Spiritual Despots: Modern Hinduism and the Genealogies of Self-Rule (South Asia Across the Disciplines)

Historians of religion have examined at length the Protestant Reformation and the liberal idea of the self-governing individual that arose from it. In __Spiritual Despots__, J. Barton Scott reveals an unexamined piece of this story: how Protestant technologies of asceticism became entangled with Hindu spiritual practices to create an ideal of the “self-ruling subject” crucial to both nineteenth-century reform culture and early twentieth-century anticolonialism in India. Scott uses the quaint term “priestcraft” to track anticlerical polemics that vilified religious hierarchy, celebrated the individual, and endeavored to reform human subjects by freeing them from external religious influence. By drawing on English, Hindi, and Gujarati reformist writings, Scott provides a panoramic view of precisely how the specter of the crafty priest transformed religion and politics in India. Through this alternative genealogy of the self-ruling subject, __Spiritual Despots__ demonstrates that Hindu reform movements cannot be understood solely within the precolonial tradition, but rather need to be read alongside other movements of their period. The book’s focus moves fluidly between Britain and India—engaging thinkers such as James Mill, Keshub Chunder Sen, Max Weber, Karsandas Mulji, Helena Blavatsky, M. K. Gandhi, and others—to show how colonial Hinduism shaped major modern discourses about the self. Throughout, Scottsheds much-needed light how the rhetoric of priestcraft and practices of worldly asceticism played a crucial role in creating a new moral and political order for twentieth-century India and demonstrates the importance of viewing the emergence of secularism through the colonial encounter. Historians of religion have examined at length the Protestant Reformation and the liberal idea of the self-governing individual that arose from it. In Spiritual Despots, J. Barton Scott reveals an unexamined piece of this story: how Protestant technologies of asceticism became entangled with Hindu spiritual practices to create an ideal of the “self-ruling subject” crucial to both nineteenth-century reform culture and early twentieth-century anticolonialism in India. Scott uses the quaint term “priestcraft” to track anticlerical polemics that vilified religious hierarchy, celebrated the individual, and endeavored to reform human subjects by freeing them from external religious influence. By drawing on English, Hindi, and Gujarati reformist writings, Scott provides a panoramic view of precisely how the specter of the crafty priest transformed religion and politics in India. Through this alternative genealogy of the self-ruling subject, Spiritual Despots demonstrates that Hindu reform movements cannot be understood solely within the precolonial tradition, but rather need to be read alongside other movements of their period. The book’s focus moves fluidly between Britain and India—engaging thinkers such as James Mill, Keshub Chunder Sen, Max Weber, Karsandas Mulji, Helena Blavatsky, M. K. Gandhi, and others—to show how colonial Hinduism shaped major modern discourses about the self. Throughout, Scott sheds much-needed light how the rhetoric of priestcraft and practices of worldly asceticism played a crucial role in creating a new moral and political order for twentieth-century India and demonstrates the importance of viewing the emergence of secularism through the colonial encounter. Although attacks on priestcraft were ubiquitous in colonial India, the period’s rich archive of anticlerical writing has seldom been systematically studied. As this book shows, however, the spectre of the crafty priest was crucial to how the politics of religion were understood at this time. At least as important to British rule as the Orientalist representation of Hinduism and other religious traditions was the effort to reform human subjects by freeing them from external religious influence. This book traces how the critique of spiritual despotism in colonial India gave rise to ideal of the self-ruling subject. Even as reformers decried the spiritual power of priests, they promoted new types of religious discipline by mobilizing Hindu and Protestant ascetic practices and extending them to worldly householders. The result was a notion of disciplined self-governance that was crucial to both nineteenth-century reform culture and early twentieth-century anticolonialism. A work of historicist cultural studies, the argument of Spiritual Despots unfolds through readings of diverse texts from India and Britain. By using a contrapuntal method that criss-crosses colony and metropole, the book shows how South Asian writers intervened in period debates about the nature of the self and thus suggests an alternative genealogy for the liberal ideal of the self-governing individual. Relatedly, the book asks how the discipline of comparative religion can be re-imagined for the twenty-first century, rerouting some of that discipline’s key terms (most notably Max Weber’s notion of “worldly asceticism”) through empire to reveal them in a new light