Total Atheism: Secular Activism and the Politics of Difference in South India 9781789206753

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTE ON TRANSLATION
INTRODUCTION
Chapter 1 MENTAL REVOLUTION: BECOMING AN ATHEIST IN WORD AND DEED
Chapter 2 PROFESSIONS: NARRATIVES OF EMINENT MASCULINITY
Chapter 3 PROPAGATION: ENACTING ATHEISM IN ORATORY AND DEBATE
Chapter 4 PROGRAMS (1) ERADICATING SUPERSTITION THROUGH MAGIC
Chapter 5 PROGRAMS (2) HUMANISM AND THE UNMAKING OF CASTE
Chapter 6 A WAY OF LIFE: MARRIAGE AND THE GENDER OF ATHEISM
CONCLUSION
REFERENCES
INDEX

Citation preview

TOTAL ATHEISM

Methodology and History in Anthropology Series Editors: David Parkin, Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford David Gellner, Fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford Nayanika Mathur, Fellow of Wolfson College, University of Oxford Just as anthropology has had a significant influence on many other disciplines in recent years, so too have its methods been challenged by new intellectual and technical developments. This series is designed to offer a forum for debate on the interrelationship between anthropology and other academic fields but also on the challenge to anthropological methods of new intellectual and technological developments, and the role of anthropological thought in a general history of concepts. Recent volumes: Volume 38 Total Atheism: Secular Activism and the Politics of Difference in South India Stefan Binder Volume 37 Crossing Histories and Ethnographies: Following Colonial Historicities in Timor-Leste Edited by Ricardo Roque and Elizabeth G. Traube

Volume 33 Expeditionary Anthropology: Teamwork, Travel and the ‘Science of Man’ Edited by Martin Thomas and Amanda Harris Volume 32 Returning Life: Language, Life Force and History in Kilimanjaro Knut Christian Myhre

Volume 36 Engaging Evil: A Moral Anthropology Edited by William C. Olsen and Thomas J. Csordas

Volume 31 The Ethics of Knowledge Creation Edited by Lisette Josephides and Anne Sigfrid Grønseth

Volume 35 Medicinal Rule: A Historical Anthropology of Kingship in East and Central Africa Koen Stroeken

Volume 30 Human Origins: Contributions from Social Anthropology Edited by Camilla Power, Morna Finnegan, and Hilary Callan

Volume 34 Who Are ‘We’? Reimagining Alterity and Affinity in Anthropology Edited by Liana Chua and Nayanika Mathur

Volume 29 Regimes of Ignorance: Anthropological Perspectives on the Production and Reproduction of Non-Knowledge Edited by Roy Dilley and Thomas G.Kirsch

For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/series/methodology-and-history-in-anthropology

TOTAL ATHEISM Secular Activism and the Politics of Difference in South India

Stefan Binder

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2020 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2020 Stefan Binder All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Binder, Stefan, author. Title: Total atheism : secular activism and the politics of difference in South India / Stefan Binder. Description: New York : Berghahn, 2020. | Series: Methodology & history in anthropology; volume 38 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019055486 (print) | LCCN 2019055487 (ebook) | ISBN 9781789206746 (hardback) | ISBN 9781789206753 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Atheism--India--Andhra Pradesh. | Atheism--India--Telangana. | Atheists--Political activity--India--Andhra Pradesh. | Atheists--Political activity--India--Telangana. | Secularism--India--Andhra Pradesh. | Secularism--India--Telangana. | Andhra Pradesh (India)--Social life and customs. | Telangana (India)--Social life and customs. Classification: LCC BL2765.I4 B56 2020 (print) | LCC BL2765.I4 (ebook) | DDC 211/.8095484--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019055486 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019055487 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78920-674-6 hardback ISBN 978-1-78920-675-3 ebook

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

vi

Note on Translation

ix

Introduction

1

Chapter 1. Mental Revolution: Becoming an Atheist in Word and Deed

37

Chapter 2. Professions: Narratives of Eminent Masculinity

71

Chapter 3. Propagation: Enacting Atheism in Oratory and Debate

104

Chapter 4. Programs (1): Eradicating Superstition through Magic

136

Chapter 5. Programs (2): Humanism and the Unmaking of Caste

166

Chapter 6. A Way of Life: Marriage and the Gender of Atheism

196

Conclusion

228

References

245

Index

271

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In the most obvious way, this book would have been impossible without the trust, generosity, and cooperation of all the people in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana who welcomed me in their lives and homes, included me in their endeavors, and gifted me their time, passion, resources, and knowledge. They often appear in the text as “my interlocutors.” In these acknowledgments, too, it is hardly possible to name individually all who have enabled and shaped the following text, for which I apologize—especially since part of the text talks about the power of naming. I owe particular gratitude to the extended Gora family at the Atheist Centre, who have done much more than offer knowledge and support, as they provided me with a home during my time in Vijayawada. In Hyderabad, my friendship with Devi, her strength, generosity, and free-spiritedness are a continuous source of inspiration. I have profited in so many different ways from our conversations and her knowledge and practical experience as a cultural activist. I thank her and her family, especially Minnu Kosanam, Venkat Chowdari, K. Santarao, and Mahesh, for making me feel at home in Nallakunta. I am grateful to Babu Gogineni for introducing me to the wide variety of secular activism in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, and to B. B. Shaw, G. D. Saraiah, Spartakus, Shariff Gora, Ikram Ahmed, Narendra Nayak, Kavvampalli Rajkumar, B. Sambasivarao, Pasala Bhimanna, Katti Padma Rao, and G. Eswaralingam for hours of patient conversation, for including me in their projects, taking me along in their travels, and discussing my work. I also thank Vimala Katikaneni for her patience in teaching me Telugu in Hyderabad. I consider myself lucky to have had Birgit Meyer as a close advisor. She provided an invaluable environment of intellectual and emotional support, and I am deeply grateful for her

Acknowledgments

vii

inspiring example of academic openness, collegiality, and positivity. I thank Daan Beekers, Markus Balkenhol, Bruno Reinhardt, Peter Lambertz, Erik  Meinema, Marco Derks, Christoph Baumgartner, Annalisa Butticci, Katja Rakow, and all my colleagues at Utrecht University for their input and comments at colloquia, at lunch meetings, in reading groups, in hallways, and in the context of the ­important Dutch institution of the borrel. I also thank Peter van der Veer for his help and encouragement and for giving me the opportunity to spend a very productive time at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen. At Hyderabad Central University, professor N. Sudhakara Rao, Dr. G. Nagaraju, and professor Mohan Ramanan have kindly welcomed me and facilitated my affiliation as a research fellow during my stays in India. I have greatly benefited from presenting my work and receiving many thoughtful comments from meetings at the Meertens Instituut in Amsterdam, from discussions organized by Margrit Pernau at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, at the Humboldt India Project (HIP) at the Department for South Asia Studies at Humboldt University Berlin, and from insights on nonreligion and secularity at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Zurich. Research for this book was funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and received financial support through fellowships provided by the Research Institute for Philosophy and Religious Studies (OFR) at Utrecht University and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen. Parts of Chapter 4 were previously published in 2019 as “Magic Is Science: Atheist Conjuring and the Exposure of Superstition in South India,” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 9, no. 2: 284–98, and parts of Chapter 5 appeared in 2016 as “‘Let Us Become Human through Beef and Pork:’ Atheist Humanism and the Aesthetics of Caste,” South Asia Chronicle 6: 205–27. I thank the reviewers and editors of those pieces as well as the helpful reviews and editorial support received from Berghahn Books. I am indebted to Johannes Quack who made me aware of the Atheist Centre in Vijayawada and thus helped this project to get on its way when it was barely a research proposal. I thank Patrick Eisenlohr and my colleagues at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS) at University of Göttingen for providing a wonderful environment for this project to find its end as a book. In Berlin, Anandita Bajpai’s intellectual companionship, her passionate engagement with my work, and

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Acknowledgments

her unwavering support as my dear friend have carried me through this project from beginning to end. The love and support of my friends and family—you know who you are—have been ­unconditional. I dedicate the book to David.

NOTE ON TRANSLATION

Telugu and Sanskrit terms have been transliterated using ISO 15919 standard, except for the general nasal, which has been transliterated as the nasal that appears in speech (e.g., san˙gham instead of samgham or undi instead of umdi). Names of people, places, and deities appear in conventionally used Anglicized forms. For better readability, I have not reproduced the Telugu honorific “garu” and left it untranslated in literal quotes without, of course, meaning to imply any disrespect. Telugu names of Atheist organizations have been used in English translation. All translations from Telugu and other languages are mine, unless otherwise noted; italics in translations from Telugu indicate English words in the original unless otherwise noted. Words or phrases in Telugu are given in brackets in those cases where translations are difficult or the words are deemed helpful for better understanding, whereas I use a slash (e.g., atheism/nastikatvam) for emphasizing the translatedness of terms; this usually implies that both the English and the Telugu terms are commonly used by my interlocutors.

INTRODUCTION

The secularization thesis, or rather the idea that modernity spells the death of religion, has been demolished. Yet the persistence—­according to some the comeback—of religion as a public phenomenon and prominent topic in academic scholarship has still not displaced the notion that we do, after all, live in some sort of secular age; only, it is one that turns out to be compatible with and even productive of some specifically modern forms of religion (less so of others). India has been a prominent case study for demonstrating how religion, especially in its forms of religious nationalism and communalism, can thrive under conditions of modernity and is tightly tethered to the logics of secularism as a political project (van der Veer 1994; Bowen 2010; Cannell 2010; Bilgrami 2016). In the wake of reinvigorated interest in the religion in and of modernity, forms of outspoken irreligion, by contrast, have until quite recently remained somewhat in the dark. It almost seems as if the explicitly irreligious are above all interesting as an occasion to demonstrate how spectacularly wrong they are about what religion is really about, or because they are so dogmatically irreligious as to appear as yet another form of modern religion. In South Asia, irreligion has been largely invisible or ignored except for sporadic but intense media attention in extreme cases (e.g., when rationalist activists or public atheists have been attacked or murdered by so-called religious fundamentalists). However, what these cases do is redirect our attention back to a supposedly pervasive, fierce, and untrammeled religiosity of “those” cultural environments where the denial of god seems extraordinary, foreign, and disruptive enough to be a cause for murder. How such violent reactions and the public discourse around them relate to a colonial history of Orientalist stereotypes about India, the land of yogic seers and mystic philosophers, is an important story to

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be told; the story of this book, however, is about the lives of atheist and explicitly irreligious social activists in the two South Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. It is not primarily about their understandings—or misunderstandings—of religion, nor their impact on and reception by their religious surroundings; it is about their understanding of secularity and the cultural politics of their project to practically implement atheism as a way of life in order to realize their vision of a just, moral, and rational society. For my atheist interlocutors, atheism is more than disbelief in gods, and it exceeds a philosophical critique of religion, because they aspire to nothing less than a fundamental reconstruction of their selves, their lives, and their society without and beyond religion. I call this aspiration and project of social reconstruction “Total Atheism” because it is integral to my interlocutors’ understanding of atheism. It is atheism put into practice, and, as such, it is not optional; for, unless atheism is practically implemented as an actual way of life, it is incomplete and insincere and, therefore, no atheism at all. This book retraces the contested ways in which atheist activists engage with this imperative of practical implementation, with its conceptual, aesthetic, and sociopolitical implications, and with the resulting fragility and ambivalences of their endeavor to make atheism total. As a consequence, I approach atheism neither as a set of specifiable disbeliefs nor as a fixed worldview, a “thing” that one could “adopt,” “spread,” or “implement,” but as an attempt to inhabit secularity as an ongoing project that revolves around the challenge of making secular difference perceptible both in and as a way of life. By focusing on perceptibility, this ethnography of a South Indian atheist movement explores a way to think about the secular within an aesthetic framework and in terms of lived secularity: an embodied, historically and culturally contingent, globally entangled way of living in the postcolonial present. At the center of attention is not the secular as a concept or secularism as a principle of governance in modern nation–states, but secularity as an aesthetic quality or figuration of difference, as a question of sensory perception and experience rather than conceptual relations, ideological claims, or philosophical justifications. The notion of perceptibility, however, does not pit perception against concepts, ideology, and philosophy, but refers to their mutual interlacing. The perceptibility of secular difference is a reflexive project and a problem that my atheist interlocutors pose to themselves and to those around them. An anthropology of the aesthetics of secular difference, as I propose it here, does not ask to what extent atheist practices, ideas, or forms of personhood

Introduction

3

are expressive of a stable phenomenon, definitional attribute, or preexisting quality of secularity or whether they really are different in a substantial, absolute, or conceptually coherent sense; rather, it asks how atheist activists reflexively engage with discursive traditions, aesthetic strategies, and conceptual resources that they do in fact share with their sociocultural environment in order to make their way of life sensible—perceptible and intelligible—as an instance of secular difference. I therefore approach secularity as a contestable effect of the manner in which atheist activists seek to perform their way of life simultaneously as totally other and deeply familiar, as purely universal and inextricably local, as disruptive and continuous. I develop the concept of ex-centricity to describe a quality of difference that is specific to the historically contingent manner in which atheist activists in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana have come to position themselves within their environment. I propose to understand such attempts at ex-centric positioning as an instance of lived secularity not primarily because they are part of an atheist or irreligious project but because of their relationship to a diffuse and heterogeneous sense of negativity that has become constitutive of the—not doubt equally contingent—category of the secular. In its most immediate and literal sense, this negativity manifests at the grammatical level of the privative or negative affixes of terms like a-theist, ir-religious, or god-less, as well as their Telugu equivalents like na-astika or nir-is´varavadi. This morphology underlies a conceptual negativity of dependent secondariness, insofar as such terms seem to designate above all the absence or denial of something else (for further discussion on such morphological privations, see Bullivant 2013; Lee 2015: 28–47). Historically linked to this is a moral negativity that echoes an original function of such terms as invectives in theological or philosophical polemics both in India and Europe (Minois 1998; Weltecke 2010; Nicholson 2010; see also Chapter 1). In many social contexts, this history has lived on in suspicions and more or less explicit expectations of depravity, immorality, and nihilism associated with those who name themselves with such terms or are called names with them (Brewster 2014; Schmidt 2016; Richter 2018). The moral odium attached to words like “atheism” and their gestures of denial or rejection can also shade into an ontological doubt and uneasiness, a sort of horror vacui, regarding the sheer possibility of a total absence of any relation to god, religion, the transcendent, and so on (Kristeller 1968; Weltecke 2010: 28). A variety of this doubt is the deconstruction of the secular as merely a continuation of religion, and especially Christianity, by other means (for an early critical perspective on this

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argument, see Blumenberg 1985). In more recent academic debates, to which I return in detail below, negativity resurfaces as indirectness and a methodological or epistemological uncertainty about how to study phenomena defined or constituted by the absence of what they are not. These are some of the sources that feed into the negativity of the secular, which seems to be further compounded in contemporary India. As mentioned above, persistent Orientalist and nationalist stereotypes of an essentially spiritual nature of Indian civilization tend to mark forms of irreligion or modern atheism—if they are acknowledged at all—as lacking in cultural authenticity and link them with stigmas of foreignness, colonialism, and “Westernization.” Even in less nativist discourses, negative notions of inauthenticity persist in the attenuated version of expectations of numeric and/or socioeconomic marginality: if atheists exist in India, they surely ought to be found among an elite minority of Western-educated urbanites from upper-caste and upper-class backgrounds. I argue that such heterogenous, multiple, and dispersed notions of negativity, otherness, and marginality are not only discursive distortions of irreligion in general or Indian atheism in particular. They are not only historical stereotypes that academic neutrality behooves us to disregard by improving our conceptual apparatus, distancing us from theological polemics, disavowing Orientalist projections, or deconstructing the cultural essentialism of reactionary religious nationalisms. Instead, I argue that these notions of negativity are an integral dimension of atheism and secularity as historical phenomena, insofar as they are a reality that atheist activists—and other irreligious people—encounter experientially in their everyday lives. My atheist interlocutors in South India lament this reality and a major aim of their social activism is to overcome it. For them, the suspected impossibility, alleged immorality, or sociological marginality of an atheist way of life are a misconception, a historical injustice, and a social challenge respectively; they are not problems of atheism but problems to be solved by atheism, namely by “putting it into practice” (acaranalo pettatam). Hence, the story I tell in this ethnography hinges on the way in which atheist activists participate in the negativity of the secular, make it their own, and even cultivate it. It is the story of how they try to inhabit that negativity by transforming and revaluing encountered marginality and otherness into a positive form of secular difference, which they seek to reinscribe into Indian civilization as its true, ex-centric core. In order to tell this story, however, it is necessary to engage critically with a dominant methodological tendency in social sciences and humanities to discuss secularity almost exclusively

Introduction

5

as a matter of its relationship with religion. In the following section, I retrace the reason for this tendency and the relative paucity of anthropological scholarship on lived secularity to the confluence of a specific critical impetus in scholarship on the secular with an increasing interest in the aesthetic dimensions of religion. After explicating the methodological approach proposed in this book in the second section, the third and last section introduces in more detail my atheist interlocutors and their movement in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.

The Invisibility of Irreligion, the Centrality of Religion, and the Anaesthetics of the Secular In 1971, Colin Campbell (2013) was one of the first to point out the paradoxical situation that modern social science had posited the decline and ultimate disappearance of religion as an intrinsic process of modernity but neglected to study what it presupposed as the outcome of that process: irreligion as a mass phenomenon. Campbell explained this omission not merely as an empirical oversight but as an intrinsic effect of the theoretical and methodological setup of the so-called “secularization paradigm” and its constitutive role for the development of social sciences. He argued that due to the dominance of functionalist concepts of religion, the presumed disappearance of actual religions could be divorced analytically from the idea of a more basic and persistent social functionality that continued to be modeled on existing or past religions. Explicit forms of irreligion were thus approached primarily as instantiations of a more foundational “invisible” (Luckmann 1967) or “implicit” (Bailey 1998) religious function. If they did not perform that function, they were treated as an ideological claim to a difference that seemed sociologically irrelevant and thus immaterial for social theory. Campbell’s second reason anticipated what Charles Taylor calls “subtraction stories” (2007: 22), because he argued that social theory itself articulated a secular standpoint, from which religion rather than secularity appeared as a social phenomenon (or function) in need of explanation. Secularity was tacitly presumed as the baseline for that explanation and the bare foundation of human existence that would simply remain once religion was subtracted analytically or dwindled away historically. Although both explanations are interconnected, the latter garnered more critical attention within the social sciences, likely because it pointed to a more pressing and embarrassing lapse of social theory to theorize itself and its role in secular modernity. By showing how

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social theory was itself invested in ultimately ideological claims of secular difference, it became incumbent on a critical and self-reflexive social science to become “postsecular”1 by distancing itself from such claims in a way that ended up reinforcing the methodological invisibility of the secular; as we will see below, it was rendered quite literally immaterial. In other words, it took Campbell’s call for a sociology of irreligion roughly four decades to find a favorable soundboard because critics of the secularization paradigm have concentrated on its empirical refutation (religion thrives in secular modernity) and/or its conceptual deconstruction (secular modernity is not corrosive to religion but productive of it). Rather than charting the details of this vast and heterogenous debate,2 I focus in the following on how religion as a concept and a historical phenomenon remained—or became once more—central for thinking about modernity and whatever role the secular may be accorded in it. I argue that the critical impetus to dismantle the secularization paradigm has advanced scholarship on religions (in modernity) precisely to the degree that it has protracted the absence of irreligion as a topic of inquiry. In order to understand how so and what I mean by critical impetus, we must look more closely at the methodological setup of current anthropological scholarship on the secular and retrace how its blind spot for irreligion ties into the aesthetics of atheism as both a methodological and ethnographic problem of perceptibility. A good—because very influential—place to start is Talal Asad’s suggestion that “the secular is so much part of our modern life” that it is best pursued indirectly or “through its shadows, as it were” (2003: 16 and 67, and reiterated in Asad 2018). Though it is difficult to condense the complexity of Asad’s study into a single principle, one of its central moves is to relocate the secular to the level of an ontological and epistemological regime that underpins the political, economic, and cultural formation of modernity. Though he reaffirms an intrinsic relationship between modernity and the secular, Asad does not reinstate a secularization thesis; the secular appears here not as the necessarily antagonistic opposite or absence of religion but as a conceptual “grammar” (2003: 25; 2011b: 673) that underlies the development and deployment of particular categories such as religion, irreligion, magic, science, superstition, myth, spirituality, inspiration, agency, and so on. It regulates how modern discourses and institutions produce religion by distinguishing it conceptually and practically from what is considered to be—and therein coproduced as—its various others. The conceptual grammar of the secular is thus much more complex than a simple religious/nonreligious binary (see also Steyers 2004; Fitzgerald 2010;

Introduction

7

Meyer 2012; van der Veer 2014). At the same time, Asad’s framework is premised on the embeddedness of secular concepts in “a series of shifts in ways of sensing and living” (2011a: 47), which is why the grammar of the secular regulates not only conceptual distinctions but also embodied sensibilities, sensorial configurations, and structures of feeling. This, however, is where Asad’s approach becomes “indirect” on two accounts: first, to describe secular ways of sensing and living would be to describe the genesis and development of modernity as such, which is much too large, complex, and heterogenous a process to become a straightforward, direct object of analysis; therefore, Asad has analyzed indirectly what philosophical, normative, or academic accounts of modernity, liberal democracy, secularism, or religion indicate about their authors’ assumptions about the body, the senses, and human nature in general. Second, the secular has been pursued indirectly by studying “a range of sensibilities . . . that make opposites only by excluding affinities and overlaps” (Asad 2018: 2–3); in practice, this has meant studying how those modern accounts and their concepts exclude, misrepresent, devalue, or simply fail to recognize certain other sensibilities, including some of the sensibilities in which they themselves are supposed to be embedded. This is the pivotal moment where the methodological focus on secular “shadows” shades into a critical impetus because the grammar of the secular is also a grammar of power (van der Veer 2001; Agrama 2012; Chidester 2014). The shifts in sensibilities and processes of conceptual distinction regulated by the secular are neither neutral nor disinterested but part of the powerful disciplinary institutions of imperial, colonial, and postcolonial projects of modernity. In this framework, the secular is part of a powerful “moral narrative of modernity” (Keane 2013b), which, on the basis of the so-called Cartesian dichotomy of spirit and matter, projects modernity as a heroic, enlightening, and empowering liberation of the human subject and its universal capacities of reason, agency, autonomy, morality, and so on from all “external”—material, bodily, sensorial, traditional, etc.—and therefore parochial constraints (see also Asad 2003, 2011a). As far as religion is concerned, such post-­Enlightenment narratives of emancipatory “disembedding” (Giddens 1991: 21–29) or “purification” (Latour 1993: 10–11) have not led to its inevitable decline, as the original secularization paradigm had anticipated; rather, they provided the ontological and semiotic ideologies for its modern rearticulation in terms of disembodied mental states, doctrines, and more or less ir-/rational beliefs. This is the crucial juncture

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for the critical impetus of current scholarship on secular modernity, because it has demonstrated how the secular as an ideological narrative, an epistemological regime, and a colonial institutional assemblage has not only produced but effectively misconstrued religious—or rather nonsecular/nonmodern—ways of living. The negativity of the secular reappears here not as the absence of religion but as the powerful process of its “excarnation” (Taylor 2007: 288), of its rationalist truncation to matters of disembodied, private, and therefore apolitical belief. Moreover, the disregard or misunderstanding of the material, embodied, and sensorial dimensions of religion is not only an epistemological but a distinctly moral negativity: due to secular modernity’s ideological failure to understand how lived religions have “really” worked—i.e., due to its tendency to “make opposites only by excluding affinities and overlaps” (Asad 2018: 3)—its attempts at studying, reforming, or regulating it have been fraught with failure and, more importantly, with violence, oppression, and mechanisms of exclusion (Agrama 2012; Needham and Sunder Rajan 2007; Asad, Butler, and Mahmood 2009; Cady and Fessenden 2013b). Consequently, critical scholarship on the secular has been linked tightly to scholarship on religion “under conditions of secularity,” sometimes to the point where one has been collapsed into the other. This is usually justified, and rightly so, on the basis of a conceptual relationality of the religious and the secular or, more precisely, the secular production of the modern category of religion (McCutcheon 2007). I will come back to this justification below, but I want to mention here two of its practical implications: first, the insistence on studying the secular via its “treatment” of religion has left what is in fact classified as or claims to be irreligious largely unexplored; second, even when it does enter the focus of attention, it often does so as a kind of detour to religion (e.g., when Sonja Luehrmann frames her entire monograph on Soviet atheist activism as an examination of what “the apprehensions and intuitions of secularist modernizers contribute to our understanding of religion” [2011: 1]). Apart from a possible disciplinary bias, resulting from the fact that the secular has been theorized most intently by scholars of religion, the privileging of religion as the aim of academic knowledge production has a more intricate methodological reason. This reason is strikingly reminiscent of the role functionalism played in Campbell’s account of twentieth-century sociology, and it brings us back to the question of perceptibility. It is significant that critical scholarship on secular modernity has coincided and to a large extent overlapped with the material, media, and aesthetic turns in the study of religions (for chartings of these turns,

Introduction

9

see Engelke 2010; Houtman and Meyer 2011; Meyer et al. 2014; Bräunlein 2016; Grieser and Johnston 2017). An increasing orientation of religious studies toward the material, mediated, and aesthetic dimensions of religion derives part of its significance and political currency from being framed as a critique and rectification of the coercive distortions or “excarnations” of secular epistemologies. In this book, I focus on the concept of aesthetics because it is gaining increasing traction in organizing a joint methodological framework for studying the sensory, embodied, and cognitive aspects of religious practices and experiences in relation to the material infrastructures and processes of mediation that enable, shape, and constrain them within concrete historical and political contexts—in particular but not limited to the context of secular modernity. Aesthetics is here no longer confined to normative theories of art or beauty but refers to an interest in the historicity of perceptual regimes and their ideological power to regulate not only how people interpret and give meaning to the world—or what transcends it—but how they perceive, feel, and inhabit their worlds as embodied beings. Brent Plate argues that by going back to the Aristotelian concept of aísthesis and early modern epistemologies of sensory knowledge, “aesthetics is currently undergoing a kind of ‘rescue mission,’ finding in the old Greek term the roots of a body-based, sensual reconception that helps us moderns analyze not only our world, but the world of religious people in many times and places” (Plate 2017: 480). With the pithy metaphor of a rescue mission, Plate captures the point I am driving at: by restoring religion to its aesthetic and material wholeness, we save not only religion but “us moderns” and modernity in general from the negativity of the secular. Under the new dispensation of aesthetics, all human practices (including the production of secular ideologies of purification, disembedding, and excarnation) are to be analyzed in terms of their embodied, sensory, mediated, and materialized dimensions; the moral narrative of secular modernity, however, is the narrative of the liberation from those dimensions. As a consequence, the negativity of the secular as an an-aesthetic counternarrative, as it were, doubles back on itself because it appears to have misconstrued not only religion but also itself; it “turns out, at the limit, to be an impossible project, one that cannot be fully inhabitable in the terms it often seems to propose” (Keane 2013b: 162). In other words, the secular narrative of autonomy from the material and aesthetic planes is undercut by “the inescapably social and material character of the representational practices by which that ideal autonomy is meant to be inhabited” (Keane 2002: 65).

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The critical impetus to deconstruct the intellectualist and disembodied bias of secular ideology has been immensely productive for “rescuing” the aesthetics of lived religion but, in so doing, it has been unable to address the materiality and embodied nature of lived secularity as anything other than a contradiction or shadow of secularity’s own normative insistence on its autonomy from the realms of the material, the corporeal, the social, the traditional, and so on. Within this framework, to describe the embodied and material dimensions of lived secularity would be, in a sense, to describe what it is not or what it claims not to be; it would mean to describe the nonsecular, and that has meant, if not in theory then in most actual research projects, the religious—or rather, the aesthetic analog of functionalism’s invisible religion. Secularism may claim to be not religious, but this claim itself is embodied like religions and, more precisely, in a way that has been modeled in actual research on the way religious embodiment defies secular excarnation, or is excluded by it. In the necessary process of coming to terms with its own role in implementing the powerful conceptual grammar of secular modernity, critical scholarship on the secular (and religion) has once again made the secular invisible within its own framework of material and aesthetic methodologies: it has produced its own postsecularity by showing that, apart from having never been modern, to speak with Bruno Latour (1993), we have never been—and cannot be—secular either. The methodological approach that I propose as an alternative and describe in more detail in the following section hinges on making secularity rather than religion the “direct” center of our empirical attention. In the remainder of this section, I seek to explicate why this requires not only a reversal of attention away from religion and toward the secular, but also an approach that displaces the secular’s conceptual relationality to and dependence on the category of religion as its central and decisive definitional attribute. The negative relation to religion is merely one aspect of a much larger and more diffuse negativity of secularity, which I propose as an alternative—but neither the only conceivable nor essential—focus of our empirical attention. I also want to emphasize that my aim in this book is not an apology of the secular. I am in no way disputing the cogency and political expedience of the critical deconstruction of the secular/religious binary or the self-reflexive genealogy of the role played by social sciences and humanities in implementing it in the first place; nor am I arguing that previous scholarship has gotten the secular all wrong or that aesthetic and material methodologies are flawed or unproductive. On the contrary, I seek to extend them to the anthropological study of

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atheism as a form of lived secularity. I therefore approach the negativity of secular difference as a problem of perceptibility that can be described ethnographically, rather than positing a methodological a priori of umbral indirectness or uninhabitability. However, this requires a methodological space where claims to being not religious become relevant not only with regard to whether and how they misconstrue religion, themselves, or their relation to religion, but how they articulate a project of coming to terms with the negativity of secular difference and, therein, of inhabiting it as a way of life. This is a methodological space where my atheist interlocutors in India are not treated as quasi scholars of religion or mere extensions of an abstract and powerful conceptual grammar of secular modernity but as an embattled minority of flesh-and-blood social activists who seek to live secularity by putting atheism into practice in order to transform their lives and their society.3 Especially anthropologists have faulted existing approaches—in particular those inspired by Asad—for an “intellectualist and elitist quality” (Starrett 2010: 649) and for focusing too narrowly on state-driven projects of secularism rather than “ethnographic studies describing precisely in what ways secularisms are defined, appropriated and contested by our anthropological informants” (Bangstad 2009: 189; see also Cannell 2010; Bowen 2010; Baldacchino and Kahn 2011; Schielke 2012; Lebner 2015). This critique is part of a rapidly growing field of multidisciplinary scholarship on topics such as the statistical category of “nones,” secular alternatives to organized religion, religious indifference, or explicitly antireligious activism.4 This body of scholarship is gaining shape as a distinct research field clustering around the category of “nonreligion” but has, so far, been unable to address a persisting challenge for an anthropology of lived secularity (or nonreligion), namely the methodological invisibility of the aesthetics of secular difference. Charles Hirschkind was one of the first to draw attention to what I discussed above as the effects of an indirect approach to the secular. He asked how, if at all, it is possible to approach the embodied nature of secularity directly, in the sense of “a particular configuration of the human sensorium—of ­sensibilities, affects, embodied dispositions—specific to secular subjects, and thus constitutive of what we mean by ‘secular society’” (2011: 633). Hirschkind ultimately argues that we could identify and describe configurations of the human sensorium that go without reference to religion but, by so doing, we would be at a loss to define what exactly makes them secular—other than the absence of religion. It is with reference to this negative relationality of the secular that a number of

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scholars have proposed the category of nonreligion as a relational yet positive descriptor. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of social fields, Johannes Quack (2014) has proposed a relational approach, where nonreligion is not defined negatively by the absence of religion but positively via specific kinds of relation to religion understood as a culturally and historically variable field. Nonreligion is thus conceptualized as the surroundings (German: Umfeld) that demarcate the religious field by relating to it in diverse and positively describable ways such as indifference, optionality, parallelism, antagonism, supersession, and so on. However, nonreligion remains marked by a tension resulting from a simultaneous dependence on and independence from religion because it refers to “phenomena considered to be not religious despite the fact that they are indeed related to the religious field in different ways” (Quack 2014: 442). The two programmatic aims of this approach are thus (1) to describe empirically this tension between dependence and independence and (2) to reflexively integrate academic scholarship on religion into this model, insofar as it is itself not religious but related to religion and therefore part of nonreligious surroundings. In his ethnographic work on rationalism in India, Quack builds on Taylor (2007) and Ulrich Berner (2004) in order to describe a specific “mode of unbelief” that has concrete and identifiable attributes, in this case an epistemic–moral entanglement, an ideology of doubt, and a worldview based on commitment, discontent, confrontation, and dedication (Quack 2012: 19–27 and 272). Lois Lee proposed a similar framework by glossing nonreligion as a “substantial secular” (2015: 4), which is defined not only by the negative relation it maintains with religion but also by a positively specifiable set of beliefs, rituals, practices, or identities through which that relation is inhabited and experienced. Relational approaches seek to reconcile the use of nonreligion as a heuristic category with an epistemological critique of the secular/ religious binary as an analytical device but, insofar as they are relational, the main methodological challenge for their empirical implementation still redirects us to the category of religion. As Matthew Engelke has commented, relational categories are “troublesome” because “all they seem to do . . . is pull us back to what they are trying to get away from: God, gods, and religion. Godlessness, atheism, and non-religion are always beholden to something else” (2015b: 135). Like Quack, who proposes to approach the simultaneity of nonreligion’s dependence and independence from religion as an empirical question, Engelke describes how his humanist interlocutors in Britain

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themselves are troubled by that tension. However, both authors are aware that this elegant solution finds its limits in those circumstances where religion—whether as concept or social field—is itself not clearly constituted, contested, or otherwise hard to identify (Quack 2014: 454–58; Engelke 2015c); unsurprisingly, such circumstances are to be found most likely, though not exclusively, in premodern times or postcolonial settings “outside” of Europe. That such a parallelization of the premodern with the contemporary non-European comes so easily is also troublesome, but it is symptomatic of the current status of scholarship on nonreligion, which is but for few examples— Quack being one of them (but also Klimkeit 1971; Schielke 2012; Copeman and Reddy 2012; Copeman 2015; Blanes and OustinovaStjepanovic 2015)—retracing the secular in the “modern West.” The most prominent, incisive, and widely discussed example is Taylor’s reclamation of secularity for Latin Christendom (Taylor 2007; for critical discussions, see Warner, van Antwerpen, and Calhoun 2010; Bilgrami 2016). As a consequence, a postcolonial or global approach to nonreligion within a relational framework inevitably pulls us back to early modern Europe and into the controversial debate around the conceptual history of religion in its enmeshment with European imperialisms and colonial expansion (Kippenberg 2001; Masuzawa 2005; Chidester 2014; Fitzgerald 2010). I will return to the crucial importance of colonialism shortly, but I want to focus first on another implication of relational approaches, which is already adumbrated in Hirschkind’s inquiry about a secular body. While Hirschkind reduced the relationality of the secular to a negative form of triumphalism, which describes a “movement of negation and overcoming by which the secular emerges from the religious” (2011: 643), Quack and Lee opened up the possibility of a more diverse range of kinds, modes, or experiences of relationality in the sense of positively specifiable attributes of nonreligion; yet, for defining or describing what makes them “secular” or “nonreligious,” these positive aspects and in particular their aesthetic dimensions remained either insignificant or merely ancillary when compared to their conceptual relationality with religion. I therefore seek to build on relational approaches but also push them further by understanding secular difference as an aesthetic quality and the outcome of a performative positionality, both being more complex than a conceptual dependence or relationality vis-à-vis the category of religion. In the following section, I argue that the concept of positionality enables not only a direct approach to the “positive,” as in aesthetic aspects of lived secularity, but also a postcolonial approach that is attentive to the

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historicity and translatedness of categories like religion, secularity, or atheism.

Positionality: From Conceptual Relations to a Presentism of Translatedness In order to clarify what I mean by positionality, I draw on German philosopher Helmuth Plessner, who used the term in his phenomenological gestalt theory of life or, more precisely, aliveness (Plessner 2016; for a concise summary in English, see Grene 1966). I am here not concerned with the details or the agenda of his philosophical anthropology but with the potential of the concept of positionality for studying secularity as an aesthetic quality of difference.5 According to Plessner, living beings differ from inorganic things by the way they actively relate to their own boundaries, namely by actualizing them. Their boundaries are not simply the hiatus that delimits them from something else and gives their bodies a figure; rather, boundaries belong to them and are an integral part of their corporeal being that closes them off against their environment precisely by providing a crossing into it. In Plessner’s somewhat cryptic diction, living beings exist simultaneously in and into their boundary and beyond it and thereby both against and with their environment (concrete biological examples for this sort of boundary behavior are semipermeable membranes or metabolic processes). This also has important consequences for the way living beings exist in space: Every physical corporal thing is in space, is spatial. In terms of measure, its position exists in relation to other positions and to the position of the observer. As physical things, living bodies are not excluded from this relational order. Yet, among space-filling [raumerfüllende] bodies, living bodies differ phenomenally from lifeless ones, insofar as they are space-claiming [raumbehauptende]. Every space-filling figure [Gebilde] exists in a location. A space-claiming figure, by contrast, exists in relation to the location of “its” existence through being beyond it (and into it). (Plessner 2016: 186–87)

Positionality thus refers to the process or capacity of a corporeal figure to actualize its own boundary both with and against an environment (being in and beyond its boundary) in a way that claims space not only as a position in relation to other objects in abstract space but as the “natural place” (ibid.) of its existence. Since living beings are also physical objects, they have a spatial position and a concrete figural boundary that can be directly perceived by the senses—measured and

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observed—whereas their positionality is an additional quality that can only be perceived indirectly or “intuited phenomenologically” (erschaut) (Plessner 2016: 183) in the way they behave with regard to their boundary. Hence, positionality is not an ontological definition of aliveness but a phenomenological quality that appears in the way living beings exist by actualizing their boundary and occupying their place within and against their environment. I want to use certain aspects of Plessner’s concept of positionality as a way to think about secular boundaries in terms of an emergent or performative quality of difference rather than an ontological, conceptual, or structuralist notion of difference. To say that secularity is a performative effect of positionality implies that secular difference is not a relational quasi space between the religious and the secular, or a boundary where one ends and the other begins; this would be a zero-sum scenario where a thing must be either religious or secular for there to be a difference that matters in a way that goes beyond a “merely” ideological, uninhabitable claim. Instead, positionality designates a process or behavior, through which boundaries are actively claimed and actualized as part of oneself, as both a limit against and a crossing into an environment. This implies from the start an “osmotic” or “metabolic” scenario of ambivalent, dynamic, and contested negotiations of sameness and difference, belonging and otherness. Secular difference, as I understand it here, is not a specifiable boundary (or relation) but a quality that emerges through the manner in which certain people, in my case atheist activists in South India, claim and actively tend to their own boundary and their own place in a given sociocultural, political, and historical environment. In contrast to Plessner’s phenomenological approach, however, I do not presuppose secular difference as a given phenomenon that manifests itself, like aliveness is a phenomenal quality that necessarily appears, insofar as living beings are what they are. In other words, I do not make an ontological argument that secularity is a positionality or an aesthetic quality rather than a relational position; instead, I approach secular difference as an aesthetic problem, a problem of perceptibility that appears to atheist activists in their endeavor to put atheism into practice. I am not attempting a phenomenology of secular difference but an ethnography of how atheist activists try to make it appear by making it perceptible. I propose positionality as a methodological concept that can help us analyze how secularity is not only the result of a claim to being different from religion—though it certainly is that too—but the result of a specific way of tending to and inhabiting one’s difference as one’s own boundary and place in

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an environment. In this book I want to probe how the concept of positionality can help to describe the quality of secular difference not in terms of what secularity is different from (presumably religion), but how it is different. While the how is of course entangled with the what, my aim is to explore a methodological space where the elements and figurations of this entanglement and, more importantly, actual ways to live in and through it are not completely or exclusively predetermined by what has been identified as the European conceptual history of the secular. This history is certainly a crucial aspect of the negativity of secular difference, which atheist activists encounter and are forced to confront, but it does not once and for all prescribe the field of possibilities available to them for tending to that negativity as a way to claim their place within their sociocultural and political environments. Abou Farman (2013), for example, argues in reference to Hirschkind’s essay on the secular body that the history of the secular has not stopped with a negative relation of triumphalism. His research on North American immortalism demonstrates that certain materialist and rationalist worldviews may have originated in a negative relation to religion but have, in the meantime, acquired their own “traditions” (Farman 2013: 738) that constitute identifiably secular forms of personhood and embodiment. In order to identify such traditions, however, we require a direct ethnographic engagement with the present, which bridles the critical impetus to genealogically deconstruct the secular/religious binary. This is by no means a call for an “ethnographic present” (Fabian 2002: 80–87) that denies the coevalness of interlocutors or the powerful ways in which the past conditions the present (for discussions of the relationship between ethnography and history, see Cohn 1987; Comaroff and Comaroff 1992); rather, I follow Sanjay Srivastava, who argues: In recent times, a certain kind of scholarly work on India has become so over-determined by historical research that there is a tendency to render the present as almost a direct and unmediated consequence of the past. To speak of this propensity is not an incitement to ahistoricism; rather, it is an invitation to think about the present with as much finesse as that which marks so much of recent historiographic research on South Asia. So, for example, the relationships that contemporary populations have with the past and the contingencies of the present as they articulate with imagined futures appear not to interest many analysts; the present is, almost, not interesting enough. This . . . has led to a situation where we do not have as theoretically sophisticated a sense of the postcolonial present as we do of the colonial past. (2007: 8)

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It is along these lines that I want to caution against a tendency to presuppose or fix what the secular can be in the present on the basis of critical genealogies of its concept or of a large-scale conceptual grammar it designates. The kind of ethnographic presentism I deploy in the following chapters is not therefore ahistorical, as it includes analyses of the historicity of my interlocutors’ attempts to make the secular perceptible. This will lead me into diverse regions of the past, including imaginaries of the prehistory of South Asia, the remembered past of autobiographic narratives, or historical literature on medieval courtly culture, the anticolonial struggle, or the afterlife of the so-called Nehruvian era of independent India. These excursions into plural pasts will not coalesce into a single history of “Indian secularity” that challenges, supplements, or improves existing historical narratives. Following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, my aim is to “denarrativize” them so as to “denaturalize the present, rather than the past” (2008: 48) and, thereby, open a methodological space for an anthropology of the secular that proceeds via an ethnography of lived secularity rather than conceptual history. The denarrativized and in a sense “undisciplined”6 history of ethnographic presentism is furthermore a crucial device for engaging with the challenge of a postcolonial perspective on the problematic historicity of lived secularity. While scholars of religion have debated copiously and controversially whether the modern, supposedly European concept of religion is adequate as an analytical concept (Asad 1993; McCutcheon 1997; Smith 1998; Fitzgerald 2000; de Vries 2008), few have doubted that the phenomena, practices, people, or objects construed or misconstrued as religious did in some way or the other exist. Scholars usually query not whether there were medieval Christian monks or ancient Vedic rituals or early modern Muslim sharia scholars but whether they are appropriately conceptualized on the basis of our contemporary understanding of religion. The case is different for atheism and irreligion. Dorothea Weltecke has retraced how, since the sixteenth century, the historiography of unbelief (in Europe) has been “downright obsessed” (2010: 28) with the question of whether total unbelief and a complete absence of religion have ever existed before the modern era, especially since the word “atheism” is conspicuously absent in medieval sources. As a consequence, “The history of atheism, of the Enlightenment, or of unbelief is not the product of historiographic scholarship but of theological, philosophical, and political polemics” (Weltecke 2010: 97–98). More concretely, she faults the existing historiography of atheism for falling short with regard to the crucial methodological challenge of clarifying the relationship between the

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word “atheism,” the concept, and the complex historical formations it tries to grasp across the epistemological break constituted by modernity. This task, which has arguably been at the center of religious studies for quite some time, turns out to be even more pressing and difficult in postcolonial contexts, where the translation of historical alterity is often assumed to be compounded by cultural alterity. Insofar as the vocabulary and conceptual grammar of the secular is understood to be intrinsic to modernity, it is also inseparably entangled with projects of European imperialism: the epistemological break of secular modernity has been experienced by most populations outside of Europe as colonial modernity; not that modernity was any less colonial in the metropole or for European colonizers, but its coloniality could be experienced differently. While (some) Europeans could inhabit modernity as universality, colonial subjects were still confined to the “imaginary waiting-room of history” (Chakrabarty 2000: 9). If modernity is understood to involve some kind of shift or break vis-à-vis the past, colonial modernity further compounds that break for being experienced not only as new but also as foreign. As a consequence, South Asianists have addressed the secular primarily as a question of what Sudipta Kaviraj calls “the remarkable epistemic rupture brought in by colonialism” (2005: 124). While the notion of epistemic rupture has been developed in the context of discussions about the ruinous effects of colonial modernity on elite Sanskrit knowledge systems (Pollock 2002, 2008; Hatcher 2007), postcolonial scholarship has subsequently tended to relativize the radicalness of the discontinuity implied by the notion of rupture. Historical studies on different forms of colonial knowledge have shown that its categorical apparatus—including categories like religion, tradition, science, caste, or, particularly important for my discussion, Hinduism—has been produced in complex “collaborative” projects between colonial officers, European scholars, Christian missionaries, and a diverse range of so-called native informants who, in their functions as traditional pandits, religious reformers, local research assistants, and so on did of course much more than simply procure data or provide information (e.g., Sontheimer and Kulke 1991; Lopez 1995; King 1999; Narayana Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam 2001; Trautmann 2006; Nicholson 2010; Bergunder 2010). If colonial/modern/secular knowledge can appear as originating from “Europe,” this has often less to do with its actual history than with an effect of the power differentials characteristic of colonial situations where “complicated and complex forms of knowledge [were] created by Indians, but codified and transmitted by Europeans” (Cohn 1985:

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276). Andrew Nicholson (2010: 1–23) argues that an overemphasis of epistemic ruptures has also sedimented as a sort of disciplinary bifurcation, to the effect that postcolonial historians tend to focus either on the precolonial or the colonial period, leaving crucial phases and processes of transition relatively unexplored. The “undisciplined” historicism I propose as part of an ethnographic presentism helps unsettle such reified epochal schemes in order to contribute to what Joel Robbins envisions as “more precise and varied models of cultural change . . . that can comprehend discontinuity but that can also give us nontrivial insights into how processes and projects of both continuity and discontinuity shape cultural transformation” (2007: 31). One way to engage this theoretical challenge is to draw on the long anthropological tradition of addressing methodological problems of (colonial) continuity and change as a question of translations rather than epistemic ruptures. Translation draws attention to the fact that concepts are not disembodied theory but articulated in concrete, historical languages, which are themselves not neutral containers of meaning but (differentially) powerful means to enact social relations and entire ways of life. Translation is, in a sense, always cultural translation because, as Asad puts it, by translating languages, “We are dealing not with an abstract matching of two sets of sentences but with a social practice rooted in modes of life” (1993: 183; see also Asad 2018: 1–12). An ongoing critical reflection in anthropology has interrogated ethnography’s claim to translate the complexity and opacities of “exotic” cultures encountered “in the field” into orderly and transparent scholarly texts (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Leavitt 2014). This is part of a larger interdisciplinary debate on translation based on two interrelated premises: first, an expanded understanding of translation as a metaphor for a whole range of semiotic practices that exceed translations between or within languages (as in glossing or paraphrasing) because they also encompass so-called modal transductions between linguistic codes and other kinds of semiotic modes such as gestures, visual cues, tone, speech act force, style, and so on (Jakobson 1971: 260–67; Silverstein 2003; Keane 2013a); second, an understanding of translation as a productive practice that does not only transfer content from an original to a copy but transforms it in the process and constitutes it as content, original, or copy in the first place (for overviews of the field, see Bachmann-Medick 2014; Gal 2015). On the basis of such an expanded understanding, it is not translation as such that marks colonial or postcolonial situations but a set of specific practical purposes of translation and an unequal

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constellation of power between languages, where some do the translating and others are translated—or rather are rendered translatable and, thereby, made to submit to being disproportionally transformed by the translating language (Rafael 1988; Asad 1993; Liu 1995; Rubel and Rosman 2003; Datla 2013). In this context, debates about translatability are not primarily concerned with deciding whether specific translations are good or bad—or possible at all—but with the historically shifting language ideologies and political concerns that regulate what counts as acceptable or efficient translation by stipulating, among other things, the relevant units of translation (words, concepts, practices, cultures, etc.). Incommensurability or indeterminacy are thus taken for granted as intrinsic to translation, which is understood as a dynamic and contested practice whose outcome is not perfect equivalence but an “effect of sameness-in-difference” (Gal 2015: 226; see also Sakai 2006; Hanks 2014). It is thus not on principle but only within concrete political situations and power relations that people are able to decide whether this effect should be seen as a sign of an irreducible alterity of what or who is being translated or as a failure to adequately represent their sameness (Povinelli 2001: 321–25). William Hanks and Carlo Severi therefore speak of an “epistemological space of translation” where “translation in one or another variety is always already in play” (2014: 3) as a historical condition of possibility for all kinds of knowledge and understanding, not only those that take the form of explicit acts of linguistic or cultural translation. In my approach to atheism in India, I build on this notion of a sort of “historical a priori” (Foucault 2002: 142–48) of antecedent translation, but I am particularly interested in its productivity in the present rather than its historical genesis. This productivity does not consist of a unified or consistent “Indian atheism” as a hybrid outcome of specific acts of translation but rather of a field of discursive and practical possibilities enabled by atheism’s antecedent translatedness. I want to illustrate my understanding of translatedness with a brief ethnographic episode, which will also provide the entry point to introducing in more detail the people to whom I have until now only referred as “my atheist interlocutors.” It is somewhat ironic but ultimately true to my argument about the negativity of secularity that the following vignette may give an idea about whom these atheists are precisely by describing whom they are not.

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The Atheist Movement in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, or Atheism with Capital A Devi and I had met for the first time at an atheist conference where she received an award for her outstanding efforts in the struggle for women’s rights. She is regularly invited by different atheist organizations without being an official member of any of them and considers herself a sympathetic yet critical collaborator. Devi does not believe in gods and says so openly in private and in public, but she understands herself as a cultural activist and not an atheist—at least not without qualification. Before striking out on her own as an independent cultural activist, she was a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and used to be in charge of its cultural wing. While I was staying with Devi and her family, who hosted me for several months during my research, I accompanied her for a visit to a famous Hindu temple in Chilkur, around 30 kilometers from Hyderabad. In Chilkur resides Sri Balaji Venkateshvara, a form of the god Vishnu, who is commonly called “Visa Balaji” because he is particularly known for helping his devotees to obtain passports and visas for foreign travel. Devi, however, wanted to meet the temple’s head priest, Mr. Rangarajan, with whom she was planning to organize a cultural festival to reinvigorate traditional folk art. What brings Devi and Rangarajan together—besides their shared love for folk art—is a common fight against “superstition” (mudhanammakam) and, more precisely, against those who exploit the common people’s superstition for money and selfish purposes. Rangarajan comes from a family of Tamil Brahmins who have been administrating the temple for some generations and understand themselves as religious reformers. As we entered the temple compound, we were immediately sucked into a stream of hundreds of devotees circumambulating the deity’s inner sanctum in order to make a vow or give thanks for receiving what they had asked for previously. When I asked Rangarajan about petitions to “Visa Balaji” and their relation to superstition, he smiled indulgently; what ultimately mattered, he explained, was “devotion” (bhakti) for god, not the superstitious beliefs motivating it. More importantly, he was quick to add, their temple was the only one in the whole state that, as a matter of principle, did not accept any money from devotees and thus monetized neither superstition nor devotion. Leaving the busy temple compound in order to discuss the upcoming cultural festival, we met Rangarajan’s father, Soundararajan. Upon seeing Devi, he engaged her immediately in a rather heated

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debate. Devi is something of a public personality due to her regular appearances in talk shows on Telugu News Channels, where she is famous for speaking up for women’s rights, for criticizing superstitions, and for challenging what she calls the “orthodox” (chandasa) Hindu Right. Soundararajan expressed his disappointment in Devi for neglecting to talk about the plight of temple priests in her TV appearances. “Temples are being looted continuously by the government,” he lamented, referring to the Religious Endowments Act, which brings the administration of most Hindu temples under state control and has therefore been a key controversy in debates about Indian secularism. If she was so busy criticizing fraudulent Neo-Hindu godmen and the political aberrations of religious nationalism, Soundararajan questioned, why not also demand that money be spent for the renovation and preservation of ancient temples, the “real culture” of India? He went on to give a concise exposition of Indian cultural history with a critical focus on the Non-Brahmin movement in the neighboring state of Tamil Nadu, which is known for its atheism (on which I discuss more below). He concluded: “First, you shouldn’t think that you are the only one working for revolution. And, while you are an atheist and against idol worship, you have to remember that it is also of Indian origin. We also live and die here.” Devi retorted that atheism is a part of Indian heritage too, and that there are also several atheist dars´anas (classical philosophical schools). “Yes, it is part of our heritage,” Soundararajan conceded, “and I know that atheists are no raksasas [demons]. They are also human beings, but the [NonBrahmin] politicians are the real raksasas. Look how your atheism is no longer atheism but completely changed.” “I am not an atheist,” Devi interjected. “I am against the exploitation of the people in the name of god.” The conversation continued in that manner for a while. I did not understand why Devi had denied being an atheist and was glad when the topic came up again a few days later, when she told me that Rangarajan had called to apologize on his father’s behalf. I mentioned how surprised I was that Soundararajan had expected her to speak up in favor of temple priests, knowing full well that she is an atheist. Again, she said, “I am not an atheist,” with a somewhat mischievous smile betraying her enjoyment of what must have been a puzzled look on my face: Stefan: But, you don’t believe in god. Devi: No, I don’t. S.: Um, I don’t understand. D.: Well, I am an atheist, but not a nastika. You have to understand, nastika in India means not believing in the Veda.

