Spiritual Despots
Modern Hinduism and the Genealogies of Self-Rule
Historians of religion have examined at length the Protestant Revolution and the widespread effects of "priestcraft" rhetoric that grew out of it, but J. Barton Scott, in "Spiritual Despots", reveals an unexamined piece of that story: how Protestant missionaries spread anticlerical rhetoric throughout India, activity from which the ongoing effects can be felt to this day. Drawing on the archival writings of both British and Indian figures, Scott provides a panoramic view of precisely how priestcraft rhetoric has transformed religion and politics in India since the nineteenth century. After Protestant polemics developed the concept of priestcraft as religious fraud, missionaries travelling throughout the British colonies eventually dispersed it into the lexicon of Hindu reformers. These nineteenth-century reformers translated the religious insult into vernacular languages like Hindi and Gujarati, breathing new life into the idea in the context of their own tradition. Used to vilify religious hierarchy and celebrate the ideal of the autonomous individual, priestcraft rhetoric also became important to the liberalism in India. Indeed, as Scott shows, the history of liberalism in India cannot be separated from the history of subjectivity. Scott draws on close readings of texts in multiple languages from powerful thinkers of the day, such as James Mill, Keshub Chandra Sen, William Howitt, Karsandas Mulji, Helena Blavatsky, and many more, to provide a broad, transcontinental perspective. Uniting writers across time and space, Scott sheds much-needed light on how priestcraft rhetoric and ascetic religious practices in India played a surprising part in creating a new moral and political order based on ideals of self-governance for twentieth century India, demonstrating the importance of viewing the emergence of secularism through the colonial encounter.
About the Author
J. Barton Scott is assistant professor of the history of religion at the University of Toronto.
Reviews
"'Spiritual Despots' is a valuable and quite unusual intellectual history centered on the idea of "priestcraft;" an important subject, though sorely neglected in recent academic scholarship. Scott offers a substantial contribution to the new trend in intellectual history that tries to breach the boundaries of national space and pursue movements of thought across spatial and cultural boundaries. Interesting and persuasive, 'Spiritual Despots' poses a significant methodological revision for this type of intellectual history; it shifts comparatively back and forth between Indian thought on religious reform and contemporary British discussion on the nature of religiosity under conditions of modernity. Written clearly and with precision, 'Spiritual Despots' will be indispensable to academic circles in Indian intellectual history, religious thought, and social scientists engaged in rethinking theories of secularization" – Sudipta Kaviraj, Columbia University
"This wholly original book offers us a sophisticated account of the making of a new kind of spiritual and political subject in colonial India. Scott argues that the modern Hindu self is produced within a global context in which the autonomous subject of liberalism is questioned and undermined. He elegantly shows how this results in a subjectivity defined by self-rule as a form of splitting and self-referentiality that eventually provides the foundation for an anticolonial politics that was at the same time a practice of psychic revolution" – Faisal Devji, University of Oxford
"'Spiritual Despots' is an intelligent contribution to several ongoing conversations in religious studies and South Asian studies. Scott's argument is sophisticated and clearly written, and he approaches several 'big questions' associated with various works of Max Weber, Michel Foucault, and Charles Taylor from a novel perspective. 'Spiritual Despots' will be of interest to any scholar of religious studies, South Asian studies, intellectual history, or comparative political theorists" – Andrew Sartori, New York University
