 Okay, so the topic that I'm going to speak on this evening is perhaps a little bit controversial and this is the idea that the very idea of religion itself is a colonial invention. This idea comes out of a debate in the academic study of religion, which has suggested that the whole category of religion itself what we think religion is is invented. It doesn't really have any, like, actual connection to the world out there, or at least the world beyond Europe and the West. And the argument here is that a concept like religion doesn't have any kind of trans historical essence. That means that religion is something that all societies have and have always had. And in other words, the question that this provokes is that perhaps we need to understand what religion is in terms of the history of the places where it emerges. So an important question that we need to ask is, okay, where does this category of religion come from? What is its precise history? And does the history of its invention or its creation or its use limit its application in contexts that don't share that history? And if that's the case, then why has it been used to categorise phenomena outside of that history to create, for example, what was probably really familiar to us and that is the idea of world religions. So we could name them, you know, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, so on and so forth. These seem to be things that have very concrete identities to us. And when we ask that question, is it really a useful category to understand things that haven't developed in the history of Europe, where this word religion, as I'm going to talk through, has a lot of force. Why has it been used to categorise that phenomena? And then in asking that question, we can begin to ask questions of, well, perhaps what relations of power enabled this category of religion to be applied to things outside of its context? What enables the choice to name these things religion? And how can the category of religion, which has such a very specific history, which I'm going to talk through. It's connected to the West's narration of this thing called modernity based on the divide between church and state. How can that history have explanatory value in understanding social phenomena with a really very different history and social organisation with a very different history. And is it even appropriate to do that, given the colonial history that's involved in what becomes effectively a translation exercise whereby things like Hinduism or Buddhism, etc. were identified as religions as opposed to any other thing they could have been identified in a context where religion was viewed very negatively by colonial European powers. So what I want to focus on in this lecture is getting you to think through a fairly general level, how our assumptions about what religion is. But I also want to kind of bury in this question what politics is because it is the thing that's identified as different from religion. How do our assumptions about what religion is and is not have a history that perhaps we might need to subject to some critical evaluation. And in doing that evaluation, we can then think about how diverse traditions like Hinduism come to be classified as religions and what relationship that that form of classification had to colonial power, given that it was during the British colonisation of India that something like Hinduism was consolidated into an object that was named religious. But it was always it was created in terms that reflected the European conception of what religion really is. So I'm going to start with a quick overview of the ways in which religion is understood today. They'll cover really quite quickly and in really very sketchy detail how the terms developed in Europe before finally moving to look at how it functioned in the colonial era, and what the impact of that was on the societies that were really forced to take up European categories such as religion politics and so on. Now there are two different images of religion that circulate in public discourse currently and you're probably pretty familiar with them. One is that religion is essentially peace loving, non violent, non political, non profit making. It's concerned with the kind of inner spiritual life and the other world, or perhaps even like connecting with whatever one names is the transcendent. Religion has nothing to do with power. In other words, it's benign and gentle. It's a matter of personal faith and piety. It's very much separated from the non secular, a non religious or a secular state from practical politics from economics and so on. But the other image of religion that equally circulates is that religion is essentially barbaric is violent. It's irrational. It's a cause of violence and conflict. It threatens the essentially peace loving and reasonable nature of the non religious secular state. And I'm sure that all of the both of these images are actually very familiar to any of us that have ever spent any time thinking about religion in the modern world. Now both of these opposite images depend on the assumption that religion is essentially different from the secular. There are like two chemical elements, which when confined to their proper domains are harmonious are safe, but when you mix them, they become volatile. Various dualisms or binaries or kind of oppositions step in to underwrite this construction of difference, so public, private, natural, supernatural, this world and the other world, faith versus knowledge, fact versus value, reason versus unreason. And as I'm going to show you most importantly, self versus other one term is valued and the other is devalued. And the last to start by noticing is that when you have these kinds of oppositions these categories that seem to be opposed to each other, there is always evaluative weight, one is understood as positive, the other as a negative. The roots of this division between religion and the secular religion and the politics go back to the beginnings of the Protestant Reformation, and the conflicts that emerged as a result which are known as the wars of religion that were waged in Europe, from around 1524 through to 1648 following the onset of the Protestant Reformation in Western and Northern Europe. All of these wars that were really wars between various European states, the French and the British, the French and the Germans, the Germans and the, sorry, the French and the Belgians and you know there was a whole bunch of European French people, French, France seem to be rather largely involved in the rest of these conflicts, but so were the British. And all of these wars are considered to have been strongly influenced by the religious change of the period, the ways in which the Protestant Reformation was demanding a separation from the Roman Catholic Church. And it produced a lot of conflicts and a lot of rivalry between different nation states that were aligning themselves with either Lutheranism, Calvinism, Catholicism, Methodism and so on. Now, now two kind of major