Vikash Singh. Uprising of the Fools: Pilgrimage as Moral Protest in Contemporary India. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017. 256 pp. $27.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-5036-0167-3.
Reviewed by Faisal Chaudhry (University of Arizona)
Published on H-Socialisms (April, 2018)
Commissioned by Gary Roth (Rutgers University - Newark)
Pilgrimage as Protest
In this thematically poignant and evocative work, Vikash Singh provides an ethnography of the Kanwar, India’s largest annual pilgrimage rite, alongside a running meditation on the place of religion in modern social theory and (continental) philosophy. Those readers looking for a more straightforward or comprehensive description of the Kanwar—or even just the specific experience of the author’s informants—may be disappointed with the level of attention devoted to epistemological concerns. For others, however, the book is sure to prove engrossing, both for the way it challenges established social scientific orthodoxies and the perhaps excessive self-assurance with which it professes to be unique in doing so.
Signifying the shoulder-mounted assemblage of pole and attached carrying vessels, the term kānwar is affixed to yātrā (lit. procession or pilgrimage) to denote the journey that millions of devotees of the Hindu deity Śiva take across Northwestern India bearing holy waters from the Ganges. “[F]ollowing elaborate rituals” and often traversing “hundreds of miles,” the Śaiviṭē pilgrims who undertake the kānwar yātrā do so with frequently “bare, bleeding feet” in order to bring the sanctified contents they carry to shrines located along a path extending from Delhi to Hardwar past Rishikesh and on into the Himalayan environs of Gangotri, a town on the banks of Bhagirathi river, a northern tributary of the Ganges (p. 1).
The author’s interest in the kānwar yātrā does not derive solely from the vastly expanded scale the pilgrimage has taken on since the end of the 1980s, when it still drew closer to thousands of participants instead of the millions who now are involved. Rather, Singh is most fascinated by the way the Kanwar courts judgment—whether lay or academic, explicit or implicit—as irrational, magical, and fundamentalist. From the very first page of the book he thus notes that the pilgrims—who are also known as bhola (gullible, fools)—are “frequently” committed to “aggravate[ing] their travail by pledging, for instance, not to remove the apparatus from their shoulders throughout the journey or to cover a segment of the journey on the ground, moving one body length at a time” (p. 1).
From this point of departure, the introductory chapter articulates the book’s larger aim in terms of the need to move past readings envisioning the Kanwar primarily as a “‘reaction’ against social change” or a “reactive assertion of ‘identity’ in the face of the inevitable” rush “of globalization” (p. 2). While Singh acknowledges that he is not the first to contest “the dubious epistemology … of ‘fundamentalism’” that so often goes hand in hand with reading popular spirituality, he nonetheless contends that existing sociological discourse on religion remains limited because it is “intrinsically defined by the vector of modernization and the apparently infallible [contrasting] logic of the market society as Reason.” Over and against the progress-based telos of this “dominant analytic,” in a move that recalls Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe (2007), Singh summons Martin Heidegger’s critique of Western metaphysics as his own analytical starting point (p. 3).
In turning more specifically to the treatment of religion in South Asian studies, the introduction further criticizes the tendency toward preoccupation with postcolonial anxieties about Muslim-Hindu relations. Here Singh argues that the result of such a preoccupation is to strip majoritarian popular religion in India of its lived reality (or, as he puts it, a failure to appreciate its roots in “the finite character of human life”) (p. 4). The point, of course, is well taken. However, the reader who comes to the book with some awareness of the by now more than a generation-long quarrel between subaltern studies-inflected work on South Asia and more functionalist/orthodox Marxist accounts of non-elite society would be justified in expecting Singh to say more up front about whether his own rallying cry is as novel as he insists. Singh does return to the matter in chapter 6. There, for example, he further elaborates by detailing his skepticism about the frame of “resistance” through which he argues subaltern studies scholars have traditionally instrumentalized popular religion; and in dong so, he does connect this alleged inadequacy in subaltern studies to a deeper faith that “Marxist and New Left” thinking more generally has retained as part of Western social thought’s telos of universalism, with its “grand ethic and project of emancipation” (p. 168). However, without further interrogating how novel his own approach truly is from the outset, the book leaves the reader to wonder whether it has not made its own case too easy—a matter I will return to later in this review.
