Religion And The Specter Of The West

Through a case study of Sikhism, Arvind-Pal S. Mandair launches an extended critique of religion as a cultural universal, showing how certain aspects of Sikh tradition were reinvented as "religion" during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His work rethinks the intersection of religion and the secular in discourses such as history of religions, postcolonial theory, and recent continental philosophy. Mandair links these discourses to a philosophy of "generalized translation" that emerged as a key conceptual matrix in the colonial encounter between India and the West. He also demonstrates how this philosophy of translation continues to influence the repetitions of religion and identity politics in the lives of South Asians, and the way the academy, state, and media have analyzed such phenomena.