moments in these wars really kind of bookended them. In 1648, right towards the end of the conflict, you have something called the Peace of Westphalia, and this concluded the wars and initiated a new system of political order in central Europe, later called Westphalian sovereignty, which was based upon the concept of a sovereign state governed independently. And it established the convention in international affairs against one nation interfering in another nation's domestic business. And this model really becomes the model of the international political system as we see it today, different states. Their sovereignty is recognized and there is a convention against intervening in the domestic affairs of other nations, although of course we've seen many breaches of that in recent years. Now the treaties regulations served as a kind of precursor, as I said, to these later international treaties and the development of international law in general. But the Peace of Westphalia recognized an earlier agreement known as the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, in which each prince of a given state would have the right to determine the religion of his own state, and the options at the time were Catholicism, Catholicism and Calvinism and operated on the principle, this Latin phrase, que es regio, es religio, meaning who's the region, there's the religion. So states were being recognized as having a religious identity, according to the religion of the ruler. And so we can see here that religion was very important in framing the distinctiveness and the separateness of different nation states within Europe. Remember that. So Christians living in principalities where their denomination was not the established church, i.e. the church of the ruler, were nonetheless guaranteed the right to practice their faith in public during certain allotted hours and in private at their will. Now these two treaties were really, really fundamentally important in developing the split between church having its own specific domain confined to what individual believers believed, and the role of the state which was there to manage religious difference in plural societies. So the Protestant Reformation played a really pivotal role in inaugurating a shift away from the mediating authority of the church to have kind of rulership over everything, every aspect of life. And instead began to emphasize the individual as their own arbiter of salvation, as the one where salvation becomes a matter for the individual in other words rather than the guiding principle of society as a whole. And further resulted in state religion being organized along various different sectarian lines as I said Lutheran Catholic Calvinist and so on and this replaced the previous system of global Catholicism. Which had sort of had authority over very many European states, and now it kind of granted authority to the nation state and so this shift in authority from this kind of Catholic global church to the state, ensured increasingly that religion no longer warranted a privileged place in the public public sphere. So that the state increasingly took over the management of things that the church the, and by church I mean the Catholic Church had previously had control over education healthcare, welfare, and so on. And as a consequence of that religion becomes really the domain of the church and it becomes privatized. It becomes it no longer has that public role becomes really just a matter for the individuals conscience. And this privatization of religion, very much in this moment constituted its demotion from having permeated every aspect of life. It now increasingly becomes segregated from political, economic and intellectual realms. And so in the very moment that you have religion being privatized, you have the conception of the political also being separated out as a specific domain with a specific role in society. It's partly from this history that we get the view that religion in Europe at least is a is violent, that is a cause of conflict and wars. Eventually you also get its alignment with ideas of irrationality and that this violence itself is irrational, and therefore it needs to be contained by the state, the state needs to manage it and keep it in the private domain rather than the public domain. And this view enabled a representation of the secular state, i.e., the political domain as rational, as there to uphold the peace, only to be reluctantly violent. And its function was now also understood in part to be to confine religion to its proper sphere, to the private sphere, to manage the danger that it effectively posed to social cohesion. In other words, to be tolerated and tolerable, religion really had to be a private matter from now on. And in the MA in Religion, Global Politics, we really kind of investigate how that plays out, particularly in managing multicultural societies and the role that religious identities play there, but that's of course a story for another time. Now what's important in this whole history is that religion started to be imagined as though it was something that exists in the world with essential characteristics that differentiated from the domains of secular reasonableness, from politics, from economics, when in fact what happened in part, in part because of the wars of religion, was that in fact it actually began to be constructed as something different, as something distinct from the state with essential characteristics that would mark out is a difference. Now in the emergence of the opposition between religion, and we could say perhaps non religion, all of those things like politics and law and economics and so on. That was kind of provide began to provide the fundamental social structures of what became what becomes called modernity religion, which had once been understood as this kind of encompassing total social truth, the way in which all societies were kind of organized according to the Christian truth about the world became now suddenly demoted transformed into a distinct and separate social domain. Religion having been what Peter Berger calls the sacred canopy, encompassing all of life determining what you could do who you could marry, you could be buried, who you could eat with all of those kind of you know that way in which it kind of organized all of life suddenly becomes transformed into a distinct and separate social domain. And in the medieval and early modern period, and in most of Europe until literally relatively recently what we call Christendom encompassed or included what we now separate out as church and state. Religion as I've said was simply everything it informed everyday life, what laws there were, who you could marry what your social responsibilities were, what the legitimate authorities were, and so on it wasn't even something you thought about or had to choose. After the Protestant Reformation, it now becomes a matter of choice and conscience rather than all of life, and all of life includes lots of distinct different domains such as