We in the West have come to think of religious conversion as a deeply personal experience, bearing little or no relation to social structures and institutions. Stories of how people “come to faith” have more to do with “meeting God,” deliverance from sin, or personal healing than they do with law or politics. Gauri Viswanathan’s Outside the Fold compels us to consider religious conversion as a “worldly” event, which functions as a mode of social protest and challenges the very identity of a nation. Viswanathan does this by comparing and contrasting the significance of conversion within nineteenth-century England and India. The themes of this book speak not only to issues of religion and the public sphere here in the United States, but also to the heated debate being waged in India today over Christian evangelism.
Reader be warned: The book rides the currents of post-structuralist literary theory, in which the meaning of a given “sign” is not inherent, but consists only in its difference from something else in a system of signs (x is “not y”). Viswanathan uses this framework to overturn conventional wisdom about religious conversion. Her counterintuitive thesis is that the real meaning of conversion has little to do with assent to a set of beliefs or assimilation into a given community. Conversion’s meaning lies in stead in the dissent or protest it voices against systems of authority, including the secular nation.
Viswanathan develops her argument by linking two seemingly unrelated developments: legislation in England (e.g., the Catholic Emancipation Bill of 1828) that endowed religious minorities with national “citizenship,” and educational policies in India that Anglicized Indians in order to incorporate them into the imperial regime. Each of these developments, according to Viswanathan, belongs to the single, colonizing project of secular nationhood. And in each context, religious conversion becomes a mode of protest against the very organs of the state that purport to secure freedom of conscience and religion.
Remarkably comprehensive in its scope and multidisciplinary in its method, Outside the Fold draws upon sources ranging from law reports, public and judicial proceedings, nineteenth-century novels, diaries, and theological treatises. Brilliantly, Viswanathan harnesses these sources to shed light on the conversions of figures such as John Henry Newman, the most prominent Anglican convert to Catholicism; Pandita Ramabai, a learned Hindu woman who converted to Christianity; B. R. Ambedkar, a Dalit (formerly, “untouchable”) convert to Buddhism who later helped draft the Indian Constitution; and Annie Besant, whose journey from English secularism to Theosophy to Neo-Hinduism continues to mystify students of religious experience. But how exactly Viswanathan understands the “worldly” aspect of religious belief, and the criteria she uses for evaluating the “work” performed by conversion, are questions that even the informed reader may find difficult to resolve.
In making her case for “conversion as protest” Viswanathan rejects the no tion that religious experience can be isolated from social and political institutions. Contrary to this myth of “autonomous religious experience” (developed in the work of William James), belief is by nature “world ly.” It is not born in a vacuum but articulates itself in relation to political authority, culture, and law. Viswanathan’s interest in belief that actually does things renders the purely spiritual testimony (one that is indifferent to social institutions) a disappointing retreat into subjectivism. If conversion can be de scribed independently of the political culture in which it oc curs, she argues, it is because conversion, in such instances, is fundamentally aligned with the goals of that political culture.
In James’s famous description of conversion, for example, the individual moves “from dullness to vibrancy, division to wholeness, delusion to enlightenment … imprisonment to freedom.” This story of the emancipated self does not engage with history or with opposing societal norms precisely because of its fundamental congruence with the aims of American democracy. In North America, the conversion of individuals aligns itself with the project of creating a civil society. This congruence between individual conversion and societal norms actually conceals the worldliness of belief by yielding a “religious subjectivity removed from its political moorings.”
The worldly or subversive agenda of conversion is far more conspicuous in societies whose norms stand in tension with the new identity of converts. John Henry Newman’s conversion to Catholicism (discussed in chapter 2) is a classic example, in Viswanathan’s view, of an act which begins as a form of dissent but ultimately aligns itself with the nation’s structure of assents. In choosing to become a Catholic, Newman sought to retrieve the original unity and authority of the early church, now beyond the reach of Anglicanism because of its compromises with secular power and cultural relativism. This quest for a unified faith, however, eventually led Newman to endorse the very project he had protested through his conversion: the consolidation of the English nation-state.
As a Catholic, Newman increasingly identified himself with the popular aspirations of the English working class. He hoped to recover in the masses the preexisting unity of the church. But in the process, Newman curtailed the critical possibilities of his original conversion. By channeling his Catholicism into the popular will, he simultaneously endorsed the state’s project of creating an English, national identity. In Viswanathan’s final analysis, Newman ultimately retreated to inward faith, abandoning the radical agenda of worldly faith.