As for the more specific content of Singh’s study, alongside of taking the lived reality of the Kanwar as primary, there is a second thematic concern that animates Uprising of the Fools as well. Early and often the author expresses an active—and deeply felt—awareness of the fact that the largely destitute young men who have swelled the ranks of the bhola have done so against the backdrop of an increasingly harsh “dominant social order” in India that provides “no room for any alternative horizons of morality, existence, or history” beyond the neoliberal (p. 55). With these twin concerns in hand, the book draws on three pilgrimage season’s worth of the author’s conversations and interviews—from 2009 to 2011. It structures its ethnographic reportage so as to bring the reader through the various stages of the Kanwar, as Singh’s informants create an alternative space in which to lay claim to an “‘actual’ identity that subverts the stigmatizing labels of ‘failure, ‘unemployed,’ and ‘outcast’” (p. 15). Singh’s other main interlocutors comprise a parade of luminaries, largely from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s side of the divide in Western philosophy and social thinking. These include not only Martin Heidegger, but also Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, and (perhaps least characteristically) Loren Kierkegaard. Ample room is also made to discuss various figures in contemporary sociology and anthropology like Anthony Giddens, Ashis Nandy, and James Scott. While the rush of names may sound like a greatest hits list, especially in a short book like this, it is to the author’s credit that the dialogue with thinkers past and present remains always informative, nuanced, and without any appearance of puffery.
Chapter 1 starts with the initial hours of the pilgrimage and pairs its descriptive detail with a discussion of Max Weber’s insights on Indic society. Here Singh emphasizes where the bhola fit within contemporary India as members of the 90 percent of its workforce who continue to earn their living through the informal economy. Chapter 2 turns to the religious vow pilgrims take, reading it in terms of ego deferral and what Singh calls a customary “ethic of care” that he argues functions to question the “utilitarian notion of the ‘individual’ to demonstrate a[n alternative] subjectivity that is from the outset relational and morally embedded” (p. 17). Chapter 3 argues that those who participate in the kānwar yātrā must engage in an arduous and often repetitive mode of performance that is best seen as a form of work. Accordingly, chapter 3’s ethnographic detail challenges the inability of contemporary middle classes and privileged caste groups to understand a “phenomenology saturated with daily, foreboding exposure to disease, poverty, misfortune, death, [and] humiliation.” Against dismissive popular judgments that would cast the subaltern economic status of the bhola as indicative of their failure or inability to work, Singh thus offers a very different way of understanding the impulse to “follow every diktat, almost to the extent of inventing new ones” that the divine instruction behind the pilgrimage is understood by its participants to entail (pp. 82-83). Rather than a flight from the world, in Singh’s reading the bhola manifest a relentless spirit of industriousness within it.
Chapter 4 next turns to the question of communitarian (or “communal”) conflict. Here the ethnographic narrative first lingers in the city of Hardwar and its seasonal transformation into a pilgrim-based economy. The chapter then proceeds to detail the procession’s passage through Muzaffarnagar, the Mughal-era town that saw its last major outbreak of religious violence as recently as 2013, with more than sixty killed that year in an outburst of Hindu-Muslim “rioting.” Notwithstanding the “palpable tensions” that accompany passage through Muslim neighborhoods, Singh emphasizes that the Kanwar, itself, has never witnessed any major episode of killing, mass injury, or the like (p. 17). Here Singh draws on Nandy’s well-known critique of the limits of Western secularism for understanding (and living) life outside of the West; he also presses his point about the problem with reducing popular majoritarian religious expression in today’s India to so-called Hindu nationalism/fundamentalism.