politics, law, and so on. Another implication was, and this is something that really kind of develops from around the 17th century, all the way through to the 19th century, is that unlike the concept of religion as everything, as effectively the truth capital T, of which logically there could only be one, modern constructions of religion began to become objects of secular social scientific inquiry, which, and so kind of object of academic study, which was part of the way in which I essential characteristics of what religion is began to be identified and codified and making them religions and not something else, less in other words connected to the truth, and more to what different people believed and how interesting that was and how that could kind of be mapped and understood. Now no one, even from, you know, even in the modern day has yet been able to come up with a non contested definition of what those essential characteristics are assumption remains and it's a very popular one and you're probably even here in this lecture today because you have one of these assumptions that religion actually does have some essential difference from non religious secular domains is implied by the way in which social scientific study began to identify the different religions of the world, and to mark out that they're a huge difference from things like political systems and legal systems and economic systems and intellectual ones. I'm aware of course that I'm really kind of belting through this and this is a much more complicated story than I'm able to present you to today so we're now going to get moving to kind of 18th, 19th centuries to say that it wasn't just the Protestant revolution that gave us what we today understand to be religion in contrast to the secular, the European enlightenment, which follows in the 18th century was equally significant, in turn giving rise to what is now named both as the kind of age of reason, or the period of the kind of revolution and more prosaically what becomes called modernity. Now, modernity begins so the story goes with the so called death of God, famously proclaimed by this chap here the famous 19th century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the phrase encapsulated his sense that with the advent of enlightenment the kind of exercise of human reason to know the world around it. And so God, who was really in Nietzsche in terms understood as the ground of a kind of absolute totalizing moral order and system of meaning had really disappeared was no longer the basis on which people understood themselves their lives. And really, the kind of source of truth had really shifted to humanity and bear in mind that that was only really thinkable because of the Protestant Reformation, suggesting that it was the individual who had to know God. The Protestant Reformation in many ways is what inaugurates the enlightenment with its emphasis on the individual being the one who needs to know the truth and seek the truth. So modernity is said to really start with this realization that it is the individual's view of the world that matters and the individual can know the world through the exercise of reason. Now, modernity at the same time is a really quite imprecise term. In general terms, on the one hand it's being taken to kind of mark the end, perhaps of monarchical rule in Europe, the collapse of the authority of the Universal Church. It's even been said to mark the beginnings of democracy, the nation states alongside the rise of capitalism, urbanization, various movements for social and political emancipation, things that are probably very familiar to us. And as we'll see a little bit later on, it's also said to be marked by the beginnings of European colonial exploration and expansion. On the other hand, you often have lots of people referring to modernity as a period of history, with its origins variously dated to the European Renaissance which really kind of kicks off in around the 1300s. The Protestant Reformation, as I've said, perhaps a little bit later the French philosopher René Descartes proclamation of I think therefore I am. Some people place it later with the French Revolution starting in 1789, or indeed the European Enlightenment which is usually dated from around 1685 to 1815. Now in his very well known and actually very luminous work The Passage to Modernity, the Belgian philosopher Louis Dupay presents an etymology that is the kind of tracing the origins of the term modernity to argue that modern signifies in fact a particular understanding of what history is and what the present is in relationship to the past. And he says this, and I quote, the modern age was the first to distinguish itself from all others by a time indicator. Now, anxious, and this is the key point anxious to assert its superiority to past epochs, its culture exchange the older claim of upholding a tradition for the one of surpassing it. We get a sense of progress advancement being built into this idea, a different sense of time directly followed the new sense of freedom. The key point here that Duprey is really making is the concept of modernity is establishing a different relationship to time. It's marking out the distinctiveness of the present against the past. There's something new or momentous about the modern moment the new moment. And the past in this process began to be read very negatively as something that had been surpassed that was necessarily surpassed. So consequently, modernity began to be characterized in a lot of European philosophy and literature as characterized by its very self conscious rejection of the past correlated with tradition, where tradition signified in many respects religion. Erroneous beliefs superstition, some of the authoritarianism that was associated with church doctrine with monarchical rule, modernity was claiming that it had overcome that it had left all of that behind. And its rejection of the past implied the necessary demise of religion in order that so the argument went to achieve a just society of free individuals one had to leave religion behind. And that is what many theorists began to argue set in motion the secularization of society where religion would no longer play any kind of significant play role in society. It was a process that was presented as inevitable, but also desirable. And so in this view, religion as a source of meaning, truth, power was going to increasingly received to the margins of modern society and progress, liberation, human reason would take its place. Modernity really held out the promise of the freedom to be achieved by the valiant exercise of reason. And this was encapsulated in Emmanuel Kant's famous dictum Sapere Aude, dare to know, dare to think for yourself. Don't let anyone tell you what to think figure out for yourself use your reason. And importantly, what you have embedded in this ideas a model of social development. And this model of social development as I'm going to tell show you was projected as something universal about human societies. All societies throughout