Viswanathan’s disappointment with the outcome of Newman’s journey raises two important questions about her definition of “worldly” faith. The first relates to her suggestion that believers can find no critical space as members of a secular nation-state. Cornered by the two “fatal” options of citizenship and separatism, believers, in Vishwanathan’s scheme, seem to lack other alternatives for voicing dissent and avoiding co-option by the state. Her analysis practically equates “worldly faith” with protest alone and delinks it from any constructive project of nation-building. In other words, believers may not participate in national life “critically.” This perspective elides a richly nuanced history of Christian engagement with culture, outlined in H. Richard Neibuhr’s classic, Christ and Culture (1951). It also precludes the appreciation of the nation-state as a penultimate order, which believers may either engage or resist for redemptive ends, a viewpoint developed in the Anabaptist tradition and by such figures as Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
One might also question how well William James and John Henry Newman capture the nature of conversion in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western contexts. Viswanathan’s discussion of their work contributes to a picture of conversion in the West primarily as individual and not corporate, and more inclined toward “assimilation” than “protest.” Neither evangelical revival, Pentacostalism, the African American church, nor the Charismatic Movement is effectively captured by this framework. Furthermore, even the most inward, pietistic movements of the last two centuries contain their elements of protest, even if they do not suit the critical agenda of this book. In each case, it is necessary to identify the exact sites of protest and assimilation, using the convert’s own stories.
Viswanathan develops her thesis most effectively when she leaves the Western tradition and enters the reality of nineteenth-century colonial India. Under the officially sanctioned Hindu law, converts to Christianity underwent a “civil death” whereby they forfeited the right to inherit property and other familial rights. In order to rectify the loss of civil rights suffered by converts, the government passed in 1850 the Caste Disabilities Removal Act, which essentially restored the rights of converts, but only by treating them as though they were still Hindus. By recasting them as Hindus, the government preempted the radical and disruptive effects of conversion within the “Hindu society” they tried so hard to preserve.
Viswanathan views the Act of 1850 as another instance by which the state transforms the originally subversive act of conversion into an act that amounts to “no real change.” “While [converts] were treated as dead by their former religious community,” she writes, “the lease of life they were given by civil courts was founded on an equally unreal fiction, a perverse denial of their adopted religious identity.” By treating their decision to enter a new community as legally insignificant, the courts effectively suppressed the subjectivity of converts, embedded in their own stories of why they became Christian. Viswanathan illustrates this “loss of subjectivity” with detailed accounts of court cases involving converts seeking to overcome their disabilities under Hindu law.
Viswanathan develops her working concepts in the early chapters and applies them to the discussions of Ramabai, Besant, and Ambedkar later on. Her use of literary theory certainly illumines the topic of conversion in ways that a more traditional historian could not accomplish. This is especially true of her discussions of the subjectivity of converts, a facet easily missed by those who rely exclusively on missionary re ports. In some instances, however, Viswanathan’s historical findings take a back seat to her theoretical interests. Such cases render a partial or an inaccurate picture of what actually happened.
For instance, Viswanathan stresses that the laws of British India tried to preempt the disruptive impact of conversion by recasting converts as Hindus. “Nothing was more effective in regulating Christian conversion as an actual change of religious belief,” she writes, “than legislation enacted to protect converts against civil disabilities imposed by Hinduism or Islam.” This assertion speaks to the theoretical interests of the book, but does derive from the actual historic debates surrounding the Caste Disabilities Removal Act of 1850. It suggests that the Act actually inhibited conversion by recasting religious change into “no real change.” But if the Act was essentially geared toward preserving the status quo, why did it provoke the controversies that it did? The Hindu gentry of Calcutta and Madras opposed the Act, believing that it would facilitate conversion out of Hinduism and rip apart the Hindu joint family. Missionaries supported the Act in the name of freedom of conscience and converts appealed to the Act in order to secure their familial rights. Is it really the case, as Viswanathan suggests, that all of these actors were pathetically ignorant of the insidious, discursive designs of the Act to inhibit religious change?
It is true that the Act of 1850 preserved the rights of converts by treating them, sociologically, as Hindus. The claim, however, that this amounts to a “perverse denial of their adopted religious identity” elides crucial aspects of the debates surrounding the social identity of converts. First, the law was soon to recognize a new communal identity for converts, even to the degree of de-recognizing their original caste identity. The Indian Christian Marriage Act of 1872, for instance, precluded converts from marrying under their local caste rites, thus reifying a “Christian community” around marriage. The Indian Succession Act of 1865 and Divorce Act of 1869 similarly recognized different legal standards for Hindu and Christian “communities.” Christian families who continued to adhere to their caste practices sometimes challenged these Acts in court because they assumed that Christians could not be socially and culturally “Hindu.” In other words, these Acts were not based on a “perverse denial” of religious change, but on the very presumption of such change.
