Neilesh Bose | Religion and Indian Intellectual History: Islam, “Reform” and Vernacular Histories

Neilesh Bose is Assistant Professor and Tier II Canada Research Chair of Global and Comparative History at the University of Victoria. His interests include modern South Asian history from the eighteenth century to the present, colonial India, histories of religion, nationalism, decolonization, empire, and global history. Additionally, Bose holds active interests in theater, performance, and popular culture in South Asia and its many diasporas. His recent book is titled Recasting the Region: Language, Culture, and Islam in Colonial Bengal (Oxford, 2014) and articles of his have appeared in Modern Asian Studies, South Asia Research, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, and South Asian History and Culture. He has presented his work at conferences and scholarly venues throughout North America, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Germany, Finland, and the United Kingdom. Current research projects include a collaborative oral history of Bengali intellectuals (from West Bengal and Bangladesh) in the era of decolonization and a study of religious reform in colonial India.

Developments in recent studies of the term religion have tended to integrate debates about cognitive science, embodied cognition, as well as updated responses to enduring debates in the human sciences and universalisms, particulars, and the nature of humanistic knowledge. Though visible and provocative, an area left under-explored is the nature of the term “religion” when actively embraced and promoted by those in the “non-West.” Though an expansive literature has addressed the colonial nature of knowledge production in India as well as the genealogies of religion and secularism in historical anthropology, what has received comparatively less attention is the intellectual history of Indians in modern times “encountering religion,” in the terms of Tyler Roberts, Encountering Religion: Responsibility and Criticism after Secularism (2013) via “vernacular” literal languages as well as vernacular traditions of knowledge formation. This presentation explores how the history of religion in nineteenth century colonial India – debates about its definitions, uses, and purposes – links not to a history only of colonial knowledge, but to a world of vernacular intellectual histories of religion and broad engagements with comparative thought that intersected with, but were not wholly determined by, Protestant missionary and European Orientalist thought.