 141–42; resistance to, 225; spirituality in, 39 universalism: local sources of, 49; and salvation, 182; spirituality and, 38–39, 48, 62; yoga and, 174–79 universities, 147 untouchables, 96–97, 100, 113, 160, 162, 166

282 Upanishads, 45, 51, 80 U.S. Commission on Religious Freedom, 98 Utilitarians, 92 Uyghur Muslims, 194, 197, 199, 204, 208, 212, 218, 221 Vajpayee, Atal Behari, 187 Van Gogh, Vincent, Le Père Tanguy, 25–26 Vedanta, 123, 175–76 Vedas, 123 vegetarianism, 108 Victoria, Queen, 79 Victorian morality, 47, 175–76 Vietnam, 3, 219 virtuality, 131 Vishwa Hindu Parishad, 188 Viswanathan, Gauri, 99 Vivekananda, Swami, 46–49, 51–52, 57, 60, 62, 83–86, 89, 159, 174–79, 190 Vogel, Jean Philippe, 76 Wales, Prince of, 79 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 38 Wang Tao, 80 Wank, David, 107 Watson, James, 23 Weber, Max, 1, 20, 23–24, 116–19, 127, 131, 143, 171, 193, 206 wenren Daojiao, 59 the West: Asia in relation to, 15–16, 24; conceptions of China in, 16, 54–55; conceptions of India in, 45–46; Eastern religions constructed in interaction with, 63–89; Eastern spirituality opposed to, 172; impact of, on Asia, 15; magic-religion relationship in, 116–17; scholarly privileging of, 12– 13; science of, alternatives to, 139; superiority of, belief in, 91–93 White Lotus Teaching, 122, 181–82 Whitman, Walt, 39, 61, 62 Whitney, William Dwight, 16 widow-burning (sati), 15, 48, 126 Wilberforce, William, 92 Wilson, Woodrow, 224 Winch, Peter, 143 Windsor (missionary), 101–2 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 70

Index World Buddhism, 57–58, 85–86 World Buddhist Association, 57–58 World Federation of Acupuncture and Moxibustion Socities, 181 World Parliament of Religions (Chicago, 1893), 32–33, 57, 83–89, 174, 235n26 world religions, 30, 63, 73–75, 117. See also science of religion wrestling, 187 Wu Chen-En, Journey to the West, 3 Wu Qitai, 18 wushu, 181 Xi Liaozhi, 111–13 Xinjiang, China, 194, 198–99, 203, 204, 208, 221 Yakub Beg, 200 Yan Fu, 57 Yang, Fenggang, 153–55 Yang, Mayfair, 215 Yang Wenhui, 57 Yates, M. T., 109 Yemen, 3 Yew, Lee Kuan, 15 Yiguandao (Way of Penetrating Unity), 125, 151, 152 YMCA, 104 yoga, 172–79; and capitalism, 178–79; Gandhi and, 186–87; global and national profiles of, 168; historical background of, 168, 172, 174; imperial modernity and, 170–71; Indian practice of, 46, 59, 60, 136–37; nationalist role of, 174–75, 177–79, 186, 190; and power, 170; qi gong compared to, 169– 70; science and, 176–77, 179; and spirituality, 175, 178–79; study of, 169; universalization of, 174–79; Vivekananda and, 85, 174–79 Yogi, Maharishi Mahesh, 190 Zhang Binglin, 148 Zhang Xiaogang, 26 Zhang Yimou, 128, 183 Zheng He, 3, 211 Zhonggong movement, 190 Zhou Enlai, 157 Zhu Xi, 82