REVIEWS
“Spiritual Despots is a valuable and quite unusual intellectual history centered on the idea of “priestcraft;” an important subject, though sorely neglected in recent academic scholarship. Scott offers a substantial contribution to the new trend in intellectual history that tries to breach the boundaries of national space and pursue movements of thought across spatial and cultural boundaries. Interesting and persuasive, Spiritual Despots poses a significant methodological revision for this type of intellectual history; it shifts comparatively back and forth between Indian thought on religious reform and contemporary British discussion on the nature of religiosity under conditions of modernity. Written clearly and with precision, Spiritual Despots will be indispensable to academic circles in Indian intellectual history, religious thought, and social scientists engaged in rethinking theories of secularization.”
— Sudipta Kaviraj, Columbia University
“This wholly original book offers us a sophisticated account of the making of a new kind of spiritual and political subject in colonial India. Scott argues that the modern Hindu self is produced within a global context in which the autonomous subject of liberalism is questioned and undermined. He elegantly shows how this results in a subjectivity defined by self-rule as a form of splitting and self-referentiality that eventually provides the foundation for an anticolonial politics that was at the same time a practice of psychic revolution.”
— Faisal Devji, University of Oxford
“Spiritual Despots is an intelligent contribution to several ongoing conversations in religious studies and South Asian studies. Scott’s argument is sophisticated and clearly written, and he approaches several ‘big questions’ associated with various works of Max Weber, Michel Foucault, and Charles Taylor from a novel perspective. Spiritual Despots will be of interest to any scholar of religious studies, South Asian studies, intellectual history, or comparative political theorists.”
— Andrew Sartori, New York University
"Much has been written on nineteenth-century Hindu reformers. Scott’s intervention in this discourse, however, is unique and stimulating; written through the lens of postmodernism and using English, Hindi, and Gujarati writings. Scott effectively provides new insights into the role of these reformers and their connections to ideas and theorists beyond the subcontinent, thereby going beyond the boundaries of nation and culture. This intellectual history will be essential for the student and scholar of neo-Vedanta and modern Hinduism."
— Journal of the American Academy of Religion
"Will be of interest to those who are open to unlearn narratives of a monolithic body of these ideas and are, instead, amenable to embrace possibilities of their diachronic evolution and multiple genealogies, their ambiguities and fluctuations."
— The Telegraph (India)
“Scott’s wholly original and highly intellectual work contributes to the current discourses on the autonomous subject of liberalism in South Asian studies and religious studies. It is essential reading for those interested in understanding the development of modern Hinduism and the production of the Hindu liberal, self-ruling subject within a global context of appropriation, reformation, and secularization.”
— International Journal of Hindu Studies
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Against the Priest - J. Barton Scott
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226368702.003.0001
[Max Weber, Michel Foucault, Mohandas K. Gandhi, governmentality, pastoral power, worldly asceticism, secularism, anticolonialism, Keshub Chunder Sen, missionaries]
This introduction lays the conceptual groundwork for the book as a whole by re-theorizing a term that has been important to the academic study of religion since the early twentieth century: Max Weber’s notion of “worldly asceticism.” By pairing Weber with M. K. Gandhi, the introduction adjusts Weber’s story about the place of Protestantism in modernity, suggesting a much more open-ended account of how ascetic technologies of self-rule circulate between the religious and the secular. It also works to amplify both thinkers’ critique of modern subjectivity by positioning them as heirs to nineteenth-century polemics against Hindu “priestcraft.” These polemics, it is argued, implied a normatively liberal model of the subject as ideally autonomous from external control. The introduction draws on the work of Michel Foucault to rethink this ideal of self-rule. It uses the figure of the despotic priest to propose a model of the subject in which the line between self and other, or autonomy and heteronomy, becomes productively blurred. The discussion then turns to the broader scene of anticlericalism in colonial India, asking how Indian modernity came to be defined against the priest. (pages 1 - 30)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
1. A Singular Species of Despotism - J. Barton Scott