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S.: But you don’t believe in the Veda. D.: What’s there to believe? S.: Okay, but you don’t follow their rituals. D.: No, I don’t . . . It is like the Buddha, who is often misunderstood. The Buddha was not a nastika, he was a niris´varavadi. In the early sources, people still differentiated between niris´varavadam and nastikatvam. That is lost nowadays. In the early sources, nastika means “against the people”; that’s what they say. But I am not against the people, neither was the Buddha.

This vignette illustrates above all a complex yet commonplace multilingualism that makes matters of translation central for any discussion of atheism in India. While Rangarajan spoke Telugu with Devi, who had grown up in a Hindi-speaking environment in Madhya Pradesh, Soundararajan had chosen to talk in English, which was also the language Devi and I used to converse. In their family, however, Rangarajan and Soundararajan speak Tamil. Regardless of which “vernacular” was used, many of the key terms in our debates were derived from Sanskrit or, indeed, ancient Greek. If we had spoken to one another in different languages, our conversations may have played out differently, but they would have still occurred within a discursive space permeated by antecedent translations. My lack of understanding created—unintentionally—a situation that forced Devi to make this basic translatedness explicit by stating that she was not an atheist, only to explicate in a following speech turn that she was indeed an atheist but not a nastika. Since current dictionaries and actual linguistic practice leave no doubt that the word nastika is in fact translated as “atheist,” Devi mobilized the Buddha as a historical instance of an alternative way of—and word for—being an atheist: niris´varavadi. Rangarajan made a similar move by drawing on the political movement of Non-Brahmanism as a form of atheism that he rejected as no longer authentic or legitimate. Though I seemed to be the only one hung up on questions of disbelief in god, based on my understanding of the English word “atheism,” this does not mean that this word or its meaning was irrelevant or necessarily secondary to its Telugu, Tamil, or Hindi translations. Irrespective of which language they use, people like Devi, Rangarajan, and my atheist interlocutors can and do draw on a wide variety of both English and Telugu as well as Sanskrit and, via Hindustani, to a certain extent also Persian and Arabic conceptual frameworks for talking about atheism. By using the Telugu word “nastika,” competent speakers may metalinguistically imply or explicitly paraphrase it in terms of the conceptual history of one of its English translations (it can also be translated as “orthodox,” just

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as “atheist” is also translated as niris´varavadi)—and the same if they happen to speak in English or any other language. In some instances, they may highlight the incommensurability of translations to make a point (or to respond to an anthropologist); while in others, they may gloss over them or try to conceal them entirely. More importantly, these options are not bound to actual linguistic competences in the respective languages or philological knowledge because they are available even within monolingual behavior due to the translatedness of terms like “atheism.”7 My aim in this book is not an exhaustive conceptual history or some higher-order ethnographic translation that brings clarity to the shifting, overlapping, and often contradictory translations of “atheism” encountered “in the field.” Instead, I am interested in how different people in different situations draw on the incommensurability, indeterminacy, and historicity of existing and contested translations. I am interested in what kinds of histories these translations make available and how they impinge on the ways in which my atheist interlocutors can relate to those histories in order to claim their place and identity (i.e., their positionality within them). Devi and Soundararajan are unlikely to agree on how exactly to define “atheism,” and they certainly do not reject it for the same reasons. They do agree, however, that it refers to something undesirable, something negative. As their conversation demonstrates, their negative evaluations of atheism are not grounded in its association with disbelief in god, which Devi openly professes and Soundararajan seems not to mind terribly; rather, they stem from a more diffuse social and historical imaginary associated with the Sanskrit-derived Telugu adjective nastika and its nominalization nastikatvam. Coming from a Communist background, Devi condensed this imaginary in a leftist idiom as being “against the people” and stressed atheism’s social negativity, whereas Soundararajan linked it to Tamil NonBrahmanism—an understandable choice for a Tamil Brahmin—and evoked a much older tradition of linking nastikas with the negativity of the xenological and dehumanizing category of raksasa (demon). What sets my atheist interlocutors apart from people like Devi and Soundararajan is neither their definition or preferred translation of “atheism” (on which many of them disagree, as we will see in Chapter 1), nor their understanding and radical rejection of religion; instead, the central argument of this book is that the internal coherence of the atheist movement in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana as well as its claim to being different from its social and cultural environment reside in the way it positions itself with regard to the diffuse and heterogenous negative imaginary of nastikatvam translated as “atheism.”

Introduction

25

What differentiates the atheist movement from its opponents as well as from allied progressive, leftist, or secular movements, from critics of superstition like Soundararajan and Rangarajan, and even from radical detractors of religion like Devi is the way they relate to that negativity: they try to harness its social potency by transforming it into a positive form and quality of secular difference. Atheists inhabit that difference not through specific traits, practices, traditions, ideologies, or worldviews that are necessarily exclusive to them—or different from religion—but on the basis of their positionality (i.e., of how they produce their boundaries through what they share with their environment, namely the negativity of atheism as well as most of the cultural, social, and intellectual strategies used for transforming it). Theirs is a difference–in–sameness. This is why the perceptibility of secular difference is not just a given but a problem, a project, and why I conceptualize the quality of difference characteristic of the atheist movement with the geometric metaphor of ex-centricity. English dictionaries define “eccentricity” as a deviation from a circular path or, in its figurative meaning, from social convention. It describes a shape whose support or axis is off-center or askew but not entirely outside or severed from an assumed standard. An eccentric person appears odd, strange, even bizarre for transgressing conventions, but that transgression still remains “legible” in reference to them, as a form of agency, a more or less meaningful act of defiance; an eccentric is neither totally other nor outright insane, but simply a bit off. I use the orthographic distortion of ex-centricity in order to distance my use of the concept from its pejorative (or celebratory) connotations, while seeking to retain its potential as a metaphorical descriptor for the ambivalent quality of atheists’ positionality of ­difference–in–sameness, including the ambivalent value judgments resulting from that positionality. The chapters of this book will explore the diverse aspects of negativity feeding into the imaginary of atheism/ nastikatvam and the ex-centric ways in which atheist activists position themselves within it in order to make their secular difference perceptible. Who, then, are these atheists?

The “Field” and the History of the Atheist Movement Fieldwork for this book was conducted during a total of fourteen months between 2013 and 2015 in the two mainly Telugu-speaking states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana and in particular in the districts around and between the cities of Hyderabad and Vijayawada.

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Andhra Pradesh and Telangana were created as separate states in 2014, by disintegrating the until-then unified Andhra Pradesh, but the new state borders did not noticeably affect the practical affairs of the atheist movement. While individual members had various stakes in and opinions about state bifurcation, the movement as a whole did not participate in any significant or programmatic way in the movement for either separate Telangana or united Andhra (for the role of secularity in the Telangana movement, see Binder 2018). In comparison to other states, especially Kerala and Bengal, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana are not particularly famous for an organized secular tradition, which may be partly due to the diversity and organizational heterogeneity of Telugu atheism as well as its distance from party politics. I speak of an atheist “movement” because there is no dominant or in any way representative organization but rather a host of atheist activism of different forms, sizes, and types: at the smallest scale, there are dedicated individuals who write and publish books or journals with a rather limited outreach into an immediate environment of personal networks; there are small groups of people who meet more or less regularly in informal or loosely organized settings like discussion groups, issue-based public meetings, or online communities; there are localized, on occasion even residential, institutions, which may or may not be affiliated with larger, officially registered organizations with formal membership. Some but not all of these organizational forms are affiliated with supraregional or international umbrella organizations such as the “Federation of Indian Rationalist Associations” (FIRA) or the “International Humanist and Ethical Union” (IHEU). From the smallest to the largest scale, organizations usually cluster around individual leaders or a particular family, and many of the splits within the larger groups could be described as secessions of factions forming around new leaders. Affiliations are furthermore fluid and despite a tendency toward atomization and differentiation at the organizational level, and at times fierce rivalry between particular groups or individuals, most active members have plural affiliations and participate in events or programs regardless of institutional ties or ideological allegiance to those who organize them. I have therefore decided against a systematic overview of existing organizations and will introduce them individually as they appear in the course of the following chapters (a systematic overview is provided in Venkatadri and Subba Raju 2003). While the actual contours of the atheist movement seem relatively easy to discern—a fruit of the labor to make them perceptible—they

Introduction

27

are rather difficult to “define” in terms of either organizational structure or ideology; in fact, there is not even a commonly recognized self-designation for the movement but rather three main factions clustering around the labels of atheism/nastikatvam, rationalism/ hetuvadam, and humanism/manavavadam. I will discuss the issue of names in detail in Chapter 1, where I explain why I chose to use the term “atheism” even though not all of my interlocutors adopt it as a public self-designation. In the following, I will use capitalized Atheism/Atheist or Total Atheism to refer to the larger movement and to differentiate it from those who self-identify as atheist/nastika— or people like Devi who are atheist but not nastika.8 Though I have not collected quantitative data on membership or caste and class composition, it is safe to call the Atheist community a minority, especially when compared to so-called “mass movements” like the Communist, women’s rights, caste, or many religious movements. The small size of the movement becomes tangible in extended personalized networks. Most Atheist activists tend to know each other at least indirectly. As far as social profiles are concerned, activist members of the Atheist movement are almost exclusively male, at least middle aged, and hail predominantly from Hindu backgrounds. The movement has historically been dominated by leaders and intellectuals with family ties to central Coastal Andhra (Prakasam, Guntur, Krishna, and Godavari districts). Educational, caste, and class backgrounds of activists are in fact diverse, but a majority of activists, and certainly those in leadership positions, tend to be well-educated, hail from medium ranking or dominant caste backgrounds, and can be described as middle or lower-middle-class. The image of the Englisheducated, upper-caste, upper-class, elite Atheist may be pertinent as a tendency, but it is also in many cases aspirational rather than factual and should not be exaggerated. Most of the published literature and nearly all events are in Telugu language, and while many of my interlocutors were able to speak in English, there is also a sizeable number—also at leadership levels—with very limited command of English. There are also Atheist activists with working-class and more importantly agricultural backgrounds as well as vocal Dalit and lower-caste factions within the movement. Throughout the book, I address age, education, caste/class, and gender less as categories to sociometrically map the Atheist movement but as factors that “qualitatively” condition how individual Atheist activists experience and try to transform various forms of perceived, claimed, or ascribed ­marginality—including the “marginality” of elite status—into a ­positive form and quality of ex-centric secular difference.

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I approach the contentious issue of Atheism’s history in a similar way.  While the colonial genealogy and modern development of the Atheist movement is largely uncontested among my Atheist interlocutors as well as their critics, a bone of vehement contention concerns historical narratives of the precolonial roots of Atheism in India. In his aforementioned ethnography of a rationalist movement in Maharashtra, Quack (2012: 47–99) provides a concise historical overview of organized rationalism and atheism in nineteenth and ­twentieth-century India, which is equally pertinent for the Atheist movement in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. Quack retraces how the organizational history of contemporary rationalism began in the 1930s but has a longer intellectual history leading back to the publications of nineteenth-century British secularists and, by implication, to European Enlightenment discourses. Following Hans-Joachim Klimkeit (1971), he locates the immediate prehistory of what I refer to as the Atheist movement in an intellectual environment made up of various colonial social and religious reform movements such as the Bengal Renaissance, the Theosophical Society, or the Satyashodhak Samaj, the incipient independence and Communist movements, as well as the Gandhian movement. Another crucial ingredient of this environment is critical discourses on Indian religions promulgated by Christian missionaries. The Atheist movement shares this historical background with a larger milieu of so-called progressive (abhyudaya or pragatis´ ila) movements that comprises leftist, feminist, Dalit, Adivasi, and anticaste movements as well as smaller identity movements like the Telugu Muslim minority movement, the LGBTQ* movement, or certain sections of the Telangana movement; it also extends to organizations for education and science popularization, human rights, democracy, social service, or developmental aid. Progressive movements are usually considered allies but occasionally become the cause for fierce ideological boundary work, which is then decried by some as a sort of narcissism of minor differences. In fact, many of my Atheist interlocutors were or had been at some point associated with other progressive movements, and overlapping memberships and sympathies are not uncommon. Due to such intersections, argumentative styles and ideological factions within the Atheist movement can be mapped onto elective affinities with four important sources of inspiration: Communism, Radical Humanism, Non-Brahmanism, and the Gandhian movement. I will briefly discuss each of them, except for the Gandhian movement to which I return separately in Chapter 5 because only one, albeit a very influential, Atheist organization currently aligns itself explicitly with it.

Introduction

29

Many of my interlocutors are also Communists or have found their way into the Atheist movement via Communist and other leftist organizations, especially their student wings. The majority of active Atheists has grown up on the brink of the so-called “Nehruvian era” (Parekh 1991; see also Chapter 4) and lived through a phase of a distinct form of socialist populism at both national and regional levels. S. V. Srinivas (2013, 2015) argues that in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, radical leftist propaganda forms and content have been transformed into a popular mass culture through commercial mainstream cinema, which has in turn influenced dominant styles of performing politics—irrespective of actual policies that were often grounded in conservative visions of a supposedly benevolent neofeudalism. In other words, explicitly leftist style, rhetoric, and concepts such as “class exploitation” or “revolution” have permeated political culture and popular vocabularies to an extent where they need not necessarily indicate a commitment to Communist ideology or politics. The Atheist movement is no exception, and it is strongly influenced by Marxist social theory as well as leftist cultural movements like the Progressive Writers Association or the People’s Theatre Association (V. Ramakrishna 1993, 2012; Panikkar 2011), to the point where some in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana would readily equate Atheism with Communism. However, many Atheists, including those with explicitly affirmative stances toward Communism, criticize Communist organizations for downplaying or betraying certain aspects of their radical and potentially unpopular cultural agenda— above all their official irreligiosity—for the sake of electoral politics. This ambivalent stance toward Communism is particularly strong among those Atheists who are inspired by M. N. Roy’s Radical Humanism and his argument that official Marxism had become a dogmatic orthodoxy and “began to degenerate into a faith” (Roy 1999: 14; see also Roy 1981; Pant 2005; Talwar 2006). While the Radical Humanist movement failed to establish any lasting institutions in the region, M. N. Roy’s call for rationalism, materialist monism, individual freedom, and universalism as well as his preference for education and revitalization over against violent revolution have struck deep roots in the ideology and conceptual vocabulary of the Atheist movement (Innaiah 2012). It is indeed characteristic of the internal dynamics of the Atheist movement that the supporters of Roy’s antidogmatism are sometimes taunted for being overly dogmatic about their Radical Humanism, turning it into yet another quasi faith. I will devote more space to the third source of inspiration, the Non-Brahmin movement, because its influence is particularly

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significant for my interlocutors’ cultural politics and their project of practical implementation (i.e., the ways in which they try to put Atheism into practice). Although it is often conflated with its most famous and politically successful manifestation in Tamil Nadu (Pandian 2007), I approach Non-Brahmanism as a heterogenous discursive formation that is internally divided along lines of language, region, caste, class, gender, religion, or political affiliation. What holds this discursive formation together is, first, a critique of Brahmin predominance in social, political, and cultural matters and, second, a tendency to justify this critique at least partially with recourse to a certain interpretation of the so-called Aryan migration theory. While there is a long tradition in Indian cultural history of criticizing Brahmins as fake, unproductive, or parasitical (e.g., Halbfass 1988: chap. 15; Thapar 1989; Olivelle 1993; Narayana Rao 1993), the representational and political economy of colonial India introduced an important shift in this existing discourse because it produced a “new form of Brahmin power” (Pandian 2007: 63), which in turn provoked a new form of critique. In their function as custodians of Sanskrit culture and learning, Brahmins appeared to European Orientalists as the pinnacle of traditional knowledge and, therefore, an important class of “native informants” for projects of colonial knowledge production (Cohn 1985); as a consequence, they were also the first to profit from that knowledge by gaining access to English education. The educational privilege of Brahmins was particularly strong in Southern India, due to the comparatively high number of private educational institutions that produced a select and exclusive “mandarin class” (Frykenberg 1986: 65) of predominantly Brahmin elites. Brahmins could plug themselves into colonial structures of administration, material benefit, and authority and, moreover, use these structures to bolster their claim that Sanskrit culture represented not only Hinduism but India’s civilization and, later on, its nation (van der Veer 1994; Trautmann 1997; T. Sarkar 2013). Especially in South India, affluent Non-Brahmin communities from agricultural or merchant backgrounds, who profited from colonial restructurings of the agricultural sector and slowly increasing educational opportunities, started challenging this new colonial form of Brahmin power. Though their caste-status was low in Brahmanic schemes of ritual hierarchy, their economically dominant status enabled them to demand their share of power in the political and cultural spheres as well. Crucial for their self-assertion and their reclaiming of “self-respect” was the narrative of Aryan migration.

Introduction

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This narrative is based on a nineteenth-century theory positing that around the second millennium BCE, nomadic tribes from Central Asia migrated into the Indian subcontinent. Early Vedic texts, whose authors self-identify as Aryans (Sanskrit: arya), were interpreted as the oldest surviving sources of the contact and clash between the culture of these newcomers and that of the native peoples of the subcontinent; this culture contact has been considered to have brought forth ancient Vedic culture, which ultimately developed into Brahmanism and from there into what is today called Hinduism (Bryant 2001; Bergunder 2004; Trautmann 2006; Bronkhorst 2015). The Aryanmigration theory was developed in the larger framework of an imperial ethnological project that used the linguistic concept of language families—later on also racialized categories of physical and social anthropology and nowadays archeology and genetics—to uncover the “deep history of the world” (Trautmann 2006: 34; see also Dirks 2001; Hellmann-Rajanayagam 2004; Bryant and Patton 2005). This history was considered “deep” because it lay hidden in the structures of languages and human bodies that went beyond conscious human memory recorded in the discursive content of historical documents, like the Vedas for instance. The notion of a linguistically and racially marked “deep history” of Indian civilization fell on particularly fertile political grounds in South India, where landed Non-Brahmin elites with their stakes in agriculture could project themselves as the original “sons of the soil” and dispute the Brahmin-dominated Congress movement’s claim to national representation (Hardgrave 1965; Irschick 1969; O’Hanlon 1985; Pandian 2007; S. Ramaswamy 1997). They were furthermore backed by a sustained polemics against Brahmanic Hinduism promulgated by Christian missionaries, who were themselves often trained as philologists and considered Brahmin elites not only particularly recalcitrant to proselytization but also the main obstacle for the conversion of “lower” rungs of society (Dirks 1996). In its Non-Brahmin interpretation, the theory of Aryan migration told no longer of the genesis of Indian civilization but of its distortion, degeneration, and destruction; it told the story of the dispossession of the original Dravidian inhabitants of the subcontinent at the hands of foreign, Sanskrit-speaking, Aryan “invaders.” The reinterpretation of “migration” as “invasion” cleared the ground for a cultural politics of historical revisionism that challenged an increasingly hegemonic Brahmanic perspective on Indian civilizational history and was spearheaded by the “Self-respect movement” founded by E. V. Ramasami (Diehl 1977; Pandian 2007). It enabled reconfigurations of what anthropologists would later call “great” and “little” traditions

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(Marriott 1955), because it allowed Non-Brahmins as diverse as Dalit Neo-Buddhists, Vellalar Shaiva-Siddhantins, or Kamma NeoKshatriyas to project the cultural visions and religious ideologies of their respective communities as the original, indigenous, great tradition of India (Geetha and Rajadurai 1993; Bergunder 2004; Bate 2005; Keiko 2008). Although the Non-Brahmin movement in the Telugu speaking parts of South India was less successful politically than its counterpart in neighboring Tamil Nadu (see U. Ramaswamy 1978), it has had a deep impact on the Atheist movement in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, not least because twentieth-century Non-Brahmins like E. V. Ramasami started using the words “atheist” and “nastika” as self-designations. What distinguishes the contemporary Atheist movement’s uptake of Non-Brahmanism is its indiscriminate equation of Brahmanism with all forms of Hinduism and all forms of caste consciousness, as well as the idea that Aryan invaders did not only bring Hinduism but religion as such and thereby destroyed an original, Indian proto-Atheism; this Atheism was “proto” because it existed before there was any Theism to be negated (for a famous example of this thesis, see D. Chattopadhyaya 1969). This narrative of destruction is crucial for how atheists position themselves within Indian civilization because it explains not only the absence of Atheism from “mainstream” (as opposed to ex-centric) histories but also the negative affect and moral judgments commonly associated with it: they appear here as the effects of centuries of religious propaganda concocted by Aryan invaders in order to weaken indigenous proto-Atheism through Hindu ideological warfare. For most of my atheist interlocutors, their history begins with an ancient, pre-Vedic materialist culture that has manifested itself throughout the course of Indian history in the form of various social or religious dissenters and reform movements, the most commonly mentioned being materialist philosophers called Charvakas, the Buddha, various bhakti movements, and, to a lesser degree, certain forms of Tantrism. I agree with Quack that it is hardly possible to historically verify this narrative of precolonial continuity but disagree in his assessment that this “thin genealogy” (2012: 49) functions mainly as an argument for Atheists to repudiate accusations of being Westernized. As far as my interlocutors in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana are concerned, their historical narratives lie at the very heart of their self-understanding and are foundational for their project of putting Atheism into practice. As we will see in the following chapters, to tell and thereby rectify the history of Atheism is a central part of what it means to “become” an Atheist.

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Introduction

Structure of the Book Chapter 1 unpacks this notion of becoming an Atheist by following debates within the movement about the nature and name of Atheism and by tracing the historical preconditions of these debates to the complex translatedness of atheism/nastikatvam. What is at stake in these debates is less the search for an authoritative concept or definition of Atheism but a dispute about how it can be put into practice in a manner that is publicly perceptible as sincere. The chapter retraces how the reflexive and contested onomastics of Atheism articulate a moral ideal and conceptual grammar of practical sincerity, which underlies and regulates Atheist activism by distinguishing “talking” and “doing” as two separate yet linked categories of atheist practice. While Chapter 1 may appear abstract or less readily recognizable as “ethnographic” than the following chapters, it is in fact an attempt to understand conceptualizations of Atheism as a form of practice that is integral to Atheist activism as a reflexive project. Rather than presenting a merely descriptive doxography, the aim is to retrace how concrete debates about abstract conceptual issues are part of the practices they intend to conceptualize. Chapter 2 focuses on the kind of practices categorized as “talking” and analyzes how the autobiographic narratives of two male activists articulate the ideal of practical sincerity as a secular, ex-centric figuration of historically entrenched cultural notions of male personhood, community, and propriety. By selecting the life stories of a senior ex-Muslim and an unmarried ex-Dalit, the chapter highlights how atheist activism becomes a conduit for transforming marginalized masculinities into a positively revalued positionality of secular difference. Chapter 3 examines how Atheist practices of oral propagation are enacted in an “oratorical mode” that interpellates listeners into the relations of affect and power that structure the Atheist civilizational narrative and social imaginary of “Aryan invasion.” Focusing on the entanglement of content, narrative structure, and rhetoric strategies, I relate the performative efficacy of oral propagation to its ex-centric positionality within the historically shaped representational economy of postcolonial India. Chapter 4 turns to the category of “doing” and examines how Atheist activists utilize the sociopsychological properties of stage ­conjuring in order to expose the complex cognitive, affective, and  social mechanisms that they consider responsible for the persistence of harmful forms of “superstition.” The chapter

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contextualizes Atheist acts of exposure in relation to state-driven discourses on modernization and “scientific temper” as well as Hindu regimes of visuality. I conceptualize exposure not primarily as a tool of ­cognitive disenchantment but as an aesthetic form for making secular difference perceptible as an instance of benign pedagogic power. Chapter 5 addresses the Atheist movement’s commitment to social equality and its disavowal of religious and caste communalism. Focusing on contemporary ramifications of a colonial discourse on religious “sentiments,” the chapter approaches humanism and castelessness as a range of public practices that occur within affectively and historically structured, material spaces where they reinscribe social hierarchies into differential allocations of agency and affect. Chapter 6 describes Atheist marriage practices in relation to patriarchal and androcentric gender relations that both enable and constrain my interlocutors’ project of realizing Total Atheism as a practically sincere way of life. It analyzes the Atheist movement’s ambivalent relationship to Hindu reformist and nationalist discourses on female bodies and domesticity, which allows them to distribute the burden of embodying the ex-centricity of secular difference unequally between men and women.

Notes 1. Under this heading, first coined by Jürgen Habermas (2001), some scholars are trying to work through the entanglement between social science and the secular by examining—and frequently welcoming—a resurging relevance of religion and spirituality within public and academic spheres (e.g., Gorski et al. 2012; Braidotti et al. 2014). According to Patrick Eisenlohr (2014: 195–96), however, talk of the postsecular evokes a “contradictory scenario” because “our comparative concept of religion which seems so fundamental to the current discussion about a religious ‘revival’ and a decline of the secular is actually unthinkable without the conceptual and governmental operations separating the religious from the nonreligious that constitute such a key part of the secularization thesis.” For a similar critique, see Russell McCutcheon (2007). 2. Different streams of scholarship on the relationship between the religious and the secular have formed around critical distinctions of various cognates of the secular, like secularization (Casanova 1994; Berger 1999; R. Warner 2010), secularism (Bhargava 1998; Calhoun, Juergensmeyer, and van Antwerpen 2011; Cady and Fessenden 2013b), secularity (Taylor 2007; Schielke 2012; Lebner 2015; Bilgrami 2016), or the postsecular

Introduction

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(Habermas 2001; Gorski et al. 2012; Braidotti et al. 2014; Lloyd and Viefhues-Bailey 2015). 3. Secularity’s function as a modern grammar of power is often retraced— and critiqued—through the workings of liberal democracy and the modern nation–state, its legal systems, and its doctrine of secularism. Especially discussions of the supposed exceptionalism of “Indian secularism” show how secular activists, like the atheists with whom I am working, do not simply extend or inhabit the power of secular modernity but may in some respects, though not in others, be excluded from it. The secularism of the Indian state is sometimes considered special in its decidedly benevolent and affirmative stance toward religion in general and religious pluralism in particular. As a political project of governance, Indian secularism does not regulate religions by keeping them out of politics or the public sphere but by claiming to accommodate all religions with equal respect so as to avert the corruption of India’s unity in diversity into potentially violent forms of communalism (Bhargava 1998; Needham and Sunder Rajan 2007; Tejani 2008; Bajpai 2018). In this discourse of Indian secularism as inclusive religious pluralism, it is precisely the irreligious and especially atheism that are either ignored, explicitly excluded, or declared so marginal as to be irrelevant—by both politicians and academic observers. 4. The rapid growth of this scholarship is documented by a bibliography (updated till 2015) provided by the website of the Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network (https://nsrn.net/bibliography/ [accessed 30 November 2018]). 5. Plessner also uses the term “eccentricity” for describing the positionality specific to human beings as opposed to animals and plants. The concept of ex-centricity I develop in this book, however, is not related to Plessner’s use of the term and I certainly do not suggest that ex-centricity as I describe it, or secularity for that matter, is in any way a foundational or essential attribute of human beings. 6. This historicism is “undisciplined” because I am not trained as a historian, but I also mean something else by it: a productive crossing of disciplinary boundaries. My approach to the historicity of lived secularity resembles what Jack Halberstam calls a “queer” or “scavenger methodology that uses different methods to collect and produce information on subjects who have been deliberately or accidentally excluded from traditional studies of human behavior” (2003: 13). My aim is thus to use ethnographic research for identifying new historical themes that have so far appeared irrelevant for or unconnected to “the” history of the secular. 7. Another way to conceptualize what I mean by translatedness is the concept of translanguaging, which has been developed on the basis of post- and decolonial theory (Ortiz 1947; Glissant 1997; Mignolo 2000), cognitive linguistics, and language pedagogy. Translanguaging does not refer to a translation between “two separate languages nor to a synthesis of different language practices or to a hybrid mixture. Rather translanguaging refers

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to new language practices that make visible the complexity of language exchanges among people with different histories, and releases histories and understandings that had been buried within fixed language identities constrained by nation-states” (García and Li Wei 2014: 21). While translanguaging refers to a specific linguistic competence of bi- or multilingual speakers, I understand translatedness as an attribute of concepts or, more precisely, of the relationship between concepts and language. As such, the translatedness of concepts is the outcome of a past process of translanguaging, but the use of translated concepts by individual speakers does not require them to be bi- or multilingual. 8. In direct quotes and when referring to European discourses or academic literature, I use the lowercase without italics for atheism and its cognates. I will handle the capitalization of theism accordingly (i.e., capitalized Theism does not refer to belief in god or designate a specific form thereof; it refers to the opposite of Atheism or the Atheist movement as defined in this Introduction and Chapter 1).

Chapter 1

MENTAL REVOLUTION BECOMING AN ATHEIST IN WORD AND DEED

As soon as I became an atheist, inertia was gone. Care for life grew. Responsibility for actions grew. Reflexivity about [what I] am doing at every moment increased. In turn, idealism [adars´am] and happiness developed. In order to acquire such a new consciousness there was no need to study. There was no need for discipline. All these changes happened within me as soon as I became an atheist. —Gora, Nenu Nastikunni: 12

This chapter examines how Atheists in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana  debate what it means to become an Atheist and, more precisely, how this becoming ought to manifest in public by gaining perceptibility in words and deeds. As such, it also addresses the boundaries of the Atheist movement. While the above epigraph sounds like a conversion narrative, most of my interlocutors explicitly disavowed the category of conversion, maintaining that conversion is what happens between religions; it is therefore impossible to convert either oneself or others to Atheism. Becoming an Atheist, they argued, requires a more radical and fundamental process that transcends the realm of religious pluralism and is thus external to the logic of conversion as well as its legal regulation within the framework of Indian secularism.1 My Atheist interlocutors call this process “mental revolution” (bhavaviplavam). In a commentary on how to analyze narratives of conversion, Talal Asad (1996) has cautioned against confusing the word “conversion” with its concept on the one hand and with actual practices of conversion on the other hand. While it is of course possible to compare actual processes and narrative representations of Atheist and religious “becoming” within a shared conceptual framework of conversion, the aim of this chapter and this study as a whole lies elsewhere; instead of pondering if and how

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Atheist mental revolution differs from or overlaps with religious forms of conversion—it certainly does both—I am interested in Atheists’ claim to secular difference and their attempts at making it perceptible as a specific quality of difference. The coherence of the Atheist movement will emerge here less as a function of assent to a specific philosophy, worldview, or body of disbeliefs than a shared moral ideal and conceptual grammar of “practical sincerity” (dvikaranas´uddhi), which regulates what may count as an appropriate relationship between words and deeds in the sense of two distinct kinds of public practice. I deliberately speak of coherence because practical sincerity, as a moral ideal, is shared by other secular, progressive (Communist, feminist, Dalit, etc.), or indeed religious movements both in India and elsewhere. Hence, it neither substantially defines the uniqueness of Atheism nor delimits it through unambiguous boundaries. As a conceptual grammar, however, it regulates how my Atheist interlocutors establish a positionality from which they police, redraw, and contest boundaries precisely insofar as these are problematic and porous with regard to their environment, secular and otherwise. I argue that Atheists cohere as a discernable movement not by being in or outside substantially definable boundaries but by the positionality from which they problematize them in relation to the concept of mental revolution and through a reflexive project of (con-)fusing, disentangling, and configuring the shifting disjunctures between the word, concept, and practice of atheism/nastikatvam. By following chronic disagreements within the movement about the appropriateness of atheism/nastikatvam as a self-designation, this chapter shows how, through controversies of naming, Atheists identify and delimit different practical sites for enacting Atheism’s boundaries. As such, their debates establish the conceptual and moral grid against which the process of becoming an Atheist may unfold and become publicly perceptible—but also contestable—as a practically sincere form of secular difference. After a brief outline of the concept of mental revolution as understood by Atheist activists, the following two sections focus on how this concept is entangled with the words “atheism” and “nastikatvam” as well as the history of their mutual translations. This translation history is what allows my interlocutors to tell a very specific history of Atheism, which in turn grounds the social and affective efficacy of Atheist onomastics. The last section will then turn to the critical discussion about names, focusing particularly on how the contested use of the word “atheism/nastikatvam” articulates the conceptual framework for my interlocutor’s larger project of practically realizing

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mental revolution. I draw in this chapter mainly on speeches and writings of more or less eminent leaders or intellectuals, because they tend to press their points in clear-cut and, at times, somewhat polemic terms. This is useful for identifying a general contour of Atheist discourse, but I want to stress that the debates presented here are by no means intellectual arcana; they are very much a quotidian affair, in which most “rank and file” activists have a stake and participate actively; they are an integral and central part of Atheist activism. While I reproduce here the perspective of male interlocutors, I will address the gendered dimensions of this discourse in more detail in Chapters 2 and especially 6.

Mental Revolution: Total Atheism beyond Religious Critique In order to get a first idea about the concept of mental revolution, I want to quote from a published speech delivered in Telugu by a renowned Atheist leader, B. Ramakrishna (1936–2007), at a public literary event commemorating the beloved Telugu poet Vemana. In the wake of the editing work of British Orientalist C. P. Brown, Vemana, who is dated varyingly between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, saw a renaissance in the nineteenth century and has since advanced to one of the most popular and highly esteemed Telugu poets (Schmitthenner 2001). As his poetry is in colloquial language, he has not been included in the canon of “classical,” Sanskritized Telugu literature and has therefore earned the title “poet of the people” (prajakavi). Vemana’s renaissance as the poet of the people has to be seen in the context of the increasing consolidation of linguistically defined regional identities during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Besides grammar, the production of literary histories through canonization in printed anthologies played a crucial role in the formation of the cultural and political identity of Telugus, Tamils, Malayalis, and other linguistic groups (Nagaraju 1995; S. Ramaswamy 1997; Mitchell 2009). In this context, changing language ideologies and poetologies were intricately entwined with ideas about literary and moral propriety, which resulted in a sanitization of anthologies—much that appeared vulgar to the sensibilities of a growing urban, literate middle class was considered a result of historical corruption and thus edited out of the new, “original” texts. While this pertained above all to questions of sexuality, Atheist literary scholars like Ramakrishna have tried to show that religious dissent

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too had fallen victim to the politics of sanitizing censure and had thus been deliberately written out of Telugu and Indian literary history. In his speech, Ramakrishna (2011) argued that Vemana was in fact an atheist/nastika, by which he did not only reclaim Vemana for the Atheist movement but, in a sense, he reclaimed the (literary) essence of Telugu culture and identity itself. As part of his argument, Ramakrishna explained that Atheists are not what they are commonly made out to be. He stressed that they are not just a bunch of morally indifferent nihilists and skeptics who disregard considerations of social responsibility or concern themselves solely with repudiating religious beliefs: Atheists [nastikulu] are those who, without tolerating it, have fought back whenever any injustice, any wrongdoing, any irregularity occurred anywhere in society. When on one side religion—on another side society—on yet another side kings . . . and village elders were oppressing the common people in various ways, atheists were those who attacked them and put an end to them. The cheating of yogis, the secrets of babas, and the scandals of ammas, the intoxication of superstitious practices, the slavery of women, the difference of rich and poor, social inequalities—what is all that? Atheists are those who without compromise have carried on the fight of attacking and putting an end to all the diseases pervading society. In a word, atheists are those who strive to build an equal society—a new society. (Ramakrishna 2011: 16)

Religion (matam) figures prominently here, but it is, after all, only one item in a longer list of “diseases” (rugmata) afflicting society. All their differences of opinion notwithstanding, my interlocutors usually agree with Ramakrishna that Atheism is other than what it seems and more than disbelief in god. The crux of Ramakrishna’s speech—and the topic of this chapter—concerns the way in which these notions of “other than” and “more than” indicate a concern with labeling and names, as not everything that is named atheism/nastikatvam is “real” Atheism, whereas someone like Vemana, who is not called and did not call himself an atheist/nastikudu, may very well be an Atheist. This sort of chiasm of anonymity and pseudonymity adumbrates how the negativity of the secular (see Introduction) articulates with practices of naming and a moral discourse of sincerity as a relation between words and deeds. Atheists, so Ramakrishna went on to explain, were distinguished by what they do—namely, put atheism/ nastikatvam into practice as a “philosophical weapon” (tatvikayudham) (B. Ramakrishna 2011: 15) in their larger endeavor to change society for the better; this endeavor and its outcome are usually called “bhavaviplavam,” which I translate as “mental revolution.”

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Bhavaviplavam is a compound that qualifies the word “revolution” (viplavam) as relating to bhavam, whose polysemy refuses a neat translation into English. My interlocutors mostly use the words “idea” or “opinion” when they speak about bhavam, but it can also translate into the English words “emotion” and “feeling.”2 The organ of bhavam is manassu, which translates as “mind” as well as “heart.” As the Telugu word for “mental” (manasika) is derived from it, I chose to translate “bhavam” as “notion,” its plural “bhavalu” as “mindset,” and the concept of bhavaviplavam as “mental revolution.” I want to stress, however, that “mind” and “mental” refer here to more than the intellectual or cognitive processes involved in discarding beliefs or transforming ideas and opinions; mental revolution refers to a comprehensive and total reorientation of a person’s outlook or attitude including affective, behavioral, and social dimensions. The following quote is a concise paraphrase of the concept of mental revolution by Atheist writer Tumma Bhaskar: There are different mindsets [bhavalu] and different viewpoints [drkpathalu] in society. Among these, some have become institutions and organize people’s way of life. Although they may outwardly appear real and useful, scientifically speaking, they are unreal and in the long run they become harmful. Religion, caste, and superstitions are of that kind. When our mindsets about such [institutions] change according to science, they will without fail disappear and individual and social progress will occur. Man can attain liberation from mental slavery [bhavadasyam]. When our mindsets, which have remained fixed and immovable due to several social diseases, begin to change, it is called mental revolution. (2012: 125)

This formulation captures how the ambit of mental revolution is considered to exceed the minds of individuals and to be inextricably entwined with behavior and a collectively established and policed, hence institutional, “way of life” (jivitavidhanam). Ideas, emotions, and opinions are the mental foundation of social institutions, and one cannot change without the other; but if foundations change, institutions will “without fail” (tappaka) follow suit. Atheists consider change to be both necessary and natural, because they conceive of human civilization as inherently progressive. Civilization is a process of continuous convergence between reality, human mindsets vis-à-vis that reality, and the institutions to which these mindsets give shape. The progress of human civilization falters and degenerates into inequality and injustice when “social diseases” (rather than merely false beliefs) produce or perpetuate asynchronies or mismatches between institutions, mindsets, and scientifically defined reality.

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As we will see below and in Chapter 3, the crucial point of Atheist historiography and the social imaginary it underpins is that anachronistic institutions are not seen as spontaneous or natural but as intentionally produced “social evils” (duracaralu) and “diseases” that are strategically maintained by those who profit from them. This evil and immoral agency is mirrored by a failure on the part of its victims to realize this state of affairs. Atheists describe this failure as a condition of “mental slavery” (bhavadasyam) or “slave-mind” (banisabhavam). Mental revolution is thought to liberate them from this condition and refers thus to the process of extirpating mental slavery not only at the intellectual, emotional, and behavioral levels of individuals but also in its institutional and societal manifestations. The concept of mental slavery resonates with and is morphologically an inverted form of a term used in the theology of devotional movements (bhakti), namely dasyabhavam or dasyabhakti, which describes a specific quality of the emotional bond between deity and devotee. The latter’s love for the deity is imagined as the devotion of a selfless servant to their master, which is contrasted with other types or moods of devotion modeled on the relationship between parents and children, friends, or spouses (for an overview, see Bailey and Kesarcodi-Watson 1992). According to Atheists, the yogic theology and emotionology behind this concept, which suggests servitude to god as a form of liberation from servitude to the senses and worldly attachments, is a ruse to trick people into a voluntary submission to nonexistent deities and their representatives on earth: Brahmin priests, religious philosophers, gurus, saints, and so on. Here, the concept of mental slavery is furthermore linked to a critique of the caste system as an institution of slavery (Viswanath 2010; Mohan 2015). One of the most famous articulations of this critique is B. R. Ambedkar’s essay “Annihilation of Caste”: For slavery does not merely mean a legalised form of subjection. It means a state of society in which some men are forced to accept from others the purposes which control their conduct. This condition obtains even where there is no slavery in the legal sense. It is found where, as in the caste system, some persons are compelled to carry on certain prescribed callings which are not of their choice. (Ambedkar 2003: 276)

A third important source for the concept of mental slavery is Communist discourses criticizing Indian feudalism as a form of slavery. Since my interlocutors follow Ambedkar in locating the source of slavery beyond economic relations of production or concrete legal institutions, they also understand their project of mental

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revolution as being necessarily prior to and more encompassing than Marxist notions of revolution.3 For most of my interlocutors, Theism (astikatvam) is simultaneously a synonym and a specific historical instantiation of mental slavery. Goparaju Ramachandra Rao (1902–75), commonly known by his acronym Gora and one of the most influential Atheist intellectuals in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, has propagated such an understanding of Theism as mental slavery: “Though the forms of god have varied widely, all the types have one characteristic in common, namely that god is superior to man. . . . Belief in the existence of god is only an expression of man’s slave-mind. Slave-mind seeks a prop and an easy prop on which the slave-mind rested was a concept of god” (Gora 1975a: 14). For Gora, slave-mind is the cause of Theist beliefs and the concept of god is merely an archaic survival of our ancestors’ ignorance. He goes on to argue that human evolution is intrinsically progressive and that the development of rational faculties has inevitably proven corrosive to false religious beliefs. Therefore, the fact that those beliefs nonetheless persist proves that they are merely the effect of a more basic condition of mental slavery: When the foundations of early theism, which were based upon faith in the existence of god, were thus shaken by rationalist thought, people in whom slave-mind dominated, had to go in for props other than god. The new props are government, economic order, social custom, a view of cosmic rhythm, belief in natural order, materialism and the like. Modern man depends on props as slavishly as his forefathers depended upon divine mercy and god’s blessings. . . . Thus modern man is a godless theist. (Gora 1975a: 14)

Mental slavery is thus the archetype of belief in god, which is just one of its early historical manifestations that found institutional expression in specific religions (matalu). Gora defines theism primarily as the projection of one’s own agency and freedom onto various kinds of “props.” This leads to voluntary subordination to those props and thus causes passivity, stagnation, and the faltering of social progress. While other Atheists might put less emphasis on questions of individual freedom and focus instead on aspects like rationality or intellectual capacities (e.g., Venkatadri 2007a), they do share a concept of mental slavery as an abstract principle that only manifests—among many other things—in religions but does not originate from them. Gora, Ramakrishna, and their followers argue that atheism/nastikatvam is more than disbelief in god, simply because theism/astikatvam is more than belief in god. But why speak of theism and atheism if their

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relation to belief in god seems rather tenuous, and if they are supposed to be so much more than that?

The Excess of Atheism: Translatedness as Productive Incommensurability It is crucial to bear in mind that although the spoken and written discourse of the Atheist movement in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana is almost exclusively in Telugu, it is conceptually speaking at least bilingual and thus bears the mark of translatedness (see Introduction): I argue that, irrespective of a given interlocutor’s actual linguistic capacities or the language they happen to use in a concrete situation, terms like “atheism” or “nastikatvam” are always already translated. Furthermore, the excess of Atheism, which registers most explicitly yet not exclusively in the insistence that Atheism is more than disbelief, is intricately related to its translatedness. However, it cannot simply be reduced to a semantic excess of the Telugu word “nastikatvam” over its English translation or vice versa. Rather, it is the result of an ongoing “interactional history” (van der Veer 2001: 12; see also 2014) of reciprocal or circular translations. Once initiated, these interactional translations form an intrinsic part of the conceptual history of either term and thus inform the boundary work as well as the internal dynamics of the Atheist movement. I will first look at this process of translation before dealing in the following sections with its consequences. The term “nastika” may have originated in the context of Vedic ritual (Heesterman 1968), but its locus classicus is in Sanskrit dialectics and sophistic disputation as well as doxographic texts, where it designates a person who refutes or denies an argument or doctrine. Nastika derives from Sanskrit na asti: “it is not.” Most philosophical schools were using the term for their respective rivals, and it was only by the sixteenth century that a fixed list of nastikas emerged, which comprised Buddhists, Jains, and the materialists called Charvakas (Nicholson 2010). This fixed link between the category of nastika and specific schools of thought had occurred over a period of several centuries and was, needless to say, part of much larger sociopolitical, ritual, philosophical, economic, and cultural transformations, one of which was the consolidation of what Nicholson calls a “Proto-Hindu identity” (2010: 23). As a result, nastika designated no longer a flexible role in debate or ritual but something that one is or is not, namely the constitutive other of that proto-Hindu identity. According to the

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conventions of Sanskrit doxographic discourse, this identity finds expression in six philosophical schools (dars´ana), which were classified as astika because they accepted—to varying extents, it must be noted—the Vedas as a valid source of knowledge about the normative matters of cosmic, moral, and ritual order called dharma.4 The fixed list of nastikas included all those who rejected this Vedic order and the authority of Brahmins, who claimed to be the custodians of the Veda, its language, its exegetic literatures, and ritual implementations. Nastikas, therefore, challenged not only a specific social and cosmic imaginary, but also a whole system of ritual, social, economic, and political privileges that were grounded in Brahmin authority. Those who affirmed this imaginary with all its ritual and literary traditions were astikas, and those who denied it or, in the classical Sanskrit formulation, “reviled” (√nind) it were nastikas. The gradual consolidation of a homogenized, Brahmanic, proto-Hindu identity went along with what Sheldon Pollock calls “totalizing conceptualizations of society” (1993: 278): imaginaries of a unified, naturalized, and stable social order that may be perceived as being threatened by “alternative life worlds” (i.e., equally totalized “antiworlds” [Pollock 1993: 278]). In the political situation of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the origin of such a social threat to Brahmanic social order was frequently identified with Muslim Sultanates, because the classical nastikas of doxographic literature were either no real threat at that time (Buddhists, Jains) or had long since disappeared as a living tradition (Charvakas). Contemporary literary and epigraphic sources, however, began to cast Muslims in already familiar and much older symbols of demonic or heretic otherness, which had previously been used for nastikas:5 In the development of an [Hindu] ethnicity, earlier myths and images were often appropriated to provide an all-important illusion of continuity with ancient times. By representing themselves as extending far back in time, communities could claim to be natural entities, inherent to the social world. Although the antiquity of many ethnic groups is suspect, in terms of the continuity of actual membership, the symbols that represent the community’s cohesion may indeed possess prior histories. (Talbot 1995: 721)

This applies not only to symbols of the self but also of the other, and the figure of the nastika was such a symbol with a prior history. Beyond the narrow confines of Sanskrit doxography under the aegis of mostly Brahmin and other elite philosophers, it had become part of a larger xenological repertoire that had circulated for centuries across the boundaries of different genres, languages, media, and social

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groups. Besides nastikas, this repertoire included pasandas (heretics), mlecchas (foreigners), dasyus (barbarians), raksasas (demons), asuras (anti-gods), as well as ethnic or geographical terms like yavana (Greek) or turuska (Turkish) (Thapar 1971; Parasher-Sen 2004; Doniger O’Flaherty 1971; Doniger 1976). Since these terms had been used to designate very different things throughout their conceptual history, their actual referents were malleable and could remain vague. It is precisely due to this vagueness, however, that their semantics of ethnic, social, ritual, doctrinal, linguistic, or cultural otherness could also be made to overlap and evoke one another. They served as perfect vehicles to signify an increasingly generalized and totalized “outside.” This outside helped to consolidate an “inside” that found its most explicit and normative expression in Brahmanic ideologies of varnas´ramadharma (Olivelle 1993) and the caste system (Dumont 1970).6 In this context, the category “nastika” refers no longer to a philosophical opponent but to an outsider of a totalized and naturalized social and historical imaginary, fashioned along the lines of a hegemonic Brahmanic discourse. All its intricacies and vagaries notwithstanding, this conceptual history is sedimented in a no doubt diffuse but potent cultural memory that links the word “nastika” to notions of social danger, cultural otherness, and moral depravity. In order to properly understand its present-day functioning in the Atheist movement, however, it is necessary to further retrace how “nastikatvam” came to be translated into the theological category of “atheism” and its European socioreligious imaginaries. Since others have provided synoptic overviews of the conceptual history of atheism in Europe (Minois 1998; Weltecke 2010; Bullivant and Ruse 2013), I limit myself in the following to those processes of translation that are immediately relevant for my discussion. In trying to identify what they were up against, Christian missionaries in India started translating the Sanskrit word “dharma” as “religion.” South Asian nationalists, apologists, and social ­reformers of different hues gradually took up this translation, which was the decisive step in transforming Nicholson’s proto-Hindu identity not only into the “world religion” of Hinduism but also into a foundation of the Indian nation (Sontheimer and Kulke 1991; van der Veer 1994). Although the translation of dharma as religion is by now well-entrenched through dictionaries, language pedagogy, and actual usage, it is neither without friction nor without alternative. When my Telugu interlocutors talk about concrete religions or religion in general, they use the word “matam,” whereas they tend to use the Telugu word “dharmam” as a technical term related specifically to

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Brahmanic Hinduism. They furthermore use the word theism/astikatvam as a synonym for mental slavery and as a superordinate category, under which matam, dharmam, religion, as well as a whole range of other categories can be subsumed (e.g., superstition or magic, but also different kinds of nonreligious “-isms”). A crucial role in the pairing of the binaries of astikatvam/nastikatvam with theism/atheism fell to a third, mediating category: niris´varavadam. This originally Sanskrit term translates literally as “atheism” and, as it so happens, all our classical nastikas of the doxographic literature were classificatory niris´varavadis: they either claimed that a personal god (Sanskrit: is´vara) was not the origin of the universe or that he was soteriologically irrelevant (Joshi 1966). But it is worth reiterating that this was not the reason why Buddhist, Jain, and Charvaka philosophers were considered nastikas. Several of the astika philosophies too were or had been at some point in their history atheist in that specific sense, including Mimamsa, arguably the most astika school of all (D. Chattopadhyaya 1969; Nicholson 2010; Quack 2011). As I mentioned above, the decisive criterion for nastikatvam had nothing to do with the denial of god or—anachronistically speaking—religion; rather, nastikas were those who rejected the authority or certain interpretations of the Veda, the supremacy of its Brahmin custodians, and their sociocosmic ideology of varnas´ramadharma. And yet, to translate nastika as atheist must have seemed appropriate to European Orientalists and Indian pundits alike because of the “coincidental” overlap between nastikas and niris´varavadis within the classificatory logic of late medieval doxography. Since religion evoked theism within a European, Christian framework and was being translated as dharma, which evoked astikatvam within the dominant framework of Brahmanic proto-Hinduism, it must have seemed equally appropriate to translate astikatvam as “theism”—thus reinforcing by implication the translation of its opposite, nastikatvam, as “atheism.” Another intervening factor was the orthodoxy/heterodoxy binary that European Orientalists invoked to interpret Sanskrit doxographic discourse. Especially in its late medieval form encountered by Orientalists, this discourse was heavily shaped by authors belonging to different streams of Vedanta—an explicitly astika and Brahmanic philosophical tradition—and looked a lot like an orthodoxy in the Christian sense (Nicholson 2010: 176–79).7 Against the background of Enlightenment discourses criticizing Christian dogmatism and clericalism (Harrison 1990), the customary identification of Brahmins with priests would also contribute to making the translation of astikatvam as both “orthodoxy” and “theism” plausible; and hence nastika

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not only as “heterodox” but also as “atheist” and “nonreligious.” After all, in European history, atheism had been used as an accusation for heresy and heterodoxy long before it came to signify a total denial of god or religion (Weltecke 2010). The “consequentiality” of these translations has to be understood as an effect resulting from the mapping of two complex conceptual fields, which allowed collating rather heterogeneous phenomena with very distinct historical trajectories, social imaginaries, and symbolic networks. Put into a sequential order, this translation process looks like this: Nastikatvam is the opposite of dharma, which is Hinduism, which is a religion, which is like Christianity, which is belief in god, whose opposite is atheism; hence nastikatvam is atheism. In its two-dimensionality, such a series will, of course, fail to capture historical complexities like, for example, the coincidental overlap of nastikatvam and niris´varavadam in Sanskrit doxography, the role of Islamicate Sultanates in consolidating a totalized conception of Hindu social order, or the impossibility to reduce Christianity simply to belief in god. More importantly, it flattens over two millennia of social and political history in Europe and India and fades out the specific historical context in which translations are established—in this case, the colonial political economy and public sphere of British India; then again, I argue that this is precisely what translations do. If the above sequential order seems contrived and brittle, that just goes to show how much work has to be invested in making incongruous translations plausible, and how much room their interstices leave for ambiguity. At the same time, the historicity, ambiguity, and inevitable incongruity of translations—just like the (con-)fusion of words with concepts and practices—are not just nuisances for the philologically inclined scholar or the analytically precise cultural anthropologist. Rather, I propose to understand them as significant sites for social praxis, new meanings, and political potentialities. The lingering incommensurability between dharma and “religion,” for example, did not go unnoticed by the very people involved in institutionalizing their reciprocal translations. Missionary and imperialist discourses tried to establish Christian and European supremacy by arguing that Hindu dharma is a deficient form of religion. Hindu apologists, by contrast, retorted that dharma is indeed a specific form of religion, namely a superior one that transcends the category of religion (Viswanathan 1989; Hudson 1995; Bergunder 2010). Advocates of a so-called Hindu Renaissance as diverse as Debendranath Tagore, Swami Vivekananda, Aurobindo Ghose, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, and Annie Besant opposed the eternal (Sanskrit: sanatana) and

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all-encompassing (Sanskrit: sarvavyapaka) way of life called dharma to the historical and divisive nature of religion; while dharma was seen as a holistic totality, religion was criticized for creating artificial, humanmade divisions, not only between different religions but also between the religious and the secular (Radice 1999; Halbfass 1988). The factual translation of dharma as “religion” became thus the discursive site of its own contestation and established itself from its very inception under the sign of an incomplete ­commensurability—albeit a ­productive one that has fed into projects as diverse as Christian proselytizing, social reform, Hindu revitalization, and anticolonial nationalism. I asked above why Atheists would choose to stick with the term atheism/nastikatvam despite insisting that what they do and want is “more” than disbelief in god. This choice, I argue, is owed to a large extent to the productively incomplete commensurability between atheism and nastikatvam and the historical context of the Non-Brahmin movement within which this translation first gained political traction (see Introduction). Irrespective of actual forms of lived atheism or the historical use of the term in Europe, atheism’s etymology and lexical morphology links it tightly to the realm of theology and—at least within the secular episteme of post-Enlightenment modernity—to questions of belief. While the semantics of “nastikatvam” is more obviously concerned with sociopolitical questions and only tangentially, if at all, with theology in a narrow sense, it is precisely due to this partial incommensurability with atheism that its factual translatedness as “atheism” allows its sociopolitical purport to gain all the more salience. In other words, atheism/nastikatvam’s incomplete translatedness affords an ongoing debate about translatability and makes it possible to insist on the need to constantly emphasize that it is more than disbelief. At the same time, the coherence of its translatedness is guaranteed by partial commensurabilities in other respects, one of the most important being that, historically, both terms were used primarily as invectives against dissenters and philosophical or social outsiders. The commensurability with regard to their sociohistorical use as disparaging exonyms, however, adds to the translation’s overall productive incompleteness because it furthermore compounds the semantic excess of atheism/nastikatvam toward a sense of alterity. Reclaiming atheism/nastikatvam as a self-designation thus entails an inversion of its pragmatic function as an exonym and thereby implies a reinterpretation of its denotational and historical referents. Atheism/nastikatvam is thus heavily invested in the past, partly because of its own conceptual and translation history, and partly because of the histories that have and can be told with it. Through

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this double investment, where the translational history of concepts meets the history that these concepts jointly afford to articulate in the present, the excess of Atheism links up with its alterity and makes Atheism not only “more” than disbelief but fundamentally “other” than what it seems. In the following, I focus on how this translationally reinforced linkage of excess and alterity conditions not only what sort of history can be told about Atheism but also what this history entails more generally for the project of becoming an Atheist through mental revolution.