the world were predicted to move, albeit at different rates in the same direction of travel. The level of ideas, modernity as kind of filtered through this European enlightenment thought had witnessed the rise of scientific rationalism. An emphasis on the status of the individual as arbiter of truth and knowledge very much against the clerical authority of the church. Secularization, political liberalism, all kind of organized around the values. The slogan of the French Revolution, liberty, gallery, fraternity, liberty, equality and community, and the purported relationship of modernity, modernity to the past that I'm kind of very quickly and probably quite inadequately adequately tracking through here has carried really significant implications with it. The ways in which individuals began to be able to conceive of themselves as individuals in as much as they could now begin to evaluate themselves as different to, and in fact, better than others in the past. And as I'm going to talk about those that were still considered to be mired in backward ways of thinking and backward ways of thinking were largely signaled particularly by religious allegiances. I'm actually just going to skip over this because I don't want to hold you too long. So all I really kind of wanted to say here was that religious that modernity presupposed this kind of idea that the present was a moment of progress of advancement that one distanced oneself from the past where people thought things that were not right about the world. It began to develop this idea that you could a belief in God of religious allegiance with anti modern. It was backward. And therefore you begin this increasing understanding of religion as signaling irrationality. Now, I want to argue that that whole narrative is in fact an ideology. It's an ideological story. It tells a story or it enables a representation against what may in fact have been the reality of modern subjects in society as progressive developed rational free in contrast to those who were identified as perhaps as pre-modern, which was associated with backwardness as I said, mired in religion, irrational, and in many cases, illiberal. So the modern subject used religious identities, religious cultures as a way to contrast itself. And any recognition of this ideological texture of this understanding of modernity begins to bring into focus its political nature and its motivations. And this means that its claims to merely be this kind of description of human development can be challenged and rendered more complex. What I want to show you is how religion operated in effect as a very important negative signifier. That is, something against which modernity could contrast itself that set up a whole series of important conceptual dichotomies. It's going to take a sip of water. So public, private, secular, religious, church, state, and so on. And these dichotomies were really fundamental to the self understanding of European societies. Now what's often quite hard to see in many of the accounts of modernity, particularly of the relationship between religion and modernity is the extent to which this narrative, this, this negation of religion, this rejection of religion was used as an instrument for colonial expansion. The narrative of modernity of progressive as liberal was used to justify European imperialism terms of its understanding of itself as being a civilizing mission. So starting Europe's distance from religion, and by suggesting that those territories that they were setting out to colonize were fundamentally religious. Europe was able to distinguish itself philosophically and materially from those non Western societies and cultures that it was at the same time setting out to subjugate. The use of the term religion to classify worldviews at seeming odds with secular modernity, as I'll show you indicated a very stark, largely invented division between superstition and reason, the past and the present and between us brackets European and them colonized populations. And I want to show you how this structure is absolutely constitutive of all claims to modernity to European modernity, but it's real force becomes apparent when we turn our attention to colonialism, and what happened and please bear in mind that we're just going to kind of hit on some of the highlights rather than get into the kind of detail but I'm very happy to kind of provide some of that detail in the question and answer if you would like to see that. The political philosopher Eduardo Mendieta has suggested and I quote how the West allegedly became secular is a story, not just about the containment of religion within the West, but also about what distinguishes the West from the rest. Religion as a category was really central. And I could say as an adjective in many ways is a way in which to describe non European populations was really central in orienting Western identity, enabling a distinction to be constructed between enlightened European modernity and the so called religious worldviews of colonized populations. Religion played this kind of contrastive role it served really as the kind of ground to possibility for the colonizing or colonial imaginary that of the European duty to civilize. Europe had cast off religion and had made huge progress industrialized and developed the kind of scientific method was, you know, which was kind of fueling capitalist advancement and so on. And therefore it was the duty of Europeans to take that advancement that possibility to the colonized countries. Let us not forget that what doesn't get told in the story is the degree to which capital capitalist advancement was almost entirely fueled by colonial exploitation and enslavement. That is part of the story that doesn't get told. Religion in the story that is told is imagined as the kind of condition of possibility that legitimizes the colonial project it is the duty of the Europeans to go to the colonies to civilize them to introduce them to modernity and the necessity of confining religion to its correct place. So Mendieta is pointing to the extent to which religion has been in fact an ethnocentric European, but also normative category, the way in which society should be organized. And it was central to the ways in which the West self understanding began to be asserted in the colonial era. Now recognizing this fact challenges in fact the conventional conventional notion that religion is universal that all societies and cultures have or have had a religion. The assumption of religions universality disguises in fact is rootedness and that very brief but nonetheless important European history that I've gone through. And then the use that was made of it in the colonial period to classify and to evaluate cultural practices traditions conceptual schemas very very different to the specificity of its origins. The evaluation of the category within the narrative of modernity to use the term religion to refer to non Western traditions world views philosophies and so on. Noting of course that in naming any of