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226368702.003.0002
[James Mill, Jeremy Bentham, Charles Grant, Luther of India, liberalism, Protestantism, Michel Foucault, pastoral power, missionaries]
In his History of British India (1817), James Mill described Hindu priests as exercising a “singular species of despotism” over their followers. Here, it is argued that this claim and others like it played an important role in demarcating priestly or pastoral power as distinct from and complementary to the power of the state. By tracing a series of concentric circles around Mill’s book, the chapter explicates Mill’s implicit theory of the priest as spiritual despot. It draws particular attention to his interest in the history of the Protestant Reformation by exploring his intellectual debt to French writer Charles Villers, as well as noting the resonance between Mill History and the later florescence of popular writing about the “Indian Luther.” The chapter concludes with a consideration of liberalism as asceticism, arguing that the liberal norm of subjective autonomy operates under false pretences. As a whole, the chapter suggests the complex intersection of Protestant and liberal discourses on selfhood in early nineteenth-century missionary and philosophical writing. (pages 31 - 59)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
2. A Popular History of Priestcraft in All Ages and Nations - J. Barton Scott
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226368702.003.0003
[William Howitt, tolerance, secularism, Victorian religion, Quakerism, spiritualism, governmentality, Catholicism, Protestantism, Reform Act]
This chapter analyses the literary and political career of English Quaker and anticolonial activist William Howitt, with particular focus on his Popular History of Priestcraft in All Ages and Nations (1833). It uses Howitt to suggest the extent to which the figure of the despotic Brahmin had become important within Britain as a means of critiquing institutions like the Church of England. It also argues that during the nineteenth century Protestantism was not a fixed entity that could simply be exported to the colonies. Rather, It was being put under pressure in England at roughly the same time that it was being rethought from the colonial margins. Howitt, on a small scale, indicates how this was the case. Leaving the Society of Friends behind, he worked to reinvent the dissenting spirit of Quaker founder George Fox, finding the spirit of Protestantism in Romantic poetry, radical politics, spiritualist séances, and (perhaps most surprisingly) Roman Catholicism. (pages 60 - 84)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
3. Reform Affinities - J. Barton Scott
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226368702.003.0004
[Keshub Chunder Sen, Rammohun Roy, Brahmo Samaj, Victorian religion, reform, contrapuntalism, transnationalism]
This chapter foregrounds the circulation of ideas between South Asia and the North Atlantic by two principal means. First, it proposes the term “reform assemblage” as a lens for interpreting nineteenth-century reform culture. After developing this term in a theoretical register, it shifts to a more historicist account of the vibrantly transnational reform scene that interlinked Britain and India during the mid-Victorian period. Second, the chapter asks how one denizen of the nineteenth-century reform assemblage, Keshub Chunder Sen, theorized these relations. Keshub was a prominent member of the Brahmo Samaj, an influential Hindu reform society. Here, he is taken primarily as a theorist of religion. In his English writings, the chapter suggests, Keshub develops a principle of spiritual affinity that is the basis for the radically egalitarian mode of community that he describes as “spiritual fellowship”—a type of community that he defines against the stereotyped figure of the despotic priest, even as he retains a modified version of priestly power within his new community. (pages 85 - 118)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
4. Guru Is God - J. Barton Scott
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226368702.003.0005
[Karsandas Mulji, Maharaj Libel Case, Vaishnavism, Bombay, Colonial law, Hindu women, Max Weber]
Among the most important Hindu reformers in nineteenth-century Bombay, Karsandas Mulji is now mostly remembered for his involvement in the scandalous Maharaj Libel Case of 1862. This chapter looks past that trial, driven largely by the English-language press, to Mulji’s Gujarati essays from the years leading up to it. By rereading Mulji’s earlier writing, it is suggested, we can revise the standard received narrative about the 1862 trial. The Maharaj Libel Case has typically been understood as a contest between a freethinking journalist (Mulji) and a corrupt priest (the Maharaj). Without rejecting this narrative entirely, the chapter argues that it obscures how Mulji’s critique of priestcraft dovetailed with new technologies of subject formation. In Mulji’s case, these emerged through in experiments in print culture, notably translations of Protestant sermons and conduct manuals addressed to bourgeois Hindu women. The mode of worldly asceticis men joined by these essays reshapes the liberal ideal autonomy by figuring society as a system of mutual guidance and constraint. (pages 119 - 149)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