Chapter 5 turns to middle-class anxieties and offense at the carnivalesque aspects of the Kanwar, situating its discussion of the “subversive aesthetics of popular religions” by focusing on devotees’ caste and class position within the informal economy. The aforementioned critique of the notion of resistance in existing social science literature that chapter 6 provides comes next. Here, alongside of some ongoing ethnographic context, Singh mainly “advances an alternative understanding” of popular religion based on “a hermeneutic that interweaves the phenomenological critiques of Hegelian philosophy, Kantian ethics, and Lacanian psychoanalysis” (p. 18). Chapter 7 concludes the book with a brief summing up that once again warns against reading popular majoritarian religious expression as no more than fundamentalism.
If there are reservations to express about Singh’s all-around excellent study, they involve elaborating on some of the issues already touched on above. Overall, the qualifications—more than criticisms—are threefold. First, there is what above I have called the possible overemphasis on the novelty of the book’s approach to the forms of social action and consciousness that go with religious devotion. To be clear, the concern here is not about alleging that an excessive demand for credit is being made on the author’s part. Rather, it is that insisting on the failure of existing social thought to see religion other than as a reaction, Singh underplays a more basic difficulty that is bound to affect his own approach as well. This, of course, derives from the hiatus that will always likely exist between the inner and outer dimensions of social phenomena and, hence, also between how exactly to account for them. While the importance of taking the interiority of lived religious experience is surely important, just as surely Singh is not the first to be moved by seeing as much. By reading subaltern studies scholarship mainly in terms of its concern with “resistance,” therefore, Singh obscures that much of its own founding motive was the same as his own: namely, to move away from excessively functionalist—and, hence, externalist—analysis. After all, what drove the subaltern studies collective’s dissent from so-called orthodox Marxism if not an agenda that directly overlaps with the one that Uprising of the Fools pursues? While it remains possible that Singh sees the promise of that earlier call to action as having failed to materialize, he never quite says so, instead seeming to imply that the problem is one of methodological shortsightedness. Indeed, much the same may be true for the book’s characterization of the deficiency of sociological work on religion more generally. For the engaged reader, therefore, it would have been welcome to see Singh spend more time wrestling with the difficult possibility that the external(ist)-versus-internal(ist) divide—that will plague both ontology and epistemology—might always impose sharp limits on the adequacy of social explanation.
Relatedly, moreover, how are we to ever really know with certainty whether we have successfully operationalized any proposed way of overcoming the divide? Certainly, the author is likely to suggest that Uprising of the Fools is an attempt to exemplify just such a successful overcoming. Yet we can easily continue to ask why reading the action of the bhola in terms of a Freudian death drive definitively bridges the gulf between the lived experience of social action and its externalization within the world beyond the subject’s interior any more than does reading the social action of nineteenth-century subalterns in terms of resistance. In chapter 6, for example, Singh suggests that we must supplement our use of James Scott’s ideas with Heidegger’s, but as is always the case with such intellectual instructions, what exactly this would actually amount to in its capacity as a generally operationalizable wisdom remains unclear. Has the wisdom been achieved if one stops oneself from too harshly judging in one’s mind’s eye forms of religious life alien to one’s own? But what if the mind’s eye feels it has to be harsh on grounds of some kind of ethical imperative advising us to be forewarned about what might be the tip of an emerging iceberg of majoritarianism that proves ever more menacing to minorities? Is the instruction best seen, instead, only as one addressed to scholars and thus about how best to write articles and books? Even then, what does its successful implementation definitively involve: stopping one’s narrative to say “we must read x or y both through the eyes of Heidegger and Scott”? Making sure to not call x or y “magical” or “functional” to whatever other variety of coping the subject does with her material predicament? Indexing the extent to which other scholars really are merely condemning x or y as “fundamentalist” or “irrational”? Less than an outright disciplinary “heresy,” Singh’s approach may thus be subject to the same call and response that has greeted other critiques of the (latent) commitment to teleological universalism (p. 10). After all, doesn’t the logic of Singh’s critique tend to apply to his own enunciation of that critique (and hence, proposed alternative)?
