{"id":3419,"date":"2022-01-08T09:24:57","date_gmt":"2022-01-08T09:24:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3419"},"modified":"2022-02-15T10:34:58","modified_gmt":"2022-02-15T10:34:58","slug":"whatever-happened-to-mohammedan-hindus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3419","title":{"rendered":"Whatever happened to Mohammedan Hindus?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Reading Anna Della Subin’s Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine for the Telegraph, 8 January 2022<\/a><\/p>\n

He is a prince of Greece \u2013 but he is not Greek. He is a man of Danish, German and Russian blood, but he springs from none of those places. Who is he? Prince Philip, of blessed memory, consort of Queen Elizabeth II? Or is he \u2013 as a handful of her subjects, half a world away, would have it \u2013 the son of Vanuatu\u2019s volcano god Kalbaben?<\/p>\n

Essayist Anna Della Subin wants you to understand why you might mistake a man for a god; why this happens more often than you\u2019d think; and what this says about power, and identity, and about colonialism in particular.<\/p>\n

Early proofs of Accidental Gods arrived on my doormat on Tuesday 2 November, the same day QAnon believers gathered in Dallas\u2019s Dealey Plaza to await the resurrection of JFK\u2019s son John (dead these 20 years). So: don\u2019t sneer. This kind of thing can happen to anyone. It can happen now. It can happen here.<\/p>\n

Men have been made divine by all manner of people, all over the world. Ranging widely across time and space, Accidental Gods is a treat for the adventurous armchair traveller, though a disconcerting one. We are reminded, with some force, that even the most sophisticated-seeming culture exists, by and large, to contain ordinary human panic in the face of an uncaring cosmos.<\/p>\n

After the second world war, during the Allied occupation, ordinary Japanese folk plied American General Douglas MacArthur with lotus roots and dried persimmons, red beans, rice cakes, bonsai trees, walking sticks, samurai swords, deerskins, a kimono, and much else besides. These were offerings, explicitly made to a newcomer God. Now, we more often talk about them as acts of gratitude and respect. This is just ordinary decency — why would one poke fun at a land one has already nuked, defeated, and occupied? Japan\u2019s written historical record lets us focus on the Meiji dynasty\u2019s politics while drawing a veil over its frankly embarrassing theology.<\/p>\n

But not everyone has such a rich political account of themselves to hide behind. In the early 1920s Hauka mediums in Niger, central Africa, were possessed by the spirits of their European conquerors. Their zombified antics were considered superstitious and backward. But were they? They managed, after all, to send up the entire French administration. (\u201cIn the absence of a pith helmet,\u201d we are told, \u201cthey could fashion one out of a gourd\u201d.) In the Congolese town of Kabinda, meanwhile, the wives of shamanic adepts found themselves channelling the spirits of Belgian settler wives. Their faces chalked and with bunches of feathers under their arms (\u201cpossibly to represent a purse\u201d) they went around shrilly demanding bananas and hens.<\/p>\n

Western eye-witnesses of these events weren\u2019t at all dismissive; they were disturbed. One visitor, reporting to parliament in London in or before 1886, said these people were being driven mad by the experience of colonial subjection. Offerings made to a deified British soldier in Travancore, at India\u2019s southernmost point were, according to this traveller, \u201can illustration of the horror in which the English were held by the natives.\u201d<\/p>\n

But what if the prevailing motive for the white man\u2019s deification was \u201cnot horror or dislike, but pity for his melancholy end, dying as he did in a desert, far away from friends\u201d? That was the contrary opinion of a visiting missionary, and he may have had a point: across the subcontinent, \u201cthe practice of deifying humans who had died in premature or tragic ways was age-old,\u201d Subin tells us.<\/p>\n

Might the \u201cspirit possessed\u201d just have been having a laugh? Again: it\u2019s possible. In 1864, during a M\u0101ori uprising against the British, Captain P. W. J. Lloyd was killed, and his severed head became the divine conduit for the angel Gabriel, who, among other fulminations, had not one good word to say about the Church of England.<\/p>\n

Subin shows how, by creating and worshipping powerful outsiders, subject peoples have found a way to contend with an overwhelming invading force. The deified outsider, be he a British Prince or a US general, Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie or octogenarian poet Nathaniel Tarn, \u201cappears on every continent on the map, at times of colonial invasion, nationalist struggle and political unrest.\u201d<\/p>\n

This story is as much about the colonisers as the conquered, as much about the present as the past, showing how the religious and the political shade into each other so that \u201cpolitics is ever a continuation of the sacred under a new name\u201d. Perhaps this is why Subin, while no enthusiast of Empire, takes aim less at the soldiers and settlers and missionaries \u2013 who at least took some personal risk and kept their eyes open \u2013 than at the academics back home in Europe, and in particular the intellectual followers and cultural descendents of German philologist Freidrich Max M\u00fcller, founder of the science of comparative religion. Their theories imposed, on wholly unrelated belief systems, a set of Protestant standards that, among other things, insisted on the insuperable gulf between the human and the divine. (Outside of Christian Europe, this divide hardly exists, and even Catholics have their saints.)<\/p>\n

So Europe\u2019s new-fangled science of religion \u201cinvented what it purported to describe\u201d, ascribing \u201cbelief\u201d to all manner of nuanced behaviours that expressed everything from contempt for the overlord to respect for the dead, to simple human charity. Subin quotes contemporary philosopher Bruno Latour: \u201cA Modern is someone who believes that others believe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Subin sings a funeral hymn to religions that ossified. Writing about the catastrophic Partition of India along religious lines, she writes, \u201cThere was no place within this modern taxonomy for the hundreds of thousands who labeled themselves \u2018Mohammedan Hindus\u2019 on a 1911 census, or for those who worshipped the prophet Muhammad as an avatar of Vishnu.\u201d<\/p>\n

Accidental Gods is a playful, ironic, and ambiguous book about religion, at a time when religion \u2013 outside of Dealey Plaza \u2013 has grown as solemn as an owl. It\u2019s no small achievement for Subin to have written something that, even as it explores the mostly grim religious dimensions of the colonial experience, does not reduce religion to politics but, to the contrary, leaves us hankering, like QAnon\u2019s unlovely faithful, for a wider, wilder pantheon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading Anna Della Subin’s Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine for the Telegraph, 8 January 2022 He is a prince of Greece \u2013 but he is not Greek. He is a man of Danish, German and Russian blood, but … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617,78],"tags":[554,953,638,287],"class_list":["post-3419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-reviews-and-opinion","category-reviews-and-opinion","tag-anthropology","tag-colonialism","tag-religion","tag-telegraph"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3419"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3419\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3454,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3419\/revisions\/3454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}