ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I will reflect on the issue of the representation of India in Anglophone and more widely Europhone categories (‘religion’ being our prime focus). I will take issue with the claim, made by David Lorenzen 1 and others, that ‘religions existed in India’ independently of colonial interventions. More specifically I will introduce a number of features of the Anglo-European history of the category ‘religion’ directly into the context of a critique of David Lorenzen’s analysis of the situation in India. I will do this mainly as it has been published in his famous essay ‘Who invented Hinduism?’ (1999: 630–59) though I will also connect this with claims he has made in his conference paper ‘Gentile religion in South India, China and Tibet: studies by three missionaries’. 2 What I hope to add to the discussion is a view from the Anglo-European end of the relationship of the birth of the modern Anglophone category ‘religion’ and its plural form ‘religions’ since the seventeenth century, as well as its ideological function in the wider colonial enterprise. I have also included a section on the use of the term ‘sects’, which Lorenzen seems to use as an unproblematic placeholder for modern generic ‘religions’.