these as such as to fall into some of the similar problems of translation is effectively to imply their inferiority because that's what religion meant in modernity is a backward irrational way of being in the world and thinking. But there's also another problem, it also assumes that there's some kind of essential commonality, a common reference point that enables these diverse traditions to be grouped together as religions. But when you examine the history of the concept of religion, it becomes clear that the concept of religion is something distinct from perhaps other forms of social discourse and organization is almost solely a product of European modernity struggle to assert the priority of the secular realm over that of the religious encapsulated in European societies in the division between church and state, and in the confinement of religion to the private sphere. The West struggles to overcome religion with struggles to overcome Christianity, as we can see from the very brief history I've given you. But in the colonies, Christianity was in fact used as the prototype in the work to try and classify those traditions in the non European world that we now understand as religions. What happened as a consequence of European colonial knowledge production was that Christianity was taken to provide the basic template for what could be classified as a religion. Did it look like Christianity to have a belief in God, sacred texts, a priestly hierarchy, etc. Kind of creed that everyone had to sign up to. If it looked like that, then it was a religion. And this meant that the criteria or the parameters for inclusion in the category were determined on the extent to which a traditional practice resembled the Christian model, wherein, very importantly, a belief in a transcendent deity was an essential feature, alongside the assumption of the kind of centrality of a canonical sacred textual tradition, as really being the container of the beliefs, the doctrines that really marked out religion. Now this Western tendency to privilege belief as the essence of religiosity is very much a kind of Protestant derived enlightenment version of the privatization of religion, where it's all according to your unconscious you can think what you want you can believe what you want in and of yourself, which enables of course its separation from the public realm. And what I would want us to note here is that against this colonial imposition of this Christian model of what religion is, it should be noted that in fact praxis ritual kinship networks, all sorts of other things rather than creedal belief were far more often the basis for participation in those non Christian traditions and practices that colonial officials translated as religious. There are codification as religions the way which colonial officials understood these practices as religions didn't describe some kind of pre existent unity. It signaled a deliberate construction of this difference is colonial difference into a seemingly coherent whole that could be named religion on the model of Christianity. And because of the status of religion in the West, this codification simultaneously enabled the representation of colonized populations as childish as backward as inferior, based on their alleged immersion this thing that was being named as religion. And they were contrasted to modern European populations who had ostensibly cast off the fetters of religion. Now one of the issues that arises here is not so much whether or not Western notions of religion are accurate, but rather a matter of documenting the historical process where such notions come to seem utterly self evident, even to those for whom they were an innovation, such as the fact that in India today, for example, many Indians will identify wholeheartedly with the idea that Hinduism, which is also I would argue a colonial invention is a religion and is an inherent part of who they are. And there we can talk a little bit about the difficulty then of challenging this construction when people take it on and value it as part of who they are. The classification of certain cultural phenomena as religious was a choice, and it was part of the exercise of colonial power. It was not common sense or obvious at all to non Europeans to understand their ways of living in those terms before the advent of colonialism. That said, this dichotomy that was imposed during the colonial era in non European nations between the secular and the religious is part of the cultural heritage that Europeans forcibly universalized through the last few centuries of colonialism. They forced people to think about themselves and organize their societies in the terms of European society. So attention to how religion operated under colonialism helps us to see that the conceptual force of religion. Or terms such as religion, which were accompanied by actual material power to change the societies that were subjected to colonization has meant that concepts like religion didn't function simply as descriptive categories they weren't just ways of kind of mapping out and understanding different societies. They were in fact prescriptive, they set out the norms against which societies would be negatively measured and evaluated. They forced societies to organize themselves according to European ideas and social structures. And the process where expressions of cultural difference become translated now as religion in the Western imagination meant that once a society was identified as religious in European terms, as I've said, it could be represented as improperly developed backward, primitive, irrational, childlike, resistant to secular modernity and therefore in need of the colonial regime to modernize it to bring it in to the present. In other words, the secular religion dichotomy and the related groups of concepts and orientations that clustered around it began to function as prescriptive models or blueprints that very much transformed the societies on which it was imposed. The idea to become independent of colonial rule meant that the various colonized states had to mold themselves according to the European model. In many ways, the demand was that they undergo a kind of Protestant reformation you see this demand actually being made even in the contemporary era by the demand that particularly Muslim communities undergo a form of rationalization to resist forms of fundamentalism we can talk about that as well if you like. These nations had to demonstrate that they could be trusted to undertake self rule by acquiescing with the necessary separation of religion from politics, economics, law, and so on. Now what have been the consequences of this connection between European colonialism and the European concept of religion of using the concept religion to explain and classify the intellectual and cultural traditions of Asia. Well, in the 18th and 19th centuries, Western scholars and commentators began to coin a number of neologisms to denote what they were touting as a kind of newly discovered religions of Asia in