The Alterity and Affective Economy of Atheism Practices of translation, the use of translated concepts, and assumptions about translatability do not occur within empty conceptual space but always within shifting epistemological and political frameworks, where they are made to perform ideological work (Rafael 1988; Sakai 2006; Hanks and Severi 2014; Gal 2015). As already mentioned in the Introduction, in colonial South India, the translation of nastikatvam as “atheism” gained considerable sociopolitical relevance as certain dominant Non-Brahmin castes started using it as a self-designation in their attempt to assert themselves within the political economy of Madras Presidency. In contrast to the political aspirations and ultimate success of the Tamil strand of Dravidian Non-Brahmanism in independent India, the members of the emerging Atheist movement in the Telugu speaking parts of South India concentrated on social reform efforts and cultivated varying political loyalties with Communists, Congress, and Non-Brahmin parties (U. Ramaswamy 1978; Keiko 2008). They nonetheless shared the basic premise of the historical narrative of “Aryan invasion,” which placed the translatedness of atheism/nastikatvam and its use as a self-designation into the context of what M. S. S. Pandian calls the “transitive” (2007: 188) logic of Non-Brahmin critique. The word “Brahmin” referred here not merely to those who belonged to a Brahmin caste but had become an abstract trope that could evoke and bundle everything from which various Non-Brahmin movements wanted to distance themselves, be it Hindu gods, supernaturalism, the caste system, North-Indian hegemony, centralism, Sanskrit, Hindi, foreign invasions (whether by Aryans, Muslims, or the British), the Brahmin-dominated Congress movement, or abstract notions like social inequality, patriarchy, economic exploitation, or political authoritarianism. In short, everything that was considered wrong with Indian society could be transitively

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linked to the simultaneously abstract and historical trope of the Brahmin, the astika, the Theist. For my Atheist interlocutors, the gist of this critical history is that the religious and cultural complex of Brahmanic Hinduism and the caste system do not represent the true nature of Indian civilization, but merely ideological tools meant to secure social, economic, and political inequalities by disguising them as an eternal and lawful moral order of cosmic and social duties (dharma/religion). Not unlike Christian missionaries before them, Atheists claim that Brahmins started fabricating Hindu scriptures, epics, mythologies, legends, and so on as ideological instruments of oppression and exploitation. The Telugu word for ideology is bhavajalam, a net (jalam) of ideas (bhavam), which functions in this case like a mental snare: an ensnarling web of lies that keeps people trapped in mental slavery. This narrative of Brahmanic Hinduism, whose historical genesis and conceptual tellability rest on the translation of atheism/nastikatvam, provides the blueprint for an abstract concept of societal or civilizational history that revolves centrally around notions of insincerity. The two interrelated categories of “ideology” (bhavajalam) and “mental slavery” (bhavadasyam) provide a stabilizing grid for the complex and shifting amalgamations of deception, ignorance, duplicity, false consciousness, habituation, fear, social pressure, and so on that texture the varying formal or informal—and in their details not necessarily unanimous—historical narratives told by my interlocutors (for written examples, see Gora 1989; B. Ramakrishna 2010; C. V. 2015). The production of theist/astika ideology usually figures as a rather straightforward form of intentional and strategic insincerity, which is also recognizable as an instance of the traditional trope of the unproductive Brahmin who uses religion and philosophy, or rather “sophistry” (tarkam), to justify and maintain his privileged and parasitical position within society. The insincerity of mental slavery, by contrast, is subtler because it is indirect; it is the effect of ideologically induced and maintained fear, ignorance, and poverty and hence a form of heteronomy. But Atheist etiologies of mental slavery also leave room for more agentive or opportunistic forms of duplicity, like lip service, superficial compliance with norms of “respectability” (maryada), resigned habituation, and even—echoing the Marxist metaphor of religion–as–opium—pleasurable distraction. Before engaging more thoroughly with the concept of sincerity in the next section, however, it is necessary to further unpack the notion of Atheism’s alterity.

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Since Atheists tend to conceive of human nature as inherently progressive, insincerity is the glue that arrests civilizational development and gives rise to all the social evils they seek to eradicate. It is precisely because they consider insincerity to be pernicious for human society, if not outright opposed to human nature, that its continued reproduction out of the imbrication of ideology and mental slavery requires explanation. Here lies, according to Atheists, the real origin and function of the Sanskrit xenological repertoire through which Brahmins sought to vilify their opponents by branding them as forces of chaos and ignominy. Those who revolted or saw through the ideology of Hinduism were defamed as demons, antigods, heretics, barbarians, or—arguably the most iconically anti-Hindu of them all—atheists/nastikulu. Starting with the Veda itself, Hinduism appears here as a big smear campaign, artfully contrived to have people acquiesce into their own exploitation and to neutralize those who would refuse to be dispossessed of their lands, their civilization, and their self-respect. The vast majority of India’s population is thus not only trapped in an exploitative social order but—this is the crux of mental slavery—has for centuries been induced to resent and fear those who have in fact tried to liberate them. It is against this background that my interlocutors assert the alterity of Atheism and insist that it is not what it is commonly made out to be. In fact, the consistent misrepresentation of atheism/nastikatvam is the cornerstone of mental slavery, and its undoing therefore requires the restitution of its true meaning. While the recognition and rectification of this alterity certainly implies a redefinition, it also exceeds the domain of semantics, etymology, or conceptual history; it demands a more comprehensive and fundamental mental revolution. Here, it is helpful to revisit Ramakrishna’s speech from the beginning of this chapter in order to illustrate how questions of semantics operate as conduits for an affective and moral politics of sincerity encoded in the historically invested notions of ideology, mental slavery, and mental revolution. B. Ramakrishna made it an explicit topic of his speech that the identification of Vemana’s atheism/nastikatvam—and with it the restitution of its true meaning—is a highly sensitive and precarious thing to do. At the beginning of his speech, he felt the need to preemptively soothe his audience: “Please don’t be agitated as soon as you hear the word atheism. There is absolutely no need to be agitated” (B. Ramakrishna 2011: 15). He anticipated affective reactions like “alarm” or “anxiety” (kan˙garu), “malice” (asuya), or “annoyance” (ciraku), and promises that his analysis will be based on “facts” (tatvalu) and reasoning alone.

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He then urged his listeners to cultivate “courage” (dhairyam), “forbearance” (sahanam), “commitment” (cittas´uddhi), and “self-control” (nigraham) in order to be able to “stomach” (min˙gudupadu) and “digest” (jirniñcu) those facts (2011: 8–9). Ramakrishna was evidently aware that his historiographic endeavor to reinscribe Atheism into Indian civilization via the Telugu literary canon and to reconceptualize it as a moral project of social reconstruction (san˙ghanirmanam) would not come to fruition unless it was borne by a kind of emotional labor with regard to the visceral affects unleashed by the word “nastikatvam.” Ramakrishna is not worried about his listeners’ intellectual capacity to comprehend his reasoning; he worries that the mere use of the word “nastikatvam” will incapacitate them to “stomach” and “digest” his arguments. In fact, the nominalization “nastikatvam” is not very common in spoken Telugu. When I explained to people I met on the street or in public transport that I had come to India to do research on nastikatvam, some did not associate anything at all with the term. When I said that I was working with atheists/nastikulu or mentioned a local organization, that was more likely to ring a bell: “Oh, those who say there is no god, right?” Frequently, I perceived a sort of hesitance and a need for confirmation as far as the meaning of the word was concerned: “No god . . . right?” We will see below why it is significant that Atheists are usually described by what they say rather than by what they believe. In any case, a denial of god appears to be the primary connotation of atheism/nastikatvam, but a lingering uncertainty about who Atheists are—or what they say and do—indicates that there is indeed something “more” to it. Atheists often explained to me that irrespective of its etymological or theological meaning, “nastikudu” was first and foremost an abuse for an immoral, careless, irresponsible, or untrustworthy person to be better avoided. Shariff Gora, a very active member of the Atheist movement, whom we will get to know better in the following chapter, narrated how in his youth the word “atheism” was “not to be touched”: Actually, earlier, you cannot get the atheist subject in any schoolbooks and all. They were never talking.8 Because that subject itself is something, like, very fearful and that is not to be touched. In school, I have not heard this word other than as an abusive word. That is, “atheist” is an abusive word in our [language], you know. If you want to abuse somebody: “That fellow is an atheist. . . .” They used to say like that. That means: this is a bad fellow. Like that, the word was used like that. So, you can’t get it in any books, in your [school] subjects, in those days. I am talking about fifty, sixty years back.

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Other interlocutors told me that they were ostracized or boycotted by their families, neighbors, or village communities for openly professing to be atheists/nastikulu, that it may cause difficulties for being hired or remaining employed and, perhaps most serious, that it often poses a considerable obstacle for arranging marriages. While the degree of anxiety associated with the term might have decreased since Shariff Gora’s childhood, there is still a sense of wickedness or taboo of which Atheists themselves, as we have seen in Ramakrishna’s speech, are very conscious. For Ramakrishna, atheism/nastikatvam is a “philosophical weapon” not only for its cosmological or theological purport, but for the historically accumulated, affective charge conjured by the sheer act of its articulation. By associating Vemana with atheism/ nastikatvam, Ramakrishna tried to disrupt the “affective economy” of the Sanskrit xenology that is based on the discursive contiguity of the atheist/nastikudu with other “sticky words” (S. Ahmed 2004a: 122), such as immorality, demons, untrustworthiness, depravity, foreignness, barbarity, and more. Atheists describe the debased state of mental slavery as an entrapment in this affective economy, which may render people incapable of cognitively grasping the truth, even though it is expounded to them in all clarity and facticity. Or, even worse, the odium of atheism/nastikatvam may lead them to disavow what they have in fact understood and dissimulate their state of mind out of fear, anxiety, or opportunistic conformism; either way, the result is insincerity. By naming a popular and beloved personality like Vemana an atheist/nastika, Ramakrishna did not only redefine the denotational meaning of that label or make a historical claim that Vemana did not believe in gods; he restored sincerity to Vemana and thereby enacted his own mental revolution. He did so not primarily or necessarily because he “persuaded” his listeners, about which we know nothing, but because he was able to “stomach” the naming of atheism/­ nastikatvam and thus demonstrated that he, unlike his audience, had thrown off the yoke of mental slavery. By naming a beloved personality like Vemana an atheist/nastikudu, Ramakrishna became himself an Atheist—with capital A—while his listeners turned into mental slaves whose potential liberation was yet to come. The example of Ramakrishna’s speech shows that the historically invested, translational incompleteness of “Atheism”—its excess and alterity—is productive as it sets the parameters for its practical completion as a heterogenous process in time and across a social space fragmented into Atheists and different kinds of Theists (ideologues and slaves). In Chapter 3, I will discuss in more detail the triadic structuration

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of this Atheist social imaginary and especially its significance for the relationship between oral propagation and persuasion. But first, it is necessary to examine more closely how my interlocutors debate among themselves what it means to become and to be an Atheist. This debate will show that public enactments of mental revolution, like Ramakrishna’s act of naming, are fragile and disputable achievements, which remain always vulnerable to contestations regarding their sincerity. In fact, practices of naming and their reflexive uptake in critical onomastics of Atheism are a prime site where my interlocutors articulate what I gloss as a moral ideal of “practical sincerity.” This ideal regulates how Atheist activists perceive, authenticate, or call into question the nature and sincerity of their own and others’ mental revolutions. The following foray into the critical onomastics of Atheism thus links the question of Atheism’s semantic and affective excess and alterity to a semiotic and moral ideology of sincerity, which informs the Atheist movement’s project of practical implementation, as I will retrace it throughout the following chapters.

Practical Sincerity and the Onomastics of Atheism In speech act theory as well as its critical uptake in linguistic anthropology, sincerity figures primarily as a condition of felicity and is usually discussed in relation to the role of intentions for producing meaningful (linguistic) interaction and moral responsibility (Austin 1962; Searle 1970; Duranti 2015). Initially, anthropologists sought to demonstrate ethnographically that the attribution of intentions— what came to be called mind-reading—is not a universal or necessary aspect of how people represent, make sense of, or morally judge their own and others’ actions (e.g., Rosaldo 1982; Appadurai 1985; Rosen 1995). In a later phase of this debate, scholars emphasized that attitudes toward and concepts of intention and sincerity are not culturally determined and permanently fixed; rather, they are contingent on interactional situations and power relations within specific historical contexts marked by conflicting ideas about human selves and their semiotic capacities (Robbins 2001; Keane 2002, 2007; Asad 2003, 2011a; Bate 2009, 2010; Lempert 2012; N. Roberts 2012). The understanding of—or rather preoccupation with—­sincerity as a question of uncoerced and transparent public expression of ­otherwise internal and opaque intentions of (ideally) autonomous individuals thus turned out to be part of a specifically modern semiotic ideology whose ideal type is usually abstracted from European moral

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and political philosophy and/or versions of Protestant missionary discourse. A major thrust of current scholarship has been to retrace how this semiotic ideology has circulated through colonial and postcolonial pathways of capitalist political and cultural economies, and how it is interwoven with shifting forms of neo-/liberal governance and regimes of political secularism in the institutional framework of modern nation–states. The central issue is thus no longer the quasi ontological question of whether particular people are mind-readers or not, but the genealogical question of how and to which effects they have adopted, transformed, or resisted the semiotic ideology of modernity. Thus, the notion of sincerity constitutes a discursive site where people define different kinds of action in relation to ideas about human subjectivity, moral accountability, and institutional frameworks. In this section, I am neither pursuing a genealogy—whether European or Indian—of the concept of sincerity nor am I trying to gauge the extent to which my interlocutors’ discourse around sincerity converges with or diverges from a presupposed ideal type of secular modernity; according to the methodological principle of presentism suggested in the Introduction, I assume sincerity’s translatedness and focus on its present use as a preliminary but necessary step for charting a pragmatic field, rather than merely a word or concept, as the starting point for a possible, subsequent historical/cultural contextualization. I therefore concentrate on the way in which Atheist activists define different kinds, contexts, and realms of practice and thereby establish a conceptual grid on which claims to sincere Atheism as a form of mental revolution become a matter of public perceptibility and debate rather than mind-reading. As we will see below, sincerity inaugurates yet another register of translation, namely the question of translating Atheism into practice. The ongoing controversy within the Atheist movement about the role and appropriateness of atheism/ nastikatvam as a public name serves as a particularly apt point of entry into this debate. Jacob Copeman (2015) describes how rationalists in India deliberately use personal names that are either devoid of all markers of caste and religious belonging or combine several such markers, so as to confuse their referential function. He conceptualizes such acts as “secular onomastic experimentation” (2015: para. 6) whose rationale assumes that names have concrete effects on social relations (e.g., by facilitating caste discrimination or interreligious prejudice). Copeman argues, “Secular names do not simply reflect an ideology but are designed to iteratively produce a particular kind

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of intersubjective sensibility” (2015: para. 34). What makes these names and the sensibility they produce secular is their “purification” from religion, which “concerns less a move toward secular or ration­ alist piety or virtue than a move towards productive not-knowing and disidentification” (Copeman 2015: para. 23). He conceptualizes secular names as “a form of speech act that seeks to undo things with words” (2015: para. 51)—and those things are caste and religion. I want to engage this concept of onomastic experimentation by expanding it, because my interlocutors in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana extend their experiments beyond personal names to the level of their movement as a whole and the nature of their entire project of social reconstruction. While the notion of piety may be unsuited, I want to show that what is at stake in the project of Total Atheism is indeed a kind of “secular virtue,” namely a specific moral ideal of sincerity, which is based on a manipulation of the intersubjective sensibilities mobilized by the affective economy of “atheism/ nastikatvam.” Since Copeman conceptualizes onomastic experimentations as speech acts, he consequently asks about their conditions of felicity and mentions that, even within rationalist circles, it is disputed whether names can really produce significant and lasting social change. By paying attention to the reflexivity of this dispute, I will retrace how Atheist practices of naming articulate a critical onomastics that negotiates a specific virtue of sincerity as its own condition of felicity. In order to do so, I want to revisit Gora, whom I have already quoted above and in the epigraph of the chapter, because he is one of the most famous and influential Atheist activists in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. Like Ramakrishna, to whom Gora was a mentor, Gora self-identified as an atheist/nastikudu and did so in a programmatic way. Gora was not only an influential Atheist leader but also a staunch Gandhian. In what is likely his most famous book, he recounts a conversation he remembers to have had with Mohandas K. Gandhi where he justifies his use of the word “atheism”: [Gandhi]: You have tried atheism sufficiently long. Now, you give up the term atheism. It does not help your work. [Gora]: I am very well aware that the term atheism is a condemned word. The Oxford dictionary gives “godlessness” as the meaning of atheism and “wickedness” as one of the meanings of “godlessness.” I know, Bapu, what odium is attached to the term atheism. Yet I have taken it up deliberately, because it is the only word that inspires full self-confidence and complete social outlook in man. I regard that atheism represents the progressive tendencies in civilization. (Gora 2010, 54—italics in original)

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This conversation, or Gora’s recollection of it, was in English because Gandhi did not speak Telugu. Irrespective of this, Gora started to publish more extensively in English in the last decade before his death in order to forge links to an international scene of secular activism, mostly in the United States, Australia, and Europe. As part of this effort, he launched an English language monthly called “The Atheist,” whose first issue appeared in 1969. The journal’s title caused a controversy among Gora’s supporters about whether “atheism” is an appropriate translation of “nastikatvam” and an apt label for his project of social reconstruction. Gora responded to this discussion in the same way he had countered Gandhi’s objection, asserting that atheism would “awaken all men to a sense of honour and ambition,” as it “helps them to feel free and to stand on their feet” (Gora 1969: 2). I want to suggest that Gora’s switch of linguistic code from Telugu to English in the later stages of his activist career highlighted an already existing translatedness of Atheist discourse and thus triggered a new iteration of an ongoing debate. Though Gora seldom indicated the sources of his ideas, his early Telugu writings bear a clear imprint of “Western” discourse via figures such as Charles Bradlaugh, Robert Ingersoll, Sartre, or Karl Marx. However, the matter of names appears equally prominent in his Telugu writings, where he rejects niris´varavadam as negative and too narrowly linked to disbelief in god (see above) and contrasts it to nastikatvam as a positive or “constructive” (nirmanatmakamaina) way of life (Gora 1990: 94–95; see also Lavanam 1989). While the distinction of niris´varavadam and nastikatvam elaborates in a Telugu register what I addressed as the excess and alterity of Atheism, the comparison or juxtaposition of precisely these two terms derives its poignancy from the translatedness of both as “atheism.” In order to render their distinction in English, and forestall the negative reactions he had previously received, Gora went on to develop the English concept of “Positive Atheism” (Gora 1972), which he then retranslated in Telugu as nirmanatmakamaina nastikatvam. I mention these philological intricacies primarily to show that under conditions of translatedness, the choice of linguistic code was quite immaterial for Gora’s claims about the inspiring, awakening, and freeing effects of appropriating the calumniated word “atheism/ nastikatvam” as a self-designation. Its transformative power transpires also in Gora’s more personal descriptions of how he became an Atheist, one of which I have reproduced as this chapter’s epigraph. There, Gora reiterates twice that his transformation—his adoption of care, responsibility, reflexivity, effort, and so on—occurred “as soon as [he] became an atheist” (nastikunni avagane) (Gora 1990: 12). His

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account contains a sort of tautological slippage where the cultivation of an actual atheist/nastika way of life is not the cause but the effect of becoming an atheist/nastikudu; it is not the effect of study (caduvu), discipline (sadhana), or the development of an appropriate consciousness (caitanyam), but an epiphenomenon of being able to name oneself, to openly profess: Nenu nastikunni/“I am an atheist” (this is also the title of the anthology where this essay appeared). In order to understand this folding back of a process of becoming into an act of naming, it is necessary to look more closely at how Gora frames the difference between Theism and Atheism in relation to actions and agency. We have seen above that he equates Theism and mental slavery with a more or less willing submission to supposedly superior powers and, therefore, defines his Positive Atheism as the opposite: a socially responsible exercise of freedom. As a consequence, there is no such thing as Theist practice because every kind of human practice requires some form of freedom (sveccha), effort (prayatnam), and agency (kartrtvam)—even an ostensible relinquishing of agency to a supposedly superior will. Gora argues that Theists are in fact anonymous Atheists, as they may very well claim that everything depends on the will of God (or another superior force) but, especially in meeting their basic needs of survival, everyone ultimately relies solely on their own effort: To the extent that they [human beings] are making efforts and are acquiring objective knowledge out of a desire to survive, they effectively reject theist doctrine and adhere to an atheist outlook. To the extent that they abandon effort, become idle, and resign themselves entirely to God’s will, they effectively follow a theist outlook. Because they are talking about theism while they are practicing atheism, deceit is developing in them.” (Gora 1989: 143–44)

People may adhere to a “theist outlook” (astika drkpatham) out of mental slavery—or merely profess it for ideological reasons—but either way, this entails a form of “deceit” (mosam) of self or others and hence insincerity, because: “In practice everyone is an atheist! Theism and atheism are distinguished solely by mindsets” (Gora 1989: 11). The onomastic speech act of openly professing to be atheist/nastika is transformative because it realigns practice and mind and thus restores what can be called an “Atheist virtue” of sincerity; a virtue for which Gora coined the Sanskritized term “dvikaranas´uddhi”: For social reconstruction one moral principle is indispensable. That is trikaranas´uddhi. “Trikaranas´uddhi” means the consistency of thoughts, words, and deeds. A notion in the mind is revealed through words and deeds. Unexpressed notions will expire in one’s interiority [lolona samasipotayi]. Society is not concerned with that kind. Therefore, for people

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[living] in society, “dvikaranas´uddhi” is more important. Dvikaranas´uddhi means a match between words and deeds. That is, to act like one talks, and to talk like one acts. Therein is no room for secrecy or deceit. (Gora 1989, 24–25)

Since dvikaranas´uddhi is a rather arcane term, it is hardly used in ordinary conversation, and most of my Atheist interlocutors tend to use the word “nijayiti” (honesty or integrity) instead. The maxim “Act like you talk and talk like you act,” however, is used in a remarkably consistent way to gloss the meaning of nijayiti. Gora’s distinction of trikaranas´uddhi and dvikaranas´uddhi, which can be literally translated as “purity of threefold practice” and “purity of twofold practice” respectively, captures precisely how this understanding of sincerity deemphasizes the relevance of intentions by foregrounding practices, and more precisely talking and doing as two different kinds of practices. The existence and ultimate inscrutability of people’s interiority is circumvented by redirecting attention to a publicly perceptible—and therefore socially relevant—matching of words and deeds. I therefore translate both dvikaranas´uddhi and nijayiti as “practical sincerity” in order to convey this emphasis on practice and publicness. The notion of practical sincerity connects to a larger moral discourse on duplicity in South Asia and to what Arjun Appadurai (1990) calls a Hindu “topography of the self” (see also Chapter 2). He argues that the felicity of practices of praise, for example, depend neither on the sincerity of the eulogist’s feelings of admiration nor on the satisfaction of the one being lauded. Rather than relating internal intentions or feelings with external expressions, the success of praise depends on the creation of social relations between eulogist, praised, and audience by means of a “community of sentiment” (Appadurai 1990: 93). In an earlier article, Appadurai (1985) had already analyzed why gratitude in South India can hardly be expressed felicitously in words at all. Its sincerity cannot be established through a verbal reference to interior states and must be either performed nonverbally—touching feet, body posture, tonality of voice, gift transactions, and so on—or expressed indirectly by way of praise and the bestowing of honorific names. And yet, notions of duplicity or interiority are of course not unknown in South India, and people are aware that praise can hide resentment, envy, or even abuse. Appadurai suggests that discourses around the evil eye (disti) could fulfill the function of discussing as well as remedying the emotional ambiguity deriving from suspected discrepancies between interior feelings and external expressions. I will try to show in the remainder of this chapter that for Atheists in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, who repudiate notions of the evil

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eye as “superstition,” the problem of internal duplicity is consistently displaced onto the level of public practice and interrogated as discrepancies between talking and doing. Since Gora maintains that all forms of human practice are intrinsically atheist/nastika, the fundamental function of talking consists of making this explicit; hence, the act of naming oneself an atheist/ nastikudu is indispensable for matching words and deeds and, by the same token, realizes a practically sincere mental revolution. The very idea of “matching,” however, presupposes that the heterogenous array of everyday human practices can be mapped onto talking and doing as distinct yet commensurable and ideally congruent categories of practice. It is precisely by turning to those within the Atheist movement who disagree with Gora, that we can observe how discussions of practical sincerity pertain above all to definitions about which practices count as relevant instances of “talking” and “doing.” Once relevant forms of talking and doing are established, an assessment of their “matching” or congruence can effectively replace a probing of socially irrelevant interior intentions. Though Gora is widely recognized as an exemplary and influential philosopher of Atheism—to the point where, for some in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, his name has become synonymous with atheism/nastikatvam (e.g., Bhaskar 2012: 60)—there are also voices who criticize his onomastics. Gora’s public image is generally very positive, but it often comes with the caveat that atheism/nastikatvam is ultimately a misnomer of his philosophy and activism (e.g., Lindley and Mukherjee 2009; Mashruwala 2010). A top-level functionary in the Sarvodaya-movement, for instance—who also happens to be Gora’s grandson-in-law—explained to me that, in his opinion, Gora was above all else a Gandhian. Because Gora had constructed his identity around the label atheism/nastikatvam, it was now too late for his family to backtrack and acknowledge that there is really no difference between Gora’s Positive Atheism and what Gandhi called spirituality or constructive work. Such sympathetic, if somewhat ambiguous, external appraisals are inversely mirrored by severe criticism from within the Atheist movement. One particularly sharp critic is Ravipudi Venkatadri, former leader of the Rationalist Society of India and erstwhile member of M. N. Roy’s Radical Humanist Movement. In the 1970s, he published a number of essays where he accused Gora of being an “anonymous theist” (ajñata astikudu) (Venkatadri 2007b: 238) who confused religious reform or “Ex-Hinduness” (maji hindutvam) (Venkatadri 2007c: 182) with atheism/nastikatvam. Venkatadri criticized that Gora therefore transformed it into “merely

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‘another Hindu atheist religion’” (maroka “hindu nastika matam” matrame) (Venkatadri 2007c: 192). Without going into the details of Venaktadri’s critique, to which Gora did not live long enough to respond (at least in print), he argues that Gora used a misconstrued concept of atheism/nastikatvam to designate himself and his work; irrespective of his intentions, his deeds did not match his words. The fundamental philosophical disagreement between these two leading thinkers may have fortified already existing factions within the larger Atheist movement, but it did not jeopardize its overall coherence, precisely because it remained interpretable within the framework of practical sincerity. Although the harshness of Venkatadri’s invectives against Gora are considered excessive by most of my interlocutors, he is often recognized as the better philosopher. Even some of Gora’s supporters concede that he may have propagated an inflated and imprecise concept of atheism/nastikatvam. Regardless, Gora is consistently praised as an “acaranavadi” (Bhaskar 2012: 63), a man of practice who applied his philosophy not only in his own everyday life but also in various forms of social activism (see Chapter 5). He is credited with indubitably outshining his intellectual opponent in matters of practice. While Venkatadri is praised for his clear reasoning, he is faulted for not delivering on his words: he merely propagated atheism/nastikatvam by talking (or writing) about it but failed to translate it into concrete programs of social reconstruction. Both men are recognized as exemplary and formidable Atheists, even though both may have failed on different accounts to match their words and deeds—or make them matchable. While some of my interlocutors articulate a clear allegiance for either Gora or Venkatadri, they hardly understand this as a zero-sum game between incompatible philosophical standpoints. It is precisely the proliferation of the category of practice across different domains—personal profession, philosophical conceptualization, public propagation, social activism, everyday life—which makes it possible to use arguments of both philosophers to navigate an ongoing debate about practical sincerity. This can be illustrated with the example of an organization called Human Development Forum (Manava Vikasa Vedika) or simply MVV. It was founded in 2004 through a schism from Indian Atheist Society (Bharata Nastika Samajam), which is one of the three most important organizations in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana besides Gora’s Atheist Centre and Venkatadri’s Rationalist Society. MVV’s founding member and current leader, B. Sambasiva Rao, was a disciple and coworker of B. Ramakrishna, who had himself been a member of Indian Atheist Society until he founded his own institution, the

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Charvaka Ashram (see Chapter 3). In an interview, Sambasiva Rao explained to me that he and his followers had seceded from Indian Atheist Society because its leadership had rejected their proposal for a name change: Sambasiva Rao: In villages or among educated people, if we say, “I’m atheist,” they will . . . segregate us.9 They don’t accept to come into our group. “Oh, you are atheist? Go, go, go,” they will say like that. We are doing hard work, very much, but they are not receiving our hard work properly. So, I proposed in Indian Atheist Society: “Why don’t we change our name, our organization’s name? We name it as a humanist organization, leave the word ‘atheism,’ and we will propagate atheism by another name.” . . . Humanism is a popular word and nobody rejects it. . . . But, everywhere we talk only about atheism and rationalism; everywhere, in every meeting. We talk about the theory of atheism or rationalism, that’s all . . . Stefan: Why did they want to keep the name “atheism”? S.R.: They are fond of that word. Because Mr. Jayagopal founded that organization, he doesn’t like to leave that word. He argues that atheism is the base of our philosophy. Yes, I agree with that. But when we want to take this theory, our philosophy, to the people, we have to go there [and do] what they like. Change that name but talk about atheism; that is my policy. S.: What do you think, when people hear atheism or nastika, what do they think? S.R.: Nastika is a type of abuse. . . . This Brahmanic culture and theistic people propagated atheism as something not respected. “Atheists are all thieves,” they propagated like this. “So, don’t believe atheism. Who believes or propagates atheism can go to hell,” so they have written in their literature and they have propagated through media, by radio and television . . . in songs, literature, in cinemas too. So, the common people think atheism is not good. “We won’t accept it,” they decide like that. So, I proposed to change that name. Now, we all are atheists. In Manava Vikasa Vedika, all the members are atheists. Some members are named after atheism. You have seen a man [at our last conference], Venkanna. He drummed very eagerly on stage. Mr. Venkanna, he attached atheism to his name. “Nastika Venkanna,” he says everywhere. “I’m Nastika Venkanna,” he proudly says. He is a district secretary of Manava Vikasa Vedika.

Sambsiva Rao framed MVV’s secession very deliberately as a purely pragmatic decision rather than an ideological rift or—as critical commentators would have it—a bid for power and leadership. While his main concern is still to convey Atheism to the people, he disagreed with Indian Atheist Society, as well as Gora, that the name “atheism/ nastikatvam” was either necessary or helpful to do so. Centuries of slanderous defamation had discredited that word beyond repair and had rendered it an obstacle rather than an instrument for social

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change; after all, social change was, he argued, the professed aim of the Atheist movement as an organized form of social activism. Hence, to effectively thwart the practical realization of that professed aim solely for the sake of a name would betray either a serious lack of judgment or, worse, a form of practical insincerity. MVV, however, has had to face allegations that it tried to pass off as a pragmatic strategy of activism what is really just a lack of courage to openly profess a commitment to atheism/nastikatvam (it is, nota bene, not the commitment as such that is under doubt). By hiding behind a popular pseudonym like “humanism,” so their critics argue, they not only introduce a discrepancy between their words and deeds but also yield to and reinforce the odium attached to atheism/nastikatvam; and this odium is after all the major reason why India is still caught up in mental slavery to begin with. It is against the implicit background of such criticism that Sambasiva Rao may have felt compelled to emphasize MVV’s continued commitment to atheist/nastika philosophy in our interview. It is all but circumstantial that he chose to authenticate that claim with the example of Mr. Venkanna adopting “Nastika” as a personal name. He thus reconfirmed a link between practical sincerity and onomastic practices but differentiated an individual domain of personal professions—as well as personal interests—from a domain of collectively organized social activism. Sambasiva Rao seemed to suggest that the only reason why Indian Atheist Society stuck to its name was its founder’s self-interest and personal fondness for the word; just like Gora is said to have invested too much into the word. More bluntly put, Indian Atheist Society forfeits any chance to actually realize its professed goal of social reconstruction because of its leaders’ sentimental investment in a word—hardly a sign of sincere commitment to affecting societal change. While MVV’s members may be accused of double talk for not saying what they do out of cowardice, Sambasiva Rao suggests that their critics are willing to thwart their own capacity to do what they say out of selfish sentiment. Before concluding, I want to add one more voice to this debate, because it opens yet another crucial domain of practice for mental revolution: the domain of “way of life” (jivitavidhanam). In November 2014, MVV organized a two-day “study camp” (adhyayana taragatulu) dedicated to the concept and history of mental revolution. After Sambasiva Rao had inaugurated the event with a speech on mental revolution in ancient India, Penmetsa Subba Raju, also known as PSR, continued with a long speech on its modern history. PSR has been associated with several organizations, including Venkatadri’s Rationalist Society, and he is a well-known writer

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and acclaimed orator. I am quoting from the beginning of his speech, where he explicated the criteria on whose basis he would select who was to be included in his history of mental revolution. In a nutshell, he argued that merely calling oneself an atheist/nastikudu did by itself neither indicate nor initiate a mental revolution: “I’ll give you a small example.10 In our state, there is one family that is famous for being a great atheist family. I will not give any names. Even in that family, there are some who marry the daughter of their elder sister.” PSR elaborated for a while on the fact that traditional-minded Hindus in South India preferred matrilateral cross cousins as marriage partners and contrasted this with Muslims’ preferences for patrilateral parallel cousins. In order to underscore his argument that, biologically speaking, there was no difference whatsoever between different types of cousins, he quoted a satirical verse by Vemana—the same Vemana of B. Ramakrishna’s speech—mocking the arbitrariness of such marriage rules, and then continued: Because here [in a Hindu environment], we have been thinking since childhood that it is not wrong to marry your elder sister’s daughter [matrilateral cross cousin], and because we have been growing up in this kind of mental slavery, here anyone in whose family cousins are married is a Hindu; even though he joins an atheist association, even though he joins a rationalist association, even though he joins yet another association.

The choice of this “small example” deals a heavy blow to the reputation of the family in question, whose identity was obvious to the audience despite PSR’s histrionic attempt at discretion. Beyond its vocal public commitment to the label “atheism/nastikatvam,” this family is widely known for emphasizing the need to transform Atheism into an everyday way of life, especially within the family. It is thus quite sensational that PSR exposes a lingering “Hinduness” (hindutvam) precisely in their marriage practices, which are generally considered to reflect a family’s true way of life (see Chapter 6). He dedicated the rest of his introduction to illustrating the latent—in other words, anonymous—workings of “this kind of mental slavery”: Therefore, today, into whatever religion or whatever caste we were born, the extent to which we will be able to come out of their mindsets will be based on how strongly they [caste and religion] have influenced us since childhood. I’ll give a small example: Among those who are present here, there are many atheists and rationalists. We all say that we have extricated ourselves from religion, that we have extricated ourselves from caste. We all say that. Let us once be self-critical. . . . If anywhere, at any time, anyone with our own surname comes in contact

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with us, whether we are acquainted or not, feelings like “he is one of our own” arise within. . . . If an unacquainted person had our surname, we would think to ourselves: “This one is one of us.” And, hidden inside, thoughts will be stirred, like “them and us, we all share one ancestry.” We cannot express this openly. . . . As it is not so easy to have [a real mental revolution], it has become necessary that associations emerge, dedicating themselves specifically to enabling mental revolution. Now, if we examine whether the associations that claim to strive for enabling mental revolution and the persons, activists, or leaders working in those associations have really undergone mental revolution, we find ourselves in the position of having to give a distressing answer. . . . By merely talking about the subjects of mental revolution in our speeches, we will not bring mental revolution to the people. On one side, we may be writing in our publications and speak about the need for mental revolution. So, with respect to whatever we say about the need for change in a given topic, only when we show change in exactly that topic in our own life, only when we establish a match between what we say and what we do, then only will also those who thus observe us start thinking: “Oho, this is indeed a desirable transformation.” If we cannot do that, no matter how many speeches we give, it will be of no avail. Why am I saying all this? If we want to discuss the history of the movement for mental revolution in Andhra Pradesh, unless we speak of those who have worked partially for mental revolution at their own level without giving the answer of “we are atheists, we are rationalists,” we will certainly not do justice to this subject.

PSR insisted that an open profession of atheism/nastikatvam, or any other name for that matter, did not remedy the problem of insincerity, as Gora or Ramakrishna seemed to suggest, but produced it in the first place. He argued that such professions frequently functioned as a convenient veneer behind which people hide their failure to really accomplish the mental revolution they are so eager to profess and propagate. Despite talking about inexpressible internal thoughts and feelings, PSR’s argument remained squarely within the ambit of practical sincerity. It is not coincidental that he mentioned the English word “feelings” in relation to caste. As I will show in more detail in Chapter 5, the tenacity of the undeniably social institution of caste is frequently assumed to be grounded in powerful collective feelings, also called “sentiments.” Though PSR imagined them to stir “within” (lopala), sentiments and in particular caste-feelings are not individual; they are understood to be part of a larger behavioral habitus that is enacted through interaction—like meeting strangers, for instance— and structured by affectively embodied social institutions such as marriage. Moreover, PSR does not call on a notion of interiority to explain why caste-feelings are hidden and inexpressible; they must remain unexpressed because Atheists tend to boast that they are beyond such

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things, claiming over-eagerly that they “have extricated themselves” (bayataku vacceyatam) from caste. Put differently, if expressed, they would introduce a mismatch within the category of talking. Unlike Sambasiva Rao, who proffered the onomastic practices of individuals to vouch for their and their organization’s practical sincerity, PSR argued to the contrary that social associations are necessary to help their members achieve sincere mental revolution. However, he introduced the domain of social activism only to almost immediately retract it, as existing associations continue to disappoint in matters of mental revolution, which ultimately remains conditional on individuals’ practical sincerity. PSR suggested that for propagation to be persuasive and appear “desirable” (vañchaniyamaina) to those who listen and observe, Atheists had to embody the message and “show” (kanipiñcatam) it in their “own life.” In other words, the practical sincerity of talking, whether personal profession or public propagation, can only be guaranteed by becoming perceptible in and as everyday behavior. Throughout the entire speech, PSR illustrated mental slavery or “Hinduness” primarily through issues of caste and marriage practices and thus positioned family, kinship, and domesticity as the most relevant domains of practice for mental revolution. The category of everyday behavior (pravartana), frequently glossed as “way of life” (jivitavidhanam), introduces yet another domain or kind of “practice,” which is distinguished from both associational social activism and individual profession; it emphasizes individual practice yet firmly contextualizes the individual in the gendered social relations of everyday family life (see Chapters 2 and 6 for a more detailed discussion of contextualized individuality and gender). Hence, in order to either profess Atheism or propagate it in a practically sincere manner, one must have already become an Atheist in one’s everyday life. Where Gora sees anonymous Atheists who must become what they already practice by publicly professing it, PSR sees only self-­ proclaimed Atheists who have not yet become what they profess to be and propagate for the sake of others.

Conclusion Total Atheism is quite literally a movement for mental revolution. It is a becoming in which disbelief in gods, the critique of religions, and the rejection of caste are merely the most basic and—as far as members of the movement are concerned—taken-for-granted starting point; I have never encountered a situation where Atheist activists questioned

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each other’s disbelief. It is also a movement in a sociological sense because it is conditional on the public perceptibility of a practical sincerity that must be achieved across a heterogenous range of social relations and disjunctive domains of practice. It is a becoming because its heterogeneity and publicness renders the achievement of boundaries fragile and subject to contestation. The arguments of people like Ramakrishna, Gora, Sambasiva Rao, or PSR do not represent fixed ideological positions onto which different factions within the larger Atheist movement could be mapped: the self-identified rationalist PSR, for instance, gave his speech at an event organized by humanist MVV, some of whose members are ardent supporters of the atheist/ nastikudu Gora and his erstwhile follower, then rival, B. Ramakrishna. Rather, the preceding section captures three moments of a dialectical movement of critique that, as a whole, indicates a shared positionality that characterizes the Atheist movement and makes those three men recognizable as potential interlocutors within it. Debates, disagreements, and at times harsh criticism among Atheist activists reveal that the coherence of their movement depends not necessarily on a shared philosophy but on an underlying moral ideal and conceptual grammar of practical sincerity that regulates how people can distinguish and relate different kinds of practices in varying but recognizable ways. The moral ideal of practical sincerity opens up another register of the incomplete but productive translatedness of Atheism: namely, its translation into practice. The contested ways of defining and configuring different practical domains for mental revolution (i.e., different kinds of talking and doing) produce different modes of putting Atheism into practice. The following chapters will show how such domains and modes of practice, like personal transformation (Chapter 2), oral propagation (Chapter 3), associational forms of social activism (Chapters 4 and 5), or everyday ways of life (Chapter 6), do not integrate into a seamless and systematic whole but constantly “contaminate” each other with a potential lack of practical sincerity rendering the final achievement of Total Atheism a fragile and ever-receding horizon. If practical sincerity is a means for Atheists to make their positionality and the boundaries of their movement perceptible precisely insofar as it is not uniquely Atheist, the remaining question is, however, what, if anything, is secular about it? It is, after all, grounded in a more general South Asian topography of the self—one that Appadurai (1990) termed “Hindu”—and a moral concern with practical implementation is furthermore a prevalent feature of many religious reform projects as well. Does mental revolution ultimately

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differ from religious discourses of conversion in any significant way? As my discussion of the translatedness of Atheism shows, a concept of secularity that is based primarily on a negative relationality with or difference from religion is insufficient to describe the kind of difference my interlocutors try to realize in their project of mental revolution; nor does it capture how discourses of excess and alterity or of exo-, pseudo-, and anonymity analyzed in this chapter address a larger and more diffuse sense of negativity. I therefore propose to “expand” the category of secularity by making it sensitive to a more complex notion of negativity and by conceptualizing it as a quality of difference rather than letting it be delimited in a structuralist sense by what it is not. In the following chapters, I seek to show that in the case of the Atheist movement in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, this quality is produced as a complex form—and sense—of ex-centricity. At a more general, methodological level, the notion of quality is intended to direct attention toward historically shaped practices and questions of lived experience, perception, aesthetics, and materiality rather than conceptual history—whether European, Indian, or translational. In fact, this book’s methodological premise is that the secularity and distinctiveness of Total Atheism are first of all ethnographic topics, as they relate to the claims and reflexive practices of those who adhere to the Atheist movement and who experience themselves as being utterly and intentionally different from their surroundings. The aim of this book is not to adjudicate whether this claim is true but to analyze how Atheist activists attempt to make their claim to secular difference not only intellectually sensible but also publicly ­perceptible—and therefore contestable as well.

Notes   1. Against the background of the majoritarian logic of Hindu nationalism, the notion of forcibly induced or incentivised conversion, especially of Dalits and Adivasis to Christianity and Islam, as well as attempts at reconversion in so-called s´uddhi or ghar vapsi campaigns have been extremely contentious issues and triggers for communal violence. As such, conversion bears directly on political secularism as a governmental means of regulating religious and caste communalism (Jenkins 2008).   2. Etymologically, it is derived from the Sanskrit root “bhu” (to be) and can therefore also convey the meanings of “nature” or “disposition,” although it is seldom used in that way in spoken Telugu. “Bhava” is also a key concept in Sanskrit aesthetic theory, where it refers to eight, sometimes nine, fundamental human emotions that are to be transformed or

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refined into their corresponding aesthetic emotions or “flavors” (Sanskrit: rasa) in the processes of producing and experiencing works of art (Chari 1990).   3. For a Marxist rebuttal of this perspective, see Ranganayakamma (2012), who argues that Atheists confuse the relationship between basis and superstructure. Extending the onomastics of Atheism (see below) beyond the confines of the Atheist movement, she criticizes that the Atheist movement misconstrues the concept of atheism/nastikatvam and, therefore, misuses the word to describe their ultimately ineffectual practices.   4. For an overview of the extremely broad semantic range and diverse history of the concept of dharma, see Olivelle 2004.   5. It is important to note, however, that not all historical sources represent Muslims antagonistically, and those that do are not necessarily reflecting the lived experiences of the population in general (Thapar 2004; B. Chattopadhyaya 2004).   6. While Louis Dumont’s work on the caste system has been criticized as an inadequate empirical description (see Marriott 1969; Tambiah 1972; Béteille 1986; Appadurai 1986), it is useful as an account of precisely the ideological aspects of a Brahmanic perspective on caste as a holistic and hierarchical system.   7. Another mediating translation for astikatvam as orthodoxy is chandasam, which again has very close associations with Vedic and Brahmanic culture. This word is derived from chandam, a specific Vedic meter that came to signify prosody as such. A chandasudu is thus a person who is engrossed in reciting the Veda. This word was also used as a slur even within Brahmanic milieus in order to denigrate “Vedic” (vaidika) Brahmins as opposed to “puranic” (pauranika) or “worldly” (laukika) Niyogi Brahmins. Vedic Brahmins were considered to be caught up in their recitations, to lack pragmatic prudence (vivekam), and to be out of touch with the world (Narayana Rao 1993). This strong connection of chandasam to Vedic culture and thus astikatvam may have further reinforced the latter’s translation as orthodoxy.   8. Shariff Gora, Hyderabad, 14 January 2014; recorded interview in English.   9. B. Sambasiva Rao, Hyderabad, 27 February 2014; recorded Interview in English. 10. Subba Raju, “Andhraprades´lo Bhavaviplavodyamam—Nadu Nedu,” Batasingaram, 13 December 2014; recorded speech in Telugu, italics indicate English in original.

Chapter 2

PROFESSIONS NARRATIVES OF EMINENT MASCULINITY

In this chapter, I analyze life-stories of two male Atheist activists, Shariff Gora and B. B. Shaw, in order to further elucidate the relationship between Atheist onomastics and the moral ideal of practical sincerity, as well as the notion of ex-centricity as a quality of secular difference. The chapter is intended to complement the more abstract discussion of Chapter 1 by retracing how two individuals narrate what it means for each to become an Atheist. The personal specificities of both the content and form of these life-stories provide not only the individual perspectives of two men but offer a chance to examine the concept of individuality itself as a social, gendered, and historically inflected practice. I therefore approach the following narratives less as representations of an “external” reality to which they stand in a relation of truth or untruth, but rather as ethnomethodological “accounts” (Garfinkel 1994: 1–4) that are themselves part of what they relate. By further expanding on Jakob Copeman’s concept of “onomastic experimentation” (2015: para. 6; see also Chapter 1), I examine how two individuals with different social backgrounds and at different stages in their life trajectories creatively interweave the moral and conceptual grammar of Total Atheism with “traditional” tropes of personhood and agency. These life stories are not only professions of individual commitments to Atheism; they also create complex narrative textures through which Shariff Gora and B. B. Shaw position themselves within their society in ways that seek to make their difference from that society perceptible as instances of secular difference. I selected the life stories of two male activists because the majority of my interlocutors were men, but also because the conceptual and moral grammar of Total Atheism is fundamentally androcentric. The resulting implications for relations between genders and female perspectives on Atheism will be addressed in Chapter 6. Shariff Gora and

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B. B. Shaw should moreover not be understood as representatives of a generic form of Atheist masculinity. I juxtapose their narratives in order to highlight how a person’s social location in terms of age, class, religious background, and caste conditions the manner in which he or she creatively weaves the project of Total Atheism into existing moral expectations of gendered social roles, cultural symbols of personhood, and notions of appropriate agency. My analysis of these narratives builds on Mattison Mines’s concept of the “contextualized individual” (1994: 21). It therefore engages critically with two stereotypes that have informed both popular and academic representations of Indian society and that have to be addressed briefly before turning to Shariff Gora’s and B. B. Shaw’s stories: (1) The idea that there are no individuals in India, and (2) the Orientalist notion that Indian society and culture are somehow essentially religious or spiritual. Both stereotypes would suggest that Atheism with its insistence on irreligiosity and individual freedom must be the outcome of a colonial encounter with European modernity in whose wake notions of irreligiosity and individualism have displaced traditional forms of religious practice and communal personhood. The presumed nonexistence of individuals in India does, of course, not imply a denial of the existence of individual human beings. It derives from a long anthropological debate about the historicity and cultural specificity of individuality as a social category and moral value. A classic starting point for this debate is Marcel Mauss’s (1985) essay “A category of the human mind,” first published in 1938, where he distinguished a supposedly self-evident and universally given “sense” of self at the level of bodily and psychological awareness from socially constructed and therefore historically and culturally variable “concepts” of the self. On the basis of this distinction between sense and concept of self, Mauss sketches a global history but claims that only in European civilizations has the universal psychobiological sense of self found a “clear” and “precise” (Mauss 1985: 2) social concept: the modern individual. The idea of the exceptionalism of the European sense and concept of the modern individual has continued to inform scholarship in the social sciences and humanities (for an influential, recent example, see Taylor 2007). As far as South Asia is concerned, Louis Dumont has famously argued that there is no concept of the individual in Indian society because persons are relevant only in relation to the “encompassing” (1970: 76; French: englobant) and hierarchically structured, ideological whole of the caste system in which they are subsumed or, rather, dissolved. Criticizing Dumont’s reliance on texts, European philosophy, and ideological perspectives on the

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caste system, McKim Marriott and Ronald Inden have proposed the alternative of an ethnosociology that conceives of persons as constituted by webs of material transactions rendering them, ontologically speaking, “dividuals” (1977: 232; see also Marriott 1969). The topic of individuality has been central for anthropologists of South Asia ever since, because it has implied a larger debate about the nature and possibility of modernity in India. The issue of the existence of an abstract concept of individuality is intimately connected to modern ethical and political values like freedom, autonomy, or equality. At stake has therefore been the compatibility of “Indian civilization” with a certain idea of modernity as well as—and this is the link to the second stereotype—with the kind of secularity it supposedly entails or, at least, enables. Regardless of the ethnographic details of this debate,1 its reliance on a European ideal type of the concept of the self inevitably sets up India as either derivative or deficient. I therefore propose to follow Georg Simmel (1908)—rather than Mauss—who approaches individuality and its attendant attributes and values not in relation to the existence of an abstract concept of the individual but in relation to the outcome of social interaction and specific qualities of relationships. Individual autonomy and freedom, for example, can thus be conceptualized as part of a specific form of social relation: To be free from ties, as a negatively social behavior, is thus in reality almost never a dormant property [ruhender Besitz] but a ceaseless breaking loose from ties . . . ; freedom is not a solipsistic being [solipsistisches Sein] but a sociological doing [soziologisches Tun], not a situation restricted to the singularity of the subject but a relationship . . . ; and it consists no less of a relationship of power with others, of the possibility of acquiring advantage inside of a relationship, of the obligation or subjection of the other, in which freedom only then finds its value and its realization.2 (Simmel 1908: 79–80)

If we understand individuality as a particular form of agency or “sociological doing,” the concrete ways in which people express their sense of individuality in everyday life gain methodological significance precisely in their specificity and diversity. This point has also been made by Mines (1988, 1994), who argues that sociologists and anthropologists of South Asia have misconceived the role of individuality in Indian culture and society because they have focused too much on abstract theorizing or scriptural representations. He criticizes that people’s everyday experiences and empirical expressions of individual personhood have been ignored or considered sociologically irrelevant. In his ethnography of Tamil personhood, Mines argues that—far from being nonexistent, anomalous,

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or negligible—assertions of individuality are conspicuous and highly valued in South Indian society: A middle-class, middle-aged merchant in Madras City, for example, can trace a genealogy that includes several hundred members, and he can describe who these people are (or were): what they do, where they live, when they were married, their level of education, which affines are related to whom, and so on. I believe this kind of detailed knowing about people reveals something important: individuality, in the sense of the aggregate of traits that distinguish who a person is, has great significance in Indian social life and is central to how Indians conceive of their society. Indians know their society in terms of who people are. (Mines 1994: 2)

Mines makes here more than a methodological argument, because his empirical observation that a sense of individuality is crucial for how Indians understand not only themselves but also their society goes hand in hand with this claim: “Nonetheless, Tamil individuality is distinct in several respects from Western notions of the individual” (Mines 1994: 2). He calls the Tamil variant a “contextualized individual” (1994: 21) and an “individuality of eminence” (1994: 43). Tamil individuality derives from the public knowledge about a person’s distinctive aggregate of traits, from standing out, and from being known and valued by others as a unique personality. It is important to note, however, that this emphasis on public reputation does not dissolve individuality into external, social, or primordial ascriptions, for eminence is conceived as a personal achievement: it is the result of the extensiveness and quality of social ties a person is capable of cultivating. As Mines and others (Price 1989, 1996b; Mines and Gourishankar 1990; Dickey 1993) have shown, an important way to gain eminence in South India is to engage in reciprocal ties of patronage (i.e., by acquiring and then redistributing economic, social, or cultural resources). Whereas Western “doings” of individuality may depend on freeing oneself from social bonds as a means to establish relationships of power and obligation, the South Indian notion of a contextualized individuality of eminence is based on strengthening transactional ties of redistribution in order to bind others. An individuality of eminence does not indicate a passive submission to social ascriptions, as it requires the deployment of sociological agency for the purpose of achieving reputation by “making a name” for oneself. In Shariff Gora’s and B. B. Shaw’s cases, their personal projects of making a name for themselves are intricately entwined with the onomastics of Atheism and the project of transforming the negativity and marginality

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attached to the name of atheism/nastikatvam; in other words, it is a constitutive part of their mental revolution. The question I want to answer is thus not whether there are individuals in India or whether Atheism produces a unique kind of secular personhood, but which forms of sociological agency do Atheists deem appropriate, desirable, or necessary for achieving individuality and secular difference? I argue that existing or “traditional” structures and tropes of personhood constitute the medium within and through which Atheists may narrate their individuality as Atheists and thereby produce a specific form of secular difference: ex-centricity. The chapter thus elaborates on one of the central arguments of the entire book by retracing its implications for the production of individuality: it shows how Total Atheism as a form of lived secularity is not defined solely by the nature of its negative relation to religious concepts, discourses, or practices but by the specific ways in which it allows—and constrains—individuals as well as groups to position themselves within existing social, historical, and cultural imaginaries. Rather than identifying a discourse or form of male individuality that is unique to Atheists, my aim is to show to the contrary how Shariff Gora and B. B. Shaw narrate secular difference within and out of sameness.

