ABSTRACT
There is a certain aporia that marks Indian thinking about the relationship between violence and religion. Perhaps the clearest manifestation of this aporia is the way in which Indians have attempted to engage the political through a mode of identification that once did not exist, yet which today is brought to life through a response to the word ‘religion’. Indeed the aporia can be visualized in terms of the relationship between ‘religion’ and ‘response’, such that religion not only informs the Indian response to the political, but that religion is also the response that gives form to the Indian experience of political modernity. Given that an aporia refers to an experience that is simultaneously possible and impossible, this aporetic response would be one which, on the one hand, accepts without resistance the translatability of the term ‘religion’, and at the same time resists what is encompassed by the term ‘religion’.
