Sikh Dharam and Postcolonialism: Hegel, Religion and Zizek

Abstract

This article ponders what it would require to rethink Sikh dharam today, given the irreversible transformation that occurred from a (pre-colonial) sikhi to today’s (colonial/modern) Sikhism. Such reassessment is approached through the employment of a third term, sikhi(sm). This third term operates as a postcolonial strategy to foreground the legacy of powerful colonial inscriptions, and in doing so, this study aims to recall how (colonial) power continually affects the production of (modern) knowledge. The article therefore charts not only how Europeans created the modern, and now, ‘world religion’ called Sikhism, but how this mode of naming the other as religious through an abstract conceptualization of religion in general, derives from Hegel and his colonial era—an era where the manufacture of religion as a universal category is simultaneously understood as a racial one. Furthermore, Hegel’s way of confronting difference was through an intellectual/academic project of conceptualizing history as the evolution of religion, and that this way of conceptualizing the other married well with colonial adminstrators that sought to control their colonies. This intellectual project to name the other as being part of a religion and therefore of the past, along with its inherent colonial subjugation, has persisted up to the present—even evident in the critical theory of the Left (Žižek). The persistence of this coloniality in contemporary academic discourse is marked by a mode of enunciation that operates to keep the other at bay and relatively voiceless in their subjugated speech. This subjugation is achieved and maintained through a theory of translation-as-representation; where the difficulty of translation proper (as a real meeting of equals with their varied epistemic centers that are allowed mutually to affect each other) is substituted by one where a singular epistemic center is seen as authoritative, and interacts with the other through orientalist modes of representation only it itself fashions, revealing less a heterolingual dialogue and more a hegemonic monologue. After charting the colonial/modern context, the article then briefly sketches some of the key principles that are required to begin the figuration of a postcolonial sikhi(sm).

The Old and New Comparative Theologies: Discourses on Religion, the Theology of Religions, Orientalism and the Boundaries of Traditions

“…We will return to this question in due course. Certainly, even critics of the colonial construction of the term 'religion' have suggested it may still be employed in new senses [37].…”

“…We see then that different strands underlie Fulfilment Theology itself (see [28], pp. [26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43]. For a further example we can point to its best known proponent, John Nicol Farquhar, whose concept of fulfilment essentially meant the 'death' of Hindu ideas as they are replaced by Christian conceptions, as Hindu ideas 'died' to become improved Christian ones ( [28], pp.…”

“…Throughout its existence Christian theology has been in a process of cultural and interreligious engagement, and so to suggest that we have a Christian theology which imposes itself on others is itself problematic (see [13], pp. [31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44]. At the same time, it cannot be denied that Western (in the Nineteenth century especially European and British) authority and worldviews were dominant and exerted an undeniable influence on the shaping of knowledge, which is part of Masuzawa's narrative [1].…”

“…As such, in creating 'religions', or 'world religions', as something to be seriously engaged, the OCT started to break the Western vision that only its own local truths are universal and something to be considered the norm. Therefore, we should join scholars who question the strong Orientalist thesis that we must reject developments like 'religion' as simply impositions ([18], p. 240; [37]), a stance that sometimes draws inspiration from Mandair [50,51]. Another issue that must be raised is the question of the disavowal of the past, which if we understand it as partaking in an 'Orientalist' discourse which we ourselves wish to disown may seem natural.…”