This first problem relates to a more concrete second one as well, which has to do with the relatively short shrift the book ends up giving to considering the question of Hindu nationalism. Of course, this reviewer understands that the author’s very point is to contest the need to ask such a question. Yet, ultimately, it is not the anthropological gaze that is the main factor in making the Kanwar the phenomenon of ever-greater scale that it has become since the 1980s. Accordingly, is it really possible to just ignore the key external factors that have driven this process when or if they clearly are one and the same with those that have gone into making Hindu “nationalism” (or “fundamentalism” or even “majoritarianism”) a real phenomenon in the social world?
This tension in Singh’s account emerges especially in his treatment of Hindu-Muslim relations, even granting that to date no overt violence has broken out between these communities in the context of the annual kānwar yātrā. This is because the fact of violence’s absence thus far cannot dispose of all other concerns, especially when we consider that the Kanwar is clearly still evolving and in flux. Considering how much has already changed since the late 1980s and the general unpredictability of the future, what other way if not through exploring majoritarian religious nationalism/fundamentalism is there to investigate whether the Kanwar resonates with/adds to the general tendency by which polity and society in India has in recent years seemingly allowed ever more space for hostility to minority religious communities? Of course, such questions do not—and should not have to—exhaust the appreciation that lived majoritarian religious experience merits on its own terms, as Singh eloquently urges. Yet even if we accept that every monograph will have to be judicious in what it focuses on, one might still insist that there is more that Singh’s approach would have to try to answer for if it is to avoid becoming its own mode of reductive apology for the less romantic potential of “popular” religion.
Finally, the second qualification connects directly to a third as well. This has to do with what Uprising of the Fools leaves us to think about the larger politics it advises its reader to ponder/assume. Here too, of course, much of what there is to wonder about will involve sifting through dilemmas that are hardly novel, even if no less important for being so. Especially for those with an interest in emancipatory politics—whether through a commitment to socialism, Marxism, or whatever other broadly New Left/postcolonial/social justice orientation—Singh’s use of Heidegger (and the various others he draws on) is likely to seem challenging and frustrating in a familiar way. Of course, Singh does not—and should not have to—identify his intervention as poststructuralist or, if one likes, postmodernist. Regardless, his skepticism about the telos of rationality’s faux universalism obviously echoes critiques that have been made in the more express name of those spirits (or, by now, bogeymen) of the recent academic past. Indeed, when the reader encounters the key passage quoted earlier from chapter 6—in which the author questions the unrelenting grip of the “grand ethic and project of emancipation” that can be attributed to Western social thought—it is both moving and thought-provoking in the same way as it was to hear Gyan Prakash, channeling Edward Said, plea for “postfoundational” histories of the colonial world in the mid-1990s.
Yet equally does the same passage inspire nascent versions of the challenges that Prakash’s proposition elicited—often in extremely embittered tones—in response. (This includes those famously made by David Washbrook and Rosalind O’Hanlon, who asked why conventional Marxist or even simply ordinary social history approaches did not just as well suffice.) What alternative is actually better, after all, to one in which our attempts at impartial understanding also serve to facilitate an “ethic and project of emancipation” (p. 168)? Of course, this reviewer sees that Singh might just as compellingly, and empathically, retort that the disenfranchised, despised, subaltern, and “irrational” can do just as well without being once more made into props for those who usually take leadership over the politics of emancipation to perform their benighted ethics, all the while self-righteously securing their own dominance in the process. The point is only that a work—and more importantly, an approach—as engaging and thought-provoking as Singh’s will do itself only better by embracing such ghosts of past academic vexation more openly.
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Citation:
Faisal Chaudhry. Review of Singh, Vikash, Uprising of the Fools: Pilgrimage as Moral Protest in Contemporary India.
H-Socialisms, H-Net Reviews.
April, 2018.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=49447
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