Second, since the beginnings of their operations in India both Roman Catholic and Protestant missionary societies debated the question of whether conversion to Christianity should sever converts from their original caste and familial bonds. For the most part, Catholics were more optimistic than Protestants that Christian belief could thrive within the Hindu social structure. In some cases, even Protestant missions recognized the merits of keeping the original social identity of converts in tact. To the extent that mission societies entertained the hope that converts could believe in Christ while remaining a part of their Hindu family and caste, they shared with government officials the conviction that conversion should not entail the forfeiture of property rights. In terms of the Act of 1850 per se, it appears that the conflict between converts and secular authority was not as pronounced as Viswanathan made it seem.
Because of the priority Viswanathan assigns to religious persons and their ideas, her book will be of great interest not only to students of religion and society but also to Christians who seek a more sympathetic and less reductionistic treatment of religion in the academy. The book certainly tries to recover the “voice” of religious persons from the distortions and elisions of missionary reports and court records. At the same time, people of faith may wish to treat critically Viswanathan’s claim that belief functions as a form of cultural criticism. On the one hand, the notion that belief and conversion have acted in history to interrogate the premises of secular power underscores the work of Lesslie Newbigin, Stanley Hauerwas, and other Christian writers who highlight the clash between belief and modernity. On the other hand, the notion of “belief as criticism” may simply be a way for radical writers to co-opt Christian belief into the cultural studies agenda.
Viswanathan appreciates belief not in terms of its own claims about reality, but in terms of the work it performs toward postmodernist ends. It is not what believers are doing consciously and deliberately but what they do unconsciously that primarily interests Viswanathan: not Newman’s Catholicism but his conversion’s critique of the nation; not Ramabai’s conversion to Christianity but her acquisition of “a voice of her own”; not the new allegiance of converts but the challenge that allegiance poses to the interests of the state. In each case, the propositional content of belief masks its performative character. Thus Viswanathan’s project of rescuing the subjectivity of converts from some form of hegemony results, to some extent, in the loss of the same “voice” within the framework of her own theoretical interests.
The book purports to overturn conventional understandings of conversion by exploring its role as an act of cultural criticism. It thrives on paradigm-shattering statements: Conversion has less to do with assimilation than with a sense of exile; subjectivity is produced not as a function of epiphanic awakening “but at the intersection of law, nation, and sectarian society”; dissent has less to do with recovering autonomy of popular religion than with challenging state categories; Ambedkar’s conversion was less a rejection of political solutions for Dalits than “a rewriting of religious and cultural change into a form of political intervention.” Yet, after sifting through masses of rich historical data shrouded in literary jargon, the reader might wonder if the returns of this counterintuitive approach are as great as the book suggests.
That conversion to Christianity in Buddhist-, Muslim-, or Hindu-dominated regions is potentially disruptive, for example, is no news to any serious student of South Asia. Works by Dick Kooiman (1989) and John Webster (1992) highlight the role of conversion as a mode of protest against the Hindu caste hierarchy. Webster has shown how missionaries often acted as the patrons of Dalits against the vested interests of upper caste members and colonial merchants. The work of Robert Frykenberg, Lamin Sanneh, and Geoffrey Oddie also has shown how conversion can interrogate the premises of caste and colonialism. Viswanathan draws little or nothing from their work. Even her chapter on Ambedkar, who has become a hugely significant figure in light of the Dalit movement in India, pays little homage to those who have gone before her to shed light on his remarkable career (Eleanor Zelliot’s work, for in stance, receives no mention).
So does Viswanathan actually say something new? Or is the book itself another instance of “change that is not real change”? Though its historic claims are not terribly new, the book presents a very stimulating discussion of conversion and nationality, private judgment versus orthodoxy, and the accommodative claims of the secular state. The notion that conversion can change the face of a nation is particularly relevant to the current political climate in India. Since 1998, Hindu nationalist groups have attacked Christian missionaries, claiming that they are engaged in “fraudulent” or “forced” conversions. Debates between advocates of a “secular” and a “Hindu” India resemble debates in the United States concerning the place of religion in politics. The notion of a “cross-current” offers an innovative scheme for studying both histories simultaneously. History suffers, however, when facts and events become subservient to theoretical concerns.
In the final analysis, Outside the Fold challenges us to consider how conversion interrogates systems of authority. The volume’s source materials and insights make it a potential feast for those who desire a more prominent place for religious ideas in secular scholarship. At the same time, its Cultural Studies approach tends to subordinate religious belief to an independent critical agenda. This approach evaluates religious converts for their capacity to “do radical work” regardless of whether they do so consciously or intentionally. Can Cultural Studies, by incorporating religious belief into its agenda, help cure the secularist ills of the Western academy? How effectively does this perspective portray the actual “voices” of its believing subjects? Such questions prompted by this study will give readers from many disciplines much to ponder.
Chandra Mallampalli is a Ph.D. candidate in History (South Asia) at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
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