particular Hinduism, a term that was first used by the British evangelical missionary Charles Grant in the 1770s, but then was subsequently adopted by Hindu reformers such as Ram Mohan Roy who I'll talk about in a minute. Buddhism was coined in the 1820s, Taoism in the 1820s as well, all by Europeans. These Western accounts of Asian traditions benefited from actually relatively easy circulation across colonial networks of power. They became increasingly valorized in terms of the emerging global political system, of course a system that was dominated by Western nations based upon the Westphalian model of the secular nation state. The Christian versus secular division of society came to function as a kind of dominant template through which colonized and also semi colonized Asian countries began to seek entrance into modernity that is to try and kind of gain recognition as a civilized and modern nation state in a context of military, economic and political encroachment into their regions by Western powers. So in the late 19th, early 20th centuries, we see the rise of a variety of reformist and modernizing agendas in various Asian countries, exemplified up there by the Meiji regime. The establishment of course of the Republic of China trends such as the late 19th century so called Bengali Renaissance, there you have Ram Mohan Roy in India, which we're all seeking in their ways to respond to and almost replicate Western driven conceptions of modernity. And these reformist trends were really trying to organize and reform indigenous traditions and and polities in response to the colonialist demands that the non West conform to the Western model of social organization, where of course this is strict division between church and state. And so in this manner, some of the key cultural fault lines and traditional modes of identity construction were written over by an emphasis upon kind of the distinguishing features of the terrain that have been significant really only in a European Western context. And that is the period of colonialism requires that colonized societies can form and become like the West. The colonial domination of the West over the rest in recent centuries has effectively caused many Western categories and ideas and paradigms to appear much more normal normative and universal than they might otherwise have seemed. And that religion has been this really key feature in the imaginative map of Western, I guess, for want of better words supremacy, at the very least, modernity, the concept, particularly the dichotomy between secular and religious really became this kind of cognitive map, it had this epistemological dimension for enabling the classification, the interpretation of diverse cultural and historical terrain of forcing it into conformity with the European way of understanding the world was through colonialism that European concepts that were really only relevant to Europe reconfigured the very territory that they purported to represent. And you can see the force of this prescription and the tendency in both colonial narratives but also in the indigenous perhaps even South Asian responses to now locate claims to authentic diversity within the sacred texts of their tradition, many of which were not at all sacred until the British came along discovered or these collated the Sanskrit manuscripts and kind of impose them on India as their own sacred texts. Whereas I think paying attention to what Tala al-Assad, a very important anthropologist of religion has called the inequality of languages by which he means the kind of conceptual languages by which we know the world in which we live the kind of asymmetrical power relations that are present in the translation of Western concepts between what he says are non equivalent languages through colonialism, British colonialism that is English and English concepts universalize themselves are imposed at the butt of a gun on other societies. The factor in the claimed universality of certain Western concepts is European imperialism and the effect that this has had upon the cultures of the colonized, both our modern understanding of religion, even as kind of banal as a system of beliefs and practices. And the academic field that seeks to try and understand religions are a product of this particular history I've been tracking, certainly of the European enlightenment, but also of European colonialism. And that's something that we need to take very seriously when understanding how religion the category is operating to shape the way in which we understand the world today, how we think about it, how we understand the cultures that we are particularly interested in, and how in many ways it benefits us from understanding those cultures that we are interested in. So final points to summarize I know this has been very kind of quick and rushed and not very detailed. But this is the kind of stuff that we really explore in the degree when modernity is framed in terms of its repudiation of religious ways of being. It's aligned with both secular and colonialist values. And more importantly, it's profoundly implicated in an imperious legacy that imposed the category of religion on the populations that claimed to want to civilize, and yet it denigrated them, because they had apparently failed to pursue the path of modernity. And this is a way that colonized populations could win in this story. It should be clear that religion, as we conventionally understand it in the West, is caught up with a very particular European history. And it's connected because of this history to theistic concepts of God, of belief, it's functioned as an instrument of colonial power. And this history has created really very significant difficulties for continuing to use this phrase this term religion to use any of the associated concepts. And yet of course, because it's so important so constitutive to the way in which Western modernity has narrated itself, and the impact of the colonial era on colonized populations who now use many of those terms it's impossible to avoid. What we understand religion to be today is a product of historical events and processes that are particular to Europe. A significant part of modern European history, social organization, cultural values is premised on the idea that religion is separate to the state. So how might we understand societies where that division is not made. What is it that we think we're talking about there. These processes that I've charted today did three things. A, they determined religion to be different and necessarily separate from other institutions and forms of knowledge in society. B, they aligned religion negatively with irrationality, superstition, violence, and so on. And C, they turned religion into an object of study, which enabled them the identification of other religions all sharing apparently some kind of common essence. The role that religion play that's what I call the kind of negative signifier was used in part, in large parts in fact to justify colonialism's understanding of itself as a