Against Pluralism: Rethinking Religion in South Asian Anglophone Literature

Abstract

The persistence of religion’s public presence and the surging instances of majoritarian violence have impelled scholars of South Asia to approach the question of religion anew. In the study of Anglophone literature this renewed interest is reflected in the attempts to salvage an idea of plurality by contrasting orthodoxy to more fluid forms of religious co-existence. This paper argues that the attempts to explain majority-minority tension through recourse to notions such as orthodoxy-heterodoxy are underwritten by a secular logic, resulting in the ossification of religion as a cultural artifact and oversight of how religion comes to be lived, inhabited, and embodied within conditions of modernity. Reading the various registers of language animated by Anees Salim’s novel Vanity Bagh, the paper explores how the Anglophone novel makes the inhabitation of religion thinkable, less as adherence to cosmopolitan virtues than as attunement to an embodied tradition, thereby suggesting the need to rethink the secular grammar undergirding much contemporary Anglophone scholarship.