ABSTRACT
Rethinking religion is a postcolonial project. The critical trajectories of postcolonialism provide the opportunity to think in new ways about the network of phenomena recognized as ‘religion’. Several commentators have recognized the implication of ‘religion’ in the development not just of modern relations of power, but more particularly in the ‘epistemic violence’ of post-Enlightenment thinking exported to the rest of the world through European expansion (see Fitzgerald 2000; King 1999; Masuzawa 2005). As such, postcolonialism provides a most apposite space for the critique of this category, and for the articulation of subversive alternatives. More specifically, ‘religion’ as it is articulated in and about India may be productively deconstructed in this way, because of the challenges this site poses to the discursive possibilities of the category. As Richard King states, ‘what is required of the study of Indian culture and “religion” in a postcolonial context is an attempt to think across or beyond traditional orientalist representations – to “transgress the boundaries” imposed by normative western models of “religion”’ (King 1999: 210; see also Ballard 1996; Suthren Hirst and Zavos 2005).