civilizing mission, but also to manage and to know colonized populations and to coerce them into cooperating with European ways of thinking and organizing society. So let's talk about religion as a colonial invention. What I mean is that a concept that was embedded in and the product of European history and society was removed from that context and imposed on colonized populations, who were henceforth forced to make sense of their terms that were not their own. And so what do we do? How can we think differently about the relationship between religion and politics between religion and secularism when we're paying attention to the parts of the world that don't have this history that I've traced today? Well, it's a really, really complicated question, and the answer is equally complicated. But if you want to know more and you want to explore it more, well then obviously I'll end on this, you need to register for the MA in global politics. And thereby ends today's lesson. I'll just turn my camera if I can find where I put it. Yeah. Okay. What I'll do is I'll just, I'll make everybody a panelist that way if you want to put your videos on, you can do. And also your audio will be on. So if you want to ask questions through the audio you can as well but there's no, you don't have to put your videos on if you prefer not to, but we'll just do it that way. It might be easiest to do it that way. I can see that there's been a few. A couple of questions. Yeah, and I know it was fast. I'm sorry about that. We had to kind of pack in quite a bit quite quickly. It has been recorded. And if you get the recording, you can slow the pace down. But I couldn't make the argument without kind of giving you all the different little moments. And of course we had a short amount of time. So, okay. I'm wondering if you could talk a bit about the nationalist anti-colonial struggle in 20th century India, the influence of the Bhagavad Gita and Gandhi's point about modernity being the problem. I think that's a really good question. I think that much of the problem with the anti, it's not that it was a problem. It was a problem that the anti-colonial movement in India faced. And that was how to assert India's identity as a force able to govern itself. And largely it did so by almost acquiescing with the European understanding of what a modern society is supposed to be about. Now, the Gita, I mean, this could really be a very, very long question. What India tried to do was assert its own unified identity. And it did so often by returning to what it by that point understood as religious idioms. And Gandhi is actually very influential in shaping the idea that Hinduism is this particular thing. It's a kind of worldview has a set of rituals associated with it. It's associated with non-violence, with the necessity of, you know, behaving according to one's duty, one's status in life and so on. The idea that he's peddling there was largely a colonial product. And that was because the British had come along that identified these Sanskrit texts. These were the texts of the high caste Indians in India. They collated them. They created critical additions. They then even began to use those texts in order to impose something that they began to call Hindu law on the population. What that did was that itself unified the population where before differences in class and classes and different like, you know, different kind of social organizations that were very, very diverse throughout the Indian subcontinent began to become much more unified. This is the British who identified the Geetha. They called it literally the Bible of India. Why? Because they were looking for something where there was some kind of comparison between our religion has a sacred text. Christianity has a sacred text. So if you're a religion, then you must have your sacred text. What is it? Oh, well, here's the Geetha. The Geetha was nowhere near as popular as the British seem to think it was. Nor was it as central to Indian culture as it, of course, then later becomes once the British begin to elevate it as, you know, as the kind of key sacred text of India, the British really kind of make it into that text where it had not been that before. Now, of course Gandhi in many ways, his whole kind of anti colonial movement was in many ways kind of premised on anti being anti-modern of kind of returning to traditional Indian ways of being, you know, he kind of opposed, or he only ever kind of war hand woven cotton. He lived a kind of very austere lifestyle really as a way of kind of distancing himself from the British colonialist. And yet, of course, there were many kind of conceptions that he had taken from modern ideas about the status of religion about the necessity of the nation state and what the nation state would look like. Gandhi didn't escape the influence of the British on on the colonization of India and how India was going to be able to emerge from that was going to be able to come independent was largely by having to acquiesce with the idea that nation states need to be these discrete states with a clear social organization that are concerned with things like equality and freedom and community and so on and Gandhi takes many of those those ideas and puts them to work. Yeah. Okay, I hope that kind of if it's that hasn't answered your question and then come back to me. I could you please provide some examples of how the colonizers implemented the idea of religion being backward to the colonize and perhaps what was the most historic important historical event advocation that signified this. I mean here, this really, you know, it's always going to be specific to the context and British colonialism wasn't exactly the same everywhere that it happened. They engaged with local cultures and shaped them in particular ways so British colonialism and various African nations was very different to how it was in India, let alone in Burma, let alone in Singapore. There were different ways of implementing this idea. But what you have are for the British. I mean what I know most about is the British and India is that they, they began to develop forms of legislation for example, that would outlaw forms of behavior that they were religiously motivated and therefore backward. So many of the rules that they have their legislation that they introduced against something called sati, which is widow burning which was actually numerically incredibly small only really happened in a couple of northern states. They use that as a kind of signifier of India's barbarism and as backwardness, and they introduced laws specifically to outlaw it and then would kind of stage these rescues of women who had chosen or not mean who knows the answer to that question. Who have chosen to emulate themselves on their dead husband's funeral pyres. And what the British did was use that as a way to kind of demonstrate their own civility and the necessity of protecting the Indian population from itself, suggesting that these ideas were rooted in backward irrational religions and