Shariff Gora Shariff Gora was born in 1946 into a Muslim family as S. Muhammad Shariff, but took on Gora’s name as a sign of his public commitment to Atheism. He grew up in Brahmanakotukur, a small village around 250 kilometers south of Hyderabad. At the time of writing, Shariff Gora lives in Kukatpally, a middle-class neighborhood in Hyderabad’s northwest, where he moved with his late wife Mumtaz to support his daughter who had relocated there earlier. Before his retirement, he worked in the Indian Air Force, the paper industry, and as an insurance agent. He is very active in a number of Atheist organizations, mostly Human Development Forum (MVV), the Hyderabad-based Society for the Eradication of Caste (Kulanirmulana San˙gham), the Atheist Centre in Vijayawada, and various Facebook groups. Though he does not hold an office in any of these organizations, Shariff Gora is a dedicated worker for the larger Atheist movement, and for him, Atheism is more than a personal disbelief in god: it is a public identity and part of his individuality, which he cultivates through his extensive ties within the Atheist movement—especially by means of the Internet.

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Although formal access to the Internet in India has been increasing rapidly for the last two decades, especially via mobile phones (Gopinath 2009), most Atheist groups do not have websites or effective online presences. People like Shariff Gora have therefore become all the more significant, for they are instrumental in opening up the Atheist milieu to new audiences and potential recruits. Individual Facebook accounts are not only opportunities for personal professions of Atheism, but also important sources for the circulation and discussion of information, ranging from upcoming events and current affairs to marriage announcements. In fact, over the last few years, Shariff Gora has become a sort of Atheist marriage broker, a very old institution in the economy of Indian arranged marriages, which has successfully transitioned into the new medium of the Internet. While marriages used to be arranged by relatives, community elders, family priests, or indeed professionalized brokers, these agents are increasingly complemented or replaced by online marriage portals. In cooperation with MVV and the Society for the Eradication of Caste, Shariff Gora is keeping a database of people who seek Atheist marriage partners. He puts interested parties in contact by mailing personal CVs and profiles to potential couples and their parents. He also started a Facebook group called “Rationalists, Humanists & Atheists Matrimony (Nastikula vivaha vedika),” where group members can upload marriage ads, announce upcoming weddings, or document recent Atheist weddings. When I arrived at Shariff Gora’s apartment for our interview, he first walked me through his Facebook pages before starting with our recorded conversation. When I asked him how he became an Atheist, he seemed happy to indulge this rather blunt query and offered a narrative that was both personal and conventional, insofar as it contained all of the main themes I had repeatedly encountered in other people’s stories. These themes are skepticism about religious beliefs and doctrines starting in early childhood, refusals to submit to social and religious authorities, and feelings of distress caused by the violent aspects of communalism and conflict within a religiously plural society. A very important theme for Shariff Gora was his moral indignation with regard to what he perceived as a pervasive discrepancy between words and deeds of religious people (i.e., a fundamental practical insincerity at the heart of Theism) (see Chapter 1). Shariff Gora had been struggling with these things long before his first encounter with explicit Atheism. In his case, he got hold of a copy of “Nastika Margam” (“Atheist Path”), one of the journals published by the Atheist Centre. After reading that journal, Shariff Gora became

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curious to visit the Atheist Centre and asked his brother-in-law to accompany him. Once they had arrived in Vijayawada and seen the Atheist Centre’s signboard on the street, which openly announced this to be a place of nastikulu/atheists, his brother-in-law became scared and refused to enter. Shariff Gora, however, ventured inside. He was shown around by one of Gora’s sons, Niyanta, who took him to the Centre’s science exhibition and its library. He then gifted Shariff Gora one of Gora’s most famous books, his autobiographic essays titled “Nenu Nastikunni” (“I am an Atheist”). This book made a big impression on him: “After reading that book, I felt that, yes, man should be like this! Self-confident, self-sufficient, not depending on anybody, on others, outside sources and all.3 Not believing is best sometimes.” Shariff Gora went on to describe how, after that first visit, he started coming regularly to the Atheist Centre during holidays or while visiting his in-laws, who happened to be residents of Vijayawada. It was a chance for him to socialize with like-minded people, get hold of new books, and learn about new aspects of Atheism. The details of this first encounter may be specific to Shariff Gora’s story, but its role within the story’s plot is quite typical for male narratives of becoming an Atheist. In Shariff Gora’s account, it was clear that “Nastika Margam” and his visit to the Atheist Centre were significant because they confirmed already existing doubts, disillusionment, and disbelief in religion. As we will see in Chapter 6, this is a gendered plot, as men tend to narrate their Atheism as a natural disposition, the spontaneous result of an acute mind, or a gradual achievement, whereas Atheism is considered to enter abruptly into women’s lives, namely as the novel and disruptive worldview of their husbands (or other male relatives). The Atheist Centre was thus instrumental for Shariff Gora only insofar as it allowed him to consolidate previously held ideas and experiences into a personal identity as an atheist/nastikudu, which culminated in him adopting “Gora” as a last name. It was less about novel ideas than a tangible example that Atheism is in fact more than a set of ideas or disbeliefs and can indeed be a way of life—to the extent of building a Centre for it, advertising it with a signboard in the street, and putting it on the title of one’s autobiography. Many of my male interlocutors have described feelings of wonder but also intense relief upon experiencing for the first time that they were not alone, that there were indeed others like them, and that a dignified life as a professed Atheist is possible. Yet, becoming a (male) Atheist exceeds cognitive assent to specific ideas as well as a process of merely individual self-realization. As mentioned above, I approach it here as a sociological doing and, more specifically, as a practice of

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positioning oneself vis-à-vis others. Atheists imagine this positionality as the outcome of a mental revolution (bhavaviplavam) encompassing intellectual, emotional, as well as behavioral labor within the different scales of social relations represented by family, the Atheist movement, and society at large.

The “Sociological Doing” of Atheist Individuality Shariff Gora formulated these aspects of labor poignantly and therein demonstrated that his emphasis on self-confidence, self-sufficiency, and independence indicated less an attempt to shed social bonds than a desire to reconstruct them. In our interview, he used a striking simile to explain why it had been particularly difficult for him, an ex-Muslim, to position himself as an atheist/nastikudu: From a lead atom, if you dislodge one electron, it will become gold. . . . But dislodging an electron from this lead atom and making gold is tougher than exploiting it from the earth. . . . So that is the way, and a Muslim is like lead. You want to make gold? Converting [a Muslim] to an atheist is equally impossible. . . . People are that religious, you know, binding is so tight. They will not allow you to come out of the clutches of religion. “Say anything but be here only, in this group only,” like that. Some people are even killed for this. In Islamic countries, nobody can even talk about this. But I said: “No! I believe this [atheism] is the scientific way of living; it is correct. I am not afraid of any activity,” I told. Even if somebody wants to just kill me, no problem. And I choose to die for my belief. . . . It is impossible to get a man to declare himself as an atheist from a Muslim community. Binding is so tight, you know. I told you, from the atom of the lead, taking out one electron . . . any physical scientist, you ask him, he’ll tell you. “It is next to impossible [laughs]. I tell you, instead of that, you just dig the mud. Take out so many tons and tons of mud and you can make one gram of gold . . . that is easier than this,” they’ll say. . . . So that is the way with Islam. Muslim means lead. Converting him into atheist is equal to making him into gold. So, one of my friends, a doctor friend, told me: “I don’t know how you came out of that [laughs], that circle. You have done the miracle.” I told this: “I believed it, and I want to practice it. . . . I’m going ahead. I’m not afraid of anything.”

After we had ended our interview, Shariff Gora accompanied me to the bus station and impressed on me once more that I had to understand that in India, religion was about community, about being part of “the mainstream.” And as far as that mainstream was concerned, one could believe whatever one wanted, just as long as one performed the appropriate rituals and demonstrated commitment to a communal identity. This is crucial for understanding the concepts

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of mental slavery (bhavadasyam) and practical sincerity (dvikaranas´uddhi): the “mental” challenge of Atheism is not disbelief itself but the intellectual/emotional/behavioral capacity to see it through openly, spurning the much easier alternative of a duplicity tacitly condoned by society. The actual trial by fire for Atheists is thus the pull and push—the molecular force field, as it were—of the social pressure exerted by their communities. I do not want to overstretch Shariff Gora’s alchemical metaphor, but it helps to clarify how the process of becoming an Atheist is not about the separation from community and even less about its destruction; it is about its fundamental transformation and contains an act of revolutionary revaluation: becoming an Atheist is like making gold out of lead. The odious marginality of Atheism is to be revalued as a precious radicalness, a rare accomplishment, and, as we will see in the following, a source of distinction and eminence. Shariff Gora’s doctor friend, a man of both science and social service and thus a beacon of respectability, authority, and social status, had to commend him for having “done the miracle”: he is one atom of gold in a sea of lead. It is important to listen closely to Shariff Gora’s narrative in order to understand what is miraculous about his courage, fearlessness, and boldness. He reported praise from others, including some of his friends and family members, who are not Atheists themselves but feel compelled to admire him and to admit that, unlike him, they “don’t have the guts.” Shariff Gora’s emphasis on the recognition of others indicates what is miraculous about his mental revolution: it is precisely his defiance of communal pressures, his risking of social ostracism, that turned out to be the reason for the respect he could eventually command in his community. In fact, he even challenged the elders in his hometown that he would become a believer again, if only science proved the existence of god: They accepted my challenge! And they were confident that science will prove god, and that I will come back to their fold. But I know: god is an imaginary thing. How can science prove a thing, which is not there? [Laughing]. And let them satisfy the village. Normally, if I go there, I go once or twice [a year] to my village. There, some elders are there. Most of them are dead. But they respect [me]. . . . Since childhood in my village the impression is that I am a very smart boy. In every class, I used to be the topper. I never failed in any subject or any class, so: regular attendance and topper. And I cleared all the high school exams for work. Then I got a good job and I won merit. I toured all over India and have given a good impression in the village. . . . So, with that respect, they respect me even now. Even youngsters, they salute me when I go; they respect. I am, like you know, in my village I am a hero.

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But I am a nastika. They still know that I don’t believe in god, but they respect me because even without god’s help, I am surviving—with my own talent. And that is why they have respect for me. Okay, what am I doing? Nothing! I am doing nothing special for their sake. I am going on my own way, normally. That’s what I am supposed to do for my family, for my parents, sisters, or my friends. And, what is genuine, how to survive, how to live with the people, how to talk to them. Nothing! I have no big dreams of becoming an overnight millionaire or something. No, I have just what is sufficient. Whatever I need: happy with it. I am living, and I am living happily without greed. Greediness is not there. That they know. So that’s why they keep me as their idol man.

A little later, he stressed again how his commitment to social responsibilities, especially toward his family, was factored into the treatment he received from his community: I used to take care of my parents. . . . My mother lived to eighty-five years of age. My father lived to ninety years. Normally at my village, nobody used to live that many years. Because I used to take care of them in time, giving medical help and all, all those things. I kept my parents with me for quite some time. So, this practice also gave a very good impression of me in the village: “Although this man doesn’t believe in god, he has responsibilities for his parents and is giving a good example of how your son should be.” So, that has given a very good name in my village also . . . : “He says, god is not there but he’s very responsible. He takes care of his entire family, sisters, parents.”

Especially in this account of his relationship with his native village, Shariff Gora clearly evokes a form of male personhood grounded in contextualization and eminence: his individuality emerges as a function of the quality and extensiveness of the social ties he is able to cultivate. While contextualization and eminence as an infrastructure for individuality are not per se gendered, we will see in Chapter 6 that authoritative gender ideologies prescribe different routes for men and women to attain them. Shariff Gora’s narrative conforms here closely to what current heteronormative notions of hegemonic masculinity prescribe for mature, adult men in India (see Osella and Osella 2006): due to his personal efforts and professional success, he embodies not only the idea of a self-sufficient, competitive, and autonomous man, but he is also able to provide for his entire family, including his parents, which makes him both an ideal father and “a good example of how your son should be.” Contextualization as the maintaining of social ties appears here as his continued engagement with his village community but also, more concretely, in his effort and capacity to keep his parents alive and in good health beyond local expectations. He engages in a steadfast and bold way with figures

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of authority (village elders) yet seems to maintain enough decorum to not be rude. At the same time, Shariff Gora takes care to balance his achievements with declarations of humility, contentedness with a simple lifestyle, and genuineness. He is respected precisely because he is not fixated on personal wealth but earns money only for taking care of his social duties and responsibilities. While others praised him as a “hero” and “idol man,” he downplayed his achievements by stressing that he was “doing nothing special for their sake” (i.e., he was not fishing for approval through conspicuous generosity but simply doing what is proper and goes without saying). This careful balancing of praise and humility points toward a fundamental ambiguity at the heart of eminent individuality as well as the hegemonic masculinity of the adult provider: since eminent masculinity is based on acts of patronage and displays of generosity, a person needs to acquire the necessary economic resources, which in turn requires the pursuit of a certain amount of self-interest; this self-interest needs to be legitimized or at least diffused through recognizable acts of altruistic and socially responsible redistribution. According to Mines (1994: 185), this constitutive ambiguity and the skepticism it produces do not pertain to the ideal of eminent masculinity itself but only to the concrete individuals who seek to embody eminence based on generosity. The ambiguity between self-interest and altruism is thus productive and shows that eminent individuality and gender conformity more generally are ongoing projects of sociological doing rather than a status to be attained once and for all. In order to better understand how the ambiguity and fragility of eminent masculinity structure not only the content but also the form of Shariff Gora’s narrative, it is necessary to take a brief digression into a cultural history of praise in South India. To interpret juxtapositions of praise and humility merely as a strategic self-contradiction in the service of a thinly veiled vanity is to fundamentally misconstrue their function as an onomastic practice whose performativity is grounded in a specific “Hindu topography of the self” (Appadurai 1990). Arjun Appadurai uses Sanskrit aesthetics (alan˙karas´astra) and its treatment of literary emotions in order to elucidate the contours of that topography—or in Maussian terms: concept—of the self. This concept leads back to medieval royal courts as the social location of both Sanskrit aesthetics and the actual literary practices (Sanskrit: kavya) it theorizes. Sheldon Pollock (2006) argues that panegyric (Sanskrit: pras´asti) was at the origin of kavya and, as a mode of public communication, played a major role in medieval political and cultural practices. As such, praise as

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panegyric participated in a comprehensive “monarchical cosmology” (Price 1996a: 6) in which power and notions of lordship or eminence materialized in a whole range of symbolic transactions; these included not only displays of military prowess but also rituals of conspicuous consumption, demonstrations of charitable largesse, patronage for the arts and sciences, religious gifting and endowments, and so on (Narayana Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam 1998; Talbot 2001; Ali 2004). Such practices instantiated an intricate “representational economy” (Keane 2003: 410) of lordship and subordination as well as honor and deference, which was underpinned by a complex aesthetics of pleasure (Sanskrit: kama), enjoyment (Sanskrit: bhoga), and emotion (Sanskrit: rasa). As Appadurai points out, this aesthetics comes with a layered topography of the self where pleasure and emotion were located in the exterior domains of the self. This means that it was located in  the realm of the senses as well as the mind or heart (manassu) as the site of all kinds of mental formations: perceptions, ideas, ­emotions—what my interlocutors today call bhavam.4 In a close reading of Vatsyayana’s famous Kamasutra, Daud Ali (1998) argues furthermore that medieval aesthetics of pleasure articulated not only a theoretical topography but also a practical technology of the self, which instructed cultured urbanites (Sanskrit: nagaraka) on how to cultivate their sensorium and engage the external world semiotically as a surface for pleasure. Panegyric, especially in its literary form of pras´asti, was an important part of the artifice and exteriority of the courtly world of signs and surfaces; and its main function was neither to record the historical truth of praiseworthy deeds nor to express interior emotions of the panegyrist. It was a public and social practice of power within the representational economy of medieval India’s “monarchical cosmology.” This is the historical background against which Appadurai argues that performances of praise in contemporary India are “not a matter of direct communication between the inner emotional states of the parties involved but of a publicly understood code for the negotiation of expectations and obligations” (1990: 102). Giving praise—and I would add articulating critique or cynicism as well—is thus not primarily an expression of interior states but an aesthetic practice that negotiates, produces, and comments upon social relations and the expectations and obligations that come with power, wealth, and eminence; these are, above all, expectations of generous patronage and altruistic redistribution as well as obligations of subordination, deference, and indebtedness. And yet, what does Shariff Gora have to do with medieval maharajas,

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the elite culture of their aristocratic courtiers, and the theoretical treatises of Sanskrit aesthetes? I am not arguing here for a timeless Hindu self or a singular Indian concept of individuality—not even for a linear historical continuity. Historians of South India have amply demonstrated how early modern monarchical cosmologies and their political cultures were transformed and fragmented by the colonial state, its specific public sphere, and the logic of emerging nationalist politics (Dirks 1987; Waghorne 1994; Price 1996a; Washbrook 1975, 1976). At the same time, however, scholars of contemporary South India have shown that symbols of power, notions of status and honor, and values of personal authority rooted in medieval monarchical culture continue to inform social transactions and practices of eminence—praise and critique for instance—in both political and popular culture (Mines and Gourishankar 1990; Dickey 1993; Price 1989, 1996b; Bate 2009; S. V. Srinivas 2013). Contemporary actors, like Shariff Gora, need not be courtiers or versed in the Kamasutra for this because, as Pamela Price puts it, “kingship would become a question of tacit political culture—the provision of models for discrete, appropriate actions—not consciously and formally accepted political ideology” (1996a: 44). Even though Shariff Gora is not a king, nor even a community leader, his narrative is an instantiation of such a tacit political culture of kingship and its associated topography of the self, because it utilizes the deeply entrenched aesthetic practice of praise to evoke and narratively perform a contextualized and eminent individuality. To some degree, Shariff Gora told an utterly conventional success story narrated from the perspective of a person who has reached all the major social goals prescribed for an adult man: heterosexual marriage, procreation, economic stability, facilitation of marriages for his children, responsibility for his parents. At the same time, however, his life story was centrally structured around his open profession of atheism/nastikatvam and can therefore be interpreted as an onomastic practice and an essential part of his project of becoming an Atheist— in addition to becoming a man and an eminent individual. Shariff Gora’s narrative is moreover structured in a way that produces a synergy between these projects as it unfolds a dialectic between the “very good name” he has gained in the eyes of others and the takenfor-granted odium of the word atheist/nastika with which he names himself. At a formal level, this manifests in the use of disjunctives: He is known to disbelief in god, but they respect him regardless. From the perspective of his village community, he has achieved great things although he is an atheist/nastikudu. His achievements and personal

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success are the basis for his reputation, but he is all the more respectable for having accomplished them despite the disrepute attached to atheism/nastikatvam. It is implied that Atheism and social conformity are mutually corrosive yet Shariff Gora navigates both and, moreover, both in relation to each other: his extrication from social pressures and conventions demonstrates his strength, personality, and practical sincerity through which he eventually excelled in realizing some of the most important social conventions weighing on adult men; he stands out, not as marginal or deviant but as gold does among lead. In the previous chapter, I argued that the concept of mental revolution is tied to a transformation of the negative sentiments and odium attached to atheism/nastikatvam. This is what Shariff Gora described in his life story: he has realized the mental revolution constitutive of Total Atheism not because of his personal disbeliefs in god but by becoming a public Atheist who, through his moral behavior and practical sincerity, managed to overcome the odium of Atheism not only in himself but also in the eyes of his community. His life belies the common charge of immorality levied against Atheism demonstrating instead that it is possible to live openly as an Atheist and, moreover, to do so successfully and with social recognition. Yet what is the role of Atheism in this story besides a rhetorical device to produce a heightened sense of achievement and eminence in what turns out to be a conventional biography complying with ultimately conservative expectations for an appropriate male life trajectory? Its role is precisely the negotiation of alterity and conformity in the narrative construction of the specific quality of secular difference that I call ex-centricity. In order to further elucidate what I mean by this quality, the following section examines Shariff Gora’s account with regard to his experiences of marginality and social nonconformity.

Transforming Marginality into Eminence and Ex-centricity As part of a Muslim community in Andhra Pradesh’s rural southeast (Rayalaseema), Shariff Gora had already known what it meant to be a minority before becoming a public Atheist. Furthermore, he had had a taste of social ostracism when his family was boycotted for his father’s non-compliance with a “fatwa” issued by the religious authorities in their village. He told me this story a few months after our interview while we were both in Rajahmundry attending a rationalist wedding that he had arranged. He mentioned that, to a certain extent, he was the outcome of that episode. Because he grew up in a poor environment, Shariff Gora’s family had not been

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able to afford a great variety of food, and he remembered how one day, he complained over breakfast that he wanted “tasty food.” His grandfather became angry about his insolence, and as punishment, sent him off to school with a teacher from the village’s government school who just happened to pass by their house at the right moment. Since Shariff Gora’s family was Muslim, he had previously attended a private Urdu school. After this incident, however, he stayed on at the Telugu-medium government school, because it was better equipped, had more teachers, and offered better education. The trouble started when, after some time, his father disregarded the village mullah’s pronouncement that Shariff Gora was to return to the Urdu school. Even after being sent before the village panchayat, his father remained stern. As a penalty for his noncompliance, the whole family was socially boycotted for some years. When I asked what that entailed, Shariff Gora answered that their relatives would no longer come to visit them and that his father was banned from the mosque. In a sense, they had become socially “decontextualized,” as they were cut off from a whole range of regular social interactions. Shariff Gora concluded that the situation changed once he had become successful with a good job, a respectable salary, and exemplary behavior. I commented that, due to his defiance of traditional authorities, his father had already displayed a “nastika spirit,” but Shariff Gora promptly and sternly refuted that: “No, no! He was not an atheist. He believed in god. And his reason [for disregarding the panchayat’s decision] was for economic purposes only.” I had made that comment partly because he had introduced the story by mentioning that his personality today was the outcome of it, and partly because I remembered that in our previous conversations, including our interview, he had stressed the importance of questioning “the authority of these mullahs and Brahmins.” Had not his father done exactly that? However, it was important to Shariff Gora to distinguish a true nastika spirit from just any kind of social deviance. His father might have acted as any self-respecting Atheist would, but he did not profess atheism/nastikatvam; as we have seen in the previous chapter, the crux of Atheism’s mental revolution is the practical sincerity of matching words and deeds. By equating his son’s education with future professional success, his father had merely thought about his personal economic gain. He had not acted with a social outlook or out of a desire to improve society by ridding it of religious authorities and mental slavery in general. In a similar way as eminence requires the combination of self-interest and altruistic generosity, an Atheist is more than a socially deviant maverick who defies authorities solely

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for personal profit—or worse, out of moral indifference. An Atheist, so Shariff Gora insisted, acted out of a sense of social responsibility and true understanding of the injustice of a social order based on mental slavery. It is the onomastic practice of consciously and intentionally professing atheism/nastikatvam that distinguished Shariff Gora’s mental revolution from mere social deviance on the one hand, and his successful life from mere social conformism on the other hand. It is important to further clarify the nature of this distinction in order to properly understand both Shariff Gora’s sense of self as an Atheist individual and my concept of ex-centricity. As I mentioned above, Shariff Gora is an active member of MVV (Human Development Forum). Its members organize regular social gatherings called “Humanist Family Meets” whose main purpose is to build a sense of community among Atheist activists by engaging their whole families. In our interview, Shariff Gora told me how and why he had organized such a meeting in his apartment: So, [Atheist] people are feeling, you know: “We are alone.” You see, you take [my building], about twenty-one families are living in this; ­twenty-one families! Rationalists? Only one family. So, they are afraid. We are the only people different from the others. In my house, there was a get-together. The house was full. People even had to sit on the veranda [laughs]. Then these people [his neighbors] are surprised: “What is that question here? No festival, nothing in the calendar. What is happening in your house?” I said, “See, our group is here, ­nonbelievers’ group, we have a get-together.” “Huh? Nonbelievers’ group is also there?” [laughs] They were surprised to see. They have seen different believers, Ayyappa Swami, and Durga Puja, and so many. And, they think like: “What is this nonbelievers’ group?”

The texture of this account evokes very clearly how Atheists try to cultivate a very specific sense or sentiment of both community and communal distinctiveness. The Humanist Family Meet is seen as an opportunity for Atheist individuals to ease the feeling of being alone and isolated by creating a new community of their own (i.e., by recontextualizing themselves within the Atheist movement). This process of recontextualization is a very concrete project of providing an alternative to conventional social networks, like caste, extended family, or religion, which are helpful and often indispensable for practical matters such as finding marriage partners, looking for a job, getting an apartment, or simply finding opportunities for get-togethers and socializing. As such, the Atheist movement functions as a surrogate community and as a crucial intermediary for what my interlocutors identify as the ultimate goal of Total Atheism: “social reconstruction” (san˙ghanirmanam).

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Shariff Gora testifies to his capability of mobilizing people by describing how the Humanist Family Meet spills out of his private apartment onto the veranda, which is actually the shared hallway connecting the different flats in his apartment block. In this image, Atheism as a community figuratively spills into Indian society, since that common area of the apartment block, insofar as it is a semipublic space, possesses a fundamental attribute routinely ascribed to Indian society: religious plurality. Shariff Gora introduced his nonbelievers’ group straightforwardly in terms of an alternative within a discourse of religious pluralism; yet a close reading of the passage shows that he also evoked a distinctive sense of otherness: the Atheist alternative is based on a different difference than religious difference. Shariff Gora was amused that his neighbors—otherwise so used to a variety of ­religions—were unable to place the nonbelievers into an existing category of a familiar religious other. The calendar of festivals serves here as the materialization of a larger nationalist discourse that conceives and produces religious pluralism as a geographically organized and periodically recurring succession of “festivals.” Srirupa Roy (2007) has shown how projects of nation-building and secularism in independent India were founded on a discourse of unity in diversity, which conceptualized difference—be it regional, ethnic, or religious— in terms of aesthetic difference: as traditions, costumes, folklore, or festivals that can be represented visually or materially in a parade, a classificatory chart, or indeed a calendar. The presumed inexistence of a distinctive material culture and aesthetics of Atheism, to which I return in the following chapter, renders it unassimilable into the representational logic of a “scenography of national integration” (Copeman 2009: 73) rooted in an aesthetics of religious pluralism. This structural exclusion and nonrepresentability of Atheism within a figuration of the Indian nation as essentially religiously plural as well as Shariff Gora’s memories of social deviance and ostracism share a certain form of encountered or externally imposed marginality, which is crucial to my understanding of ex-centricity. I argue that the translational history of Atheism and the concepts of mental revolution and practical sincerity, which all revolve around the sublation of a constitutive “odium” attached to Atheism (see Chapter 1), offer a conceptual and moral grid for Atheists like Shariff Gora to resignify encountered or imposed marginality and otherness as eminence and distinction. While telling me about his family meet, Shariff Gora displayed a sort of relish for provocation and seemed to enjoy his neighbors’ surprise and consternation. His recurring laughter and attitude of ridicule indicate that Atheists are compelled to

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engage with the hegemonic logic of religious pluralism, but they also retain and cultivate a sense of otherness, distinctiveness, and indeed superiority. Since they are perceived and behave as a “nonbelievers’ group,” but continue to be marked by absence and lack, they cannot help but become a deficient token of the type “religious community”; yet at the same time, they produce a fundamental difference out of the marginalization, otherness, and deficiency that hegemonic logic bestows on them. Atheists tend to explain their ex-centricity (i.e., their different difference) by substituting tropes like unity in diversity or religious pluralism with a discourse of humanism in which social, ethnic, or religious identities are seen as introducing artificial and prejudicial differences into what is “really” an undifferentiated, common humanity. This humanism allows Atheists to adopt a positionality vis-à-vis society from where social differences, inequalities, and boundaries—including those based on religions—appear as something merely human-made, grafted onto the reality of a generically or potentially homogenous humanity as part of a material universe (see Chapters 4 and 5 for more details on the role of materialism and humanism respectively). Shariff Gora cannot entirely escape the social logic of religious pluralism or the conventions regulating an acceptable life trajectory for an adult male—even if he wanted to. He can, however, relate to it from a position of aloofness: he can challenge his village elders, he can laugh at his neighbor’s limited understanding of religious pluralism, and he can distance himself from the narrow economic self-interest that motivated his father’s disobedience. If Shariff Gora nonetheless fulfills the conventional duties of a respectable Indian man and contributes to shaping the Atheist movement into a recognizable community, the tone of his narrative clearly suggests that he does so not because he must, but because he can. At the same time, it is crucial to recognize that an important dimension of this aloofness from society had already been imposed: he had already grown up as part of a Muslim minority, his family had already been ostracized within that community, his neighbors’ framework of religious pluralism had already marked the nonbelievers’ group as strange and deficient (lacking beliefs, festivals, calendar slots, etc.). Ex-centricity refers to the process of transforming encountered marginality into a social positionality of difference and aloofness that bestows eminence. The following case study of B. B. Shaw’s biographic narrative further elucidates how being at the margins—being neither in nor out but ex-centric—may allow men to become individuals of eminence by claiming the necessary freedom and sociological agency to transform both themselves and society.

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B. B. Shaw B. B. Shaw was born in 1985 in Nelamarry, a small village in Nalgonda district in eastern Telangana. Like Shariff Gora, he discarded his given name, Bacalakura Bhiksham, and changed it into a humanist name by adding “Shaw” to his initials. He chose this name as an homage to the Irish humanist G. B. (George Bernard) Shaw and, furthermore, as an expression of self-respect: the homonymy between Shaw and “shah,” an Urdu word for king, was an intentional contrast to his given name: Bhiksham is a Telugu word for begging. As we will see in the following paragraphs, B. B. Shaw seeks a form of self-respect that is based on social work and service to society—not like a slave would serve his master but rather like a king would serve his people. In 2014, B. B. Shaw quit his job as a chemical lab technician in Suryapet and began studying law in Hyderabad. B. B. Shaw is the state convener of Humanist Youth, MVV’s official youth wing, but I also met him regularly at all kinds of events hosted by other Atheist organizations. In addition, he runs Miracle Exposure Programs in villages, schools, and colleges by conducting so-called magic shows (see Chapter 4). “B. B. Shaw: Magician and humanist;” this is how he introduced himself when we first met. He showed me a thick folder of newspaper articles as a sort of portfolio of his past programs, of which he claimed to have conducted more than six hundred during the last couple of years. He is a young and dynamic man who is full of enthusiasm for dedicating his life to the improvement of society by becoming a full-time “propagator” (pracarakudu) for the Atheist movement. The following is based primarily on an interview I recorded with B. B. Shaw in March 2015 when I visited him for the second time in his hometown of Nelamarry. Talking about his childhood, B. B. Shaw emphasized that he had grown up in poverty, and that his family often lacked food and clothes, which forced him to drop out of school and work as a child laborer. At the age of fourteen, a school teacher from a nearby town started supporting him by reenrolling him in school, helping with the required school materials, and procuring a place in the local government hostel and social welfare scheme for Scheduled Castes. Most importantly, however, he introduced him to science and Atheism: B. B. Shaw: At the time of teaching a class, or if someone told a [ghost] story at the hostel . . . he [his teacher] was there: “There is no god, there are no evil spirits, there is nothing at all.5 Write this down! . . . There is no god. In society there is no spirit, only I, he, this universe.” So, I did not understand. This is, ah, the sun is revolving. Morning and evening are

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false. Morning, evening, they are false. Sunset and sunrise, setting and rising are false. It is only the revolving [earth]. It doesn’t stop anywhere. Like that. But it is like that, he was saying. “Oh, that’s true,” I thought. . . . As soon as he told this, what did I do? I felt affection for him. Feeling like that, I thought: “Okay.” Whatever that Sir was saying, I believed him blindly. Blindly! . . . Then, [I said]: “I am an atheist [nastikudu].” Actually, I asked him: “What do they call those who believe in this [heliocentric theory]?” He said: “Atheists. Being atheist does not mean they don’t believe in anything at all.” Stefan: He said he was an atheist? Or did others say that he was an atheist? B.B.S.: He didn’t say anything. What he said is that those who say this are called atheists. “But then you, Sir, are an atheist,” I said. I hadn’t known that he was an atheist. Because, if you teach and say, “I am an atheist,” the government will cause trouble. Therefore, without saying anything, he just spoke relatedly. Then I got tempted. Suppose I go forward saying, “I am an atheist,” nobody can do anything to me, right? . . . Like that, he nourished, nourished, nourished [my Atheism]. So, wherever I saw that some unscientific news came up, I said: “This is not [real], but that is!” . . . Everybody was surprised. “This is unreal,” I said. Like this, in my childhood, it was like this. Then I came into tenth standard. Back then, when you had an argument with me, to whomever I spoke, I used to say: “This is not [real]. If it were, how is it possible?” S.: How did people react to your saying “I am an atheist” and to all your criticism? B.B.S.: They said: “One mustn’t listen to what he says. One mustn’t listen to what atheists say.” So, there was nobody who listened carefully. I was talking about something, [and] some people used to think: “He’s saying the right thing.” But as soon as I said “atheist,” they used to say: “Oh my, this one says, there is no god.” Then [they thought]: “I believe in god. So, I shouldn’t listen to what he says.” They used to be scared: “Oh, you don’t believe?” S.: But, did you get into trouble? B.B.S.: No, they didn’t cause any trouble.

He laughed at his youthful, “blind” enthusiasm for professing atheism/nastikatvam without really grasping the theory of it. At the same time, however, it was hard to miss a certain sense of pride as he recalled the audacity of his younger self standing up to everybody else as a denier, a nastikudu. Despite his initial lack of theoretical understanding, it seems he understood very well what it meant to behave as an Atheist: denying the truth of false assertions, criticizing those who spread them, and rectifying them with the authority of science. This authority was incarnated in his teacher, with whom he had a relationship that went beyond food, tutoring, or a place to study. It was about mentorship, attention, opportunity. When B. B. Shaw invited me to visit his former teacher in nearby Nadigudem, it

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was clear that this person is more than an educational professional to him. The affection, gratitude, and respect they feel for each other were palpable. This was only an initial but not the last experience of patronage in B. B. Shaw’s life, as he would encounter several other persons who would act as his mentors and gradually induct him into the Atheist movement. In B. B. Shaw’s life story, Atheism is more than the substitution of one set of beliefs for another, as it is tightly linked to his first-hand experience of benefactors: people of knowledge and authority who demonstrate their social outlook not only by exposing falsehoods and criticizing all sorts of “social evils” (duracaralu), but also by practically combatting them with concrete and tangible acts of social service. Disbelief in god is of course a crucial aspect but, as B. B. Shaw had to experience, its profession can be distracting and prevent people from listening to what one actually has to say; or worse, the odium and prejudice attached to it can alienate people even though they would, in fact, agree with what is being said and done. Toward the end of high school, he left his village to study in the nearby town of Kodada where he met new and different kinds of people like PhD students, journalists, or politicians. By mingling with them, he realized that they talked about different things than the people in his village: not just about marriage and family life but about ways to change and improve society. “By roaming around with these very eminent people [peddapeddavallu], it made me think: ‘Oho, we have to do social work.’ The feeling arose that we need it.” This feeling of necessity reinforced hitherto rather diffuse notions of self-respect and social work that Dalit activists inspired by B. R. Ambedkar had propagated in his village, a Dalit colony. It was then that he came in contact with Human Development Forum (MVV) and its manifesto: After getting to know about MVV, the very first thing Sir [B. Sambasiva Rao, founder of MVV] did, was introduce their program. There is a manifesto, right? A program. In the MVV program, the very first [point] is the eradication of caste: casteless society. Eradication of caste! I liked that. Due to caste, I had been distanced from people in my village, I was being pushed away. Therefore, I opposed caste. I avoided caste. I liked that very much, the first point. Second point: a life without religion [matam]. . . . Oho! It said how religion is not necessary for life.

The remaining items of the eight-point manifesto are (3) gender equality, (4) human values, (5) human rights, (6) secularism, (7) scientific temper, and (8) ecological balance. B. B. Shaw added that hearing about this program, he “understood very well that [the

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question of] whether god is there or not is not enough.” By insisting on the possibility, nay the desirability, of a life without caste and religion, MVV’s manifesto had an effect on B. B. Shaw that is similar to what Shariff Gora had experienced when he first set foot into the Atheist Centre. The significance of these encounters lay not only in the confirmation of cosmological or theological worldviews or the details of ideologies of social change, but in the confident affirmation that it is possible to lead a life without caste and religion—a respectable life, moreover, that promised to be successful personally and beneficial socially. Coming from a poor Dalit background and with a jolty educational trajectory, B. B. Shaw is no stranger to experiences of caste and classbased hierarchies and the discriminatory barriers these put in place; in his village, many young men of his age are unemployed, and few have perspectives for imminent improvement. The Atheists whom B. B. Shaw had met in his life, however, had provided not only perspectives but also real opportunities to improve his life for the better. And it is because of his involvement in the Atheist movement that B. B. Shaw has earned if not status then at least notoriety in his village community. He has gained access to an enlarged social network, and everybody knows that B. B. Shaw has international contacts. I was already the second foreigner he got to know through the Atheist movement and brought to his village as a visitor. Moreover, his membership in MVV has provided him with access to an infrastructure and sometimes also the material resources for doing social work. After our interview, we visited the local village school where, in the company of faculty and principal, we ceremoniously handed over a donation of textbooks and writing pads that B. B. Shaw had procured for the students studying for their final exams. As I mentioned above, extensive social ties as well as access to and the redistribution of material resources are crucial means by which individuals gain recognition and eminence. In contrast to Shariff Gora, who told a success story from a primarily retrospective vantage point where Atheism heightened his personal achievements and eminence, B. B. Shaw’s narrative was as yet unfinished and had an open-ended, essentially prospective directionality: for him, Atheism—and more precisely the actual community of the Atheist movement—was a means through which he could engage in social work in order to achieve individual eminence in the future. In more than this directional respect, their narratives appear to be inverted mirror images of one another, as Shariff Gora’s account is based on praise and recognition, while B. B. Shaw’s story is more invested in critique and struggle.

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Overcoming Hierarchy through Activism B. B. Shaw’s critique is based primarily on the aforementioned ideology of humanism, according to which conventional markers of social difference or rank like religion, caste, education, employment, marital status, and so on are merely human-made, superficial, and ultimately unreal. Atheists should therefore either disregard such distinctions completely or at least keep aloof from them by criticizing or—as demonstrated by Shariff Gora—ridiculing them. For B. B. Shaw, this ideological “should” is very important because it implies a system of meritocracy in which individual success ought to depend on personal qualities alone rather than social status. Unfortunately, he had to experience persisting barriers of social distinction even within the Atheist movement: He [the typical Atheist] compares from an economic viewpoint. He compares regarding employment: “This one comes and goes to other countries, I am staying together with my children,” he says and compares. “This one works as a doctor, my children should work as doctors too,” he compares. But will his society develop? Why aren’t we developing truth and ourselves; why aren’t we comparing that? How come? It is necessary to compare that. If you compare like that, then the movement will advance. Therefore, what I have to do is first strengthen myself; language-wise, giving a speech [in English], such things I have to achieve. Then, I don’t have any employment. At present, I am not married. Seeing all this, they consider me a small boy. So, if I had what they call status [hoda], then they would receive me differently. Therefore, I am studying law now. If I want to run this movement and want to be received, they are thinking: “What did he study? Who is he?” . . . In society everybody thinks like that: “Is he employed? Does he have a job?” We, the atheists and rationalists, think [like that] too. It is because of this that today I am studying law. I don’t need law. I am doing it because society needs law.

B. B. Shaw criticized that even among Atheists, professional success, education, and marital status remain preconditions for recognition and eminence within the social structures of the Atheist movement. His argument resonates with the ambiguous exigency of eminent individuals to pursue self-interest only for the sake of ultimately altruistic purposes: he feels the need to strengthen himself and study law only in order to acquire the social status necessary to make a move within the structures of a movement that—ideologically speaking—purports to overcome the exclusionary effects of precisely such status distinctions. B. B. Shaw’s criticism of “comparison” (polcukovatam) resonated moreover with the fact that eminence entails not only relations of patronage with constituencies, but also intense

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competition between rivaling eminent individuals (Price 1996a). He studied law not only for its educational value or its usefulness for the movement, but because it provides social recognition; and Atheists too, he complains, tend to think like society rather than keeping aloof from it. Marriage is ambivalent as well, if for different reasons. In India, marriage is a crucial marker of adulthood for both men and women (Osella and Osella 2006; Kaur and Palriwala 2014). Since B.  B. Shaw was in his early thirties and had two younger siblings who were already married, he faced increasing pressure to start a family. In addition to this general social expectation, marriage and family relations are considered a prime locus for realizing—and more importantly reproducing—Atheism as a way of life (see Chapters 1 and 6). Without having a family of his own (i.e., without being the head and provider of a family), B. B. Shaw was effectively excluded from both a crucial dimension of masculinity and a major domain for putting Atheism into practice. He recounted how a couple of years ago, he had met a famous senior rationalist intellectual with whom he shared his plans of becoming a full-time, professional worker for the Atheist movement. As a reply, he was told to come back into the movement a few years later, after finding a job, marrying, and “settling down.” The time for social activism would be later in his life, once he had a family and children who could support him in his livelihood. This normative insistence on marriage as well as seniority has to be seen against the background that families—rather than the state, for instance—are the most important form of social security in India. B. B. Shaw found himself in a situation where he risked becoming too old to be considered “marriageable” but remained too young—or rather, as a bachelor, not adult enough—to be an Atheist activist. B. B. Shaw recognized the conventional duty of a male adult to start a family as much as he appreciated the importance of families for the reproduction of the Atheist movement. He agreed that unless Atheists managed to transmit their worldview to subsequent generations, their movement could not develop a consistent “varasatvam”: a succession, lineage, or inheritance. Where he disagreed with his seniors, however, was that family is the only place for ensuring the continuity of Atheism, and that being “settled down” should be a precondition for activism: Lastly, my opinion is that if you want to develop the movement, the talk of being settled economically as an employee and being settled with regard to marriage is a sham. Never mind all that. When is the [right] stage for the movement? Vivekananda was young when he did it. Ambedkar did it at that stage. If you look at it like that, any intellectual,

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for instance, in the whole world, basically, their whole life was driven by an ideology that started while they were youngsters. They have continued precisely those programs that were carried out with the ideology they had had as youngsters.

While the Dalit activist Ambedkar seems a particularly congenial role model for an Atheist like B. B. Shaw, it might seem surprising that he mentions him in one breath with the famous monk and Hindu reformer Vivekananda. Throughout our interview, B. B. Shaw used religion as a contrasting foil and kept on comparing the Atheist movement with religious organizations like Vivekananda’s Ramakrishna Math and Mission or Hindutva outfits like RSS, VHP, or Bajrang Dal. He did so because these organizations represented a successful model for ideologically driven and collectively funded forms of activism and social service. According to B. B. Shaw, the problem with these organizations was that their social service was such “in name only.” It was therefore a form of practical insincerity, because what they effectively did was Hinduism, and Hinduism could never be social service. Regardless, the point of those comparisons for B. B. Shaw was that youth need not be a disadvantage but could be an asset for the Atheist movement. Rather than focusing solely on the reproduction of Atheist families, he proposed to strengthen Atheism by maintaining a consistent level of organized social activism. In his opinion, the future of Atheism depends on the development of a committed and professionalized Youth Wing capable of sustaining “continuous programs”: S.B: How to do it, in your opinion? How can you do it? B.B.S.: In my opinion? If you want to develop the Youth Wing, what you need is completely full-time workers; full-time workers for ­humanism. . . . It will be good if continuous programs are happening. If you want such continuous programs to happen, the main, main problem is the economic aspect. . . . If you want to implement this economic aspect, the current situation now is that there are no people who give us donations. They say, “If you give donations to god, you will get some kind of spiritual merit [punyam].” But if you give to us, there will be nothing. Therefore, there are no donors for us in that way. Now, what we should do is that those within our society [Atheist movement] should share their property. The employees within our society earn five thousand rupees. If they can give two hundred, that’s enough. When they get ten thousand, if they can [give] one thousand: great! Like that, we have to share income collectively.

B. B. Shaw had experienced being unemployed and ­unmarried— and being unemployed makes getting married all the more ­difficult— as the main hurdles in his endeavor to spread humanism. His solution for this conundrum was simple: by strengthening economic solidarity

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within the movement, Atheist activism would no longer be premised on having settled down and would become itself a form of employment, and hence the basis for being able to settle down, marry, and have a family. But B. B. Shaw went further, because he saw Atheist activism not just as a means to solve his personal problems of bachelorhood and unemployment: full-time workers for humanism had to be people with real “love and affection for true ideas” (nijamaina bhavalapaina premanuragalunna vallu). It was this love and dedication to social service that could justify the necessary solidarity within the movement, just as in B. B. Shaw’s opinion, “false” ideas of divine reward and spiritual merit motivated religious donations: In a religion, everyone is just one; everyone just one. Why aren’t we working—everybody as one—in our humanism? Why aren’t we doing it in humanism? . . . Now, I am trying to think about it from a new perspective. Therefore, I am still postponing marriage. In my family, both my younger brothers have been married; I am coming next. But, you know, I am thinking this about marriage: in this human body, psychologically, some desires are to be fulfilled and minimizing them is against nature as well as increasing them is against nature. One should be balanced. Marriage is a necessity. If some among us take to the ideal [of celibacy], if there is no procreation, how will there be a next generation? . . . You [may think] it is good to go along in society as someone even completely dead. When you take on this [social] death, there also arise some problems. “So, you are a bachelor?” [they will ask.] You won’t be received well because there are a lot of problems with bachelors. . . . So, I am also thinking about this issue. Just, in my life, I want it to be only about humanism—humanism and better than humanism. That’s what I am trying to do. My education is a bit, my knowledge, these are not so great. I work hard to strengthen that more, to develop myself well . . . in order to bring humanism into society.

It is precisely because B. B. Shaw recognizes marriage as not only a social but also a biological and psychological necessity that his decision to postpone or even forsake it completely acquires the status of an altruistic sacrifice: it is for the sake of humanity that he is willing to be dead in the eyes of society—a social death that enables individual “development.”6 Without doing so explicitly, he evoked here the figure of the celibate and ascetic “renouncer” (Sanskrit: samnyasin) as opposed to the procreating and economically productive “householder” (Sanskrit: grhastha).7 I argue that just as Shariff Gora’s narrative resonated with notions and symbols of monarchical eminence, B. B. Shaw tried to justify his rejection of certain social duties and obligations by having recourse to the time-honored ideal of renunciation.