5. Pope-Lila - J. Barton Scott
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226368702.003.0006
[Swami Dayananda Saraswati, Arya Samaj, brahmacharya, worldly asceticism, lila, biopolitics, caste reform]
This chapter interprets Hindu reformer Dayananda Saraswati’s magnum opus, The Light of Truth (1883), via a curious term that plays a pivotal role in the book’s polemical history of Hinduism. The term in question, “pope-lila,” is evidently a translation of the English word “priestcraft.” Like his English counterparts, Dayanand depicts post-Vedic Hindu tradition as a priestly fabrication; but he also does much more than this. The Light of Truth advocates for a radically expanded notion of asceticism or brahmacharya. Where brahmacharya had previously been the reserve of a narrowly demarcated segment of society, whether student or renunciant, Dayanand generalizes it to the population as a whole—it being through generalized ascetic practice that the national body is to be reconstituted and reformed. Brahmacharya somaticizes self-government by associating it with a set of techniques for regulating the body in accord with “virtue.” In this chapter, it is argued that Dayanand’s extension of brahmacharya is closely linked to his critique of priestcraft. The rhetoric of priestcraft helps Dayanand to imagine the radically diffuse field of power in which his reformed asceticism will intervene. The self-ruling ascetic is thus less a replacement for the despotic priest, than a means of reorganizing priestly power. (pages 150 - 176)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
6. Astral Ethics - J. Barton Scott
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226368702.003.0007
[Theosophical Society, Helena Petronva Blavatsky, Henry Steel Olcott, T. Subba Row, Bhagavad Gita, occultism, spiritualism]
This chapter interprets texts by Helena Blavatsky and other members of the Theosophical Society, an occultist organization that was prominent in both India and Britain in the late nineteenth century. It asks how Theosophists’ routine decrial of religious authority squared with their absolute devotion to the authority of the “Mahatmas,” a group of spiritual adepts who allegedly lived in Tibet and guided the society through astral projection. The chapter argues that the Mahatmas’ astral form was crucial to the power structure that they represented. The Theosophical disciple who imagines her own potential to become a Mahatma is internally divided, both the object and the subject of spiritual self-discipline. The Mahatmas may have receded from view after the scandalous Coulomb affair of 1884-85. But ascetic self-discipline remained important to Theosophy, as is evidenced by two genres of writing that flourished during the late 1880s: conduct manuals and the commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita. The attempt to reform subjectivity through writings like these, it is argued, was essential to Theosophy’s anticolonial politics. Theosophists hoped to use comparative religion to open up new potentialities in the human subject and thereby articulate a new principle of political cosmopolitanism. (pages 177 - 206)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Conclusion: The Circulation of Self-Rule - J. Barton Scott
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226368702.003.0008
[Mohandas K. Gandhi, Bhagavad Gita, Hind Swaraj, Max Weber, worldly asceticism, sovereignty, secularism]
The conclusion turns to the writings of M. K. Gandhi, especially Hind Swaraj (1909), to draw together the several theoretical strands that run throughout Spiritual Despots. Gandhi, like his contemporary Max Weber, was interested in the intertwined histories of subjectivity, religious asceticism, and colonial capitalism. As is well known, Gandhi’s notion of self-rule or swaraj was a means of recuperating religious asceticism as a political tool in the struggle against the British Empire. Less discussed is the particular structure of subjectivity that Gandhian self-rule entails. This conclusion argues that, in contrast with the self-enclosed subject prized by the Victorian cult of the individual, the self-ruling Gandhian subject opens out onto networks of tutelary social relations. This structure can be found in different ways in the dialogic structure of Hind Swaraj and in Gandhi’s writings on the Bhagavad Gita. By reading Gandhi through the lens of nineteenth-century religious reform, the conclusion suggests how the early twentieth century “culture of the self” was both a continuation and a refiguring of that earlier historical moment. (pages 207 - 220)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Notes
Index