that they needed to be reformed and it's really those that produce reform movements in the 19th century, where a number of quite elite Indian thinkers attempt to demonstrate to the British that they are not backward that they are rational but to kind of reform various practices within India in order to kind of reflect their embracing of what the British were presenting as rational ways of behaving. But what you have happening there is actually a misrepresentation of many of these practices which we would probably understand as kind of culturally derived rather than rooted in any particular religious worldviews we might understand it from the present. So many of the kind of what you have here is a kind of politics of representation you have a representation of these countries as backward and in need of British intervention. And there's a wonderful thinker called John Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak, who says that what happens in the colonial regime, particularly in terms of the example that I've just given you, you have white men saving brown women from brown men. And the white people were kind of presenting themselves as the kind of civilizing mission, that's what they were there to do so religion was really helpful, suggesting that could be intervention because these were just irrational, unscientific ways of thinking, and and British men needed to save Indian women from Indian men. Any other questions. Let me just scroll down. Does it mean religion was put in place to render the colonized population submissive. It's kind of a chicken and an egg story. I think they just simply decided that religion was obviously something that all societies had, but that it was a problematic way to live. When they kind of invaded colonized countries and began to, you know, kind of set up their own regime. They also set out to understand those populations and what they did was they looked at their own understanding of the world and thought it was perfectly adequate for understanding the colonized society. And so they just began to kind of categorize it in that way, and kind of name anything that they could see through their own, you know, it's like putting on colonial spectacles and just that's all that you could see could only see the way that you thought about the world, rather than really recognizing that perhaps other people have different ways of thinking, and they don't have the same categories and they don't, you know, don't perhaps separate out certain practices from other practices that became a means of which, in naming those practices as religion, they could equally at the same time classify them as irrational, as backward, as primitive, as childish, and so on and so forth. Any other questions? And yeah, do come back to me if you feel like I'm not quite answering your question. It's hard to tell. It's hard to, you know, I can't see you. I don't quite know whether what I'm saying is literally utterly baffling or you disagree and you're really welcome to disagree. You can fight back. Okay. Anyone got any questions about the program that you would like me to answer? Yeah, absolutely. I'm just going to put my, just in case you didn't catch it at the beginning, I'm just going to put my email address in the chat and you're absolutely welcome to email me anytime you want. But if you would like an individual chat with me on Zoom, I'm really happy to do that as well, especially, I think, you know, in about a week's time, our teaching for the year will be coming to an end, so I'll be much more available. My time will be my own. I'm very glad we, of course, spend more time on Zoom. But if that's something you would like to do, I'd really love for you to kind of get in touch and we can get that set up. Okay, I'm not seeing any more questions. And I know that I've kind of kept you over time and I've certainly kept Kim over time. Yeah. Okay. Well, thank you all so, so much for coming. And I'm sorry it was all bit rushed, but we got there in the end and in touch if there's anything more that you want to know. And I believe this will be put up somewhere, won't it? Yes. So the recording will be put up on the website and then for everybody who registered, we will send out an email with the link to the website so that you can watch the recording back again. And we'll also include all on that part of the website, all of the recordings from all of today's sessions. So if there was another session that you weren't able to get to at all, then you can feel free to go through and click on a number of the links. What I would say is that in terms of SOAS and our programs, even though our, we have particular programs in each area and particularly as our master's students do like to specialize at that point. What I would say is that SOAS is a very interdisciplinary university and that a lot of our programs are interconnected and intersected with each other. So it might be quite helpful for you to go on it and kind of listen to some of the other talks as well because you'll find there's kind of a lot of crossover between our programs. Especially for this program where you can do kind of modules in almost every department in the school. So if you have a particular discipline that you're interested in, then do go and do that. Well, thank you all for joining us today and wish you a good evening or a good day depending on whereabouts in the world you are. I'll also put my email address in the chat box. And so if you've got any more general questions, more about kind of if you've put an application in already and just want an update, do let us know. I did see another quick question about scholarships. Do you want to take that one? Yeah, so we have quite a range of scholarships depending on where you're from and which program you're taking. So let me just pop the scholarships link in there for you as well. And then once you've gone to that part of our website, if you have more questions regarding it, there is the fees and funding teams details but also you can also email me on them. There is quite a list that we have in terms of scholarships and some apply to multiple programs and others apply to particular programs. There's some for international students, there's some for home students. So it's worthwhile taking the time to look through all of them. They can have their own deadlines. And some of them you might have to write an additional essay for. So do take time to look through that page and if you have any questions on it as I say my email address is in there for you and you can also ask me any further questions on that or, you know, if you're waiting to hear about your application or you haven't put an application in yet and you're not sure what to include. Again, feel free to email me with that. Okay, thanks so much for coming everyone. I hope you have a great evening, night, day, whatever it is. We're all used to this now and I look forward to hearing from you all and thanks Kim so much for hanging around so long. That's okay. Thank you everyone. Bye everyone. Bye.