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Transforming Marginality into Ex-centricity through Renunciation Louis Dumont claimed that there is no concept of the individual in India because the only way to develop a sense of individuality is to leave the world of social relations—by which he meant the duties and obligations of the caste system—and become a renouncer: an “individual–outside–the–world” (1970: 275). Dumont has been criticized for ignoring the historicity of renunciation and thus misconstruing its past and present manifestations in concrete, “worldly” social institutions both within Brahmanic Hinduism and outside of it (Olivelle 1986, 1993; Heesterman 1988; Thapar 1988; van der Veer 1989). Actual communities of hermits, ascetic movements, or monastic orders have not only internally replicated social structures but, as nonproductive communities, they have also depended for their subsistence on either state patronage or economic support from lay householders. As religious professionals or spiritual virtuosi, renouncers have in turn preformed important ritual, symbolic, and cultural functions for their various patrons. It is thus on the basis of transactional relations that renouncers as individuals or collectives “outside–the–world” have in fact been very much part of the world and its social, economic, and political networks: “The isolated renouncer remained socially marginal if not ineffective, but the image and connotation of the renouncer when it was associated with social movements became a powerful force for mobilization. The strength for such a force doubtless derived from the fact that renouncers were the only category of persons who could with impunity discard social mores” (Thapar 1988: 290). B. B. Shaw did not talk about renunciation explicitly. What mattered to him, I argue, is precisely the “image and connotation” of renunciation, whose primary focus is not “ultramundaneity” (Dumont 1970: 273) as a negation of the world but a very specific mode of relatedness to and positionality within the world. This positionality derives its esteem and power from the sanction and indeed the requirement to transgress social conventions while thriving for a particular kind of human perfection. Buddhist and Jain renouncers were not only classified as nastikas but, like their Brahmanic counterparts, were also called s´ramanas due to the extraordinary exertions or toil (Sanskrit: s´rama) they were performing in matters of ritual duties (Olivelle 1993: 9–16). Founded on notions of distinction—in both senses of difference and eminence—renunciation as a mode of being– in–social–relations opened up a particular space for acting upon

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those relations, precisely by keeping in certain respects aloof from them. Romila Thapar notes, “It is not accidental that socio-political reformers in India have frequently appropriated the symbols of the renouncer” (1988: 274). Symbols and notions of social “death”8 or aloofness from society as well as associations with socially authorized nonconformism and with a way of life based on toiling excellence resonate with B. B. Shaw’s decision to forsake married life in order to dedicate his whole life to humanism; not just for strengthening and developing himself but “in order to bring humanism into society.” Here, B. B. Shaw’s critique of the Atheist movement and the moral ideal of practical sincerity become relevant, because he alleged that many of his fellow Atheists contradicted their professed commitment to humanism by continuing to think, act, and compare in terms of conventional markers of social rank such as employment, education, marital status, and sometimes—most devastatingly—even caste. In other words, rather than bringing humanism into society, they bring society into humanism and thus lack practical sincerity. What resurfaces here is the paradoxical predicament of eminent individuality that mandates the pursuit of status and self-interest and, simultaneously, its performative denial through conspicuous acts of redistribution. B. B. Shaw mobilized the ideal of renunciation in order to criticize those who fail to detach themselves from their acquired wealth and their investment in social status, but also in order to diffuse any potential doubts about his own altruism. He was eager to stress that he did not seek leadership or eminence within the Atheist movement for selfish purposes of wealth, power, or status: “We [full-time workers] have to eat. [But] one dish of curry, lentils, and curd is enough. We do not need more. . . . Shirts for five hundred rupees are not necessary. Even a two-hundred-rupee shirt is fine for us.” B. B. Shaw cannot entirely escape the logic of eminent individuality, but by evoking the renouncer’s association with frugality and asceticism—not only in its marital or sexual but also sartorial and prandial dimensions—he can shift the emphasis from individual wealth and power to altruism. Eminence results here less from personal achievements as a householder and family provider than from altruistic distribution and social service in the form of organized activism in the Atheist movement. When B. B. Shaw emphasized the importance of social work or talked about “social service” (san˙ghika seva), he referred to an important modern dimension of the trope of renunciation. The concept of social service emerged in colonial projects of social and religious reform, which introduced “modern” concepts and imaginaries of society, nation, as well as humanity as the

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appropriate realms for political, economic, and religious practices—as opposed to a “traditional” realm of personalized networks based on kinship, caste, sect, or religious community (Dirks 1987; Haynes 1987; Copley 2003; Sen 2003; Watt 2005; Copeman 2008). Existing forms of transactional practices like charitable donation (Sanskrit: dana), selfless service (Sanskrit: seva), or altruistic action (Sanskrit: karmayoga) were thus “made social” (Copeman 2008: 50; see also 2009) by—at least ideally—including all of society, the whole nation, or entire humanity into their transactional ambit. By being made social, transactions were transformed into “modern” or “progressive” projects of philanthropy, mass uplift, or welfare programs that constituted a new category of public practice: social service. It makes perfect sense that B. B. Shaw considers Vivekananda a source of inspiration given that the latter is widely recognized as an early paragon of social service as well as of “renunciation–made–social.” On the basis of his reformed Advaitavedanta monism, Vivekananda propagated that the epitome of the renouncer’s spiritual practice (Sanskrit: sadhana) is selfless service rendered to society as nation, and to humanity as god (Beckerlegge 2006). Historical and therefore continuously changing symbols of renunciation underpinned and coalesced with B. B. Shaw’s imaginary of social service, just as monarchical notions of power and lordship informed the “tacit political culture” (Price 1996a: 44) and conceptions of individual eminence in Shariff Gora’s account. B. B. Shaw could mobilize highly esteemed images of renunciation in order to transform his social marginality in terms of caste (Dalit background), class (low education, unemployment), and social status (bachelorhood) into a positively revalued sense of aloofness from society. Associations of asceticism and personal sacrifice were combined with an ideology of humanism that devalues certain manifestations of the social without, however, negating it completely: it is through the aloofness from social conventions that the renouncer–made–activist gains the capacity to transform society. As B. B. Shaw was excluded from realizing Total Atheism within the realm of the family and the conventional structures of male adulthood, he emphasized the importance of organized activism and the ideal of the Atheist movement as a realization of a true humanist community from within which humanism could be brought into society. Since eminence is based on establishing, maintaining, or enlarging transactional relationships, B. B. Shaw tried to do so by means of the existing social networks of the Atheist movement. It is through the structure of a collectively funded organization for full-time activists (MVV’s Youth Wing) that

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his transactional ties could in theory be enlarged to all of society. After all, he envisioned the Atheist movement not only as a collection of Atheist families, but also as an associational agent of societal transformation. The position of eminence he aspired to was based on his distinction as an extraordinarily dedicated, altruistically toiling social activist, yet he found himself blocked by his fellow Atheists’ submission to social conventions. While this submission might be less severe than the mental slavery of a regular Theist caught in mental slavery, B. B. Shaw considered it nonetheless a lack of practical sincerity. This lack of sincerity prevented him not only from “developing himself” as a free and socially responsible individual, but also from effecting actual social change.

Conclusion The most obvious way in which Shariff Gora and B. B. Shaw have made Atheism part of their individuality is by morphing their own names with the names of eminent Atheist individuals, the atheist/ nastikudu Gora and the humanist G. B. Shaw. Following Jacob Copeman (2015), I understand these personal professions as an onomastic practice whereby Shariff Gora and B. B. Shaw do more than publicly announce their commitment to an Atheist ideology; they become Atheist individuals by becoming known to and by others as such. Atheist names exceed the “singularity of the subject,” to borrow Simmel’s (1908: 79) formulation, as they are part of an individual’s social contextualization. Margaret Trawick’s (1990) ethnography of the emotional dimensions of kinship categories helps to elucidate what contextualization through onomastic practices entails. Trawick shows that kinship categories like elder brother, maternal uncle, or mother-in-law, which are often used instead of given names in India, are capable of establishing hierarchical or reciprocal relationships between individuals by organizing affect and affording sentiments: Sentiments, like ideas, may be channeled by means of words. It is important not to overlook the fact that in many parts of India . . . the selective use of kin terms is a powerful way of conveying, igniting, or engendering certain sentiments. One may apply a particular kin term to someone who is not in the genealogically “correct” relationship to one as a way of expressing a kin-based feeling toward them. Conversely, when a certain term is applied to a person, convention dictates that appropriate sentiments be expressed, inappropriate ones suppressed. (Trawick 1990: 152)

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Trawick argues that kinship categories are actualized in an “emotional habitus” (1990: 154) that people acquire through socialization and on the basis of kinship dramas represented in a vast cultural repertoire of stories, folklore, myths, songs, and so on. She also shows, however, that people can use that cultural repertoire to manipulate the affective dimensions of kinship categories in a politics of everyday life—both within and outside their families. This also describes the workings of Atheist onomastics within Shariff Gora’s and B. B. Shaw’s biographic professions, which seek to radically transform the negative emotional habitus encoded in the translational history of atheism/nastikatvam by manipulating culturally sanctioned forms of male individuality. Shariff Gora’s narrative of praise and humility evoked a historically entrenched template of “monarchical” eminence rooted in personal success and altruistic generosity. The reason why he could harness the negative affective charge of atheism/nastikatvam for increasing his sense of individual eminence within and outside the Atheist movement depended to a large extent on his fulfillment of the socially expected life goals of a male adult. B. B. Shaw, by contrast, lacked this sort of social “status” (hoda) and shifted his focus from the label atheism/nastikatvam to humanism as part of his larger concern about how he was being “received.” He mobilized long-standing and highly esteemed notions of renunciation in order to justify and transform his noncompliance with conventional social expectation into a potential source of eminence. This eminence was based on B. B. Shaw grafting humanist notions of aloofness from social distinctions onto the renouncer’s exteriority to the world so as to enable an expanded reengagement with that world in the form of the altruistic social service of Atheist activism. Instead of family life, B. B. Shaw proposed professionalized social work as an alternative form of practically realizing Atheism as a way of life. Both narratives provided distinctive emplotments of the kind of sociological agency my interlocutors call “mental revolution” (bhavaviplavam): they told of a transformative engagement with society that rests on the reflexive—thus socio-logical—resignification and revaluation of different forms of either encountered marginality or active noncompliance into positive forms of eminent individuality. The insistence on a transformative reengagement with society is not only crucial for the concept of Total Atheism as a positive project of social reconstruction—as opposed to a merely negative denial of certain beliefs—but also resonates with notions of control, self-sufficiency, detachment, courage, or innovation conventionally associated with

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masculinity in South Asia and elsewhere (Chopra, Osella, and Osella 2004; Osella and Osella 2006). Atheism is in all this not a carrier for a fixed and abstract concept of the self—“the modern, free, autonomous individual”—but a moral and conceptual grammar that regulates how activists like Shariff Gora and B. B. Shaw may evoke and manipulate existing tropes like kingship, renunciation, religious pluralism, humanity, or social service in the narrative crafting of a contextualized and eminent individuality. In its abstract formulation of practical sincerity, this moral and conceptual grammar refers to the matching of words and deeds (see Chapter 1) and requires a careful balancing of freedom (sveccha) from social convention on the one hand, and social outlook (san˙ghadrsti) or responsibility (badhyata) on the other hand. In this context, Shariff Gora, B. B. Shaw, and many of my other interlocutors were eager to distinguish freedom from mere egoism (ahan˙karam) or selfishness (svartham). They also differentiated a concern for social responsibility from blind submission to social dictates leading to mental slavery (bhavadasyam). In its abstract generality, however, this framework is hardly specific to Atheists and may be equally applicable to other formulations of ideal individuality, be they “modern,” “traditional,” or “religious.” The difference of Atheism, according to Atheists themselves, emerges through the practical realization of these ideals. While Chapter 1 retraced the underlying semiotic ideology of this claim to difference, this chapter took a first step toward specifying the nature or quality of this difference as a form of ex-centricity. Ex-centricity does not imply an absolute otherness, but rather a specific positionality of “aloofness” from which to sublate forms of marginality into eminence. The project of Total Atheism thus hinges on the sometimes subtle, sometimes aggressive, but always contestable and therefore fragile production of difference that separates the atheist/nastikudu Shariff Gora from a regular big-man (peddamanisi), that distinguishes the humanist B. B. Shaw from a Hindu renouncer, and that makes the nonbelievers’ group stand out as strange in the scenography of the familiar religious other.

Notes 1. For critical reviews of this debate, see Tambiah (1972); B. Morris (1978); Béteille (1986); Appadurai (1986); or Jaer (1987); and for alternative approaches to Indian individuality, see Kakar (1983); Daniel (1984); or Trawick (1990).

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2. I followed here the English translation of Anthony Blasi, Anton Jacobs, and Mathew Kanjirathinkal (Simmel 2009) but changed their translation of “soziologisches Tun” and “solipsistisches Sein,” because their elegant renderings as “sociological event” and “solipsistic existence” do not capture the active aspect of the German gerundival nominalisations “Tun” and “Sein,” which I chose to translate as “doing” and “being” respectively. 3. Shariff Gora, Hyderabad, 14 January 2014; recorded interview in English. 4. This topography does not lack notions of an interior self or soul (Sanskrit: atman, jiva, or puruasa), yet this interior self is not the locus of pleasure, emotions, or perceptions. There were, however, philosophical schools that denied the existence of such a soul: Buddhists with their concept of “nonself” (Sanskrit: anatman), as well as materialist Charvakas and determinist Ajivikas. These schools were classified as nastika, which is why contemporary Atheists usually see themselves as their present-day successors, and the denial of a soul is at least as important to them as the denial of gods. However, as Daud Ali (1998) has shown for the case of Buddhism, a categorical—or in this case ontological—argument against the existence of a soul does not necessarily entail a complete rejection of the Hindu topography of the self at the practical level. 5. B. B. Shaw, Nelamarry, 3 March 2015; recorded interview in Telugu, italics indicate English in original. 6. In Chapter 4, I will engage in more detail with the links between Atheist social activism and postcolonial discourses of development and modernity grounded in notions of scientific rationality. 7. I want to stress that this is not a distinction between “secular” and “religious” figures since both the householder and the renouncer were regarded as “ways of life” (Sanskrit: as´rama) in accordance with Vedic injunctions. These injunctions are the basis of dharma, which is supposed to regulate a virtuous and righteous life. If dharma is translated as “religion”—which it often is (see Chapter 1)—then being a householder is at least as, if not more, “religious” than being an ascetic renouncer. Orthodox Brahmanic circles have often considered the as´rama of householder as the most excellent way to fulfil dharma, because householders are the only ones qualified to perform Vedic sacrifices and thus sustain the cosmos, the ancestors, and the gods (Olivelle 1993). 8. Historically, it was by performing one’s own death rites that a Hindu person acquired the official status of renouncer (Dumont 1970; Olivelle 1992).

Chapter 3

PROPAGATION ENACTING ATHEISM IN ORATORY AND DEBATE

In Chapter 1, I introduced the concept of practical sincerity as a moral ideal and a conceptual grammar that regulates how Atheist activists distinguish “talk” and “action” as two different kinds of practice so as to evaluate people’s attempts and strategies of implementing Atheism as a total way of life. In this chapter, I concentrate on the category of talk and explore one of the most important modes of putting Atheism into practice: propagation (pracaram). Atheists are notorious for a certain prolixity, and it may seem at times that they are mainly occupied with giving speeches about Atheism. They are, in fact, regularly criticized—and often criticize each other—for not doing anything but talking and, what is more, they are seen in most cases to be merely preaching to the choir. During my fieldwork, oral propagation tended to occur primarily in the framework of meetings of and for the Atheist movement itself. While the patent rationale of propagation was to communicate an Atheist worldview to those still in the thrall of religion in order to liberate them from mental slavery (bhavadasyam), the audience for propagation was in most of its concrete instances already constituted by Atheists and the content of speeches was hardly new to them. Thus, it was not uncommon for activists to complain that, by and large, meetings were boring and that their movement was weak because all they ever do is talk. Nonetheless, oral propagation made up the largest share of Atheist activism, and laments of boredom were frequently juxtaposed with stories about famous orators whose speeches were considered entertaining and enlightening masterpieces credited with marvelous powers of persuasion. In his study on the rationalist organization Andhashraddha Nirmulan Samiti (ANiS) in Maharashtra, Johannes Quack (2012: 148–59) argues that the function of rationalist meetings consists primarily of providing activists with an occasion to mutually validate

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and reaffirm an already shared worldview, whose transgressive and deviant aspects were hard to sustain without some form of social support. Especially in the case of larger events, which are less concerned with practical or administrative issues, Quack’s “interpretation is that the most important point of these gatherings is not what is said in the speeches, but the fact that they strengthen the cohesiveness of the group” (2012: 171). I want to build on this argument but also take it in a new direction by questioning the distinction between internal and external audiences and the implicit assumption that the social function of speeches matter to the former whereas content matters with regard to the latter. I approach Atheist propagation in both cases as a kind of “speech act” (Austin 1962) whose efficacy does not flow exclusively from convincing an audience of the truth of its message but also from practically enacting that message through the very act of uttering it. Concretely, I argue that—in the ambit of propagation as a distinct mode of putting Atheism into practice through “talk”—to be an Atheist is not dependent on persuading others into becoming Atheists themselves; rather, it depends on making them listen to acts of propagation and thereby interpellating them into the relations of affect, power, and morality that structure the Atheist social imaginary communicated in those speech acts. I will describe the importance of making others listen as a function of an oratorical mode of address that characterizes Atheist propagation, irrespective of whether listeners are members of the Atheist movement or not. It is therefore highly relevant what is being said, but equally so are the concrete circumstances of its articulation as well as the complex historicity and social implications of aesthetic forms. Linguistic anthropologists have extensively studied the varying relationships of form, content, and performance of speech and how language ideologies, in the sense of specific normative representations of those relationships, align with larger societal power relations and political economies (Irvine 1979; Schieffelin, Woolard, and Kroskrity 1998; Bauman and Briggs 2003; Duranti 2004). The semiotic toolkit of linguistic anthropology has proven particularly productive for a larger anthropological project of describing modernity—and by extension secularity—as an aspirational, normative, and in many cases coercive and exclusionary moral narrative that is based on a specific ideological understanding of how signs work in relation to notions of human agency, material things, social relations, as well as religious beliefs and practices (van der Veer 1996; Robbins 2001; Keane 2007, 2013b; N. Roberts 2012). From a semiological perspective, secular modernity thus appears as a privileging of symbolic over and against

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iconic or indexical modes of signification leading to a post-Enlightenment language ideology of referentialism. Here, language is understood primarily in its denotational function of representing things or ideas, whereas notions of so-called magical or ritual efficacy (i.e., the notion that a thing can be manipulated by manipulating its sign) are rejected.1 Michael Lempert has argued that, as a consequence, “it has become part of linguistic anthropology’s subdisciplinary identity” to restore and “[welcome] back all the semiotic modalities exiled under a post-Enlightenment referentialist regime” (2012: 15). For my discussion, it is particularly relevant that those semiotic modalities have frequently been recovered in the context of religious practices (magical/ritual efficacy) and, more precisely, by analyzing how their exile is a function of modernity’s secular episteme and its ideological misinterpretation of religion as its constitutive other (e.g., Keane 2002; Asad 2003, 2011; Mahmood 2009). Hence, the semiotic analysis of modernity is often conjoined with an ideological critique of the secular as an epistemological regime that produces categories like religious belief, tradition, or ritual in order to make sense of practices that are thereby constituted as premodern and nonsecular. In other words, secular modernity’s semiotic ideology functions as a contrastive foil against which nondenotational language practices gain salience precisely insofar as they resist a secular/modern grid of intelligibility. However, to the limited extent that secular speech or practice itself, as opposed to an abstract epistemological regime, has attracted scholarly attention, it has served the purpose to demonstrate the ideological nature of secular discourse and its ultimate practical impossibility (e.g., Hirschkind 2011; Keane 2013b); simply put, to describe the poetics, pragmatics, or aesthetics of secular speech within this methodological framework is, in a sense, to describe away what distinguishes it from religion and thus makes it secular in the first place. It is against this background that I propose to study not how secular ideology contrasts with religious practice (or produces it as a category), but how a concrete semiotic ideology—in my case the moral ideal and conceptual grammar of practical sincerity in its relation to a specific civilizational narrative of Atheism in India—informs Atheist language practices and therein produces secular difference as an ex-centric positionality. To begin with, I describe a rather typical situation of oral propagation in the context of an Atheist conference before fleshing out how the content of Atheist propagation conditions its pragmatic functioning and aesthetic efficacy within a given representational economy of postcolonial India.

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Narrating the Triadic Social Imaginary of Atheism “You should visit the Charvaka Ashram,” I had been told repeatedly since I had first arrived in Andhra Pradesh. The name alone seemed peculiar: a hermitage (as´ramam) of Charvakas, the notorious materialist and atheist philosophers of ancient India. After some months, I finally met Satyanirdharana and Ayyanna at a conference organized by Human Development Forum (MVV). The two men were directly associated with the Charvaka Ashram and invited me to visit it on the occasion of its annual festival, the Nastika Mela—another somewhat curious juxtaposition: “mela” can refer to all kinds of festive gatherings where the boundaries of commercial, social, and religious aspects often blur. It has, however, a certain Hindu ring to it, and a festival of atheists/nastikas at a hermitage of Charvakas sounds indeed rather odd. The Charvaka Ashram, a compound of perhaps two acres, is located around forty kilometers from Vijayawada next to a country road connecting the town of Mangalagiri and the village of Nidamarru. Shielded by a row of trees and concrete walls, it lies surrounded by agricultural fields. Upon arriving, I could already hear from a distance the amplified sound of a group of folksingers accompanied by drummers; and as soon as I had gotten off the shared auto-rickshaw, someone ushered me past a registration desk and seated me in the first of around fifteen rows of plastic chairs that were set up under a large, colorful cloth tent in front of a big stage and next to an impressive sound-system. Children were running around scattered groups of adults chatting with each other or browsing through some of the provisionally set up bookstalls; as I realized later on, the participation of whole families and a certain festive atmosphere are unique to the Nastika Mela, because many other Atheist events are attended predominantly by men and often have the more prosaic feel of a conference rather than a mela. With at least two hundred people attending and its comparatively long history—celebrating its twenty-seventh annual repetition in 2019—the Nastika Mela can be considered a large and important event. Most of the participants have been coming for years, and many have been associated with the Charvaka Ashram through a private school it had been running until 2005. The official host of the event is Atheist Society (Nastika Samajam), which, like MVV, is one of several offshoots from Indian Atheist Society (Bharata Nastika Samajam). When I participated in the Nastika Mela in 2014 and 2015, members of various Atheist organizations as well as a considerable number of unaffiliated activists

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and sympathizers were present. While the majority of visitors lived in the surrounding towns and villages, some had come from other districts all over Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. After a while, Satyanirdharana spotted me and gave me a tour of the place. He took me past the white, larger-than-life stone statue of the ashram’s founder, B. Ramakrishna, and the two-storied main building to the back of the compound. There, he showed me a group of six sculptures that depicted three ancient Charvaka philosophers (Ajita Keshakambali, Makkhali Gosala, and Purna Kashyapa), the founders of the Vaisheshika (Kanada) and Samkhya (Kapila) philosophical schools, and the atheist freedom fighter Bhagat Singh. The busts were placed on top of large white pedestals with inscriptions of the philosophers’ names, short introductions to their teachings, and illustrative poetic verses composed by Vemana and B. Ramakrishna. More statuary was arranged in a kind of sculpture park outside the main wall of the Charvaka Ashram. A full-figure statue of Vemana in his common iconography as a sitting man was placed right in front of the main entrance where it was flanked by busts depicting another Charvaka philosopher, Payasi; as well as the Buddha; the ­nineteenth-century social reformers Swamineni Muddunarasimha Naidu, Jyotirao, and Savitribai Phule; the famous twentieth-century Tamil and Telugu Non-Brahmin leaders E. V. Ramasami and Tripuraneni Ramaswamy; the Dalit leader B. R. Ambedkar; and the Telugu freedom fighter and Marxist K. B. Krishna. Satyanirdharana walked me through the busts at the back of the compound and commented on some of the inscriptions, explaining that all of these personalities were rationalists and proponents of materialism and thus part of the age-old tradition of Atheism in India. For many of the depicted ancient philosophers there is scarce historical information beyond associations of their names with materialist doctrines, but what mattered to Satyanirdharana, and what he tried to make me understand, was just how old their tradition really is. Even before the Buddha—and long before Marx, he stressed—there had been Indian rationalists teaching materialism and Atheism. Our conversation was cut short by the inaugural ceremony of the Nastika Mela at the entrance of the compound where Grihalakshmi, B. Ramakrishna’s wife, hoisted a small flag with the logo of the Ashram: a pink question mark in concentric circles on white ground. Most of the attendants had already gathered around and were chanting “joharlu” (homage) as a reply to Ayyanna’s chanting of the names of notable Atheist leaders of the past. Ayyanna, who was director of Atheist Society until he passed away in 2018, continued to shout:

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“Religions (matalu) . . .” to which the crowed replied: “. . . must perish (nas´iñcali)!” The same was repeated with “caste,” “Brahmanism,” “class exploitation,” “Aryanism,” and “spiritual culture,” to all of which the crowd replied, “must perish.” After this brief ritual, the people began to settle down in front of the stage and the main program commenced: speeches. As is the case with most other Atheist events, the Nastika Mela consists mainly of oratory. In 2014, the program announced the following titles: “The Need for Anti-superstition Legislation,”2 “Science in the Puranas,” “Dialectic Materialism,” “Today’s Need for a New Woman,” “In the Footsteps of Periyar,” “True Buddhism,” “Generating Popular Awareness through Art,” “On the Need of Science among Students,” “Materialism and Today’s Science,” and “On Rationalism and Atheism.” This list is a quite representative example for the sort of themes typically discussed at Atheist conferences. Speeches usually combine a critique of worldviews and practices identified as religious or superstitious with a defense of materialism and science and frame this as a story of conflict playing itself out in history. The Nastika Mela lasts two days, with informal discussions and socializing stretching far into the night. Lunch, snacks, tea, and coffee, as well as basic accommodation facilities for those staying overnight were included in the small registration fee collected from all participants. During intermissions between speeches, groups or individuals could climb onto the dais and perform songs, poems, or magic tricks. Writers launched new publications, recently or soon-to-be solemnized Atheist marriages were publicly announced, and members of the movement could share personal experiences or address messages to the audience. Some outstanding personalities in the movement were honored for their achievements. Given that speeches can last up to several hours and that most speakers were talking on subjects that were well-known to the majority of the audience, one could observe varying, more or less polite forms of inattention in the audience. The amplification at such events always seems a tad too loud and people regularly complain, but the volume usually remains the same; it almost seems like a technological strategy to make people listen—whether they want to or not; we will see below why this is significant. In Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, as elsewhere in India, it is considered an honor and a sign of social standing to be allowed to speak publicly or, from a different vantage point, to be listened to. It is considered polite to start a Telugu speech with a greeting to the audience, to which Atheists often add the vocative of “Friends” (mitrulara), and speeches usually

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end with a formulaic expression of gratitude for having been given the “opportunity” (avakas´am) to speak. Besides functioning as genre markers, these formulae indicate a fine-tuned politics of oratory at play during Atheist meetings. While the conventional usage of the vocative “Friends” among Atheists demonstrates their commitment to a principled egalitarianism, its effects remain nonetheless inflected by hierarchical structures within the movement. By addressing an audience as friends and thus as equals, a person of high social status signals humbleness and lack of an inflated ego, which is, in fact, an important part of performing social eminence (see Chapter 2). If persons lower in the hierarchy use the same address, however, it is a sign of recognition that seniors and superiors in the audience bestow upon them as their listeners. The discourse of friendship and egalitarianism does not change the fact that, for some, the opportunity to speak is a duty and prerogative while, for others, the opportunity to be listened to is a gift of patronage. The honor of speaking also manifests physically since all forms of minimally organized public oratory usually take place on stages. Before the actual speeches commence, all scheduled speakers are formally “invited onto the dais” (vedika mida ahvaniñcatam). As they are supposed to remain there until the function ends, this can be exhausting, even onerous, for the dignitaries have to remain on the dais for hours on end. If eminent people (peddavallu) show up unexpectedly, yet no time can be spared for a lengthy speech (upanyasam), their presence and status will often be acknowledged by asking them to address at least a short message (sandes´am) to the audience. Precisely because speeches may be long, speaking time is a scarce resource and the length of speeches is a subtle way to negotiate status and authority within the movement. While it is possible—certainly in confidential conversations—to criticize that particular people get too much or too little talk-time solely on account of their social status, it seems common to address such issues indirectly, namely through qualitative evaluations of oratory. A speech is experienced as “boring” not only because of its content, but also because it is too long; and it is too long because a speaker takes more time than is appropriate. Such a person is seen as hogging the microphone and may be taunted as a “microphone-demon” (maikasura). Conversely, it may appear haughty or arrogant if speeches are too short or people refuse to speak altogether—as if the present audience was not worthy of their time. Just what duration is deemed appropriate for any given speaker depends on a subtle equilibrium of status, content, and style: of who you are, what you have to say, and how you say it. Such an

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interplay between content-related, moral, social, and aesthetic factors is by no means peculiar to Atheists. According to Leela Prasad (2012), it is a more general feature of everyday ethical discourse in India and has been formalized in Sanskrit aesthetics in the concept of aucitya, translatable as “appropriateness” or “decorum” (see also Chari 1990: 231–37). I will return below to the concrete aesthetic criteria for evaluating speeches, but I want to stress here that Atheist meetings and their “aesthetic politics” of speaking are an important institutional framework not only for the production of internal cohesion but also for the negotiation of status and hierarchy as well as a more general imaginary of social differentiation. This will become clearer through a concrete example of an actual speech delivered by the late Ayyanna at the Nastika Mela in 2012. After the usual preliminaries of polite welcome, Ayyanna started by describing how religious people (matavadulu) kept on dragging their ideas and attitudes into the public sphere and were thereby intoxicating the people. This, he claimed, had a long history in India, which could still be observed daily by everyone. He went on to narrate a version of the Non-Brahmin historical narrative I have described in the introduction and Chapter 1: Aryan Brahmins (arya brahmanulu) had come as foreign invaders to the subcontinent and invented the ideological instruments of the caste system and Hindu religion in order to make the people “feeble” (nirviryam) and “simpletons” (daddammalu) to be controlled like “marionets” (bommalu). He described how the authors of Hindu scriptures not only slandered the original materialist culture of India but tried to actively destroy it or, where they were unable to do so, as was the case with the Buddha, neutralize it through a process of “hinduization” (haindavikarana). Ayyanna explained that B. Ramakrishna had established the Nastika Mela in 1994 and erected the statuary of ancient philosophers and social reformers in order to build an “alternative culture” (pratyamnaya samskrti) and counter the effects of this tragic story of distortion and loss. B. Ramakrishna had then gone on to found his residential school as a means to spread what knowledge remained of India’s original Atheism and offer an alternative to the Theist ideologies promulgated by Hindu, Christian, and Muslim educational institutions. Their “respected teacher” (mastarugaru) had taught that Atheists needed to produce their own culture by creating a literary corpus of poetry, songs, nursing rhymes, dramas, and historiographies, by establishing new festivals like the Nastika Mela, by celebrating the birth and death anniversaries of Atheist luminaries, by performing inter-caste marriages, and by giving non-Hindu names to their children.

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Atheist activism emerges here as more than just religious critique, as it responds to a historical necessity to creatively reinvent Atheism as an entire culture and way of life. Surely, there are some within the Atheist movement who feel uncomfortable with B. Ramakrishna’s strategy to model his alternative culture on religious templates, especially with his reliance on material culture. Critics argue that Atheists do not need an actual “ashram” and especially the installment of statuary seems to them dangerously reminiscent of Hindu practices of idol worship (for a more detailed analysis of the role of materiality and the aesthetic environment of the Charvaka Ashram, see Binder 2020). This controversy can be interpreted as a typical product of the aforementioned semiotic ideology of secular modernity, for which the relationship between human agency and material things is crucial and constitutes a site of strict policing and anxiety (Latour 1993; Keane 2013b). It is furthermore linked to long-standing problematizations of the shifting and contested boundary between religion and culture, which has been of central and vexing concern for many modern religious reform movements all over the world (e.g., Metcalf 1982; Sen 2003; Copley 2003; van der Veer 2014). I will address this boundary as well as the Atheist anxiety around material culture in Chapter 6, and focus here instead on the role of propagation or “talk” as a means of Atheist social reconstruction. I have never heard or read that my interlocutors would try to dissimulate the aspect of invention in their project of social reconstruction or the fact that hardly any explicit evidence of their ancient Atheist culture remains. To the contrary, the very absence of a concrete tradition, just like the marginality and disreputability of Atheism, corroborates the Non-Brahmin narrative of Aryan invasion and destruction. More importantly, it leads to a situation where the culture of Atheism must be told (as it does not exist otherwise) and, moreover, becomes tellable not only as its suppression by Aryan invaders but also as an Atheist attempt at resistance and reconstruction. A closer look at the narrative structure of Ayyanna’s speech will help to elaborate this point. Ayyanna framed his speech as a riposte to a person who had once challenged him with the fact that Atheists had no culture of their own, no scriptures, no customs, no festivals. Ayyanna did not know how to respond at that time, as he was indeed unable to find any of those things. He then started reading B. Ramakrishna’s books about Atheist history as well as his literary works and his retelling of the Non-Brahmin civilizational narrative. Ayyanna’s speech was thus not only a story about the history of Atheism in India; it also enacted it at various diegetic levels, namely by telling it as an essentially narrated

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history. First, his history of ancient materialism and of contemporary Atheist culture met the intradiegetic challenge, to which he could not rise in the past; second, his history was explicitly marked as a retelling of answers he acquired from others, mainly his “respected teacher” B. Ramakrishna. Ayyanna enacted the history he was narrating, because it was essentially a history of Atheists who narrate the lost history of Atheism to others—which was exactly what he was doing in that moment. The implications of this diegetic folding emerge most effectively at the end of Ayyanna’s speech: We have culture!3 He [B. Ramakrishna] went to prove, that we have an alternative culture. He has shown the way for it. . . . We have the strength. There is no need for us to be afraid of anybody. Some say, religious people are in the majority, right? We are so few in number. What can we do? There is no need for such despondency. We might be alone, but we have the strength to confront society. . . . When we come to the Nastika Mela together with [our] families, listening there to the speeches they give . . . and to the good things they say, when we understand, when we ourselves read books, then we will be able to give answers to them [religious people] easily. . . . Among you there are many who are more knowledgeable and learned than I. But, once this mela is over and we go home, you too have to come forward courageously and make known all these things to those around us. In that way, we will make this program a success.

This short excerpt demonstrates that the propagation of Atheism is considered a necessity but also that Atheists describe its significance not primarily in relation to its effect on an audience (persuasion) but to its role as an opportunity to put Atheism into practice through the act—and the privilege—of public speaking or, in Ayyanna’s words: making known (teliya ceyatam). Ayyanna conceded not only that people in the audience may have superior knowledge; at the beginning of his speech, he even stated explicitly that he was not telling anything new. After all, the history of Atheism is conceptualized essentially as a history of retellings, as a lineage of Atheists who “make up” the history of Atheism through narrative acts. Precisely insofar as he was not telling anything new, Ayyanna became part of that lineage and urged his audience to do the same: “you too have to come forward.” This does not mean that the content of speeches is irrelevant; it does mean, however, that newness is not necessary for Atheist propagation to do its work. The precise nature of this work is grounded in a seemingly banal yet crucial implication of Atheism’s history being essentially a narrated history: it presupposes an Atheist narrator. This radically impacts the dynamics of the Non-Brahmin civilizational narrative, as it transforms

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the dualistic structure of Brahmins versus Non-Brahmins into a triadic social imaginary. Hence, there are three types of characters in this triadic imaginary: the selfish Brahmin villain, the guileless NonBrahmin people, and the heroic Atheist. Since this imaginary revolves around the relationship of mental slavery between Brahmin masters and Non-Brahmin slaves, the positionality of Atheist narrators within it is one of ex-centric marginality; they are part of the story of mental slavery only insofar as they have successfully extricated themselves from it and thereby become capable of narrating it. The end of Ayyanna’s speech also adumbrates a crucial transformation in the affective set-up of the triadic social imaginary. Due to the marginality of Atheism and its ideologically produced “odium,” it requires strength, courage, and a certain heroism to make it known to a potentially hostile society (see also Chapter 1). However, through the prism of Atheism’s triadic imaginary, Theist society presents no longer a single front: it is split in a rather small group of evil, Brahmin villains and a large majority of superstitious victims, who have fallen prey to a Theism not of their own making. In order to describe the victimized status of the people, my interlocutors often used the Telugu word “amayakatvam,” which expresses a mixture of innocence, guilelessness, simplicity, ignorance, and gullibility. Though Atheists condemn the common people’s lack of agency and critical self-­assertion, which ultimately leads to insincerity, they are not the real enemy but instead need to be saved, educated, and reformed. Therefore, Atheists need not and must not be afraid but can bravely assume their position of marginality and transform its odium by making it sensible as a positionality of heroic ex-centricity—not just for their own but also for the people’s sake. By so doing, they realize a mental revolution and become practically sincere Atheists. Based on both the content and the narrative structure of the Atheist sociohistorical imaginary, the triad Villain– People–Atheist encodes a structure of affect, power,  and morality, which underlies and scaffolds Atheist practices of propagation as a form of enactment rather than persuasion. As such, the following sections examine how the efficacy of such enactments is grounded not only in the content and narrative structure, but also in the rhetoric mode and aesthetic register of Atheist oratory.

Atheist Propagation as an Oratorical Mode of Address Bernard Bate (2009, 2010) argues that public oratory, especially in its political form of a leader addressing the public as a constituency

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of citizens, is a relative newcomer among existing speech genres in India.4 He traces the antecedents of Tamil political oratory to Christian missionaries, who started speaking to a general public in prose and colloquial Tamil during their sermons. This form of public, colloquial oratory was replicated first by Hindu reformers and later by nationalists in their attempts to mobilize the masses. Bate argues that the practice of public oratory is grounded in a semiotic ideology according to which the orator “embodies the center of a social order which he is thought capable—entitled, authorized—of changing. He is an icon of that order and embodies it ritually as he speaks” (2005: 470–71). However, this kind of public speaking not only enacts the orator’s social position, agency, and power, but also simultaneously constitutes listeners as a particular audience by interpellating them (e.g., as heathens to be converted, as Hindus to be reformed, or as national citizens to be mobilized for independence) (Bate 2013). Louis Althusser coined the term “interpellation” to conceptualize the process whereby ideology materializes in a range of state apparatuses that “hail” (2014: 190–92) individuals as subjects. As such, it describes an essentially asymmetric power relation, which nonetheless depends to some degree on mutual recognition—in order for people to be hailed, they must turn around, as it were, and recognize themselves as being addressed. Anthropological research on political speech has focused centrally on the function and capacity of oratory to produce speakers and audiences by creating “a site of figuration of what people are to each other politically” (Stasch 2011: 164; see also Lempert 2012; J. Jackson 2013). Maurice Bloch, for instance, argued that oratory in “traditional societies” enacts hierarchical power and coercion through the use of heavily formalized and patterned speech that limits or even forecloses the articulation of dissent: On these occasions if you have allowed somebody to speak in an oratorical manner you have practically accepted his proposal. The reason is that the code adopted by the speaker contains within itself a set pattern of speech for the other party. What gets said, or rather cannot be said, is laid down by this polite, respectful behaviour—both linguistic and non-linguistic. . . . In these formal interactions if you stay within the code you can only listen in silence and allow a pause to elapse afterwards which in fact means yes. (1975: 9)

While Bloch’s suggestion of an essential link between formalized speech and conservative reproduction of hierarchies—let alone the concept of traditional society—does not withstand ethnographic scrutiny (e.g., Irvine 1979), I want to retain two interesting aspects

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of his argument: first, formal features of speech can override questions of content, insofar as they enact power relations not by producing consent but by preventing the articulation of dissent; second, formality can be efficacious because it encodes relations of power in terms of politeness and decorum rather than coercion or violence. I use these two aspects to describe an oratorical mode of Atheist speech—as opposed to oratory as a formal genre—through which Atheist activists try to enact the power relations and affective dynamics of their triadic social imaginary. Besides formal oratory, which occurs mostly in the framework of conferences or gatherings where the audience is likely to already identify as Atheist, practices of informal propagation are an important part of the everyday life of Atheist activists. Many of my interlocutors used every chance to engage people in discussions about Atheism and religion: at the bus stop, on a train, at the tea stall. Some constantly carried with them pamphlets or copies of the latest issues of one or the other Atheist journal, which they distributed to interested strangers. At the same time, I have never observed that Atheists would approach people directly or indiscriminately in order to “proselytize”; rather, everyday propagation tends to develop within ordinary conversations, in the course of which the topic of Atheism either happens to come up spontaneously or an Atheist sees an opportunity to mention it—and the topic does come up frequently. The following is an example for such a conversation, which I witnessed in a small roadside breakfast stall in Suryapet, one of the larger towns of Nalgonda district in Telangana. A number of Atheist and Dalit organizations were jointly organizing a meeting on the need for an “Anti-Superstition” legislation in the state. As I arrived ahead of time, I was invited to a second breakfast by two other early birds: G. Eswaralingam, a dedicated Atheist and advocate for organ donation from Hyderabad, and Venkateshwara Rao, a fellow activist from Elluru. We walked to a nearby breakfast stall where, as a foreigner, I was drawing the attention of the owner, who started inquiring about our business in town. Eswaralingam started explaining that we were participating in a nearby meeting concerning the eradication of “superstition” (mudhanammakam). A lively conversation ensued in which the owner, Eswaralingam, and Venkateshwara Rao took turns in sharing examples of superstitious beliefs and customs and commented on the latest scandal of a fraudulent godman that had been all over the news recently. Everybody agreed enthusiastically on the pernicious and irrational nature of superstitions and the need to get rid of them when suddenly the owner seemed to stumble over something

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Eswaralingam had said about a more principled repudiation of god and religion. “So, that means you are atheists?” he asked hesitantly, to which Eswaralingam replied immediately and with a huge, proud, perhaps somewhat provoking smile: “Yes, we are atheists! We do not believe in god” (Ah, manam nastikulam! Devudimida nammakam ledu). With this profession of atheism/nastikatvam, the atmosphere changed noticeably. Although, until then, all had agreed on the damnability of superstitions and appeared bent on outdoing each other in pointing out their silliness, the owner of the food stall suddenly went quiet and remained so until we left. Eswaralingam and Venkateshwara Rao, by contrast, got into their stride and explained everything about Atheism, its history, its meaning, and so on; they had stopped talking with the man, and started instead to talk to and at him. The vendor’s slight alarm or uncertainty caused by the explicit mention of atheism/nastikatvam transformed the previously dialogic conversation into an opportunity of propagation with monologic, pedagogic, and indeed oratorical features: the breakfast vendor changed from an interlocutor to an addressee. Hence, the switch from an everyday and quite common critique of specific superstitions to a principled repudiation of god and religion was accompanied by a switch of register from dialogic conversation to oratorical instruction, which also modulated allocations of agency and power within the overall interactional situation. As Eswaralingam and Venkateshwara Rao assumed the authorial position of The Atheist, the vendor, listening in silence, became a representative of The People in need of education. As a telling indication of the changed power relations, the episode ended with an aside from Eswaralingam dispensing the perhaps justified but nonetheless uncalled for medical advice that the owner, judging by his physique, had better cut back on his sugar and oil consumption in order to avoid diabetes. Before moving on, I want to provide another vignette of a comparable switch in register, which enabled a speaker to modulate an interactional situation on the basis of the Atheist triadic imaginary— this time by transforming an interlocutor into a proxy for The Villain. Some months after the event at Suryapet, I was accompanying a group of activists of People’s Atheist Society (Praja Nastika Samajam or PAS) to a series of so-called Miracle Exposure Programs in which they used stage conjuring—and oral propagation—in order to dispel beliefs in supernatural powers (see Chapter 4). Crammed in a small public minibus, we were on our way to a village called Shanigaram, around 130 km to the northeast of Hyderabad, when a heated discussion broke out with another passenger about the program planned

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for the evening. As was the case in Suryapet, everybody agreed that superstitions had to be condemned and eradicated, yet the whole bus was debating an issue I call the “some–force–argument.” Briefly summarized, it goes as follows: While Atheists are correct in attacking superstitions and those who seek to cash in on them, they should recognize that life and the universe are simply too complex to be fully grasped by the human mind. Therefore, there will always remain an unexplainable rest of “some force” (edaina s´akti) active in the universe; some choose to call it god. By indiscriminately lumping together irrational superstitions and an epistemologically justified belief in “some force,” Atheists throw out the baby with the bathwater and jeopardize their otherwise justified fight against the social evil of superstition. It was fascinating to hear the whole minibus discuss vociferously the theological and epistemological intricacies of the category “some force” in its relation to Miracle Exposure Programs. It was hard to tell who had the upper hand, as the Atheist activists began to debate among themselves about how to engage that argument. After about fifteen minutes, however, Satyanvesh, a young member of PAS, shut the debate down with an air of unnerved, angry impatience: “What force? What’s this force? Tell me!” He brought a new angle to the topic by arguing that all this talk of “some force” completely missed the mark. We had to realize instead that this very argument originated with the Manusmrti (a famous legal treatise on Brahmanic social order, which my interlocutors sometimes use metonymically to speak about Brahmanism as such). By inventing nonsensical entities like “some force,” Satyanvesh explained, Brahmans wanted to distract from real problems by making the people blindly submit to them, just like sheep. The bus had gone quiet, and everybody was listening to Satyanvesh, who went on to give an exposé of the exploitative nature of Brahmanism and its history in India. Whereas arguments had earlier been crisscrossing through the bus in an unorderly discussion, Satyanvesh managed to effectively end the debate with a monologic closing argument. By changing the topic from theology to social history, he transformed the previous debate into a symptom or epiphenomenon of a Brahmanic ruse. The person introducing the some–force–argument had taken on the role of The Villain who had succeeded in veering all the passengers, including the troupe of Atheist activists, away from what really mattered. He turned them into foolish sheep, just like The People. Satyanvesh accomplished this transformation not by explicitly reinterpreting the situation but by changing the topic from theology to social history and by switching the speech genre from debate to oratory.

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Both episodes have in common that Atheists were able to change the dynamic, atmosphere, and outcome of a verbal interaction not only by changing the topic and thus evoking the triadic social imaginary at the level of content, but also by ending a dialogic debate through a monologic, oratorical intervention. To a certain extent, even Ayyanna’s speech at the Nastika Mela replicated this dynamic, insofar as its specific diegetic structure framed it as a final monologic riposte to the man who had challenged him with regard to the lack of a distinctive Atheist culture. By adopting an oratorical mode of address, Eswaralingam, Venkateshwara Rao, and Satyanvesh could realize the triadic structure of their Atheist social imaginary because they managed to silence their opponents/interlocutors and make them listen. While they enacted the paradigmatic role of the ex-centric Atheist narrator, those who listened were interpellated into the triadic structure of the Atheist imaginary, as they turned into proxies for either The Villain or The People. Though many of Satyanvesh’s listeners were in fact Atheist activists themselves, they did not speak in that particular instance and thus could not enact an ex-centric positionality within the triadic imaginary. However, this oratorical mode is not automatically realized simply by talking about Atheism, nor is it contained in the formal properties of oratory as a genre of speech; rather, my ethnographic vignettes suggest that it has to be achieved by dominating a verbal interaction through a sort of dialectical victory. Here, my observations on notions of appropriateness (aucitya) within Atheist politics of oratory become relevant, as they speak directly to the second aspect of an oratorical mode: its relation to culturally and historically specific expectations of decorum and politeness. Concretely, I argue that dialectical victory is not conditional on persuading others of knowledge they do not yet possess or disagree with. Instead, it refers to an interactional situation where speakers have succeeded to establish their engagement with a largely shared corpus of knowledge as appropriate. This may, of course, fail, and Atheists are keenly aware of this possibility. Many Atheists have shared with me their frustration—and critics their glee—about the limited resonance of Atheist propagation and its failure to mobilize “the masses.” One explanation proffered by critics, especially those of other so-called progressive movements, is that Atheists simply missed the mark with their philosophical critique of religion; a majority of the people in India have no time to worry about such things in their daily struggles for livelihood. Another common argument seems to state the opposite, as it attributes Atheists’ limited success to their habit of attacking and ridiculing people’s most

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cherished beliefs and customs in a manner that can only be described as conceited and insulting. What Atheists consider a justified form of “critique” (vimars´a), adapted in its gravity and frankness to the dire circumstances it addresses, is perceived by their critics as a habit to excessively and indiscriminately “scold” or “abuse” (titlu ceyatam) anyone and everything. This second explanation is particularly relevant for my present discussion, because it reveals a sensitivity of both Atheist activists and their critics to the style or aesthetic form of propagation. Despite their divergent perceptions of it, both Atheist activists and their critics describe the effects of this style in a remarkably consistent way as a matter of listening: “the people don’t listen” (prajalu vinaru). I argue that this recurrent phrasing suggests that the main challenge for Atheist practices of propagation is not their message, but the creation of appropriate conditions for this message to—quite literally—be heard. Or, from another perspective: if the aim of an oratorical mode of address is the achievement of a dialectical victory that, by definition, impedes the articulation of dissent, then “not listening” seems a potent way to signal resistance or dissent regarding the appropriateness of a given speech act. It is, therefore, necessary to look more closely at the aesthetic criteria through which appropriateness (aucitya) is negotiated.

The Aesthetics of Atheist Propagation: Fluency and Hyperliteralism Atheists might need to silence their interlocutors in order to oratorically interpellate them, but they cannot just shout them down— even though they may at times try to do so. After all, the silence of interlocutors does not necessarily indicate listening, and listening guarantees neither mobilization nor persuasion, which is, after all, the overt rationale of oral propagation. My theoretical concern for enactment, form, and aesthetics notwithstanding, my interlocutors squarely locate the power and purpose of their propagation in its denotational content. I therefore want to repeat that while my ethnographic conceptualization of dialectical victory suggests its relative independence from persuasion, this does not entail an indifference toward questions of content. The efficacy of dialectical victory or the lack thereof derives precisely from the complex entanglement of form and content. For an adequate description of the oratorical mode of Atheist propagation, it is thus necessary to review first what counts as efficient and appropriate oratory among

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my interlocutors in order to then, as a second step, look into the historicity of these criteria. While attending the 2014 annual conference of FIRA (Federation of Indian Rationalist Associations) in Berhampur (Odisha), I had a conversation with an Atheist activist from Coastal Andhra during a coffee break. We were talking about Buddhism when I casually mentioned that I had read a book on the topic written by a notable Atheist leader called Katti Padma Rao, whom I was going to meet the following week for an interview. My interlocutor’s eyes immediately lit up, and he could hardly contain his excitement on hearing Katti Padma Rao’s name. He launched into an extended rhapsody about the oratorical skill of that man, who had visited his district a few years back and had talked “like a stream” (pravahamlaga). He offered me a spontaneous sample of that kind of speech: a rapid, slightly rhythmic, but rather unmelodious recitation, which sounded to my ears more like a roaring cascade than a stream. I was unable to understand anything, and I am not sure if it was actual sentences or just a phonetic imitation. He asserted that he, along with a total number of fifty people in his hometown, had become Atheists upon hearing Katti Padma Rao, who had gone on to convert whole villages on his tour through the region. This was, in fact, not the first time I had heard of Katti Padma Rao’s prodigious oratorical skill, about which I was curious to learn more when I finally met him at his house in Ponnur, a small town around 60 kilometers south of Vijayawada. Katti Padma Rao explained that the most important features of a good speech are expressiveness, a sense of novelty, and the bundling of different topics and aspects into a single message—in his case rationalism. When I asked him about the meaning of his concept of expressiveness (abhivyakti), he explained that it refers above all to clarity, wit, and brilliance of thought. He used the word pratibha,5 which can be translated as poetic genius, and then specified that it referred to a skill of oratorical imagination that draws from various sources: “Humor, mass psychology, wit, seriousness, all things, so many things. . . . Thought, flexibility, grasping, observing, psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, philosophy, mixed thoughts, mixing all subjects, promoting the one way [of rationalism].”6 This circumscription of the concept of expressiveness led directly to the third criterion he had mentioned, the combination of a vast canvas of themes into one coherent expression of rationalism: “Oration is a description of society, a description of mankind, the analysis of human nature.” In other words, a good orator is capable of spontaneously and effortlessly evoking a compelling social imaginary. The capacity of being

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compelling seemed to be a fundamental feature of Katti Padma Rao’s understanding of expressiveness. Many of my interlocutors within and outside the Atheist movement, including those who are renowned as skilled orators, stress that, besides sound knowledge and lucidity, efficacious speakers require above all sincerity and personal sensibility for the audience; they must be able to establish rapport. Orators are admired if they command wide knowledge in a range of different topics, but oratory is perceived to fail if it appears “bookish” or out of touch with the “style” (dhorani) of an audience. It is then experienced as condescending and criticized as “preaching.” A good speaker, by contrast, should generate “inspiration” (sphurti) by evoking experiences from everyday life and linking knowledge to telling examples in order to have it resonate with the audience and thus demonstrate its practical relevance. Resonance is an apt metaphor here, because rapport has an important phonetic dimension. Many of my Telugu friends and interlocutors have demonstrated a remarkable attentiveness and sensitivity to the aesthetic qualities of voices, not only the voices of orators but also of chanting priests, television anchors, or tea vendors by the roadside. A seasoned speaker once told me that if her oratory is successful, it is because “some like the sound of my voice, some the clarity of speaking, and only some, very few, actually take up the points I am raising.” It is crucial to note, however, that besides sensuous qualities, like melodiousness or raucousness, a speaker’s voice carries a tremendous amount of social information, which can play a significant role in determining whether a given speech act is experienced as appropriate and compelling. During the politically tense months before the official separation of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh in 2014, regional dialects of Telugu could become important factors for a speech’s efficacy. The main argument for a separation rested on the narrative of a continuous domination and exploitation of Telangana by people from Coastal Andhra, which manifested itself not only economically but also culturally, most notably in the promotion of the Coastal dialect as “standard Telugu” (Janardhan and Raghavendra 2013; Binder 2018). In such a situation, the persuasiveness of the Non-Brahmin narrative about Aryan economic, cultural, and mental exploitation can be less convincing if delivered with a pronounced Coastal dialect—at least for those in the audience hailing from Telangana or sympathetic to state bifurcation. Native Telugu speakers are not only competent in placing people geographically but also socially by mapping dialect, timbre, pitch, lexis, and so on onto categories of class and caste. Sounding like a Brahmin, for example, may evoke conventional associations

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of learnedness and authority but can, at the same time, undermine a Non-Brahmin narrative or cast doubt on a speaker’s oppositional stance vis-à-vis caste discrimination. A wide range of such more or less subtle and context-sensitive criteria determines the effect of a speech on a given audience. The task of establishing rapport—not to mention dialectical victory—is at times hardly controllable and exacts not only skill and experience but indeed an intuitive sense or genius (pratibha) for the appropriateness (aucitya) of both form and content in concrete, socially structured speech situations. When Katti Padma Rao is praised for speaking “like a stream” (pravahamlaga), this seemed to articulate such a complex entwinement of expressiveness, rapport, skill, and more in a single aesthetic criterion I call fluency. The aesthetic ideal of a continuous, smooth flow of language clamps together the sensual quality of speech and its content: to speak like a stream requires there to be no hesitation, no searching for words, examples, arguments, or quotations. If speakers are valued for  their command of knowledge, it seems they are valued above all  for the spontaneity of that command and their ability to extemporize. Knowledge cannot be understood as a simplex category, but has different aspects, and the aspects that are valued in Atheist oratory are ready availability, extensiveness, and spontaneity rather than, for example, analytic depth, intensity, or—as we have already seen in Ayyanna’s example—novelty. As an aesthetic ideal of speech, fluency also points to the difference between the genre of oratory and an oratorical mode: although fluency is commonly used as an ideal for oratory, it seems to be more congenial to a situation of disputation or debate, where the exigency to spontaneously counter an opponent requires extensive knowledge and extemporizing more urgently than is the case in a monologic, potentially rehearsed speech. Like most other orators I talked to, Katti Padma Rao downplayed the purely technical side of oratory over against its intuitive or situational aspects and described it as a “complicated, comprehensive, and competitive expression.” He explained that he did not have any particular teacher and stressed instead the importance of the local Christian Sunday school he had visited as a child. While he had learned many things there, including ethical values that were to shape his life, the most important skill he acquired was the power of memorization. It would prove extremely useful during secondary school, where he participated—very successfully, he insisted—in debating competitions. He had not only read all the books available at the local library but also memorized their arguments in order to use them during disputations. Katti Padma Rao demonstrated this

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in our interview by frequently interspersing his answers to my questions with literal quotes, sometimes even whole passages, which he recited extremely fast and without faltering—like a stream. The art of memorization has of course a long tradition in India and might immediately conjure up associations with traditions of ritual recitation in Vedic and Hindu contexts (Fuller 2001; Wilke and Moebus 2011; Knipe 2015). I argue, however, that Atheists’ appreciation of impromptu recollection engages the tradition of memorization by translating it into a specific dialectical technique of Atheist propagation. Following Paula Richman, this technique may be described as “hyperliteralism” (1993: 190) and is, as we will see below, intricately linked to specific uses and understandings of texts. Where fluency expresses in one notion what makes a speech appropriately expressive and compelling, its genealogical trajectory leads to textualist hyperliteralism as a common ingredient of religious criticism and apologetics among Christian missionaries as well as nineteenth-century Hindu and Muslim reformers (Metcalf 1982; Hudson 1995; Bate 2005; Bergunder 2010). What exactly is “hyper” about it will become clearer in the following paragraphs. A good example of hyperliteralism is Katti Padma Rao’s story of how he first came in contact with Atheism through a Telugu teacher in secondary school who “taught rationalism.” When I asked what he meant by that, Katti Padma Rao described a Telugu class in which they read a famous episode from the Bhagavatapurana, an important text of Vaishnava devotionalism. The episode in question tells the story of the elephant king Gajendra, who is assaulted by a crocodile and in his distress calls to Lord Vishnu for help. Hearing the plea of his devotee, the deity rushes to the scene and liberates the dying elephant. Gajendra’s cry for mercy happened to reach Vishnu while he was lying with his consort Lakshmi, which is why he comes running with her Sari still in his hand. Katti Padma Rao was already roaring with laughter but, seeing that the joke was lost on me, he explained: since he was holding her garment still in his hand, it means he left his wife behind completely naked. The story proved how irrational and indecent the gods are, and that was teaching rationalism. My Atheist interlocutors generally appear to enjoy the supposed irrationality of religious scriptures, as they enumerate one plot-hole and non sequitur after the other. Orators earn repute by commanding an uncommonly large or especially witty repertoire of such hyperliteral interpretations, or by using it with particular astuteness in order to expose the irrationality, inconsistency, and indecency of religious scriptures. This kind of hyperliteral hermeneutics is also a regular ingredient of

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my interlocutors’ everyday discourse and need not necessarily pertain to scriptural passages. Especially in informal conversations, it often appears in rhetorical questions: If every religion says there is only one god, why are there so many different religions? If people pray to god, why do they still fall ill—and why do they go to the hospital not the temple? Critical observers have not failed to notice that such hyperliteral interpretations are overtly unsympathetic, that Atheists seem to take the letter of religious scriptures even more seriously than religious people, and that hyperliteral arguments are highly unlikely to persuade anybody, least of all devoted believers. In a similar vein, Richman (1993: 177) suggested that Atheist literalist interpretations of Hindu scriptures mistake mythological writings for historical accounts. Critics perceive hyperliteralism as a facile criticism that actually boasts of a disinterest in any realistic understanding of how religions work. However, by understanding hyperliteralism primarily as a question of persuasive argument, they may themselves take those arguments and questions too literally and miss their essentially rhetorical and dialectical function. Atheists do not really expect an answer to them, and their facetious nature makes a serious refutation quite exasperating for apologists—once more “demonstrating,” as it were, the rational baselessness of religions. While Atheists themselves may find them persuasive, hyperliteralisms are above all meant to entertain and occasion laughter. Their purpose is to ridicule, embarrass, or annoy those who feel compelled to refute them. Hyperliteralisms certainly cannot guarantee persuasion nor even dialectical victory, but—whether they are facile or not—they do force interlocutors to engage with them, lest they be silenced by them and made to merely listen. The broader significance and power dynamics of hyperliteralisms can be better appreciated once they are placed in the context of the entwined historicity of their form and content, which leads back to the Non-Brahmin narrative of Aryan invasion.

The Context of Atheist Propagation: Print Culture and Hermeneutic Literacy Since Atheists conceive of their past as a history of loss and destruction, it is only logical that very little direct historical evidence can be found and that, therefore, their history has to be recovered indirectly through existing narratives that are symptomatic of Atheism’s destruction in the first place. Intellectuals of the Non-Brahmin

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movement started to systematically reinterpret Indian literary and religious canons against the grain in order to establish their narrative of Aryan invasion and mental slavery. An important interpretative strategy consisted of an ethical hermeneutic that threw into disarray the foundational moral coordinates of Brahmanism by demonstrating the moral depravity, irrationality, and cowardice of the heroes and deities of Hindu narratives. Their supposedly villainous antagonists— the xenological repertoire of atheists/nastikulu, demons, heretics, barbarians, and so on—were conversely shown to be the true heroes who can, in their defeat, claim at least a moral victory (particularly famous are non-Brahmin rereadings of the Ramayana epic: Ambedkar 1988; Richman 1993; Narayana Rao 2001, 2004; Chalam 2008). It is crucial, however, that colonial and early postcolonial NonBrahmin reinterpretations were not entirely novel, as they linked up with a larger counterhegemonic cultural repertoire that had been circulating for a long time across boundaries of religious community, caste, social standing, genre, or medium. This repertoire has percolated through elite courtly poetry, epigraphy, epic traditions, religious lore, folk art, as well as popular and political culture (e.g., Thapar 1989; Richman 1991; Doniger 1993; Babb and Wadley 1995; Hiltebeitel 1999; Talbot 2001; Pinney 2004; Negers 2004; Ramanujan 2006; V. Ramakrishna 2012). Especially folklore studies have shown that “heterodoxies” like Jainism or Buddhism, bhakti movements, and marginalized or local traditions of lower castes, women, or Muslims have been cultivating a host of counternarratives that undermine the homogeneity of Brahmanic representations of Hinduism as well as their claim to cultural hegemony and national representation. Brahmanic traditions themselves, moreover, have been far less monolithic a cultural force than both Brahmins and Non-Brahmins are wont to claim (e.g., Olivelle 1993). How exactly do Atheist discourses differ from this large repertoire of counterhegemonic traditions? My Atheist interlocutors do not deny their cultural predecessors, and they stress continuities even into the prehistory of the subcontinent. They locate the distinctiveness of Atheism in a particularly radical, fundamental, and comprehensive break with Brahmanic culture and its ideological effects: they call this break a mental revolution (bhavaviplavam). According to Sudipta Kaviraj, such radicalness is a typically modern characteristic of revisionist cultural politics: Modern rebellions announce themselves even before they are wholly successful: revolutions in traditional cultures tended to hide the fact of their being revolts. They pretend to respect a continuity which they do not in fact practise. By declarations of continuity, however, they

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circumvent the censorship; precisely by their submission, they create a space for themselves in which the narrative axis, patterns of denouement, and delineation of characters all undergo a subtle transformation. (2010: 137)

It is thus not a rupture with the past per se that characterizes modern revolutions, but a certain style or rhetoric of radicalness with which they represent and conceptualize their relationship to the temporalities of rupture and continuity (see also Koselleck 1985). This is not just a question of “new wine in old bottles”—or the other way around. Atheists’ explicit and fundamental rejection of religion as such, as opposed to specific religious practices, institutions, or beliefs, may indeed mark a novel departure from previous forms of religious or sociocultural critique; but that departure at the level of ideas cannot be separated from the narrative structures, rhetoric strategies, and style that both enable and constrain its performative articulation in relation to an aesthetic ideal of appropriateness (aucitya). As such, appropriateness is not just a function of conformity or a necessarily conservative force of continuity, but a historically shaped framework that regulates how people evaluate and judge particular configurations of rupture and continuity at the levels of form, content, and the entanglement of both. I proposed the concept of ex-centric positionality to describe the specific configuration pursued by my Atheist interlocutors. In this last section of the chapter, I therefore examine the specific historical context that shapes—enables and constrains— the way in which the oratorical mode of Atheist propagation with its rhetoric strategy of fluent hyperliteralism entangles content, form, and performance so as to enact ex-centricity. I argue that the nature and efficacy of Atheist propagation as a form of interpellation hinges at a fundamental level on the content of the Atheist civilizational narrative and, more precisely, on its triadic social imaginary: the narrative of Aryan invasion, loss, and destruction functions as the precondition for subsequent Atheist reconstruction. While proposing a radically revisionist history of India, Atheists cannot afford to ignore existing historical narratives and simply invent their own history as they please. In order to be considered appropriate (i.e., to be efficacious), they must conform to what Arjun Appadurai calls the “general constraints which limit any collective use of the past” (1981: 201). The past, he argues, “is a rule-governed, therefore finite, cultural resource. As with other kinds of cultural rules, anything is possible but only some things are permissible” (1981: 218). In his example of disputes over the distribution of rights and obligations in a South Indian temple, Appadurai

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examines how the past is used as a resource in struggles over social power. The participants in these struggles have to rely on prevailing cultural notions about such things as historical authority, continuity, depth, or interdependence in order to establish their history as a legitimate, collectively recognizable version of the past. At the same time, however, the criteria for what counts as legitimate history are not enshrined in an immutable, self-contained realm of “culture,” but are themselves the object of social and political negotiation within the context of what Webb Keane calls a “representational economy” (2003: 410). Appadurai shows, for example, that once the colonial judicial system had assumed the authority to adjudicate temple disputes and started imposing its institutional logic on collective uses of the past, material texts became a powerful and indeed privileged medium of history. The importance of texts in the representational economy of British India is particularly relevant for my discussion because it impinges directly on the aesthetic strategy of fluent hyperliteralism—as ­mentioned above, hyperliteral rhetoric has its roots in an oppositional Non-Brahmin hermeneutics of Hindu texts, as Atheists claim that their own culture, including its scriptures, has been destroyed and can only be recovered indirectly via its distorted representation within Theist ideology. Hyperliteralism is thus a form of what Appadurai calls “interdependence” (1981: 203), insofar as it presupposes a speaker’s intimate knowledge of an opponent’s “text,” which is cited against itself in order to bolster the speaker’s own position. I put text between quotation marks because it is not a self-evident category. The appropriate use of a text in a given historical context is contingent on certain authoritative assumptions about what a text is in the first place as well as the technological infrastructures that produce it, be it as material artifact or performative event. Hence, in order to understand how fluent hyperliteralisms seek to enact an Atheist version of the past by making it count as appropriate yet ex-centric, we need to place it within the historical context of a specific regime of “entextualization.” Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs coined this term in order to describe “the process of rendering discourse extractable, of making a stretch of linguistic production into a unit—a text—that can be lifted out of its interactional setting. A text, then, from this vantage point, is discourse rendered decontextualizable” (1990: 73). While we have seen above how recent linguistic anthropology approaches processes of entextualization as part of larger semiotic ideologies, a related and earlier debate has done so by interrogating the relationship of literacy and orality (McLuhan 1962; Goody 1968; Ong 1967, 2002; Fuller 2001).

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Jonathan Parry (1985) argued in that context that colonial modernity occasioned profound transformations regarding the status and nature of texts by initiating a shift not from oral to literate but from scribal to print culture. Increasing literacy rates in British India was an important factor of historical change, but their scale must not be exaggerated. Mass education was not an immediate goal of colonial education policies, and literacy was to remain for a long time the prerogative of so-called native elites (Frykenberg 1986; Viswanathan 1989). Regardless, literacy as the ability to decipher letters would leave “ordinary” Telugu speakers, for instance, still without the means to master the technical and highly Sanskritized classical Telugu (granthika bhasa) that was used for all elite literary purposes until well into the middle of the twentieth century. Literacy is thus not merely a neutral “technology of the intellect” ushering into a democratization of knowledge practices and a flattening of social hierarchy (Goody 1978; Parry 1985). Furthermore, orality and literacy cannot be understood as abstract opposites since they occur mostly as hybrid practices, like “literate orality” (Narayana Rao 1993: 95), “spectacular literacy” (Bate 2009: 28), “graphic literacy” (Narayana Rao and Shulman 1998: 197), “enlightened literacy” (Cody 2013: 129), or “writing orally” (Rao 1999: 253). More than literacy as such, it was thus the technological innovation of print that transformed not only practices of reading but also practices of speaking and listening, as well as the very notion of text. Velcheru Narayana Rao elaborates on this argument in an essay on the cultural politics of Telugu reinterpretations of the Ramayana epic: Bringing palm-leaf texts into print was not an innocent act of making multiple copies available to readers. Before the advent of the printed text, the manuscript served as the recorded text, from which the ­performer/ interpreter created a new text for his/her audience. . . . Reading the recorded text was a specialist’s job and required a certain training in using it. Printing the recorded text, and making it available to readers untrained in using the text, generated new and unprecedented modes of reading. Western education prepared the minds of young scholars to receive the printed text as a univalent artefact, with every page and every word consciously produced by a single putative author. (2001: 174)

Narayana Rao describes here the impact of modern print technology on a previously dominant scribal regime of entextualization that had regulated and restricted appropriate ways of conceptualizing, re-/producing, and using texts. Literacy in the sense of knowing an alphabet is merely the most basic of a whole range of requirements

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one has to meet in order to be judged competent and authorized to manipulate certain kinds of texts. Print culture refers not only to the material availability of printed texts; it also implies assumptions about the social and political desirability and indeed necessity of their general accessibility in the framework of a language ideology that makes literacy a precondition for modern citizenship and democratic participation (V. Ramakrishna 1984; Raju 1988; Nagaraju 1995; Cody 2009; Udupa 2010). Print culture as a specific regime of entextualization has enabled Atheists—and potentially everyone else who commands its specific form of denotational or hermeneutic literacy—not only to make use of religious texts that had previously been the reserve of different classes of religious or cultural professionals, but also to relate to religion itself as decontextualized text, as “a univalent artefact, with every page and every word consciously produced by a single putative author” (Narayana Rao 2001: 174). The sort of logical or narrative inconsistencies on which hyperliteral arguments thrive become intelligible as a problematic property of texts only if the latter are seen as finished products originating from the minds of particular individuals. Without the hermeneutic literacy of a print-textual approach that presupposes individualized, intentional authors of Theist ideology, the Atheist narrative of Aryan invasion, mental slavery, and historiographic slander would not only be less compelling but hardly possible at all. The case of hyperliteralism is thus a prime example for the manner in which practices of orality are fundamentally entangled with literacy, practices of reading, hermeneutic principles, and material infrastructures like print technology, which together shape a much larger representational economy—larger than the Atheist movement in any case. As Appadurai’s case study on temple disputes has shown, Atheists are by no means the only ones who rely on printed texts in their bids for social, cultural, or political power. Christopher Fuller, for example, has shown that the contemporary training of agamic temple priests, which seems like a rather traditional, heavily oral, and certainly religious enterprise, is also very much a “product of literate print culture in which, among other factors, the Agamas are now conceptualized as authoritative books” (2001: 29; also Fuller 1997). At a more general level, historical scholarship has retraced in detail how scriptures and texts have been instrumental in instituting the modern category of religion as well as concrete “world religions” like Hinduism or political formations like Hindu nationalism (e.g., Sontheimer and Kulke 1991; van der Veer 1994; King 1999; Masuzawa 2005; Ludden 2007).

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Against this background, we can begin to see that the distinctiveness or ex-centricity of Atheist practices of propagation does not originate in a total break with the dominant regime of entextualization but, to the contrary, derives from pushing it to its extreme: Atheist propagation heightens hermeneutic literacy to fluent hyper-literalism. Just like modern semiotic ideology with its privileging of rationalized denotation and referentialism did not simply displace other semiotic modalities and eradicate the embodied, aesthetic, or poetic qualities of language, print culture is not a seamless, homogenous, or monolithic regime. Rather, it is a framework that regulates how different modes of reading, speaking, and listening can reinforce, undermine, ignore, or assault each other. Hyperliteralism is hyper because it willfully ignores and brushes aside all other modes of reading texts within a larger economy of hermeneutic strategies afforded and transformed by print culture, be it the exegetical and pedagogical tradition of Brahmin priests, the devotional reading of devotees, the textual performances of professional bards, the literary analysis of academic philologists, the political instrumentalization of religious nationalists, or the interpretative reading of cultural anthropologists. The dialectical purchase and rhetorical impact of fluent hyperliteralism stems moreover from its claim to and ostentation of a revolutionary hermeneutics leading to the exact opposite of received wisdom about India’s civilizational history and the sociocultural hierarchy it rests upon: demons turn into heroes; gods into villains. Whether textual competence and authority are legitimated through the birthright of one’s caste, divine grace, academic credentials, national belonging, or—as is the case in Atheist self-representations—a virtuoso exercise of rational thinking, they represent a claim to social and cultural power. This can be illustrated with the example of Devi, my host in Hyderabad (see Introduction), who is widely recognized—sometimes feared—as a critic of Hindu fundamentalism because she is able to quote spontaneously and copiously all sorts of “embarrassing” things from Hindu scriptures. Devi regularly appears in Telugu talk shows where she enjoys citing salacious details of saints’ and deities’ sexual escapades. She claims that her opponents, especially the less learned among them, are often left with no other means than taking umbrage at the fact that she, a known disbeliever, dares to use and appropriate “their” Hindu culture. Devi, on the other hand, argues that culture does not belong to anyone. Atheists are moreover not the only ones contending for the right to interpret Indian or, in this case, Hindu culture in “alternative” ways. A highly publicized case was Penguin India’s decision in 2014 to withdraw a monograph by

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American Indologist Wendy Doniger (2009) from the Indian market after a lawsuit was filed under Section 295A of the Indian penal code that protects “religious sentiments” from hate speech (Doniger 2016; R. Viswanath 2016; Adcock 2016). Since colonial times, the discourse of hurt religious or communal sentiments, to which I return in more detail in Chapter 5, has been regularly summoned to incite, prevent, and explain religious violence in India, and it speaks directly to the sort of aesthetic, social, and political sensibilities encoded in the concept of appropriateness (aucitya). I have already mentioned above that critics of Atheist propagation and even members of supposedly allied progressive movements take more offence at its “inappropriately” arrogant, brash, and argumentative style than its actual content, which can be dismissed more easily, it seems, as either facile or futile. While “not listening” emerged as a potent way to resist the “arrogance” of an oratorical mode of address, there remains, of course, always the possibility of active disagreement, as well as conflict. I have heard many a gleeful story about Atheists being chased away by angry mobs of villagers whom they had tried to enlighten, and some of my Atheist interlocutors recounted incidents where they were threatened verbally or attacked physically by so-called religious fundamentalists. At its most extreme, high-profile activists have been murdered, like the Maharashtrian rationalist Narendra Dabholkar in 2013 or the left-wing politicians, writers, and activists Govind Pansare in 2015 and Gauri Lankesh in 2017. If Atheists are perceived as being arrogant and indeed offensive, to the point of being assassinated, this can be understood quite literally as a consequence of them arrogating claims to social power that have been protected, among other things, by restrictions with regard to the legitimate access and appropriate use of cultural “texts.”

Conclusion In his aforementioned essay on the past as a scarce resource, Appadurai  (1981) intervened in a major anthropological debate about the role of rituals for social structure and historical change (for a summary, see Kelly and Kaplan 1990). In contrast to a Durkheimian understanding, where cognitive systems and their ritual manifestations are expressive of social structures and thus conservatory with regard to power relations, Appadurai follows Edmund Leach (1954) and Maurice Bloch (1977) in asking how people can think not only within but also about their society and culture. Leach had argued

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against sociological reifications of social structures and proposed instead to understand them as “a set of ideas about the distribution of power between persons and groups of persons” (1954: 4). As such, social structures can be literally up for debate, and a particularly efficient way to debate them is to talk about the past in order to reflect upon, justify, challenge, or possibly change existing forms of institutional power and social inequality. Atheists talk very explicitly about the past as a question of power, namely by narrating Indian civilizational history as a story of Aryan invasion and mental enslavement. However, they do so not only by speaking about it, but also by speaking in a rhetorical and aesthetic manner that realizes it: they enact the triadic social imaginary of People–Villain–Atheist. It therefore does not even matter whether they literally narrate their version of Indian history in every given instance of propagation or only allude to it indirectly while talking about other topics—or whether that story is news to anyone in the audience—for its enactment is not conditional upon persuading listeners of its truth-value, but on a propagator’s ability to constitute an audience as listeners and thus interpellate them oratorically into a triadic social imaginary as either guileless or villainous addressees of Atheist propagation. Throughout this book, I argue that the specificity of the project of Total Atheism—its aesthetic quality of secular difference—­originates not primarily in their worldview, but in the distinctive way in which Atheist activists negotiate sameness and difference or rupture and continuity by taking up an ex-centric positionality within their sociocultural environment. In the context of this chapter on oral propagation, that environment is a hegemonic regime of entextualization grounded in modern print culture and hermeneutic literacy. This regime of entextualization enables the oratorical mode of Atheist speech and provides the foil against which its rhetoric strategy of fluent hyperliteralism emerges as ex-centric—critics would say offensively arrogant; my interlocutors would say expediently critical. I argue that the positionality of ex-centricity, in the sense of a careful negotiation and configuration of rupture and continuity, familiarity and outlandishness, historical belonging and revisionism, is the experiential ground of Atheist mental revolution (bhavaviplavam). Thus, Atheism as a worldview cannot be separated from the modes of articulation that express it. But, what about the question of whether Atheist propagation can be described as anything but a failure, judging by the small size of the Atheist movement, the marginality of its claims within public discourse, the largely negative or no reactions it receives, as well as

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a rather strong sense of stagnation and failure within the movement itself? Put this way, however, the question is already the result of too narrow a focus on persuasion of others as the decisive function of propagation. Instead, I understand propagation first and foremost as a means for Atheists to realize and put into practice their own mental revolution. As such, the nature of its success or failure may not be inferable from its effects on others. I even want to go a step further and claim that the apparent failure to persuade others or have a substantial transformative impact on society at large can even enhance the efficacy of propagation for Atheist activists themselves: without The People and The Villain, there is no Atheist. The affectively charged marginality and odium that Atheists encounter objectively, as a stigmatized minority, is not the same as the marginality they themselves narrate, imagine, and cultivate. I understand Atheist practices, including practices of propagation, as a means to make the discrepancy between their encountered and their cultivated marginality sensible as a positively charged condition, performance, and sentiment of heroic ex-centricity and secular difference. Ayyanna expressed this sentiment very concisely in his speech at the Nastika Mela: “We might be alone, but we have the strength to confront society.” Even if—and sometimes especially when—Atheist propagation fails to persuade its addressees and leaves those who propagate alone and isolated, it ends up confirming their ex-centricity, their heroism, their difference, and thus their “slandered” Atheism. As far as my Atheist interlocutors are concerned, the limited outreach of their movement does in no way cast doubt upon their message but, if at all, upon “talk” as an appropriate means for putting that message into practice. Oral propagation is certainly a privileged instrument, yet, as I will show in the following chapters, not the only one to realize mental revolution and Total Atheism as a practically sincere way of life.

Notes 1. It is crucial to bear in mind, however, that the modern privileging of rationalized denotation did not simply displace embodied practices, poetic qualities, and aesthetic experiences of language. Modern semiotic ideology is, after all, an ideology whose referentialist self-representation as rational, disembodied, denotational, and so on need not be taken at face value. Furthermore, denotational understandings of language did not arrive with Christian missionaries or colonial officers in the rest of the world. In “premodern” India, people were not suspended in a universe of

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embodied sound experience of iconic Vedic recitations without concern for the meaning of verbal utterances. Sanskrit language analysis, for example, differentiated very clearly between different semiotic modes and genres of speech: the mantras of “mystical” seers were primarily relevant as sensual sound qualities (s´abdapradhana), while scholars and bards produced epics and treatises based on a predominantly denotational discourse (arthapradhana); finally, the ornate verses of poets were characterized as a balanced confluence of both sensual and denotational dimensions (s´abdarthapradhana) of language (Narayana Rao and Shulman 1998: 156–58). 2. After the murder of Maharashtrian rationalist leader Narendra Dabholkar in 2013, Maharashtra passed an antisuperstition bill for which Dabholkar’s organization had been fighting for some years (Quack 2012: 247–55). Since then, the Telugu Atheist movement has started to campaign for similar legislation in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. The prospective law tries to criminalize what Atheists consider superstitious practices by defining them within the framework of consumer protection as fraud and false advertising. 3. Ayyanna, “Svagatam,” Charvaka Ashram, 11 February 2012; recorded speech in Telugu. 4. One possible explanation for this belatedness and the remarkable lack of rhetorical theory on public speaking in South Asia—remarkable when considering its sophisticated tradition of language analysis—is related to the nature of the political economy of precolonial South India, which was organized around the structural analogy of kingship and divinity: kings—like deities—did not speak to the people but engaged in a discursive interaction based on devotion. As devotees praised their gods, so court poets lauded their kings who, in return, dispensed blessing and patronage (Price 1996a; Narayana Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam 1998). As a result, kings and deities do not address the people but are addressed— lauded, praised, worshiped—by them. 5. The Sanskrit term pratibha is, like aucitya, a key concept in Sanskrit aesthetics, where it is discussed as an indispensable attribute of a poet (Shulman 2008). 6. Katti Padma Rao, Ponnur, 3 December 2014; recorded interview in Telugu, italics indicate English in original.

Chapter 4

PROGRAMS (1) ERADICATING SUPERSTITION THROUGH MAGIC

The “Silver Jubilee Hall” was filled with around seventy primary-­ school  pupils and their teachers, who had come for the annual “Miracle Exposure Program” of the Atheist Centre in Vijayawada. Pasala Bhimanna, an Atheist writer and activist, conjuring aficionado, and long-time associate of the Atheist Centre, was about to perform one of the classics: sticking his tongue out, he started piercing it with the pointy end of a small, metal trident (tris´ulam), a common divine weapon in Hindu iconography. The piercing of the tongue or other body parts is a well-known devotional and supplicatory practice in certain Hindu festivals. To bear the pain of this feat and perform it without incurring physical harm is usually taken as a confluence of both pious devotion and divine grace. The audience gasped, someone shouted “Bhayam!” (scary), while Bhimanna grimaced, wrinkled his forehead, clenched his eyes, and slowly, ever so slowly, pushed the small pike of about twenty centimeters in length and the diameter of a thin pencil through his bared tongue. He had covered his mouth while doing so, but when he had finished, he stretched out his hands and stared with wide eyes into the room, the trident apparently stuck in the middle of his protruded tongue. He waited, letting the audience bathe in amazement, savoring the suspense, before he removed the pike and grinned with his tongue still intact and not a single drop of blood spilled. The atmosphere of tension collapsed. Some children started laughing, others clapped or cheered, as Bhimanna began to repeat the same trick once more—only this time he explained what he had done. Showing the small tris´ulam the first time, he had held it in such a way as to conceal an indentation in its middle. He did not actually pierce his tongue, but squeezed it into the bend, which he then turned backward, thus hiding it in his mouth cavity when stretching out his tongue. The kids were excited, some could not hold still anymore,

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and Bhimanna asked, “Is this a miracle?” (Idi mahatyama?) To which the delighted children yelled in reply, “No!” (kadu!) This routine was repeated again and again throughout the workshop: “Is this divine power?—No! Do supernatural powers exist?—They don’t! Can you do this too?—We can!” The whole workshop lasted more than three hours, during which Bhimanna and his conjuring colleague, Gautam, continued to perform a series of such magic performances followed by explanations of the “real” tricks behind them. The workshop had begun with three members of the Gora family, the administrators of the Atheist Centre, explaining to the audience that this event was not merely an entertaining magic show, but really a “Miracle Exposure Program,” an educational and scientific workshop intended to capacitate its participants to dispel “superstition” (mudhanammakam) in themselves as well as in society. As the Atheist Centre had invited members of the press, an English and five Telugu newspapers ran articles the next day. The following is a quote from the widely circulating Telugu daily “Eenadu,” which captures well how the Atheist Centre and other Atheist organizations project the overall rationale and conceptual background of this sort of program: “Babas1 say they perform miracles. They do magic based on science and say they have supernatural powers. They take the people for a ride,” said Doctor Samaram. He said that, as a means for entertainment and education, magic-science was based on factual reality. Under the auspices of Gora Science Centre, a magic training workshop was conducted on Sunday in the Atheist Centre at Benz Circle. . . . Niyanta, director of Gora Science Centre, said they had set up this study program in order to promote understanding, knowledge, and scientific temper in the people. The magician Gautam explained the science behind many magic tricks. (“Eenadu,” 24 November 2014, Vijayawada Edition)

The reporter’s use of the rather unusual, transliterated English compound “magic–science” is a concise rendering of the Atheist understanding of conjuring as a pedagogic device, which combines the debunking of claims to supernatural power with the promotion of so-called scientific temper (vijñana drsti). After the workshop had finished, Vijayam, current director of the Atheist Centre, explained to me that this sort of program was meant to make people understand that miracles are nothing but magic tricks, and that magic tricks, in turn, are nothing but science. This unequivocal equation of miracles, magic (in the sense of conjuring), and science expresses a materialist worldview where these things are ontologically identical insofar as they are based on

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knowing and technically manipulating “factual reality” (yathartham) (i.e., the physical or material properties of the world). From an Atheist perspective, what is ultimately unreal about miracles is their difference from science; and this unreality is socially harmful and morally reprehensible because it is strategically produced and maintained by so-called babas who rely on secrecy and deceit to exploit people’s gullibility for their own selfish gain. Since Atheists consider conjuring or stage magic a morally neutral form of entertainment, they appropriate it as an educational instrument for the advancement of materialist science, understood as a quest for transparent truth and the salutary progress of society. A number of authors have pointed out that Atheist materialism in the activist form it takes in contemporary India is not only an ontological stance but also an ethical project, an “epistemic-moral entanglement” (Quack 2012: 272; see also Copeman and Reddy 2012; Macdonald 2015; T. Srinivas 2017). Jacob Copeman and Johannes Quack furthermore show how such materialism is itself mediated through a material culture based on the “retooling of sacred objects for non-religious purposes” (2015: 42). The material things involved in practices like Atheist conjuring become part of a strategy to “reclaim materials for materialism” (Copeman and Quack 2015: 43) in order to make it persuasive by enacting it. Against this background, I approach Miracle Exposure Programs as a specific mode of making Atheism total by putting it into practice—a mode that my interlocutors call “program” (karyakramam). Within the framework of practical sincerity, programs constitute instances of “doing” as opposed to “talking,” even though people may of course talk during programs and engage in practices of oral propagation (see Chapter 4). Programs usually take the form of social service and tend to cover three classic social reform topics: education (this chapter), caste (Chapter 5), and gender (Chapter 6). Within the framework of practical sincerity as a specific moral and semiotic ideology of relating words and deeds, programs can be distinguished from practices of “talking,” such as biographic professions (Chapter 2) or propagation (Chapter 3), insofar as they are considered to contribute more directly to a tangible reconstruction of society (san˙ghanirmanam), which is, after all, the ultimate goal of Total Atheism. I therefore propose to shift the focus of analysis away from materialism as an ontological option and concentrate instead on the social and aesthetic dimensions of Miracle Exposure Programs as a specific kind and mode of Atheist practice. As a corollary, the following analysis does not revolve around the reception of Atheist conjuring or its effects on “believers,” nor does it

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seek to contribute to scholarship on miracles; rather, it is grounded in a conceptualization of exposure as a complex performance, display, and enactment of an Atheist perspective on miracles. The specificity of this perspective consists in an act of distancing display, through which miracles are repudiated by sidestepping questions about their ontological status—which is taken for granted—and displacing them instead into the domain of social relationships and power. From an Atheist perspective, the reality and truth of materialism is at no time in doubt; I therefore interpret Atheist conjuring not only as an instrument for propagating a materialist worldview but above all as an attempt to display—to make perceptible—the sociopsychological condition of “superstition” (mudhanammakam), which Atheists hold responsible for preventing the cognizance of a materialism they consider an otherwise self-evident reality. Besides the debunking of particular miracles, Miracle Exposure Programs seek to display how, at a more general level, “superstition” enables a fraudulent masking of science as miracle and how its inverted mirror image of “scientific temper” offers a way out. Hence, the concept of exposure that I develop in the following refers to an aesthetic form for the perception of secular difference, whose pedagogical efficacy does not depend on disenchanting the minds of an audience (or understanding what they actually do when they “believe” in miracles) but on authenticating Atheist conjurers as moral and trustworthy sources of true knowledge (for a discussion of the ambiguous relationship between exposure and the category of “fakes,” see Copeman 2018). After contextualizing my approach within current anthropological scholarship on magic in relation to modernity as a project of disenchantment, the following sections will successively develop the concept of exposure as an aesthetic form by examining Atheist understandings of superstition, the social psychology of Atheist conjuring, and the cultural history and politics of scientific temper.

Exposing the Magic of Anthropology In his seminal “Formations of the Secular,” Talal Asad (2003) described the workings of an episteme of secular modernity for which scholarship on religion, including the anthropology of religion, played an instrumental role by consolidating an essentialist difference between the religious and the secular. As a consequence, the secular has come into view as a specifically modern project and “moral narrative” (Keane 2013b), which has turned out to be as constructed and

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constructive as its other: religion. One way of dealing with anthropology’s complicity in the epistemological regime of secular modernity has been to genealogically deconstruct the secular/religious binary and the normative claims to secular difference it often implies. A major topic in this context concerns the way in which the category of “magic” was constituted in contradistinction to the moral legitimacy of “religion” and the epistemic authority of “science” (Steyers 2004). The critique or exposure of supernatural or other types of extraordinary claims and practices as immoral, devilish, illegitimate, selfish, fake, futile, fraudulent, and so forth emerges here as an integral part of the historical and cultural production of secular modernity and its foundational distinction of magic, science, and religion (Pietz 1985; Tambiah 1990; von Stuckrad 2014; Jones 2017). Critical interrogations of secular modernity have furthermore traced how modern projects of disenchantment, including the academic project of anthropology, produce their own reenchantments, myths, and magics (Hanegraaff 1996; R. Morris 2000; Meyer and Pels 2003; S. Dube 2009; Saler 2011; Josephson-Storm 2017). A major site for retrieving the persistent magic in and of modernity has been, unsurprisingly, the art of conjuring or entertainment magic. The history of conjuring appears to be less a disenchantment of religious magic than a field of continuous categorical ambivalence and instability undercutting clear-cut dichotomies like natural/ supernatural, fake/real, or secular/religious (Schmidt 2000; During 2002; Landy and Saler 2009; Jones 2017). Ironically, the enchanting powers of conjuring seem to flow from a combination of disclosure and concealment (i.e., from implicitly disavowing “real” magic as illusion and technique while, simultaneously, keeping secret the knowledge of that technique). In his historical and ethnographic study on street magic in India, Lee Siegel (1991) has moreover shown that the boundaries between entertainment magic and real magic are porous and can be subject to strategic manipulation. Sanskrit terms for magic like indrajala or maya contain a semantic core of trickery, illusion, or trapping that links conjuring to the magic of the gods who create the universe as a magical illusion in order to trick, dupe, and defeat their demonic enemies. Conjuring on earth is said to mirror the magic of heaven, and in both cases, the power of the magician—whether human or divine, real or fake—derives from the manipulation of ambiguity, uncertainty, and secrecy. Similarly, anthropological scholarship has shown practices of magic to inevitably contain within themselves aspects of fakery, moments of skepticism, and acts of exposure (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 167–86; Shipley 2009; Pedersen 2011;

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Graeber 2015); and this may include the exposure that comes in the form of anthropological analysis and explanation. A seminal example of the latter appears in Michael Taussig’s reading of Edward Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande (1976), where he shows how the anthropologist’s text is “part of a larger and more complex staging in which exposure of tricks is the name of the game” consisting of “the skilled revelation of the skilled concealment necessary to the mix of faith and skepticism necessary to magic” (Taussig 2016: 477). Magic encompasses here its ethnographic explanation whose modes of production and textual fixation replicate the mix of concealment and revelation constituting magic in the first place; it merely adds another turn to “an endless circle in which magic explains magic” (Taussig 2016: 479). Taussig’s own analysis proposes a perspective that seems to escape this magical circle by explicitly disavowing not magic but exposure: “Far be it for me to expose such exposure.” (2016: 476). By refusing to commit yet another act of magical exposure/exposing magic, Taussig tries to escape the reenchantment of science by abstaining from the disenchantment of magic. While this may, at first sight, appear as a reinstatement of magic, it accomplishes the contrary: an exit from the circle of magic in which the, in the Asadian sense, “secular/modern” anthropology of religion is already subsumed. Though Taussig’s example may be rhetorically extreme, it illustrates a larger trend within anthropology where the secular/religious binary is disavowed by a self-reflexive move of retrieving a conceptual genealogy where the religious and the secular constantly contaminate each other. This “postsecular turn” has, in turn, sparked a debate about the role of faith in anthropology itself (e.g., Blanes 2006; Oustinova-Stjepanovic 2015; Willerslev and Suhr 2018; Copeman and Hagström 2018). I argue, by contrast, that postsecular critiques of modernity remain haunted by a reflex to distance themselves from their own secular past, which manifests as a tendency to methodologically parallelize the secular and the religious, as well as a reluctance to theorize difference. Elizabeth Roberts’s proposal of a “programmatically non-secular” (2016: 209) anthropology, for example, takes its cue from Science and Technology Studies in order to show how science and religion are both constructed and dependent on processes of mediation: both make reality through mediators, things crafted through relationships. Scientific mediators, such as microscopes, air pumps, and graphs, are “indirect” and “artificial” means of making the tiny or the faraway and the counterintuitive, like germs or quarks, into an objectively seeable, knowable reality (Latour 2010: 114). Similarly,

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religious images or mediators have the ability to bring deities close by transforming those who experience them. (Roberts 2016: 210)

Yet similar does not mean identical, which is why it is necessary to analyze exactly how processes of mediation in science laboratories and in religious rituals are different in their similarity. While Roberts shows persuasively that socioeconomic factors condition whether people tend to opt for secular or religious mediations, she pays less attention to how those processes of mediation themselves are different besides the content they mediate. Regarding Atheist conjuring in India, Helen Macdonald goes further and describes how attempts by a Chhattisgarhi rationalist to expose traditional healing practices as trickery share with those practices “similarities in presentation and style,” which she identifies as a common “aesthetics of revelation” (2015: 486). The similarity in aesthetic form is contrasted with divergent social effects based on different epistemologies: illumination through naturalist empiricism versus divine revelation. With the concept of exposure, I propose to follow this line of inquiry by developing an analytical vocabulary capable of tracing the production of secular difference in the aesthetic forms of its presentation. Exposure as an aesthetic form is here not approached as a container for “conflicting discourses of materiality and rationality” (Srinivas 2017: 381), but as itself subject to historical transformation by the epistemological or ontological stances it shapes and mediates. The Atheist materialism under consideration in this chapter rests on the premise that there is nothing but the immediately given material world, a world which is in no need of being mediated but merely of being exposed; religious mediations are precisely what ought to be undone. By juxtaposing mediation and exposure, I do not intend to reproduce materialist claims of immediacy or deny the constructed nature of materialist worldviews. I do, however, argue that such world­views may be constructed differently than religious worldviews not for being secular in an ontological or essentialist sense, but for producing difference at the level of perceptible aesthetic forms and practices of mediation. In concrete terms, I propose to approach Atheist practices of exposure not by asking how adequately or erroneously they ­represent miracles—or the nature of the world for that matter— or how successfully they “disenchant” those who believe in them, but how they display and therein produce and shape a specific form of secular difference. This notion of secular difference is not structuralist, insofar as it does not require mutual exclusivity or constitutive otherness. The Atheist practices I analyze may share traits with religious

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practices at different levels, including the level of aesthetic forms. However, a premise of the following ethnography and theorizing of secular difference is precisely that difference can be made sensible only on the basis of similarity: the question is not whether Atheist conjuring is different from religious miracles in a structuralist or ontological sense, but how Atheists employ similarities between miracles and conjuring in order to produce secular difference as an object of perception.

Exposing Superstition: Atheist Epistemology between Narrative and Performance A cornerstone of Atheist activism is the public critique of religions, and Miracle Exposure Programs have been the most well-known and spectacular form thereof. They have been an integral part of rural “mass meetings,” where activists address whole village communities and conjuring is integrated with song and oratory into a larger program of Atheist propagation. In this form, Atheist conjuring was first popularized at a larger scale in India by the Keralite rationalist Abraham T. Kovoor (1898–1978) who started touring India in the 1960s and used magic tricks as a means to debunk alleged miracles performed by babas and similar religious actors. Born into a Christian family in Kerala, Kovoor immigrated with his wife to Sri Lanka where he taught as a botany teacher until his retirement in 1959, when he assumed the presidency of Ceylon Rationalist Association (Lavanam 1980; Quack 2012: 96–97; Kovoor 2013a, 2013b). He is known for his public challenges of babas, to whom he offered large amounts of money if they were able to prove their powers under scientific conditions. His successors, Basava Premanand (1930–2009) and Narendra Nayak (b. 1951), have continued to travel all over India in order to expose miracles. Besides mass meetings in rural villages, Atheist conjurers increasingly target students at secondary schools and colleges in an effort to recruit younger members. Especially at college level, Miracle Exposure Programs are often hosted by already existing student clubs or organizations with rationalist leanings. In such circumstances, Atheist magicians tend to change their repertoire and style of performance to match their audience, as those programs tend to function less as occasions for propagation than as a means to recruit and train potential future activists by providing them with the necessary knowledge, skills, and strategies to face potential adversaries. The event described at the beginning of this chapter at the Atheist Centre is a sort of hybrid,

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since it was explicitly framed as a training workshop but addressed very young students who were not expected to start performing Miracle Exposure Programs themselves. Miracle Exposure Programs have moreover become so iconic for the external and internal image of Atheism that they have turned into a sort of Atheist material culture and are often included together with song and dance in the schedules of conferences, meetings, or weddings under the rubric of “cultural program.” As such, they are used to kick off, conclude, or loosen up an event and function as a form of diversion and entertainment for an audience already constituted as Atheist. The popularity and attractiveness of Miracle Exposure Programs has been such that some within the Atheist movement have begun to distance themselves from them, fearing that the entertaining qualities of conjuring risk undermining its instrumental character, and that Atheism may get lost in magic. At the same time, it is conceded that the efficacy of conjuring rests precisely on its capacity to fuse propagation and pedagogy with recruitment and entertainment. The most common magic tricks performed at Miracle Exposure Programs are the production of so-called sacred ash (vibhuti) or small trinkets “from thin air” as well as fire tricks, like the combustion of camphor pieces on hands and tongues. Besides sleights of hand or tricks based on psychological manipulation (illusion, misdirection), most tricks either utilize technical apparatus (false bottoms, hidden compartments) or exploit the chemical properties of substances (having them change color, density, or reactivity) (see also Quack 2012: 109– 44). I have not come across any kind of official or unofficial manuals or guidelines for Miracle Exposure Programs, which indicates that Atheist magicians in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana usually learn through workshops and informal channels of apprenticeship. While individual conjurers usually cultivate unique styles regarding their repertoire of tricks, the props they use, including costume and multimedia support, or the general tone of the event (humorous/serious, mimetic/caricatural), Miracle Exposure Programs tend realize variations of the following script: first, the miracle to be exposed is introduced by portraying the context in which it is usually encountered. This can happen through a verbal description or by imitating a baba and casting a volunteer from the audience as a client-devotee. The second step contains the actual performance of the miracle, followed by a third step of disclosing how the trick is accomplished and, if not already addressed in step one, how it is used to defraud believers. The concept of exposure, however, is more complex than step three of this script, because it does not exhaust itself in the debunking of

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particular miracles as technical conjuring tricks. According to the explicit agenda of Atheist activists, they use the exposure of concrete miracles only as a means to eradicate superstition in general. Telugu words used for superstition (mudhanammakam, guddinammakam, andhavis´vasam) all translate literally as “blind belief” or “blind trust.” Already at the level of semantics, superstition points beyond an intellectual realm of assent to propositions and toward an affective relationship of “trust.” Similar to the semantic layers of the Latin credere (Asad 2011a: 46), believing in gods not only refers to the ontological existence of deities, but also encompasses trust in their efficacious power to impact the life of devotees. The everyday usage of these terms furthermore shows that superstition is not considered problematic primarily for being erroneous knowledge, but for leading to behavior that is undesirable, inconsequential, or outright dangerous and harmful. Blind trust is usually described in a way that makes it hardly distinguishable from the “blind customs” (mudhacaralu) it is said to sustain. When asked to define superstition, most of my interlocutors tend to produce lists of concrete examples, which include practices like astrology, numerology, temple worship, ritual propitiations of deities, “social evils” (duracaralu) like widow immolation or child-marriage, “black magic” (banamati), as well as abstract concepts like karma, soul, rebirth, or indeed god. It is thus a highly generic category covering diverse practices that are often coded socioeconomically insofar as they are considered to be prevalent in certain social classes or castes; in both public and Atheist discourse, banamati, for example, is often linked to rural and lower-caste communities, whereas so-called spiritual practices, like Yoga, are represented as typical for the middle class. Atheist conjurers can and do utilize this “sociological polysemy” of superstition strategically—while it allows to make criticism specific to the kind of superstitions supposed to be prevalent in a given audience, it may also help to mitigate the impact of that criticism by providing audiences an opportunity to displace superstition onto others. In more abstract conceptualizations, however, my interlocutors tend to define superstition temporally: as anachronism. Beliefs and practices are not blind for being erroneous sub specie aeternitatis but for not being discarded once their inaccuracy and futility have been established ­objectively— in other words, by science. Hence, superstitions are disproven beliefs that nonetheless persist, and for Atheists, it is this counterfactual persistence of trust that requires explanation and intervention. This is the basis for a defining aspect of exposure as I conceptualize it in this chapter: a sidestepping of ontological questions, which are

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simply taken for granted, and a redirection of attention to the plane of social and affective relationships. Such redirection is grounded in acts of display through particular aesthetic forms. In trying to demonstrate the falsity of superstitious beliefs, Atheist discourse itself is sensitive to the aesthetic forms and in particular the genres of speech that mediate superstitions like, for example, pukaru (rumor), kaburlu (idle chatting), or chandasam (“senseless” recitations of Vedic verses by Brahmin priests, also translated as orthodoxy) (Kantaravu 2004; Sambasiva Rao 2007; Maharaju 2009; Kovoor 2013a, 2013b). By attributing such forms of talk to people who are portrayed as particularly prone to superstition—women, lower-caste people, children, old people—Atheist narratives evoke an implicit socioaesthetic etiology of superstitious discourse. It is thus hardly coincidental that this etiology itself tends to take the form of narrative rather than, for example, epistemological argumentation. Narratological research stresses that formal features like emplotment or eventfulness are crucial instruments for representing transformative processes at the level of a story’s characters and for generating “experientiality” (Fludernik 1996:10–22; see also Porter Abbott 2009). In this regard, a tendency toward formal narrativity in Atheist discourse allows Atheists to lend experientiality—in my words: perceptibility—to their understanding of superstition as a complex social and historical process. An illustrative example for such a narrative is the Telugu autobiography of the cofounder of the Atheist Centre (see Chapter 5) Saraswathi Gora (1912–2006), where she relates an episode that took place in 1927 in Colombo between herself and her husband Gora. This account concerns beliefs and practices related to solar and lunar eclipses, which are considered inauspicious by some Hindus. Especially pregnant women are enjoined to remain at home and refrain from eating and drinking lest their children be born with cheiloschisis: I was pregnant when I came to Colombo. The future child was my first. Therefore, I was naturally a bit afraid. But, because Gora explained in detail over and over that there was no relationship between the eclipse and the child in [my] womb, and because as a father he bore as much responsibility for the unborn child as I did as a mother, I summoned up courage. . . . Some of the Muslim, Christian, and Buddhist women around me were pregnant. During the time of the eclipse, none of them behaved differently. From the start, they had never been afraid of an eclipse. Had their children actually ever gotten a cleft lip, they too would have been afraid and behaved cautiously. Seeing all this, I stopped being afraid. In the end, when I had my girl, she had no cleft lip. She was born beautiful and normal. Therefore, if I still had any deep-seated, little fear or doubt, they too were gone. This incident was

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a turning point in my life. The determination to courageously examine old customs grew. I developed the notion that one should not trust in anything blindly. (S. Gora 2003: 44)

Just before telling this story, Saraswathi stressed that her husband’s explanations “seemed perfectly reasonable” to her and had made Hindu customs “seem meaningless” (2003: 43). What eventually lead to her “turning point” (malupu), however, was not astronomical knowledge but courage (i.e., a changed affective relationship to knowledge). The turning point was triggered by her observation that women from other religious backgrounds appeared to be without fear. Colombo’s multireligious environment was crucial because, together with Gora’s admonishments, it enabled Saraswathi to construe her affectively charged beliefs as the result of a socially instituted and therefore contingent tradition belonging to one of several distinct religions: they turned out to be merely Hindu beliefs. Her husband Gora (1975b: 12–13) described the same episode in his English autobiography, where he argued more explicitly that superstitions are transmitted primarily through social institutions like family, marriage, and of course religion. In such biographic narratives, whose gender-related differences will be discussed in Chapter 6, the compelling nature of superstitions is attributed to their entwinement with the moral and affective codes of social institutions: love, commitment, responsibility, compassion, duty, devotion, and so on. Accordingly, Gora described Saraswathi’s overcoming of superstition as affectively charged acts of “noncompliance,” “infringement,” “transgression,” and “violation” (1975b: 12–13). I do not want to pit reason and knowledge against affect and behavior, because neither Saraswathi’s fear nor her courage were unreasonable; quite the opposite: they were firmly embedded within her knowledge about the expectations, duties, responsibilities, and predicaments of a Hindu wife and mother. Even though her daughter turned out to be born “beautiful and normal,” Saraswathi’s parents “severely castigated” (S. Gora 2003: 44) her for recklessly jeopardizing the well-being of her first-born child. Atheists are routinely criticized—often by scholars of religion— for reducing religion to questions of supposedly erroneous belief. However, the process of overcoming superstition is here not described as an epistemic event contained in Saraswathi’s mind, but as a process unfolding in time and social, gendered, and multireligious space. In this process, the power of family pressures and traditional beliefs and customs did not contend with astronomical truths as such—which Saraswathi claims to have never doubted—but with her affective

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readiness to heed her husband’s authority as a source of trustworthy knowledge. This is why Atheists conceptualize superstition as a form of “mental slavery” (banisabhavam): people are bound by blind trust even in situations when they actually know better. The crux of Atheist understandings of superstition is therefore that blind trust must have been perpetuated strategically by those who profit from it (i.e., by those who gain from social inequalities between genders, between priests and devotees, between babas and their followers, between astrologers and their clients, and so forth). My interlocutors maintain that religious history clearly demonstrates that the performance of miracles and alleged supernatural powers has been a major technique for keeping people in thrall to mental slavery. Against this background, I interpret Miracle Exposure Programs as an attempt to translate complex narratives of superstition into a perceptible aesthetic form of exposure: a performance that seeks to show, in a choreographed display, the social and affective mechanisms that create and maintain superstition as well as the learning-process of its eradication. The following section explores how the sociopsychological properties of conjuring enable this sort of performed epistemology of superstition.

Exposing the Power of Secrecy: The Social Psychology of Conjuring The day after the Miracle Exposure Program at the Atheist Centre, Bhimanna invited me to accompany him to his hometown of Rajahmundry in order to show me his magic school. Bhimanna had been interested in conjuring since his schooldays, but had related to it merely as an entertaining amusement, until he met Premanand in the late 1970s and acted as his assistant and translator during a Miracle Exposure campaign in Andhra Pradesh. It was then that he saw his rationalist commitment, his passion for conjuring, and his vocation as a pedagogue conjoined in the format of Miracle Exposure Programs. During our train ride to Rajahmundry, he started showing me a card trick and watched amusedly as I got stuck halfway trying to repeat it. I eventually gave up and asked him to explain where I had made the mistake, but he shushed me hurriedly, put away the card deck, and whispered: “I will show you back in Rajahmundry. People are looking, and I don’t want to expose the trick.” When I asked him later if commercial conjurers got angry with Atheists for revealing the secrets behind magic, Bhimanna answered in the negative and clarified:

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Bhimanna: I am not exposing magic tricks. I am only exposing the tricks of babas. Stefan: But, what is the difference between magic tricks and tricks of babas? B.: There is no difference. The only thing is that they say that it is based on supernatural powers. But what they say is false, because science doesn’t accept. [Seeing me take notes] You want to write this down? Okay, do it. [Dictating:] “Definition of miracles: A wonderful, supernatural event. They say that ordinary people cannot understand them and cannot do them. Science won’t accept supernatural powers and events. Next sentence: So-called miracles done by babas are also magic tricks, there is no difference at all. Magicians do magic tricks; they don’t cheat people. Babas do miracles and cheat people.”

Bhimanna reiterates here the equation of miracles and conjuring not only at the ontological but also at the technical level: they are the same tricks. And yet they are different in the moral qualities and intentions of their performers and the social effects they produce: cheating and mental slavery on the one hand and entertainment on the other. It is this difference and moreover the capacity to discern it, rather than the technique of particular tricks, that Atheists seek to expose. In a crucial sense, then, exposure is less about showing that magic tricks and miracles are the same—something that science has already done—but showing how they are made to seem different. Historical and sociological literature describes conjuring as a form of commercialized entertainment, where a magician performs ostensibly extraordinary, supernatural, or superhuman feats, which are clearly marked or implicitly understood as tricks accomplished by illusion, sleight of hand, or technical apparatus (Nardi 1984; During 2002; Jones 2011). Technically speaking, the performance of conjuring consists of a magician’s skillful combination of different strategies to manipulate the attention, perceptions, affects, and ratiocinations of an audience; it is a technology of “psychological manipulation” (Gell 1988: 7). At the same time, it is an interactional process coproduced by magician and audience: “The audience brings to a magic event several features necessary for its effectiveness: (1) knowledge and rational faculties; (2) perception; (3) expectations; and (4) a willingness to be entertained, in fact, to be tricked. . . . An audience must bring to a magic performance some amount of knowledge concerning the existence of scientific and technological explanations in order for tricks to be framed as entertainment” (Nardi 1984: 37). If miracles are defined by supernatural powers, as they are according to Atheists, one can argue that those who believe in them also need to have some “rationalist” notion about

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how the natural world ordinarily works in order to even cognize miracles as extraordinary. Even without any claim to supernatural feats, however, the ability to ostensibly break the laws of nature remains a demonstration of differential knowledge, skill, and ultimately power: “The process of performing a magic trick involves a kind of deceit that involves power, control, and one-up-man(sic)ship. Magic is an aggressive, competitive form involving challenges and winning at the expense of others” (Nardi 1988: 766). The decisive moment for the success or failure of conjuring is thus the creation of a social situation where the magician’s demonstration of skill and power is carefully deployed in order to manipulate the audience into a “willingness to be tricked.” In his ethnography of commercial conjuring in France, Graham Jones (2011) shows that such situations are precarious and need to be handled and cultivated with great care by conjurers, lest the audience becomes defensive. It turns out, a willingness to be entertained is not necessarily coterminous with a willingness to be tricked. As one of Jones’s interlocutors put it: “It’s very disagreeable for a spectator to have someone in front of him, someone who does things that people don’t understand. It’s practically unbearable” (Jones 2011: 150). What makes such situations “practically unbearable” is their dependence on a demonstration of superior power based on access to exclusive, secret knowledge. And this technically produced epistemic-affective complex of power and secrecy is precisely what the practice of Atheist exposure seeks to reveal and make perceptible. It is indeed not the magic trick that is to be exposed, but the tricks of babas (i.e., the complex process of how babas use the secrecy and power dynamics inherent to the practical skill of conjuring in order to turn a willingness to be tricked for the sake of entertainment into a willingness to become mentally enslaved). Again, I do not claim that this adequately describes the functioning of miracles; it describes what Atheists claim that babas do. While the anthropological literature on magic referenced above may be correct in describing moments of skilled revelation as integral to magic, it is nonetheless possible and necessary to distinguish different kinds of revelation. The conjurers described by Jones, for example, need to manage secrets carefully so as to protect them from the general public, but, at the same time, they need to divulge secrets in a controlled manner through internal networks of apprenticeship in order to reproduce their “culture of expertise” (2011: 17). Hence, they differentiate between tipping as an “initiatory revelation that produces secrets” (2011: 107) and a destructive disclosure they call débinage:

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For magicos, the illegitimate revelation of secret knowledge is a kind of defilement, a desecration of cultural sacra forming the basis of the magic community. Paradoxically, débinage not only dissipates secrets but also conveys a distorted sense of their importance. . . . [M]agicianship involves a tremendous amount of skill beyond simply knowing how a trick is done; débinage denigrates magic by suggesting that there is nothing to it beyond knowing secrets. (2011: 107)

Débinage is illegitimate not because it reveals too much, but because it reveals too little. It is destructive, for it prevents a realistic appreciation of the expertise and artful craft that is conjuring and thus endangers the goal of entertainment. Similar to tipping, the Atheist practice of exposure is not a subtractive act—the removal of secrecy—but an additive one. Rather than just revealing that superstitions are false by disclosing the trick, exposure seeks to perform and make sensible how falsity comes into being and is maintained. It demonstrates how superstition relies on the power of secrecy by undoing it, and this very act of disclosure adds a reflexive surplus: it shows not only the immorality of babas who translate secrecy into deceit and superstition; it also seeks to expose the morality and pedagogic agency of the Atheist conjurer, who retranslates superstition into entertainment and pedagogy. This reflexive and moral surplus of exposure constitutes “scientific temper” as the positive message of Miracle Exposure Programs and the inverted mirror image of superstition. Exposure is thus both transitive (exposing something) and intransitive (being exposed). This intransitivity resonates with the colloquial use of “exposure,” where people tend to use the English term even when speaking in Telugu. In everyday conversation, to say that somebody “has exposure” refers to a diffuse set of skills and dispositions, like being able to interact confidently with strangers (preferably in English); feeling comfortable with things like foreign food, cutlery, or escalators; or commanding certain codes of professionality and politeness. In short, it indicates a certain habitus acquired by being exposed to “modernity,” especially in its urban and cosmopolitan guise. In postcolonial India, this modernity includes “scientific temper” as one of its crucial elements.

Exposing Scientific Temper: Modernity and the Encounter of Knowledge In order to start unpacking the notion of scientific temper, we can return for a moment to my introductory vignette of Bhimanna’s performance at the Atheist Centre. It is important to note that the

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dramaturgical arc of his piercing routine pivoted on the exposure of how the trick is done, but it did not end there. It continued into an enactment of scientific temper, as he made the school children recite in unison the answers to his questions: Is this a miracle? Do supernatural powers exist? Can you do it too? Bhimanna had furthermore brought a plastic banner, which he had hung on the wall and had the pupils recite collectively at some point during the show. It comprised six bullet points: • • • • • •

Scientific attitude is scientific thinking Develop scientific attitude Supernatural powers and events are false Adopt scientific method to solve problems Prayers do not solve problems Miracles done by Babas are magic tricks

Bhimanna’s performance had been preceded by speeches in which members of the Atheist Centre explained the need for scientific temper. Samaram, a respected medical doctor and Atheist author, gave this succinct definition of scientific temper: “Questioning! What happened? How did it happen? How did you do it?” The pupils were told to remember these questions, and some of them were summoned onto the stage during the event and prompted to “question” Bhimanna with exactly these words after each magic trick. What would be the didactic value of this kind of rehearsed performance of scientific temper as well as its abstract, tautological conceptualization? On Bhimanna’s banner, scientific attitude is qualified as scientific thinking, which is, in turn, qualified as scientific method. In a seemingly contradictory way, the tautological indeterminacy of scientific temper as a procedure of questioning is juxtaposed with fixed, almost dogmatic iterations of the insights it is foretold to yield: supernatural powers are false, prayer is futile, miracles are tricks. The example of another Miracle Exposure Program by a different Atheist conjurer, G. D. Saraiah (GDS), will help clarify why I propose to conceptualize scientific temper, like superstition, as a complex and historically informed social process, rather than a merely cognitive state. GDS is a gifted singer, songwriter and poet, seasoned orator, and experienced conjurer, who started his activist life as a young man by joining the Maoist movement. He explained to me that he left the Naxalites and joined the Atheist movement because he had become disillusioned with persisting caste-based discrimination among Communists. He had begun to realize that at the “core”

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(kendrabinduvu) of economic and social problems lay the “notion of god” (daivabhavam). In the mid 2000s, he founded his own organization called People’s Atheist Society (PAS). Although PAS is a rather small group, whose followers are mostly concentrated in the districts of Karimnagar and Adilabad, GDS as its charismatic leader is well-connected in the larger movement and active throughout Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. Moreover, he is lauded by his supporters as one of the last real activists who has sacrificed everything, including his family and professional life, for the cause of the movement. GDS’s activism, along with the material infrastructure for his magic shows (stage, lighting, sound, etc.), is largely facilitated by a network of ­sympathizers and collaborators who are often personal friends or allied activists. The Miracle Exposure Program described in the following, however, was requested and organized by a local superintendent of police. Some weeks prior to the event, a death had occurred in the village of Shanigaram, after which the afflicted family had started making allegations of being victims of banamati, a form of malevolent magic. Since they had threatened and already beaten an accused sorcerer, the local police invited GDS to conduct a Miracle Exposure Program in order to prevent worse things from happening. Retaliatory murders of alleged banamati practitioners are reported quite regularly in the media, which tend to portray belief in “black magic”—and the crimes it inspires—as prime markers of the “­backwardness” of rural and especially lower-caste communities. When GDS, a group of six PAS activists, and I arrived at Shanigaram, we found a stage set up at the central crossroads of the village, where a sound system broadcast the latest Telugu cinema songs into the surroundings. A few high-ranking police officials were already seated on chairs next to the dais. GDS started the show with his standard repertoire of magic tricks interspersed with Atheist songs and short speeches about the principles of Atheism and its history in India. GDS tends to include audience members, especially children and women, in his magic tricks as much as possible and is very adept at performing in a humorous register, which contrasts starkly with the severe, uncompromising, and sometimes aggressive style of his speeches. About an hour into the program, the superintendent of police, a stern, tall, and muscular man in his late forties, mounted the dais. He addressed the village community in an authoritative ­language, using pronouns usually reserved for children, very close friends and family, or for marking addressees as subordinate. He made an “appeal” (vijñapti) to the villagers’ reason, asking them to discard their belief in banamati and to desist from any acts of retaliation. He

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would not tolerate any illegal activity, and the event was a “warning” (heccarika); severe consequence awaited those flaunting it. One of GDS’s local collaborators delivered another speech, where he explained how superstition consisted of three main components: fear, blind following, and cheating. As an oblique reference to the presence of police officers, he stressed: “This is not a government event. These people [PAS activists] are here only to tell the real facts [tatvalu] and then they will be on their way. That’s all. No money is involved here.” Toward the end of the three-hour show, Sujatha Surepally, a renowned sociologist, feminist, and anti-caste activist from nearby Satavahana University concluded the event with a long speech arguing that superstitions like banamati were above all instruments for maintaining social inequalities based on caste and religion. She assured the people in the audience that they were in no way inferior to “educated people” (caduvukonna vallu), who had their own kinds of superstitions: “If you believe in god, do as you please. Although we [gesturing toward the stage] do not believe, we are here only to oppose superstition and deceit.” In order to analyze this episode, it is necessary to first take a brief digression into the conceptual history of scientific temper in postcolonial India.2 The concept is closely associated with the personality of India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who coined the English term as a cornerstone of his project of national modernization (Parekh 1991; S. Roy 2007: 105–32). After independence, big science, large-scale industrial projects, and institutions for technological education (IITs) became key components of nation building and state-directed development. As such, science was firmly embedded in a discourse of lack—the flipside of development—where it figured as the solution not only to the nation’s economic needs but also its social “backwardness.” Srirupa Roy (2007) argues that this discourse of lack cast citizens as backward, infantile, and in need of being modernized by the state. At the same time, however, it encompassed the state itself, as “citizens were simultaneously exhorted to believe in the promise of state intervention and to develop skills of ‘self help’ in recognition of the inherent limits, fallibilities, and inadequacies of state-sponsored modernity” (S. Roy 2007: 46). Thus, state-driven big science could only fulfill its function of developing the nation if that nation itself developed the necessary skill to receive the gift of “Nehruvian Science” (Arnold 2013). Not all individual citizens needed to become scientists themselves; but for science to do its modernizing work, it was their duty to develop scientific temper. In 1976, during the Emergency rule of Nehru’s daughter and India’s

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third Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, this duty was enshrined in the Constitution of India as article 51A(h). Accompanied by the oil crisis and its attendant economic effects, however, Indira Gandhi’s Emergency rule was simultaneously a crisis of the state and the hitherto ruling Congress party, as it seemed to indicate the demise of the “Nehruvian Consensus” (Sharma 2014) at the basis of postcolonial India. Since the mid 1960s, some of the certainties underpinning the project of Nehruvian modernization had been coming under attack by an emerging criticism of the topdown dispensation of big science in the service of industrialization and development. In 1990, this criticism found institutional shape in the All India People’s Science Network (AIPSN), which fought for an alternative science that would be closer to the people, serving their needs rather than filling the coffers of industrialists and capitalist corporations (Kannan 1990; Varma 2001). AIPSN rallied behind a Marxist vision of “science for social revolution” (Zachariah and Sooryamoorthy 1994: 66) and encompassed a variety of goals and agendas, ranging from literacy programs to science popularization or medical health campaigns. The discourse of “People’s Science” still pivoted on the concept of scientific temper, regardless of whether it was located in technocratic elites or associated with an alternative, popular, or indigenous science. Scientific temper thus survived the so-called Nehruvian Era and continues to structure public debates about the relationship between knowledge, state, economy, and society (Subbaram 1989; Quack 2012: 302–8). Especially in the 1990s, the concept returned within the framework of discussions about the “crisis” of Indian secularism (R. Bhargava 1998), and it continues to appear regularly in public discourse, political commentary, newspaper editorials, and more. The common thread running through scientific temper’s conceptual history is that it addresses above all the relationship between knowledge and power. According to Atheist materialism, science and technology are a progressive approximation to and control of “factual reality”; and as such, they effectively disprove, beyond any reasonable doubt, beliefs in supernatural phenomena. Regardless, the fact remains that these beliefs persist. While this confirms for Atheists their status as anachronistic superstitions, it also evinces that science and technology alone are incapable of dispelling them for good. The distinction between science and scientific temper thus registers an attempt to safeguard the battered authority of a science beleaguered by its perceived failure: Atheists and other promoters of science must explain why the people remain superstitious even though they are repeatedly told the truth.

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My interlocutors usually argue that people are afraid and simply follow what powerful individuals like elders, leaders, or babas tell them to do. Hence, superstition is considered less a lack of knowledge or rationality than a tendency to be led by fear or sheer force of habit into misplaced trust in questionable authorities, and then into mental slavery. Bhimanna’s choreography of scientific temper demonstrates that Atheists treat it less as an individual capacity to generate knowledge than a disposition or attitude when encountering knowledge; it is about how to manage access to and the beneficial utilization of knowledge. If scientific temper means “questioning,” this unfolds in two dimensions: it means putting into question false authorities, but it also means putting questions to legitimate ones—in order to then receive trustworthy answers. As Bhimanna explained to me: the ultimate object of Atheist exposure is not the trick itself, as it rather seeks to provide the audience with a perceptible display of a moral difference between baba, stage conjurer, and Atheist, which derives from their distinctive use of the power and authority that come with differential access to knowledge. Most members of the Atheist movement are old enough to have grown up on the brink of the Nehruvian Era; and even though the discourses on scientific temper, secularism, or socialism were never “officially” Atheist or expressly irreligious, Atheists see themselves as that era’s most qualified and authentic heirs. By rallying behind scientific temper, Atheists inscribe themselves into that concept’s ambiguous discursive relationship with the authority of the postcolonial state. Like the People’s Science movement, of which many Atheist activists are in fact members, the Atheist movement latches onto the compromised moral status of the developmental state by presenting itself as carrying on where “Nehruvian Science” has failed. In GDS’s Miracle Exposure Program, the sheer presence and domineering demeanor of the police, likely the most tangible way most ordinary citizens encounter the state’s power in everyday life, lent authority to the event but also required an explicit dissociation from the state by stressing that the program was not a government event and that no money was involved. The oblique reference to money may evoke various associations, from quotidian experiences of corruption to a specific Indian discourse of financially incentivized conversion, in particular by Christian missionaries (Jenkins 2008; N. Roberts 2012); though my interlocutors regularly insist that they are opposed to all religions and reject the vocabulary of conversion, Atheists are sometimes accused, especially by Hindu nationalists, of being merely the avant-garde of a Christian/Western conspiracy out to destroy

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Hinduism. By assuring the assembled villagers of their equality with “educated people,” Sujatha further distanced the Miracle Exposure Program from the discredited elitism of Nehruvian state-modernism, which has invested scientific temper—or “having exposure”—with a distinctly urban, cosmopolitan, and middle-class/upper-caste habitus. In the wake of such elitism, practices like banamati have become iconic signs of rural, lower-caste “backwardness.” Sujatha even mitigated the need for disbelief in god, which led to a heated disagreement with GDS after the show had ended.

The Aesthetic Form of Exposure Such careful and preemptive framings of Miracle Exposure Programs highlight the amount of semiotic labor that goes into the performative crafting of scientific temper as a distinct and benevolent form of authoritative knowledge. I want to illustrate this argument with the example of a failed Miracle Exposure Program conducted by GDS at Metpalli, a small village around 50 kilometers from Shanigaram. Toward the end of the magic show, GDS and his son Spartacus produced two red-hot iron poles, which PAS activists had prepared by heating them in a pile of glowing embers at a short distance from the stage. Displaying them in front of the gathered village, GDS and Spartacus started touching the blazing poles with their bare hands in order to demonstrate that no supernatural powers or extraordinary piety was necessary for such a feat. The audience became increasingly excited, crowding around and closing in on the two daredevil Atheists until the whole atmosphere began to tilt. Before GDS could begin exposing what they were doing, a number of adults started shouting angrily, and the whole scene became so tumultuous that the poles were quickly cleared away and the Miracle Exposure Program had to be aborted. The adults were furious at the Atheist activists because they feared their children might get the wrong idea and, thinking they would remain unharmed, start burning themselves by touching fires, stoves, or other hot objects. The anger of the audience was not directed—at least not prima facie—at GDS’s harsh and irreverent criticism of religion and superstition but at the perceived moral recklessness and pedagogic irresponsibility of the two Atheist conjurers. The practice of exposure emerges here as more complex than the debunking of miracles as fakes, as it navigates a multilayered and historically shaped moral discourse about the relation of power and knowledge. Exposure, therefore, does not eradicate secrecy or

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expulse power and authority from questions of knowledge. Scientific temper must not be misunderstood as a transparent and egalitarian substitute for superstition. Atheist conjurers themselves are anything but shy about being more skilled, knowledgeable, or rational, hence more powerful, than their “mentally enslaved” audience. Yet through performances of exposure, they seek to resignify and legitimize this power differential as a positive and benevolent hierarchy within a pedagogical encounter—an encounter well-rehearsed by the paternalist postcolonial state. Srirupa Roy has shown that nation building during the Nehruvian era was not based on internalized persuasion, but rather on external pervasion in the sense of iterative encounters with “public actions, performative displays, spatial interventions, and political discourses” (2007: 14). With the concept of scientific temper, Atheist Miracle Exposure Programs have also bought into a familiar aesthetics of encounter—less so of pervasion, due to the small size of the movement—in order to fill the vacuum left by a developmental state that increasingly loses its moral mandate in postliberalization India. Among my Atheist interlocutors, this relationship of aesthetics and power registers as a debate around the appropriateness of Miracle Exposure Programs. As mentioned above, they are probably the most iconic form of Atheist social activism and, in their nature as “programs” (karyakramam), they are usually considered an appropriate (i.e., practically sincere) way to put Atheism into practice. Some within the movement, however, have begun raising doubts about their efficacy and caution that too heavy a reliance on conjuring distorts the public image of Atheism. This faction argues that in a country plagued by communal violence, a hollowing out of state secularism, and a legal framework allowing the exploitative monetization of superstition, there are more important and pressing issues than putting up colorful and entertaining magic shows. Those who defend the value of Atheist conjuring, however, stress its merely instrumental character. Narendra Nayak, for instance—a famous rationalist, miracle debunker, and current president of the Federation of Indian Rationalist Associations (FIRA)—argues that Miracle Exposure Programs are valuable as a “visiting card.”3 At a workshop he conducted in February 2014 for a free-thinkers’ student club called “Cognitto” at the Tiruchirappalli campus of the National Institute of Technology, he advised students to stick to “the concrete” when debating with other people. They should try to avoid overly abstract or philosophical topics, like the origin of the universe for instance, and focus instead on people’s everyday lives and “issues that affect society

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[and] relationships between people.” A female student pointed out that nobody would listen to her if she went into a village to talk about science, concrete or otherwise; everyone would belittle her as “just a small girl.” Narendra Nayak replied, “That’s why you have to put burning camphor on your tongue. Then they will listen to you. You won’t persuade people with talk but by debunking miracles.” As I mentioned above, Miracle Exposure Programs point beyond the particular miracles they debunk—here, the ability to sustain a burning object on one’s tongue—because they address superstition and mental slavery in general and as complex social and affective processes. The value of conjuring as an instrument and visiting card of Atheist activism resides in its capacity to make those abstract processes “concrete” and thus perceptible. It is precisely the interactional dynamic involved in conjuring that makes magic tricks concrete in a sociological sense that goes beyond their materiality and their function to “reclaim materials for materialism” (Copeman and Quack 2015: 43): conjuring is itself a social relationship whose properties are used by Atheists in order to performatively expose a process of superstition and therein replace it with scientific temper. It is thus crucial for the concept of exposure that the resignification of differential knowledge and power into a benevolent pedagogical hierarchy is not realized in an act of affection or reception; it does not refer to a postulated disenchantment of the audience’s minds. Instead, I theorize Miracle Exposure Programs as attempts to display to an audience the semiotic process of resignification they seek to affect. This feature of reflexive display will gain stronger contours by profiling it against the semiotic ideology of two related yet different practices and discourses around magic: first, a type of instrumental conjuring performed by Christians in North America, and second, Hindu practices of devotional seeing. Graham Jones describes how evangelical Christians in the United States appropriate conjuring as “gospel magic” (2012: 194) in order to spread their religious message. Quite like Atheist Miracle Exposure Programs, Christian gospel magic thrives on the sociopsychological properties of conjuring, insofar as it evokes a differential of agency and power between magician and audience. According to Jones, gospel magic seeks to resignify this conjured up power and agency as an iconic expression of God’s power rather than an indexical sign of the power of the human conjurer. This semiotic resignification is risky because if it fails, Christian magicians may appear vainglorious for arrogating to themselves the power and glory that belong to God:

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This modulation of agency in the performance of gospel magic thus requires a kind of spiritual virtue—and semiotic virtuosity—beyond whatever manual skill the magician might need to produce an effect. . . . In the eyes of these performers, making conjuring Christian not only means presentationally coupling magic effects with biblical motifs but also decoupling magical performance from personal projections of agency. (Jones 2012: 210)

The symbolic modulation and semiotic virtuosity required of Atheist conjurers is even more complex due to the added component of exposure. Miracle Exposure Programs seek to ensure that those who claim miraculous powers end up as the Hindu equivalent to a failed gospel magician: the aim is to show that babas arrogate to themselves powers which not only do not belong to them, but do not exist in the first place; the aim is to expose the rather unvirtuous semiotic virtuosity that goes into the making of superstition. It does not stop there, however, because the second dimension of Atheist symbolic modulation seeks to firmly redirect back to the Atheist conjurer the “personal projections of agency” that, going through the process of exposure, are to be reconstituted as a benevolent, socially responsible power of pedagogy. Atheist conjurers ensure their audience that no divine power is involved: “I did that.” But they add: “You can do it too!” And on top of that: “I will teach you how.” It is here that Miracle Exposure Programs differ in their aesthetic form from the actual miracles they seek to expose. Similar to Birgit Meyer’s concept of “aesthetic formations” (2009), the notion of aesthetic form includes not only the material and sensorial aspects of magic shows (costumes, props, staging), but also their conceptualization and discursive framing in different affective registers (humor, severity, argumentativeness). In an essay on the followers of the late Sathya Sai Baba—a famous miracle worker, deity-saint, and erstwhile archnemesis of Indian rationalists—Lawrence Babb argues that miracles become significant for devotees because they enable transactional relationships rooted in Hindu devotional traditions: The so-called miracles seem to derive their real energy from their role as media for deity-devotee relationships. . . . Put differently, the ­deity-saint’s acts . . . have as much to do with a devotee’s feelings about himself as about Sathya Sai Baba and the things he can or cannot do; or rather, in this context his feelings about himself and about “Baba” are conflated. This is Sathya Sai Baba’s true magic. (Babb 1983: 123)

In Babb’s analysis, Sathya Sai Baba’s magic is quite impervious to scientific rationality and critique because “it engages with it only obliquely” (1983: 123). In this chapter, I sought to describe this

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obliqueness from the perspective of Atheists: Miracle Exposure Programs do not intend to replicate the pattern of deity-devotee relationships in order to fill them with a different, materialist content; rather, Atheist conjurers attempt to take the “energy” of those relationships and put it at a distance, namely on stage, in order for it to be looked at as and through the Atheist concepts of superstition and scientific temper. In other words, Miracle Exposure Programs seek to produce difference and distance from Hindu traditions of devotional or transactional visuality and display described by Babb (1981) and others (e.g., Eck 1998; Pinney 2004: 181–200) precisely by exposing those forms of seeing—or, rather, Atheist interpretations of them—as objects of perception. Because of this obliqueness, we should not look for the effect of exposure in a functional replacement of the deity-saint with the Atheist conjurer or an immediate transformation of the audience, but in its semiotic and reflexive efficacy as a representation of secular difference. Put differently, exposure produces the secularity of Atheist conjurers rather than the “secularization” of their audience.

Conclusion In this chapter, I conceptualize Atheist acts of exposure as a performative arc where the debunking of miracles as magic tricks carries out a complex and reflexive semiotic labor that lays bare the sociopsychological properties of conjuring in order to allegorize a larger discourse on superstition understood as an immoral use of power and knowledge. By so doing, acts of exposure do not evacuate or forsake the power–knowledge contained in gestures of unveiling, but attempt to resignify and display them as an implementation of the historically entrenched pedagogic relationship glossed as scientific temper. Exposure thus consists in a simultaneous move of distancing and reflexivity that seeks to make perceptible the social and affective mechanisms that either sustain or dismantle what Atheists consider counterfactual and therefore superstitious belief in miracles. In the critical literature on secular modernity mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, the persistence of differential knowledge and power in the very promise of secular transparency and egalitarianism is often interpreted as a reenchantment of science and secularity. I tried to show, to the contrary, that the production of secular difference is not necessarily premised on the disavowal of power, but rather on its moral and aesthetic manipulation.

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The following narrative of another failed Miracle Exposure Program further illustrates why I claim that notions of enchantment, and especially of reenchantment, do not go far enough in theorizing difference. At the abovementioned conjuring training camp at Tiruchirappalli, Narendra Nayak recounted a story from one of his Miracle Exposure Programs in North India. After his performance, he had been approached by a man from the audience who supplicated him to use his powers and help him with a personal problem. Narendra Nayak had tried to explain, once again, that he had no real supernatural powers, and that the very purpose of his performance had been to expose their nonexistence. The man would not relent and, turning angry, had started accusing him of being just the same as all the other “big people”—gurus, babas, deity-saints, and so on—who kept their powers to themselves and refused to help a “common man” like himself. Narendra Nayak’s story caused much laughter and was intended to demonstrate the extreme obduracy of superstition. However, another interpretation would take the man’s “disbelief in disbelief” as a sign of that particular Miracle Exposure Program’s mixed success. Narendra Nayak had managed to get across his message about power or, at least, make it resonate with previous experiences of his audience: people who claim extraordinary powers and knowledge are selfish and immoral. It had failed, however, to produce scientific temper as the capacity to discern the crucial moral difference between the exploitative power–knowledge of babas and the pedagogic power–knowledge of Atheists. More importantly, however, Narendra Nayak himself, like many other Atheist activists, understands the possibility of a re-/enchantment of secular exposure as failure, irrespective of his inclination to place the blame for it at the feet of his obdurately superstitious audience. I would like to bring out the significance of this by returning to the example of Michael Taussig, who seems to repudiate the circle of magical explanation by insisting that his aim is not to “expose such exposure” (2016: 476) As mentioned above, he sidesteps questions of ontology by making such questions an intrinsic part of magic, which includes its anthropological or otherwise exposing “explanation” and is, thereby, relocated to the level of social power and practices of knowledge. He shows how the magic of Edward Evans-Pritchard’s anthropological text lies ultimately in its aesthetic form, namely its rhetoric of science and objectivity. Taussig himself produces—through another rhetoric—the difference or oblique distance of his own text, subtitled “Another Theory of Magic.” This assumes, of course, that rhetoric and theory are not opposed, since every theory necessarily has an

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aesthetic form; an assumption Taussig is likely to have deployed strategically. My Atheist interlocutors would insist in a similar (though not identical) way that the last thing they intend is to reenchant disenchantment. It is precisely in the how—in the aesthetic form—of distancing displays of magic that I propose to locate and theorize the production of secular difference. One of the many things that makes my interlocutors’ and Taussig’s repudiations of magic different is that Taussig consistently circumvents ontological judgments, whereas Atheists simply take them for granted. What makes them similar, however, is a form of exposure that distances itself from magic by showing how it works, by making its performative or rhetorical modus operandi an object of perception rather than ontological theory. I propose to eschew the vocabulary of reenchantment, because it is not enough to deconstruct Atheist claims to secular difference; while I do not intend to uncritically validate them either, I call for an anthropology of the secular that analyzes the aesthetic strategies that make such claims plausible and efficacious by making them perceptible—or fail to do so. A focus on aesthetics and perceptibility shifts the focus of attention from structuralist or ontological difference (Is it different or not?) to the quality of difference (What kind of difference is claimed, and by which means?). The concept of exposure as a secular aesthetic form does not imply that practices of distancing display are unique to the secular or define it in a substantialist manner in all places and at all times. By contrast, it is precisely the historical context within which an aesthetic form is embedded that determines the cultural conditions for the production and the aesthetic efficacy of secular difference. Beyond the connections with postcolonial nation building and postsecular developments in anthropology that I adumbrated in this chapter, it is of course the cultural history of photographic mediations and reality effects (e.g., Pinney 2008) as well as technological mechanisms of exposure that spring to mind as other relevant fields for further exploring a cultural history of “exposure” as an aesthetics of secular difference. Insofar as Miracle Exposure Programs are a mode of putting Total Atheism into practice, their “success” does not hinge solely on the extent to which the audience is persuaded by what Atheist conjurers say. With regard to the triadic structuring of the Atheist sociohistorical imaginary (see Chapter 2) and the concept of positionality, it also hinges on the extent to which Atheists are able to produce their own secularity and difference. For that purpose, the audience need not necessarily be disenchanted; rather, they must become “The People”—those who are being exploited by babas, who, in turn,

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become “The Villain” to be fought by the moral scientist–teacher of factual reality: “The Atheist.” The secular difference displayed by Miracle Exposure Programs is thus not binary (secular/religious) but triadic (Atheist/People/Villain). In the example above, Narendra Nayak may not have succeeded in disenchanting babas, but it would be naïve to assume that the man in his story was therefore incapable of differentiating them from Atheists and both of them from common people. The difference described in this chapter is part of my concept of ex-centricity, insofar as it is grounded in similarity, not absolute otherness: conjuring as an instrument of Atheist activism is meant to show that miracles and science are one and the same, that babas and Atheists are both conjurers using the same scientific knowledge—but for very different purposes. In more general terms, aesthetic or qualitative difference, as opposed to the abstract, structuralist difference of conceptual binaries, becomes meaningful and efficacious within historically and culturally shaped perceptual regimes in which varying and possibly conflicting moral and semiotic ideologies regulate not only the interpretation but the very perception of things, social relationships, moral qualities, and so on. It is therefore within the moral and semiotic framework of practical sincerity that the practice of exposure emerges as a specific mode of Atheist practice that seeks to make a specific kind of difference perceptible. I call this difference secular because it is grounded in a move of distancing display vis-à-vis a perceptual regime in which magic is linked to and mediated by an ontology of the supernatural. Exposure is different not for being completely other, but for opening up an oblique or, in my terms, ex-centric positionality within that perceptual regime; and it is not the ontological option of materialism as such that makes it secular because, as anthropologists have shown, that option is very much part of how magic works. Rather, the obliqueness or ex-centricity to ontological questions, which Atheists share with some “postsecular” anthropologists, enables a perspective on magic that places social and affective relationships at the center of attention by making them perceptible and, therefore, the objects of manipulation (production of scientific temper) and/or description (academic theories of magic).

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Notes Parts of this chapter were previously published as “Magic is Science: Atheist Conjuring and the Exposure of Superstition in South India” by Stefan Binder (Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Volume 9, Number 2: 284–98). © The Society for Ethnographic Theory. Reproduced by permission from The University of Chicago Press. 1. I follow the language use of my interlocutors, who tend to employ the word baba as a generic term rather indiscriminately to a whole range of different religious actors claiming various forms of spiritual or extraordinary power, such as svamis, ammas, gurus, sadhus, deity-saints, etc. 2. The conceptual history of scientific temper does, of course, not start with Indian independence but has important colonial antecedents (Prakash 1999; Kumar 2006; Chakrabarti 2015). Within the framework of the aesthetic approach proposed in this chapter, it would furthermore be fruitful to transcend rigid boundaries of the pre- and postcolonial and explore instead the longue durée of socioaesthetic epistemologies in India. My discussion of an Atheist etiology of superstition rooted in the analysis of speech genres, for example, may connect colonial and postcolonial discourses to much earlier discussions about the concept of verbal testimony as a valid means of knowledge (Sanskrit: s´abdapramana) within classical Indian epistemology. In that context, the status of a particular speech act as a source for true knowledge is not reduced to content alone, as it hinges on whether or not the speaker possesses socially sanctioned credentials of an expert (Sanskrit: apta): “‘Expert’ is indeed not an adequate translation because there is a moral dimension. An apta is a person who not only knows the truth but who wants to communicate it without deception” (Phillips 2012, 83). While I do not mean to insinuate a simplistic continuity between Atheist Miracle Exposure Programs and medieval Sanskrit epistemology, I do argue that a cultural history—which includes colonial ruptures and transformations—of concepts like s´abdapramana and apta may provide further insight into the contemporary moral economy and aesthetic strategies of epistemic power. 3. It is noteworthy that popular godmen like Sathya Sai Baba also frame their miracles as merely an instrumental device to engage devotees who may otherwise fail to be led toward other, more important spiritual truths. The following brief discussion of Sathya Sai Baba in relation to practices of devotional seeing will illustrate my argument that it is necessary to locate and retrace the production of secular difference precisely in the ambit of such kinds of parallelism and similarities between Atheists and the people or practices they seek to debunk, criticize, and reject.

Chapter 5

PROGRAMS (2) HUMANISM AND THE UNMAKING OF CASTE

This chapter explores the relationship between humanism, caste, and the larger project of implementing Total Atheism by continuing to examine the category of program (karyakramam) as an instance of “doing” within the conceptual grammar of practical sincerity. When asked about their understanding of the relationship between humanism and Atheism, most of my interlocutors argued that each implied the other, insofar as humanism designates the outcome of Total Atheism as both a philosophical stance and a project of “social reconstruction” (san˙ghanirmanam). Gora’s eldest son, Lavanam (1930–2015), himself a famous Gandhian and Atheist leader, described this relationship very succinctly by defining Atheism as a “human-centered,” as opposed to a “god-centered,” approach to life: Atheism is not mere denial of the existence of god or criticism of religious texts or exposing the superstition. . . . In reality, Atheism aims at building up a new society based on freedom, equality, fraternity and justice. Atheism aims at complete elimination of exploitation in social, economic and all other fields. Atheism destroys the barriers of caste, race and religion and all other inequalities. . . . It turns attention from imaginary god to the reality of social situation and for [sic] the establishment of equality and freedom. (Lavanam n.d.: 22–23)

Lavanam conceptualizes Atheism here less as a negative turning away from god than as a positive turning toward society as the “real” foundation of human life. He thus establishes social relations, rather than theology, as the appropriate realm for Atheist activism in the form of social service or so-called constructive programs (nirmanatmakamaina karyakramalu). This understanding of Atheism as social activism presupposes a positionality from which to understand and engage with society as a more or less discrete object amenable to intentional manipulation and

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reform. Throughout the preceding chapters, I have begun to characterize the positionality specific to the project of Total Atheism as one of ex-centricity, premised less on an external relation to or rejection of society than on a particular way of being–in–social–relations. In Chapter 2, I argued that this ex-centric positionality is based on the idea of a common, undifferentiated humanity that allows Atheist individuals to develop an affective stance of aloofness from certain social conventions and moral expectations as “merely human-made.” In the terms of Atheist discourse, to cognize and act on the fact that society is human-made and therefore amenable to being changed by humans is crucial to realizing Atheism as a mental revolution (bhavaviplavam); failure to do so, on the other hand, results in mental slavery (bhavadasyam). While the previous chapter explored how the concept of mental slavery informs Miracle Exposure Programs as a performed epistemology of “superstition” (mudhanammakam), this chapter retraces how my interlocutors engage with it as social divisiveness and inequality within the discursive framework of religious and caste communalism. The caste system and religious pluralism are indeed two of the most important topics in both popular and academic representations of Indian society and have often been regarded as crucial for understanding it. Historical scholarship, however, has demonstrated that the idea of caste and religion being timeless essences of Indian culture is a product of colonial strategies of representation and has stressed instead the historicity of both categories, especially the multiple ways in which they were reshaped and fixated through colonial practices of enumeration, governance, and reform (Dirks 2001; Gottschalk 2013; Viswanath 2014). Current scholarship on caste stresses its variability across different regions, social groups, times, and interactional contexts (e.g., Béteille 2010; Madan 2016), whereas religion, and especially Hinduism, has been discussed even in terms of a “colonial invention” (Sontheimer and Kulke 1991; Bloch, Keppens, and Hegde 2010; Nicholson 2010). Moreover, one of the most controversial issues in both past and present academic as well as public debates about caste has been its relation to Hinduism and the question whether it is to be approached primarily as a religious, economic, or political phenomenon (Dumont 1970; Bergunder, Frese and Schröder 2010; Viswanath 2014). When speaking to me about communalism in everyday conversations, however, my interlocutors used the Telugu term kulam as well as its standard English translation, “caste,” not only to talk about what Indologists or sociologists would identify as caste (varna and jati), but sometimes also to refer

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to different religious groups (Hindus, Muslims, Christians, etc.) or subgroups within religions (Shiites, Sunnis, Shaivas, Vaishnavas, Shvetambaras, etc.). It could thus either substitute the word matam, usually translated as “religion,” or, in order to speak about communalism on a more general note, it was fused with the compound kulamatalu, which I translate here as “castes–and–religions.” The broad usage of the terms “kulam/caste” as well as the compound “kulamatalu/ castes–and–religions” indicates by no means an incapacity of making a distinction between religion and caste. It does indicate, however, that many people—Atheists and non-Atheists alike—thought that the first thing a foreigner like I had to learn about Indian society was its fragmentation into numerous communities. Especially as far as my Atheist interlocutors are concerned, their usage of the compound “castes–and–religions” indicates a parallelization or equivalence of castes and religions with regard to their social effects, which Atheists consider to be essentially harmful: both institute ideologies of supposedly primordial difference that have been used to justify inequality, violence, and oppression and thus obstruct general civilizational progress for the selfish gain of the few. What is at stake, according to Atheists, are mechanisms of social divisiveness and exploitation rather than religiosity in the sense of specific theological or cosmological beliefs; the religiosity of castes–and–religions may explain how their pernicious effects are perpetuated, but not why they are pernicious in the first place. Once again, Atheist attitudes toward communalism must be seen against the background of their NonBrahmin civilizational narrative and triadic social imaginary, where religiosity figures essentially as an instrumental ideology or “mental snare” (bhavajalam) deployed to make people acquiesce into, internalize, and then willingly reproduce insincerity, social divisions, and inequality. This is the definition of mental slavery, whose “mental” (bhava~) nature goes, as already mentioned, beyond intellectual ideas or beliefs and encompasses forms of socially instituted, historically habituated, and affectively embodied submissiveness. Here, Atheists participate in a larger discourse that attributes the tenacious persistence of communalism and the failure of previous efforts of social reform to the fact that castes–and–religions are simply “in the blood” of Indians and manifest as “caste–feeling” or “religious sentiment” (both “feeling” and “sentiment” can be translated as bhavam). Rupa Viswanath (2014) and others (e.g., A. Ahmed 2009; Ramdev, Nambiar, and Bhattacharya 2015) have retraced the historical roots of these notions in a convergence of colonial, missionary, and social reform discourses that construed caste and certain

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forms of religion as the sources of essentially collective, visceral (“in the blood”), and uncontainable passions. Located outside the realm of rationality, social functionality, or governmental amenability, communal sentiments appeared as a major impediment for social ­modernization—whether construed as social reform, Christian conversion, or colonial governance—and as a threat to the stability of colonial rule. This led to the colonial policy of religious neutrality, predicated on the assumption that sentiments needed to be left undisturbed or be protected in order to safeguard peace and public order. Within this discursive context, it became possible to frame problems of caste discrimination and particularly of “untouchability” as problems of religious sentiment or “spiritual slavery” (Viswanath 2014: 250–51; see also Viswanath 2010; Mohan 2015). Under the conditions of religious neutrality, this framing effectively put them outside the purview of state intervention and thus not only disguised the concrete economic inequalities that were involved, but also foreclosed the possibility of a political solution for them. What remained was the realm of religious reform and social service, which was to a large extent dominated by upper-caste/upper-class actors who frequently ended up reproducing, if not reinforcing, the very power relations they set out to dismantle (see also Geetha and Rajadurai 1993; Sen 2003; Rajagopal 2005; Watt 2005). By conceptualizing castes–and–religions as mental slavery and Atheist activism as social service, Atheists are firmly entrenched within this discourse of sentiment, which continues to inform contemporary debates about communal conflict and violence in relation to the postcolonial successor of religious neutrality: Indian state secularism (Viswanath 2016). Yet, Atheism is also ex-centric with regard to the regime of Indian secularism, insofar as the latter is premised on an affirmative stance toward religious and caste pluralism, its Hindu majoritarian overtones notwithstanding (Needham and Sunder Rajan 2007; Tejani 2008; Bajpai 2018); it is supposed to administer and protect pluralism in order to prevent it from degenerating into disruptive and potentially violent communalism. Atheists, by contrast, consider communalism to be the very nature of castes–and–religions and therefore seek to transcend them entirely into a state of humanism. And this state of Atheist humanism is simultaneously irreligious and casteless, as one implies the other within the framework of mental slavery and revolution. In this chapter, I explore the role and nature of sentiments in Atheists’ attempts at attaining humanism not only through disavowals of caste but also through efforts of practically realizing castelessness

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as a specific form of humanist social interaction. Using the Atheist Centre in Vijayawada as a case study, I show how Atheist humanism is not just an abstract philosophy, but also a range of public practices that occur within concrete material and affectively structured spaces in whose social construction they participate. I argue that Atheist castelessness enacts an “aesthetic formation” (Meyer 2009) where people are not—and do not necessarily “feel”—equal in an abstract or absolute sense; rather, existing hierarchies persist by being transformed or sublated into differential agency and distributed sentiment on the basis of Atheism’s triadic social imaginary.

The Atheist Centre and the Production of Humanist Publicness Throughout the preceding chapters, I have repeatedly quoted Gora as one of the most influential intellectuals of the Telugu Atheist movement. Gora is considered one of the earliest explicit advocates of atheism/nastikatvam in India and is credited, even by his critics, with having “put atheism on the map” in Andhra Pradesh—quite literally so in the form of the Atheist Centre, which he cofounded together with his wife Saraswathi in 1940. Gora’s reputation thus derives not only from his compelling conceptualization of “Positive Atheism” as a comprehensive, constructive way of life, but also from his endeavors to practically implement his philosophy in his own family life and in numerous forms of social activism. Though the Atheist Centre has attracted many collaborators and sympathizers throughout the years, it is, at the time of this writing, above all a family enterprise and home to three generations of the Gora family. For people like Shariff Gora (see Chapter 2) and many other Atheists I have met, it was a very powerful experience to learn about the existence of the Atheist Centre as a concrete institution and physical place that materialized Atheism as a way of life rather than a mere theory written in books. I want to briefly illustrate this with a written account by a woman called Vanga Annapurnamma, who describes the transformative effect of her stay at the Atheist Centre in 1977. This text was published in the Atheist Centre’s Telugu monthly Nastika Margam, the same journal that prompted Shariff Gora to visit the Atheist Centre for the first time: It became evident to me how big the difference was between the way of life at the Atheist Centre and the social and political way of life in my village. To honor everyone without showing distinctions of castes– and–religions, to give respect and consideration without differences of

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status had great appeal to me. When I saw that at the Centre everybody, according to their availability of time and no matter how highly educated, carried out all kinds of chores, I became filled with respect for my own work as well. . . . Seeing that atheist way of life, I began to feel a change within me. After I had returned to my village, I did not do puja on auspicious days. I did not offer food to the deity. Even so, I was not afraid at all. (Annapurnamma 2014: 14)

Annapurnamma goes on to relate how her friends and neighbors were either scared or started ridiculing her, but she remained steadfast: “I had stopped believing in god completely” (2014: 14). In this account, Annapurnamma’s adoption of Atheism is described through a range of emotives (wonder, respect, boldness, fear, courage, etc.) that are intricately related to the Atheist Centre as a tangible and concrete space for and instantiation of an Atheist way of life. After giving a brief overview of the Atheist Centre’s history, I will examine how the mediation and distribution of sentiments through anticaste programs were instrumental in constituting it as a perceptible space of Atheist ex-centricity and castelessness. Gora was born as Goparaju Ramachandra Rao (1902–75) into a Brahmin family from an eminent lineage of village accountants (karanam) in Guntur district.1 At the age of twenty, he was married to ten-year-old Saraswathi (1912–2006), who had grown up in northern Andhra but hailed from a Brahmin family originally from Vijayawada. Before founding the Atheist Centre, Gora worked as a college teacher of botany, but was dismissed twice from teaching posts in Kakinada (1933) and Machilipatnam (1939) for his involvement in the Congress movement, for propagating Atheism, and for allegedly radicalizing the student body. Despite being reinstated twice, he voluntarily resigned in 1940, because he “valued freedom to spread atheism more than the security of a job” (Gora 1975b: 35); a radical choice given that Gora and Saraswathi already had six children at that time. Following an invitation from Anne Anjaiah, one of Gora’s sympathizers in the independence movement, the young family moved to a small village called Mudunuru, around 35 kilometers to the southeast of Vijayawada, where they founded the first Atheist Centre in two small thatched huts erected on private land just outside the village borders. The young family was maintained by the village community, and their initial programs were conducted together with residents of Mudunuru and volunteers recruited among Gora’s former students. Apart from sanitation projects, educational work, and occasional antisuperstition events in the village, most of these early programs were in some way or other related to transgressions

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of caste boundaries. The Atheist Centre encouraged intercaste marriages, organized regular intercaste dinners and “tea parties,” and tried to include Dalit friends in as many social functions as possible. Gora also initiated the renaming of two Dalit settlements in the vicinity of Mudunuru. After two years, the group of activists around the Gora family decided to start a school on a plot of land officially donated to the Atheist Centre. This project was rather short-lived, however, because the Atheist Centre put on hold its social service programs at Mudunuru in order to join forces with the Quit India-Movement in 1942. In the self-understanding of the Atheist Centre, this was not a deviation from Atheist activism into the sphere of politics but an integral and necessary part of its larger project of social reconstruction. Furthermore, its involvement in the independence movement has been a source of considerable prestige for the Atheist Centre and an important part of its generally favorable public perception. In fact, Gora became “Gandhi’s atheist follower” (Gray 1978), and the Atheist Centre has been intimately linked with the Gandhian and Sarvodaya movements ever since. Well into the 1960s, the Atheist Centre referred to many of its programs as satyagraha, and some members of the Gora family have continued to cultivate distinctly Gandhian aesthetics and sartorial politics. The Atheist Centre is proud of its Gandhian credentials and, unlike some of its critics within the Atheist movement, it sees no overt contradiction between the Gandhian movement and Atheism. Members of the Gora family argue that Gandhi’s religious language was merely a strategy to make his radical ideas palatable to a wider audience. They claim that Gandhi was already an Atheist as far as his actions were concerned, and had he lived longer, he would have sooner or later matched his words as well (Gora 1988; Lavanam 1996, 2003; Lavanam and Lindley 2005). Similarly, the Atheist Centre’s association with the Gandhian movement helped assuage people’s misgivings about Atheism and allowed them to see and receive the positive work that was done in its name.2 After independence, the Atheist Centre relocated to its current location in Patamata, then a village at the outskirts of Vijayawada. Apart from programs related more specifically to the propagation of Atheism, the Atheist Centre kept on participating in satyagrahas and other forms of political and social protest (foot marches, press work, boycotts, etc.) at local and national levels. In 1960, the Centre started a second, now-defunct school called Vasavya Vidyalayam for children from neighboring villages as well as the children of the Gora family. Out of the involvement with the Sarvodaya Movement

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emerged three projects of social work, which were inspired by Gandhi’s “constructive program”: (1) in 1951, Gora and Gandhian economist J. C. Kumarappa conceived Arthika Samatha Mandali or ASM (Economic Equality Association), which was registered as an NGO for rural development in 1978; (2) Vasavya Mahila Mandali or VMM (Vasavya3 Women’s Association) focused on so-called women’s problems, was founded in 1969, and was officially registered in 1975; (3) two reform projects with joginis and “criminal tribes” led to the founding of a social reform organization under the name of Samskar in 1983.4 Several family members became medical doctors, and from its very beginning, the Centre has conducted educational projects on hygiene and disease prevention, provided medical services like polio vaccinations or health checks, and still continues to coordinate eye and corona donations. It started running a successful nursing school for young women at its own hospital, which constitutes a major source of income and public renown. Beginning in the late 1960s, the Atheist Centre made increasing efforts to cultivate international contacts, receive foreign visitors, publish more systematically in English, and organize its famous “World Atheist Conferences,” whose tenth repetition was organized in collaboration with Dravidar Kazhagam in Tiruchirappalli in January 2018. Besides the relocation to Vijayawada, the biggest turning point for the Atheist Centre happened in the year 1975: the year of Gora’s unforeseen death and the partial destruction of the Centre by a catastrophic cyclone wreaking havoc in Coastal Andhra Pradesh. After 1975, the Atheist Centre developed into what it is today, mostly in terms of an increased cooperation with foreign donor agencies, a concomitant professionalization of its social and developmental work into registered NGOs, a more exclusive concentration of leadership within the Gora family, and a gradual withdrawal from explicitly political activism.5 The Atheist Centre before its partial destruction in 1975 is often described as an idyllic, almost bucolic place consisting of a couple of small huts with thatched roofs interspersed with fruit trees and surrounded by paddy fields. In the 1980s, however, it was swallowed by the rapid expansion of Vijayawada, and Patamata became prime real estate in the middle of the city. The Atheist Centre is today located at one of Vijayawada’s busiest crossroads, and instead of agricultural fields, it is surrounded by a high-rise hotel, a huge mall, the Centre’s own hospital, a large building complex of one of its NGOs, and a middle-class residential neighborhood. In the following, I will look more closely at a concrete example of an anticommunalist program at the Atheist Centre in order to

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get a better understanding of how it was produced as an affective space ex-centric to castes–and–religions. In late June of 1972, the Atheist Centre started advertising a program called “Beef and Pork Friendship Function” via its own journals, regular newspapers, pamphlets, mouth-to-mouth propaganda, and posters on the streets of Vijayawada. In the July issue of his English journal The Atheist, Gora described the rationale of the program and announced that it was scheduled to take place the following month at the Atheist Centre: Owing to the antiquity of her civilization, castes and communities have settled down in India in isolated groups. The isolation was natural in early times when communications were not well developed. But the isolations are not only outmoded in the modern world but are inimical to the evolution of one-humanity. Further the isolations are the cause of the present riots and conflicts that disturb peace and progress. Therefore the following program is formulated to pull down the isolations and to facilitate free mingling of people. Food habits of caste and communities in India are the material distinctions that keep up isolations. For instance, South Indian Brahmins and Vysyas are strictly vegetarian while the Vaishnavite community tabus [sic] onions also. Bengali Brahmins eat fish but taboo meat. Hindus, other than Harijans, taboo beef while Muslims taboo pork. At the time of communal riots, a cow and a pig fall as the first victims. For they are slaughtered and their blood and flesh are spilt in the quarter of the opposite community, taking mischievous pleasure in offending their sentiments. Now, this program breaks the outmoded sentiment and removes the cause of meaningless offence. (Gora 1972a: 1)

He continued with the details of date, time, and venue, and then proceeded to describe the intended program: So on that day two plates of bits of well-cooked beef and pork will be kept on a table along with plates of cooked rice and baked bread. The size of the bits of beef and pork will not be bigger than one cubic centimetre. The participants are requested to take one bit of pork and one bit of beef and eat them together openly with morsels of rice or bread as they like. . . . It is not a dinner or a sumptuous meal. It is an open protest against the antiquated sentiments in food habits that have kept the communities conflictingly apart. (1972a: 1–2, italics in original)

Gora furthermore announced his intention to invite the press to the event and to publish a list with the names of all participants. He stressed the programmatic nature of the function whose efficacy depended on public and mediatized acts of prandial transgression: “Some transgress the tabooes [sic] in private life for reasons of taste or health. But such private acts do not promote social change. Hence the openness of the function” (1972a: 2). He also preemptively clarified that the function was not designed to offend anybody, but, to

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the contrary, to remove the cause of “meaningless offence” once and for all. Because Indian secularism’s official “policy of live and let live each community with its own sentiments” had failed, it was time to take public action “in the spirit of opening a new chapter in human relations” (1972a: 2). The August issue of The Atheist appeared still before the event and opened with an article by Gora (1972c), where he describes the unanticipated amount of both positive and negative reactions stirred by his previous announcement: two people had gone on hunger strike next to the Atheist Centre in order to protest the program and critical handbills and posters had been distributed in its vicinity. Objections were raised by several Hindu, Christian, and animal welfare organizations, as well as members of the Sarvodaya movement, who threatened to hold a counter-satyagraha. At the same time, Gora also mentioned positive reactions from other Atheist and progressive groups, as well as Dalit organizations. As a sign of support, Atheist groups replicated the program in various towns of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu and subsequently published the number and names of their participants (Gora 1972a, 1972b; “Beef and Pork Programme” 1972a, 1972b; Kasturi 1972). Eventually, the event had to be carried out under police protection based on Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code, which enabled police to disperse a protest march headed for the Atheist Centre on the day of the program. Out of a total of three hundred attendees, 136 participated actively by ingesting beef and pork during the function. From the start, Gora had emphasized the symbolic function of the event by clarifying that “it is not a dinner or a sumptuous meal” (Gora 1972c: 2), and, reacting especially to objections on the basis of nonviolence and vegetarianism, he stressed that he and his entire family were complete vegetarians: “We don’t eat even an egg” (1972c: 2). Even though readers might feel hesitant because of their revulsion against beef or pork—or meat in general—Gora urged them to participate and stressed the small size of the morsels of meat; these should be seen as “bitter pills of medicine” (1972c: 2) that will heal society’s affliction of communal violence. Gora also pointed out that besides arguments for vegetarianism, most negative reactions to the event were inconsistent, insofar as they belittled food habits as insignificant trifle but credited them at the same time with an inordinate power to cause offence and provoke violence. On the one hand, the Atheist Centre was criticized for blowing the issue of food habits out of proportion, as they were considered merely a matter of custom or individual preference and thus an inadequate issue for social activism. On the

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other hand, however, the program was deemed dangerous because it recklessly and out of sheer pettiness would and did offend the sentiments of a whole range of religious and caste communities. Though maybe inconsistent, the threat of violence looming over the event was all too real and grounded in the crucial significance of matters of food and especially of beef and pork for the symbolic and “sentimental” formation of religious nationalism and communal violence in colonial South Asia (van der Veer 1994). Several recent attacks and even deadly violence perpetrated by so-called cow vigilantes (Hindi: gau rakshaks) against Muslims and Dalits for allegedly storing and consuming beef testify to the continuing and continuously transforming violence generated around prandial politics. For my discussion, it is important that notions of inconsistency—if not ­outright irrationality—and of disproportion between causes and effects of communal conflict are central to the concept and historical discourse of sentiment. By characterizing food restrictions as anachronistic and dysfunctional and the arguments in their defense as inconsistent and irrational—antiquated, outmoded, meaningless—Gora foregrounded them as not only apt symbols to demonstrate but also material hinges to counter the workings of mental slavery. The purpose of the Beef and Pork Friendship Function was not to change actual eating habits or overcome bodily aversion to certain food items; it was understood as a “deliberate attempt to build up a healthy society in which all isolated groups convert themselves into humans and free themselves of sentimental aversions” (Gora 1972a: 2). The Beef and Pork Friendship Function was to symbolically enact the difference between individual feelings of aversion toward specific food items, construed as matters of private choice and embodied habituation, and a collective, public, and hence socially relevant sentiment of communal strife and isolation. In other words, the effect of the program derived from publicly ingesting beef and pork even though it went against one’s dietary habits and because habitual vegetarians like the Goras themselves (as well as other ex-Hindu or ex-Muslim Atheists) were likely to keep on feeling disgust for them. The event’s efficacy as a symbolic enactment was thus not grounded in the referential function or meaning of the prandial objects alone, but in their capacity as tangible, esculent, and affectively charged things to make public and perceptible the otherwise immaterial and abstract concept of mental revolution—here in the form of a liberation from “sentimental aversions.” To publicly ingest morsels of beef and pork while possibly feeling disgusted was meant to demonstrate that those who ingest them understood those feelings of disgust as “merely”

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human-made and thus ultimately trivial symbols of an underlying social order, which was anything but trivial. What caused offence was the contestation of a “community of sentiment” (Appadurai 1990: 93) or an “aesthetic formation” (Meyer 2009) crystallizing around the materiality of food practices and the different interpretations of their entanglement in social formations (caste, religion), bodily reactions (revulsion), and affective intensities (sentiments). Hence, besides giving perceptible form to an abstract concept, the symbolic efficacy of the Beef and Pork Friendship Function pertained to the production of a very specific form of publicness, which Gora termed “one-humanity” or “human mingling” (Gora 1972c: 2) and whose opposite is not privacy but communal sectarianism and exclusion. In order to understand this juxtaposition of publicness and communalism, it is necessary to move beyond European political philosophy and the seeming universality of the public/private dichotomy by paying attention to concrete politics of space and practices of publicness. Examples from India show that European concepts of public and private may not be absent or irrelevant in India, but they are nonetheless complicated by similar yet not quite congruent discursive configurations such as the Tamil akam/puram (inner/outer), the Bengali ghare/baire (at home/outside), or the¯ Hindi apna/paraya (mine/other) (Chakrabarty 1991; Kaviraj 1997; Bate 2010). Robert Frykenberg, among others, has argued that public spaces in India have traditionally been communal spaces, access to which was regulated and restricted by “distinctions between things ‘pure’ and ‘impure’” (2008: 289)—including human beings. Rupa Viswanath (2014) has moreover shown for Madras Presidency how the social and conceptual history of caste in relation to the category of religion is enfolded in spatial politics, notably the separation of Dalit settlements and the systematic exclusion of “untouchables” from certain public spaces of both physical kind (wells, temples, procession routes, village roads, educational institutions, public transport) and metaphorical kind (the realm of citizenship marked by civic rights like private property or elective franchise). The Atheist concepts of one-humanity and human mingling are defined in contradistinction to precisely this constitutive inscription of castes–and–religions into the production of public spaces. At the same time, a casteless “one-humanity” may be imagined as universal, all-inclusive, abstract, and boundless in principle, but in practice, it also has to be instituted, made real, and hence be determined. In the example of the Beef and Pork Friendship

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function, it was determined by a publicly mediated discursive framing (announcement, contestations, justification), the bodies of 136 participants, 164 onlookers, an unspecified number of ­protesters, and of course the physical structure of the Atheist Centre, whose confines had to be protected and thus reaffirmed by police officers and the Indian state they represented. Though privately owned, the Atheist Centre was constituted as both a public and humanist space by giving concrete, physical room to anticaste programs that manufactured social and interactional scenarios of human mingling and aimed at the abolishment of divisive sentiments of castes–and– religions. In addition to the conceptual entanglement of humanism and publicness via the public/communal dichotomy, humanism and publicness furthermore enfold each other with regard to the moral ideal of practical sincerity: in order for Atheist humanism to be sincere, it needs to become “total” by extending beyond internal commitments into the public realm of words and deeds—and sentiments. In the following, I will try to further illuminate this entanglement of humanism and publicness in the context of the spatial and affective production of the Atheist Centre’s ex-centricity toward castes–and–religions.

The Atheist Centre as a Space of Ex-centric Castelessness To the extent that the Atheist Centre was a fascinating and inspiring place of social experimentation for Atheists like Annapurnamma or Shariff Gora, it was a deterrent for others, like Shariff Gora’s brotherin-law, who refused to enter the premises of the Atheist Centre because its signboard announced it as a place of atheists/nastikulu (see Chapter 2). In fact, when the Atheist Centre first relocated to Vijayawada, it was not set up where it is today. Gora’s granddaughter Mythrie told me that the person who had initially invited the Goras to Patamata had changed his mind and, after only a short while, had their family together with the Atheist Centre evicted. Mythrie explained that their supposed benefactor had not anticipated that they would indeed act on their disavowals of caste, so when Gora actually put things into practice by marrying his eldest daughter Manorama to a Dalit, Arjun Rao, their erstwhile sympathizer feared for his status and reputation in his community. Only after Chennupati Seshagiri Rao and Chennupati Ramakotaiah, two other residents of Patamata, came forward and formally donated a different plot of land was the Atheist Centre securely

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established at its current location. Many of Gora and Saraswathi’s nine children vividly remember an initial isolation in their childhood, when even “low” service castes like barbers or washer-men would not enter their home due to their parents’ anticaste programs. They would not enter, because the Atheist Centre’s transgressions of caste rules produced a kind of caste-ambiguity or even castelessness—and hence “untouchability.” Moreover, the effects of “Atheist castelessness” in relation to both public space and “untouchability” were not limited to the physical premises of the Atheist Centre. Since the Goras’ caste status as “ex-Brahmins” was somehow uncertain or opaque, members of the Gora family were sometimes treated as if they were of lower or impure caste status. Mythrie told me that she and her siblings would or could not tell their caste when they were children, because Gora had admonished them to always answer questions about who they were only with their given names, rather than their family name, which could indicate their caste: “Don’t say your caste. Say your name: I am Mythrie. Say your name!” (This is another dimension of Atheist onomastic practice; see Chapter 1.) She remembers that, as a consequence, some people would refuse to serve them water in glasses and instead would pour it directly into their hands; this is often considered one of the most emblematic practices of “untouchability,” as it is based on the assumption that a person’s impurity can permanently pollute drinking vessels. And yet, as the following examples illustrate, Atheist castelessness is quite different from the “untouchability” faced by Dalit or Adivasi communities. In February 2015, Vijayam, Gora’s second eldest son, invited me to join him at a conference at nearby Jesuit Loyola College, one of the most prestigious educational institutions in the city. Several members of the Gora family had studied there even though it is, like many other institutions of its kind, run by Christians. Vijayam had been invited to deliver a keynote lecture on the topic of rural development and social change. We were both picked up by a car sent from the college; and upon arriving at the campus, we were immediately ushered into the principal’s office. Despite arriving with a delay of over an hour, we first had a cup of tea and a brief chat with the principal before proceeding to the conference venue. This somewhat “untimely” visit to the principal’s office was undoubtedly a sign of the administration’s intention to show their appreciation for Vijayam. Two days later, Vijayam and I met for an interview, and while we were talking about the Atheist Centre’s staunch advocacy of atheism/nastikatvam as a suitable and necessary public name, I asked about some of the negative reactions

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they had had to face because of it. “Yes, yes, yes. And that phase is over,” Vijayam responded rather dismissively, and then brought up our visit to Loyola College: Vijayam: Did you see?6 The day before yesterday, when we went there, to Loyola College, when our car was stopping and we wanted to go see the principal, there was a big banner. Did you read the banner? Stefan: The one welcoming you? V.: Yes. S.: Yes, yes, I saw it when we left. I’ve seen it. V.: Yes, I thought you would take a picture of that one. It’s a classic picture. So, they have written: Dr. Vijayam, welcome Dr. Vijayam, PhD, and blah, blah, blah, and then: “Atheist,” editor of The Atheist, and “Atheist Centre.” . . . In the abode of Christianity, the toleration has gone to the extent that nobody is tearing down that, that thing. In fact, the very place where they put the board was the place where we met father Gordon and father Matthias; and who said: “Because you are atheists, we are not giving you seats [in the college].”

Father Gordon and father Matthias were employees of Loyola College when Vijayam and his younger brother Samaram had applied for admission sometime in the 1950s and were refused for being Atheists. I had heard this story before, narrated by Vijayam’s youngest brother Niyanta, who had specified that the reason for denying them admission had been their refusal to fill in their caste and their religious affiliation in the admission form. Hence, they were not turned down for any explicit propagation of disbelief or religious critique but for not complying with conventional modes of social identification in terms of castes–and–religions. Vijayam continued to narrate that they were eventually able to gain admission only through the interventions of their father and one of his friends, who happened to be a substantial donor to the college: We went there, and Gora came; and Gora asked [why they had been refused]. And Gordon shouted like anything, the American. And he said: “You devils!” Whatever filthy language he had to speak; and he spoke, and he said: “Get out, shaitan. You get out of this place,” and all that. And Gora said: “I will go away but remember one thing: this is a secular country. You can’t discriminate anyone. If you discriminate us, and if you are a true Christian, stand by your words. Tomorrow, when I write to the government as a citizen, you’ll face the music.”

And so he did: Gora wrote to the union education minister, the state governor, as well as the Member of Parliament from Vijayawada constituency; and fifteen days later, Loyola College received a letter from the Government of India threatening to suspend their grant, after which they backed down and eventually admitted Vijayam

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and Samaram. This is a story of religious and caste-based exclusion from an educational institution, but it is mostly a story of overcoming this exclusion. Gora—himself highly educated, a renowned freedom fighter, and an ex-Brahmin—had not only powerful friends (donors, MPs) but also the necessary cultural and social capital to access the political space of citizenship in a “secular country” so as to claim redress for the religious discrimination his sons had suffered; a rather different position from which to act than that historically available to the majority of “untouchables.” Around half a century later, moreover, Vijayam was very far from fighting for admission, as he was invited as the guest of honor—and as an atheist/nastikudu—into the very “abode of Christianity.” While Dalits are admitted to educational institutions as well, surely sometimes as special guests, the current quotas for Scheduled Castes and Tribes that ensure this admission continue to be highly contested, to the point of causing public protest and even violent riots. Both Atheist and Dalit or Adivasi “untouchabilities” are relational to and marginal within the caste system, and their marginality manifests in very concrete spatial practices like, for example, the exclusion from public spaces or spatial confinement, such as Dalit residential hamlets or the compound of the Atheist Centre. And yet, there is a significant difference between the strategic ex-centricity of Atheist castelessness and the default marginality of ascribed forms of “untouchability.” Atheist anticaste programs and everyday practices of caste transgression do not open up an empty, unmarked space outside the caste system. They do not occur in what Kim Knott describes as secular space, which has no “necessary or apparent religious basis or reference” (2014: 36) and thus provides room to a variety of heterogeneous actors to negotiate religious and non­ religious worldviews as well as the rejection of this dichotomy from a post­secular standpoint. Instead, I focus here on the ways in which Atheists engage with space as the outcome of a history of spatial politics, which is densely structured by affectively charged practices and imaginaries of social marginality and exclusion. Within the context of Hindu social order as represented most hegemonically by Brahmanic ideologies of the caste system (varnas´ramadharma), this imaginary of marginality is fraught with negative affect and peopled by foreigners, barbarians, demons, anti-gods, atheists/nastikulu, and so on—all dubious figures often at the edge of and sometimes beyond humanness. In Chapters 1 and 3, I have shown how Atheism lays claim to this marginality but seeks to positively revalue it as both the indigenous origin and progressive telos of Indian civilization.

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It is thus by no means coincidental that the only food practices that were not addressed in the Beef and Pork Friendship Function were those of traditional “untouchables” like Dalits or Adivasis, who are commonly assumed to eat both beef and pork. Whether there actually are any prescriptions on food in these communities was not even considered, as food restrictions functioned as a synecdoche for a social order based on a caste system from which Dalit and Adivasis have by definition been excluded and thus rendered “untouchable” (even though it has become crucial for a Hindu majoritarian agenda in colonial and postcolonial India to nonetheless reclaim them as belonging to the Hindu fold; see, for example, Tejani 2008: 199–233; Froerer 2010). While the Dalit and the Adivasi have been subjected into the casteless margins of social order as “abject,” “primitive,” “backward,” or “impure,” the Atheist’s castelessness is a marginality that can be positively revalued as ex-centric; it is a sign of “progressiveness,” “freedom,” “equality,” and, of course, mental revolution. This revaluation, however, requires certain economic, social, and symbolic resources, which does not imply that the positionality of ex-centricity is unattainable for people from Dalit or non-Hindu backgrounds or that Dalit or Adivasi movements have not developed their own strategies of revaluation; it does mean, however, that the positive revaluation of the marginality of castelessness into Atheist ex-­centricity is more easily attained by ex-Brahmins like the Goras than, for example, by ex-Dalits like B. B. Shaw or ex-Muslims like Shariff Gora (see Chapter 2). This is also due to the fact that Atheist castelessness is not merely an individual state of disavowed caste, because in order to be practically sincere, it must be realized in and through deeds, through actual practices of social interaction. As the following excerpt from my interview with Shariff Gora demonstrates, such practices are spatially and affectively structured forms of social interaction that are premised on an unequal distribution of agency and sentiments. In this part of the interview, Shariff Gora actually explained why Gora had inspired him to the extent that he adopted his name: This man [Gora], he lived in the untouchable colony.7 Really, you won’t believe! Now it may be developed, but imagine sixty, seventy years back. . . . I am telling you, I used to go to do some work in untouchables’ areas. I would not go in, deeply inside that. I used to be at the border of that and then I shout: “Balchandra, ra!” [B., come here!] I used to shout his name. He used to come like this: “Em dora?” [What is it, master?] Because in those days, they were treated as very downtrodden people. They should respect upper caste people: “Ah, em dora, endukoccinaru?” [What is it, master, why did you come?] Like that he used to say. . . . There was a very filthy atmosphere there: No hygiene, nothing; dirty,

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dirty water is flowing in between their houses. Lots of mosquitoes, dogs, pigs roaming all around. In such an area, going and living with them, dining with them, and giving your daughter—upper-caste this man [Gora]—giving the daughter to such people is no regular thing, now also [it is] a challenge.8 Many people cannot do that. Gora’s work, he has gone with that: “I am an atheist, nenu nastikunni. God is not there. This religion is man-made. We are all equal people. We are all ­brothers.” Like that, he hugged the untouchable people. That created a very big impact on people. Such a learned man and educated man going into that, such a situation, and making them feel that you are all equal to me. So, that type of work, how many people are doing it? Even Gandhi has not done it. He only told: “There are no untouchables.” . . . But what has he done? . . . But practically, Gora has done it. This type of social injustices he tried to remove.

In this account, Gora’s onomastic profession of atheism, “I am an atheist/nenu nastikunni,” directly links the rejection of castes–and–religions with assertions of human equality. What differentiates Atheism from other critiques of the caste system or professions of humanism— in this case Gandhi’s—is that Gora did not just talk, but “has done it practically.” Moreover, the significance of Atheist anti-casteism is emerging first and foremost via the aesthetic environment and affectively charged space where it is put into practice: the topos—in a literal as well as literary sense—of the filthy “untouchable” colony. Shariff Gora’s description of Gora’s transgression of caste boundaries demonstrates palpably how caste is not only a religiously or customarily sanctioned body of rules, but also an affectively charged, embodied, and spatially inscribed social institution. Shariff Gora’s account evokes a scenario of practical Atheism that unequivocally posits human equality as its rationale and intended outcome, yet makes it very clear, at the same time, that this effort occurs neither between absolutely equal people nor within a neutral space; it occurs within a scenario whose affective structure derives from what I call Atheism’s triadic social imaginary of Villain–People– Atheist. This imaginary is premised on a historically constituted odium of atheism/nastikatvam that makes it an act of heroism, courage, and daring to publicly assume the subject position of “the Atheist” in the face of almost certain opposition, be it from religious communities, upper castes, Hindutva forces, society in general, or even one’s own friends and family. In the above account, Gora clearly assumes this position of the heroic Atheist who overcomes not only social constrictions and pressures, but also faces his own embodied aversions as he enters unflinchingly into physical proximity—and even affinal kinship—with the “downtrodden,” the “untouchables,”

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the People. That the latter are still very much entrapped in mental slavery transpires in the way they address their supposed superiors (“What is it, master?”). The Atheist’s heroic mental revolution is here inversely mirrored by the People’s sentiments of lowliness and submissiveness that ought to be transformed into feelings of equality, self-assertion, and self-respect. Their transformation, however, remains conditional upon the Atheist’s intervention and, therefore, lacks agency, which is why the People are enslaved in the first place. The third element of the triad, the Villain, is here only adumbrated by having Gora state that castes–and–religions are the cause of the problem, but are merely “man-made,” which implies: made by the Villain. Atheism itself emerges here as a sentiment, namely a sentiment of heroism, which is intrinsically embedded in a triadic social imaginary and is mirrored by the People’s sentiments of submissiveness as well as their desired or projected sentiments of self-­ respect and equality. Gora’s heroism in his interaction—his “human ­mingling”—with Dalits is intrinsically bound up with his agency to make them feel equal. I frequently came across such accounts and memories of Atheist interactions, which almost unvaryingly replicated this structure of distributed sentiments and agency. Mythrie, for instance, explained how the Gora family had made it an explicit point to shake hands with all visitors coming to the Atheist Centre, to offer them water in a glass, and, moreover, to make sure that their lips touched the glass—all things members of the Atheist Centre had occasionally been denied when they started their social activism. Mythrie narrated how people from lower-caste backgrounds tended to be particularly hesitant in their interactions, probably because it was still remembered that the Goras hailed from Brahmin families. But they were literally made to have self-respect (for example, by asking them to sit down on chairs of equal height rather than stand or crouch on a low stool). In a suddenly very stern and serious voice, Mythrie reenacted such a situation: “No! You sit! If I sit, you sit. If I sit on the floor, you also sit on the floor. If I sit on a chair, you also sit on a chair!” Pointing her finger demandingly at the chair next to hers: “We will not talk unless you sit down!” Then her features relaxed again, she smiled, and went on with our conversation. While Mythrie was a very warm and cordial person, she could certainly command great authority if required. She explained that at the Atheist Centre, everybody was treated as part of the family, the occasional international visitor as well as the kitchen help. Regardless of whether or not some among the hired staff understood it fully, they were treated on equal terms and as members of the

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family. But what kind of equality and self-respect is actually produced in these situations? In order to answer this question, it is necessary to remember that such interactions do not take place between abstractly equal or absolutely free individuals as conceptualized by post-Enlightenment humanist discourse. They take place in a context where people achieve individuality as a function of eminence and contextualization—in other words, as a product of more or less extensive social relations (see Chapter 2). The kind of interactions Gora called “human mingling” are thus not about “interior” feelings of equality and self-respect, but about the creation of scenarios where people can interact outside the ambit of hierarchies established a priori by differences of castes– and–religions; that does not automatically preclude that people have gained unequal degrees of eminence or command unequal degrees of agency. In other words, these scenarios are not meant to establish feelings of equality, but a community of sentiment where humans interact as equal with regard to castes–and–religions, though certainly unequal with regard to the scale of their acquired eminence. Hence, they establish a kind of equality whose production rests on an unequal distribution of agency and sentiments. When Vijayam and I visited Loyola College in Vijayawada, we did not do so as abstractly equal human beings: Vijayam, at least, did so as an invited keynote speaker, a guest of honor, and a local dignitary whose presence was proudly announced on a banner and who was personally welcomed by the principal. From Vijayam’s perspective and in the context of his own biographic memories, the fact that “in the abode of Christianity” this was possible despite him being an atheist/nastikudu was the outcome of the successful activism of the Atheist Centre; a success that does not consist of making Atheists out of the Christian staff at Loyola College, but of creating a community of sentiment where the social respectability of the Atheist Centre has supposedly broken free from prejudice or even consideration of castes–and–religions. This account as well as the ones narrated by Shariff Gora and Mythrie evoke scenarios where Atheists realized or performed humanism by transforming inequalities based on castes–and–religions into differentially distributed agency and public sentiments, be they of heroism, self-respect, eminence, appreciation, or praise. Sentiments can be manipulated or distributed precisely because they are public and collective (i.e., they are embedded in social relations rather than being interior to the psyche of individuals). I am aware that most of the scenarios and sentiments I have mentioned

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so far, including the Beef and Pork Friendship Function, are all in a sense narrated. They are accounts of sentiments. I approach sentiments here similarly to how literary scholar Sianne Ngai (2005: 38–88) conceptualizes the “tone” or “tonality” of a text, namely as its aesthetic attunement to actual social relations and the ideology underpinning them. Ngai uses the Heideggerian concept of attunement (Stimmung) in order to add an aesthetic and affective dimension to Louis Althusser’s discussion of how ideology, defined as “an imaginary relation to real [social] relations” (Althusser 2014: 184), is materialized in ideological apparatuses. Interesting for my discussion of sentiments is Ngai’s argument that the tone of a text is located neither in the reader’s feelings nor in the feelings of characters represented within the text; rather, the tonality of a text—qua aesthetic ideology—accomplishes an attunement between imaginary and real social relations precisely by confounding the location of feelings: “Tone is a feeling which is perceived rather than felt and whose very nonfeltness is perceived. There is a sense, then, in which its status as feeling is fundamentally negative, regardless of what the particular quality of affect is” (Ngai 2005: 76). By distinguishing feeling and perceiving as different modes of experiencing a feeling, and by including even a perception of “nonfeltness,” it becomes possible to approach Atheists’ accounts of sentiments in terms of the ideological work they perform, especially with regard to the moral ideal of putting Atheism into practice by making it perceptible in word and deed. I argue that accounts of interactions, just like interactions themselves as well as the material things these involve—morsels of meat, unhygienic environments, drinking vessels, welcome banners, chairs, and so on—are ways to make sentiments public by making them perceptible, rather than felt. Accounts of castelessness, professions of atheism/nastikatvam, or declarations of humanist equality, which either accompany scenarios in real-time or produce them retrospectively, perform the important ideological work of relating concrete interactions to Atheism’s triadic social imaginary. Accounts are therefore an instrumental part of realizing Atheist humanism as an actual aesthetic formation, namely by distributing public sentiments. The crucial point is not that people necessarily “feel” self-respect, but that they sit down on a chair of equal height and thus perform it—make it perceptible—as a sentiment that, by definition, emerges in and as a social relation. Similarly, the Beef and Pork Friendship Function did not require its participants to actually change their eating habits, not even to overcome embodied aversions against beef and pork, but to openly ingest it nonetheless

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and thus perform their liberation from communal sentiment (as opposed to individual feeling). This by no means implies that such ideological work is always felicitous or that it is enough to simply name sentiments in order to distribute them. Besides the successful accounts above, I have also encountered narratives that demonstrate different ways in which caste can “stick”9 to both upper- and lower-caste people irrespective of their attempts at verbal or behavioral disavowal and affective transformation. The Atheist Centre itself is a striking example: its disavowal of caste is widely known and cannot be denied, but it is still remembered—or rather perceived—that the Goras were once Brahmins. Nau, Saraswathi and Gora’s youngest daughter and current director of ASM, narrated to me how her parents had tried to implement a feeding program in a nearby Dalit colony, where they wanted to provide food to local residents. She told me that the people there became suspicious and rejected the food. It took her parents a lot of time and great effort to eventually gain their trust. I was surprised, for anthropological literature would suggest that food transactions are problematic when food moves from “lower” to “upper” castes and not the other way around. Nau, however, explained that the Dalits did not understand why “these people” (i.e., evidently upper-caste people) suddenly came and provided food, when they had experienced so much oppression and violence from their kind in the past. The physical presence of upper-caste people in a Dalit colony and their intention to disavow their own caste background and interact instead on the basis of human equality do not automatically transform previous experiences of caste discrimination and violence into distributed sentiments of heroism and self-respect, as suggested by Shariff Gora’s account above. Many outsiders refer to the Gora family as peddavallu, “great or eminent people”, a notion which need not but certainly can imply upper-caste status. From the perspective of the Atheist Centre, its status is in no way related to its Brahmin past, but rather to its merit, as the Goras are eminent people for many reasons, including their participation in the independence movement, their unflinching dedication to social service activities, their prominence in local and regional media, or the reputation of their hospital. Their merit is even heightened in the eyes of many by their voluntary abdication of caste privileges. And yet, there are critics of the Atheist Centre, even within the Atheist movement, who claim that despite all its anti-­ untouchability programs, the Atheist Centre has always remained a “Brahmin agraharam,”10 and that it propagated “Brahmin atheism”

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(brahmanula nastikatvam). Such accusations of casteism were initially puzzling to me, as none of the “classical” features of caste (endogamy, prohibitions of commensality, hereditary occupation) were being practiced at the Atheist Centre; people from all sorts of backgrounds were moving freely within the Atheist Centre, including the kitchen and personal quarters. As far as marriages within the Gora family are concerned, there are traditional Dravidian cross-cousin marriages as well as intercaste, interreligious, love, and arranged love marriages in all generations. All family members seemed free to choose professions of their liking. And yet, allegations of casteism were too recurring to be just dismissed as spite or rivalry, and seemed to point to the stickiness of caste habitus and the ways the power dynamics of caste persist despite their ardent disavowal. It is important to note that the Atheist Centre is by no means the only Atheist organization that has to face such allegations, as it is very common within the Atheist movement to accuse rivaling individuals or organizations of lingering practices and sentiments of caste and even Theism (see Chapter 1); the Rationalist Society of India, for instance, is sometimes dismissed as a group of “Kamma rationalists,” just as other groups with ties to the Ambedkarite movement are disparaged as “Dalit atheists.” Since accusations of casteism are indeed pervasive within the Atheist movement, and even an institution like the Atheist Centre with a more than sixty-year-long history of anticaste programs cannot escape from them, the question arises whether the transformation of caste hierarchies into distributed sentiments and the appropriation of Atheist castelessness does indeed qualify as an annihilation of caste—which is, after all, what Atheists insist to be aiming for. It would thus be necessary to clarify at which point the change of a particular form of social organization is sufficiently fundamental to qualify as its annihilation. Posed in this manner, the question already presupposes caste as an external object of Atheist programs, whereas I tried to show in this chapter that it is methodologically sounder to conceive the relationship between Atheism and caste as one of mutual implication. I understand Atheist anticaste and anticommunalist programs as attempts at attaining a positionality of ex-centricity with regard to certain public manifestations of religious and caste communalism. Moreover, any definitive answer to the question of annihilation inevitably runs up against the historicity of caste, whose discursive history, as it turns out, encompasses the idea of its annihilation.11

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Conclusion Satish Deshpande (2014) has identified the political aftermath of the Mandal Commission Report in the 1980s as a major turning point for the public debate on caste in modern India. Previously, the predominant mode of talking about caste had been marked by nationalist narratives of transition: from colonialism to independence, from feudalism to capitalism, from tradition to modernity, and indeed from the prevalence of caste to its desired annihilation. Deshpande argues that after the Mandal Commission, a new sensibility vis-à-vis caste has emerged, which is no longer expecting an “imminent transition” but assumes the continuity of caste in various, transfigured forms: “[Caste] is not a virtue or a vice but rather a contextual frame that inevitably colours everything within it” (2014: 11). This change from transition to continuity as the guiding motif in public and academic debates about caste is of crucial significance for Atheists, as they continue to aim for its complete annihilation, but do so within an altered overall discursive framework. Once caste is conceived as a “contextual frame” reproducing itself perpetually, endeavors to annihilate it must appear doomed from the start. While some self-evident and clearly identifiable forms of caste have in fact been criminalized and may have subsided over the last decades, caste has been perceived to reappear in more slithery and diffuse but no less sticky forms; this new “contextual” caste may indeed be described as a “color” or, in Ngai’s words, a “tone” of social relations, which persists even when casteism is explicitly disavowed. The focus on the historicity and political adaptability of caste enables its critique at a more sophisticated level, yet simultaneously seems to foreclose the possibility of actually getting rid of it for good. Vivek Dhareshwar (1993) argues that the possibility to completely disavow caste is from the start restricted to an upper-caste, upperclass subject position from which to effectively displace—in my words ­distribute—experiences and practices of caste onto those at the bottom of the caste/class hierarchy. Dhareshwar links this subject position to the English language: “To speak about caste, or to theorize it, in English, in the political idiom, however eclectic it may be, that English makes available, is already to distance caste practice as something alien to one’s subject position” (1993: 118). By “political idiom,” Dhareshwar means a whole “semiotic system signifying modernity” (116) that may have been developed in English but can in principle be articulated in other linguistic codes as well. Sheldon Pollock (2006) and Sudipta

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Kaviraj (2010) have argued that the relationship between English and so-called vernaculars indexes social hierarchies and has a prehistory in the relationship between Sanskrit and regional (Sanskrit: des´i) languages. Kaviraj, in particular, focuses on the problem of linguistic restrictions on insubordination in a situation where local forms of protest would have been forced to inscribe themselves into Sanskrit discourses if they were to aspire to any supraregional influence. Both Kaviraj and Dhareshwar imply that supraregional or, in Pollock’s terms, “cosmopolitan” political discourses—rather than just linguistic codes—tend to produce discourses of conservatism or reaction by virtue of being the idiom of elites. This would mean that the annihilation of caste would remain ineffective as long as it remains expressible only in the discourse or political idiom of “English modernity”—irrespective of whether or not it is articulated in the English language. The reason for this is that such “modernist” critiques of caste enable those able to inhabit them to dissociate themselves ideologically and experientially from caste precisely by transforming it into a discursive object that, qua object, is located outside the subject and can thus be displaced onto the lower-caste “other.” Since this particular “modernist” subject position is usually less available to lower castes, they tend to continue articulating their critiques in terms of caste, which, in turn, reinforces the initial displacement: their insistence on suffering caste discrimination seems to confirm that they have not yet been able to come out of a casteist mindset themselves, as they are only able to articulate their grievances in relation to caste—even though it is expressly disavowed. This is a typical discursive mechanism within identity politics, where making a problem of discrimination discernable by articulating it may be misidentified as the cause of the problem (see S. Ahmed 2012: 145–47). By virtue of its intrinsic translatedness (see Introduction and Chapter 1), Atheism participates in the political idiom of modernity, and, as I demonstrated in this chapter, Atheist critiques of caste displace it by transforming and distributing it as sentiments and differential agency. Although caste is vehemently and unanimously rejected by Atheists, it constantly encroaches upon them, namely when others accuse them of dissimulated caste-feelings. Dhareshwar’s analysis is useful here, because it shows that caste is not only part of the wider cultural and religious background of Atheism and, therefore, merely an object of Atheist critique; rather, in the discursive environment of post-Mandal India, caste is internal to its critique insofar as a subject position of castelessness is itself inflected by caste. On the basis of the Atheist Centre as a case study, I argued that Atheists’

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practical efforts at attaining a state of castelessness through programs and everyday interaction as well as the accounts that embed these efforts manufacture a specific form of publicness. At the conceptual level of Atheist discourse, publicness refers to “human mingling” as a humanist remaking of social interactions beyond the communal divisions and hierarchies of castes–and–religions. In my analysis of concrete instances of human mingling, I approached publicness as a concrete aesthetic formation of humanism, which is produced within a concrete, material, spatially and affectively structured environment where transgressions of and disregard for communal boundaries are made perceptible as practically sincere enactments of Atheist ex-­ centricity and mental revolution; publicness emerges here as a specific aesthetic formation or perceptibility of Atheist castelessness, which refers less to an individual state of disavowed caste than to concrete scenarios of social interaction. Similar to how practices of oral propagation interpellate their participants into Atheism’s triadic social imaginary (see Chapter 3), scenarios of human mingling transform caste hierarchies into differential agency and sentiments; these are distributed unequally between Atheist activists, who heroically overcome mental slavery, and those whom they seek to liberate by making them act as self-respecting individuals. Sentiments like heroism, self-respect, or mental revolution and mental slavery are not necessarily “felt” by individuals; they are formed and made perceptible through concrete interactions and the ideological work of their discursive framing. However, the aesthetic formation of humanism as Atheist castelessness is still inflected by caste, because— even when transformed into distributed sentiments—communalism is not just an external object of ideological critique, but rather remains implicated in the spatial practices, material things, social imaginary, behavioral habits, bodily reactions, and affective structures in and through which its critique is put into practice. The persistence of caste in its critique and disavowal may surface as accusations by others of lingering caste-feelings. Given that none of my interlocutors have ever come out in defense of caste, those accusations consequently address an alleged lack of practical sincerity. As such, they point beyond the failure or shortcoming of merely individual Atheists and indicate a more fundamental tension between publicness and programmatic social activism within the larger framework of Total Atheism. Concretely, they circumscribe the limits of “programs” (karyakramalu) as a specific mode of Atheist activism to fully realize the moral ideal of practical sincerity. By their very nature as undeniably practical and intentional forms of Atheist activism, programs—whether

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grounded in performed epistemologies (Chapter 4), humanist publicness (this chapter), or other forms of social work—can become means to authenticate practical sincerity over against “merely” verbal modes of Atheism, such as onomastic practices, professions, or propagation (Chapters 1–3). At the same time, the intentional and focused logic of programs runs up against its limits in relation to the notion of “way of life” (jivitavidhanam) as both the precondition and culmination of all other modes of putting Atheism into practice. Since the following chapter is dedicated to this concept, I will end this one by briefly exploring the boundary between programmatic activism and a way of life as it emerges in the context of caste. Many people I have met both within and outside the Atheist movement claim that the long-distance travel enabled by the introduction of railways, for example, was much more effective in doing away with caste than all deliberate projects of social reform; during a twenty- or thirty-hour train ride, people of different castes were simply forced to “mingle,” sit next to each other, and eventually eat together, or at least in each other’s presence. In Chapter 3, I introduced the noted rationalist orator Katti Padma Rao. In our interview, we did not only talk about oratory, but also about the alleged persistence of caste sentiments within the Atheist movement. As a Dalit leader, Katti Padma Rao was not only skeptical—to say the least—about the castelessness of the Atheist movement, he also claimed that large-scale processes like globalization and economic liberalization were in fact much more effective in alleviating caste discrimination than his fellow Atheists’ anticaste programs. This is rare, because most of my interlocutors adhere to leftist critiques of globalization and identify neoliberal capitalism as indeed one of the most pernicious instantiations of mental slavery. Katti Padma Rao, however, asserted: Untouchables want all this globalization and liberalization.12 They want it because when globalizations happened, the untouchable got a mobile phone, he got a TV. [Upper-caste people] bought cars, he got a car. . . . The Hindus didn’t like that. Equal! Then there were Brahmins; they had a mobile phone, they had a telly. [Now,] if a Brahmin has a TV, a Dalit has one too; a Brahmin has books, a Dalit has books too. . . . Before, there was Sanskritization: They have these things, the others have those things. There were books, here was labor equipment, knives, etc. Now? Equality! [laughs] . . . I mean, anybody is using these things: that is marketing. What does marketing do? It has no caste. There is no caste for the market.

He continued, saying that nowadays, Dalits wore branded clothes from London and Colgate addressed them as a target group for

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toothpaste products, while in the 1960s, many Dalits had not even had a table in their houses or shirts on their bodies. He went on to explain that globalization, liberalization, and privatization were beneficial and necessary for “those below” (kindavallu), but a loss for “the one on top” (paivadu). He was still critical of boundless consumerism and forms of upward redistribution within neoliberal market economies, but made the point that, as far as social mobility for Dalits was concerned, market capitalism was still preferable to Sanskritization. The concept of Sanskritization was coined by sociologist Mysore N. Srinivas (1952, 1956) to describe processes of social mobility within the caste system that are based primarily on the ritual and cultural emulation of regionally dominant upper castes. Katti Padma Rao’s account as well as the “railway-argument” call into question the causal efficiency of Atheist anticaste programs, because they portray the attenuation of caste discrimination as a more or less unintentional epiphenomenon of large-scale socioeconomic transformations and piecemeal daily habituation. Thinking back to Vijayam’s and my visit to Loyola College, it appears doubtful whether the warm welcome of a professed atheist/nastikudu at a Christian college is necessarily the effect of the Atheist Centre’s activism. Once social change is attributed to impersonal agencies like railways, globalization, the market, or simply an abstract notion of historical evolution, this alters how people think about the efficacy or necessity of anticaste programs as a form of Atheist activism— especially if their practical sincerity comes regularly under doubt. And yet, irrespective of their effects on large-scale social change, the programs conducted by and in the Atheist Centre were fundamental for constituting it as a concrete space of Atheist ex-centricity and, by extension, a space that also demonstrated the viability of Atheism as way of life. While the impact of the Atheist Centre on society at large may be hard to gauge objectively, its significance for many Atheists, like Shariff Gora or Annapurnamma, was doubtless momentous. As the latter wrote in her contribution to Nastika Margam: “Seeing that atheist way of life, I began to feel a change within me” (Annapurnamma 2014: 14).

Notes Parts of this chapter were previously published as “‘Let Us Become Human through Beef and Pork’: Atheist Humanism and the Aesthetics of Caste” by Stefan Binder (South Asia Chronicle, Volume 6: 205–27).

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  1. Unless otherwise stated, the following overview of the Atheist Centre’s history is synthesized from published material as well as interviews and conversations with members of the Gora family and their associates (Gora 1975b, 1976, 1990; Kashiviswanatham 1993; Shet 2000; Bandiste 2002; S. Gora 2003; Ramakrishna and Sundar 2007; Lindley and Mukherjee 2009; Herrick 2012; Quack 2012, 89–91); see also the homepage of the Atheist Centre: http://atheistcentre.in/ [accessed 19 April 2018].   2. Lavanam, Vijayawada, 29 October 2013; recorded interview in English.   3. “Va-Sa-Vya” is an acronym coined by Gora (1990: 61) to summarize three key moral principles at the basis of his understanding of Atheism. It consists of the initial syllables of the Telugu words for “realism” (vastavikata or vastavikavadam), “social outlook” (san˙ghadrsti), and “individualism” (vyaktitvam).   4. Joginis are often described as part of a larger South Indian tradition of devadasis and are particularly prevalent in certain parts of Karnataka and Telangana. They are women who are ritually married to the Goddess Yellamma and have been linked to certain forms of temple prostitution (Kersenboom 1987; Soneji 2010). “Criminal Tribes” was an administrative and legal category in British India that criminalized certain nomadic communities as “professional” gangsters. Although the “Criminal Tribes Act” was repealed in 1949, the stigmatization and segregation of the concerned communities continued.   5. Gora considered democracy an indispensable part of Atheism. He took up M. N. Roy’s concept of “partyless democracy” and promoted it as a specifically Atheist form of politics. In fact, several members of the Gora family unsuccessfully contested elections as partyless candidates (Gora in 1952 and 1967, Lavanam in 1972, Vijayam in 1978). While Gora’s second daughter, Vidya, actually won a seat as MP from Vijayawada on a Congress party ticket in 1980, the rest of the Gora family gradually withdrew from official political work in the years after Gora’s death. Vijayam has continued to work as a political advisor.   6. Vijayam, Vijayawada, 16 February 2015; recorded interview in English.   7. Shariff Gora, Hyderabad, 14 January 2014; recorded interview in English.   8. This refers to the marriage of Manorama and Arjun Rao (see above). This marriage has made such a big impression also because Manorama was Gora’s first child, and many families are afraid that an “unconventional” marriage would jeopardize all younger siblings’ chances of finding decent marriage partners. Lavanam, Gora’s second eldest son, was married in an intercaste marriage to Hemalatha, the daughter of the famous Dalit poet Gurram Joshua (see Chapter 6 for more details on Atheist marriages).   9. For a more detailed conceptualization of the notion of “stickiness” in relation to words and affect, see Sara Ahmed (2004b: 89–92).

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10. In the middle ages, an agraharam was land, often linked to temples, that was donated to Brahmins by kings whereas today, it refers more generally to exclusively Brahmin neighborhoods or settlements (Fuller and Narasimhan 2010). In the South-Indian Non-Brahmin movement, the term agraharam was furthermore used to criticize the cultural and political dominance of Brahmins in the colonial public sphere (e.g., by describing the Indian National Congress or certain administrative bodies as Brahmin agraharams) (Pandian 2007: 100–101). 11. I do not argue, however, that the question of what may count as an annihilation of caste should not or can under no circumstances be asked fruitfully; in other words, this question may have a very important political function. During my research, however, it has indeed become obvious that this question is in fact being asked constantly by Atheists themselves, their critics, and more or less neutral observers. I therefore do not want to participate here as a critic within that debate, but—within the limits of this study—I intend to focus on the parameters that regulate that critical debate. For a more detailed methodological discussion of the relationship between critique as a social practice and a sociology of critique, see Luc Boltanski (2011). 12. Katti Padma Rao, Ponnur, 3 December 2014; recorded interview in Telugu, italics indicate English in original.

Chapter 6

A WAY OF LIFE MARRIAGE AND THE GENDER OF ATHEISM

For unity of caste and race you need more than a meal. Why don’t you go and marry an untouchable woman, I say. —“String of Pearls,” Gurajada Venkata Apparao, translated by Velcheru Narayana Rao

This epigraph is taken from “String of Pearls” (mutyala saramulu), a famous Telugu poem composed in 1910 by the renowned social reformer and paragon of modern Telugu literature Gurajada V. Apparao (1862–1915). Different progressive movements in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana reclaim him as part of their history and legacy, and so do Atheists. The whole poem consists of thirty such quatrains and brilliantly evokes the aspirational atmosphere of progressiveness so characteristic of social reform—but, as the above stanza shows, also its somewhat sobering everyday predicaments. The poem starts with a male first-person narrator coming home in the early morning hours from a social reform program in the city, an inter-caste dinner perhaps not unlike the “Beef and Pork Friendship Function” described in the previous chapter. The night is not quite over yet, but it is already dawning. The morning star, a comet, birds, a rooster, and of course the rising sun all herald the new day, just as our social reformer is full of enthusiasm for having taken the first step to a new, enlightened world of unity, love, happiness, and knowledge. Gurajada’s description of the morning hours so full of promise is an apt image for the atmosphere evoked at many Atheist meetings and conferences. These events are not just about hearing inspiring speeches or learning one or the other new scientific fact (perhaps about comets and astronomy). They are also opportunities to meet old friends and fellow activists in an atmosphere of male camaraderie, where one

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can share the joys and sorrows of everyday life as an Atheist, comment on the latest scandal of some godman, lament the corruption of politicians, or complain about outrageous behavior of Theist in-laws. They are occasions to plot a better future together and to get already a taste of utopia in the company of likeminded peers. It is with such an energy that the poem’s narrator returns home, excited to share his enthusiasm and “his story” with his wife, only to have her pearls—a beautiful metaphor for words of wisdom—hurled back at him together with anger and tears. She acerbically questions, almost ridicules, the efficacy of his cosmopolitan dinner and modern education and complains that she is scorned, ridiculed, and berated by neighbors and family, especially her in-laws, because of his strange and worrisome activities in the city. After she has finished, the poem ends with a question about whether people, in these modern times, are no longer able to tell good from bad. It is unclear whether the question is the author’s, the reformer’s, or his wife’s; regardless, comet and morning star are gone, and with them the magic of the dawn’s promise of a better future. Once the sun is up, the new day turns out to be, after all, just another, ordinary day. While the preceding chapters have dealt with different modes of activism, I focus here on the concept of Atheism as a “way of life” (jivitavidhanam) and its relationship to the seemingly residual categories of the ordinary and the everyday. For most of my interlocutors, the ultimate touchstone for practically sincere Atheism is its normalization to the point where it naturally and effortlessly pervades and regulates all aspects of everyday life, where Atheism becomes itself a way of life rather than a means or instrument for transforming it. Compared to the modes of activism I have dealt with so far (propagation, personal professions, programs), the notion of “way of life” designates the most complete and at the same time the most unstable and contestable form of practical implementation. Due to its association with spontaneity, naturalness, and everydayness, it actually transcends the logic of activist implementation, as it refers to the interstices behind, between, and beyond necessarily episodic instances of activism. Veena Das (2007, 2011) has shown, however, that everyday life is not just a self-evident given, but instead an achievement gained through habituated modes of normative action. This is already indicated in the semantics of the Telugu word jivitavidhanam, which, unlike its English translation, points less to a question of personal choice or style than a collectively established and policed “method” or “system” (vidhanam) of living. Vidhanam is etymologically linked to the word vidhi, translating as “rule,” “command,” “law,” or “duty,” and in a Brahmanic context, it refers to regular ritual practices

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prescribed by the Veda. In Telugu, it often occurs in compounds like vidhinisedhalu (commands and prohibitions), vidhibadhyatalu (duties and responsibilities), or vidhividhanalu (rules and regulations). While Das proposes to study the ethnographic details of how people actually achieve the everyday, I focus here on the representability of this achievement: How do Atheists make their everyday way of life public and perceptible to others in order to evince their practical sincerity? In the same way that the concept of a way of life defies the logic of implementation, it seems also to abscond from representation as it combines the concreteness of mundane life with the abstractness of Atheism’s demand for totalization. The question is thus not only how to make Atheism perceptible as a form of ex-centricity in and of everyday life, but also how to publicly realize the moral demand of practical sincerity scaled up to the totality of every day. The chapter’s epigraph from Gurajada’s “String of Pearls” provides an important clue for answering this question. After the narrator has finished his rhapsodic vision of the enlightened future he and his wise men from the city are about to usher in, his wife introduces the realm of family life both as a contrast to social activism and indeed as its potential culmination. While berating her husband for humiliating her and disrespecting his parents, she veers off into mocking the utter futility of his cosmopolitan dinner and tauntingly challenges him to go marry an “untouchable” women, if he is indeed so serious about his social reform. We have already encountered the underlying logic of this critique in Chapter 1, where I quoted P. Subba Raju criticizing a renowned Atheist family for their marriage practices and arguing that, regardless of all other activist efforts, if someone marries like a Hindu, they are Hindu. Insofar as marriage is constitutive of the patriarchal and heteronormative family and at the same time amenable to legal and state intervention, it has been considered a preeminent tool for social transformation, far beyond Atheist circles. After all, familial relations and domestic life are subject to intense moral valuation and have been considered a prime site of social reform, especially in relation to caste (Ramakrishna 1984; Sen 2003; Rajagopal 2005). It is therefore not arbitrary that the narrator’s wife suggests his marrying an “untouchable woman”—and the primacy of marriage practices for social reform continued throughout the twentieth century. Perhaps most famously, B. R. Ambedkar has argued that intercaste and interreligious marriages are the only real—certainly the most potent— means to annihilate the caste system, which is based on isolation and resentment between communities. Instead of intellectual critique or professions of anticaste ideology, an actual intercaste marriage

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is considered to be an act that creates castelessness as a social fact, because it creates kinship and, as Ambedkar argued: “Kinship is the antithesis of isolation” (2003: 232). Hence, intercaste or interreligious kinship is the antithesis of communal divisions. A wedding may be a one-time event, but it inaugurates kinship and family through marriage and therefore transcends caste barriers once and for all, every day, and for generations to come—at least in theory. In this chapter, I argue that Atheist activists operate within a representational economy that allows them to establish wedding celebrations as a semiotic and aesthetic form apt to make perceptible both the everydayness and the ex-centricity of an Atheist way of life. Although a wedding is an extraordinary event for the bridal couple and its closest kin—less so for the majority of the wedding guests due to extended “wedding seasons” and the comparatively large number of guests usually attending Indian weddings—it nonetheless metonymically signifies the everyday, insofar as it is ideologically, legally, and practically constitutive of the most important cultural forms and social institutions of everydayness: marriage, family life (kapuram), and kinship. This metonymic extension is already indicated in the Telugu word pelli, whose translation and common usage exploits a semantic slippage between wedding and marriage. In the second half of the chapter, I take up the notion of contextualized individuality introduced in Chapter 2 in order to show how the semiotic functionality of Atheist marriages turns out to be premised on a gendered distribution of agency and responsibilities to embody ex-centricity. Once more, this is already adumbrated in Gurajada’s poem, where the narrator’s wife confronts her husband with the fact that, in everyday life, it is she who has to face the consequences of “his ways;” she has to deal with her in-laws, neighbors, and friends who might accuse her of “being in it with him.” Expanding on critical scholarship that retraces how secularism is premised on the social and political inequality of women (Scott 2013), I argue that the conceptual grammar and moral ideal of Total Atheism is grounded less in a straightforward exclusion of women than in a historically grown representational economy marked by patriarchal gender complementarity and androcentrism.

Atheist Marriages: Balancing Tradition and Progressiveness When I went with Pasala Bhimanna to Rajahmundry in order to visit his Magic School (see Chapter 4), he also introduced me to his

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friends Vijayakumar and Dharmavati, who were planning their son Sravanth’s wedding at the time. They were telling us how happy they were with the bride-to-be, a woman called Sahiti, because previously they had already rejected two other girls whose families had not had a rationalist enough mind-set. This match had been brokered by their mutual friend Shariff Gora (see Chapter 2), and the marriage was going to be intercaste, without dowry, and solemnized with a nontraditional wedding reception. They stressed repeatedly that both families wanted to make it an affair “without pomp and ostentation” (niradambaram). When I arrived at Rajahmundry for the wedding a few weeks later, I met Sravanth for the first time. He stressed how he had originally wanted a very simple wedding: just a registration and then a small function, perhaps at an orphanage, in order not to squander money and spend it instead for a good cause. But then his father had persuaded him that a function for the Atheist movement was a good cause too, as it would ultimately “strengthen the movement.” He had therefore decided to turn the wedding into a “rationalist meet.” The wedding was indeed simultaneously an activist meeting, where old friends and coactivists got together to socialize, discuss current issues and upcoming events, distribute flyers and informational material, release new books, and so on. Members of different Atheist groups had started arriving from different parts of the state, and all of them were accommodated in the same hotel. The wedding ceremony itself was merely one element of the larger event surrounding it. The day of the wedding started with a few magic tricks performed by Bhimanna before the bridal couple was seated on two throne-like chairs on the dais together with the speaker (Satish Chandar), the main guest (D.  Peralingam), and Bhimanna, who was in charge of conducting the wedding. Satish Chander and D. Peralingam each gave a speech on marriage values, including the benefits of an “arranged love marriage” such as this one. They praised the couple and their families for their “progressive” (pragatis´ila) and “rationalist” (hetuvadaprakaramaina) outlook. Following this, the couple exchanged flower garlands and, under the direction of Bhimanna, read out wedding vows: with the present guests as witnesses, they took each other as spouses and vowed to remain together through sorrows and joys, for richer and poorer, and so forth. Under a flurry of camera and smartphone flashes, the actual marriage was thus concluded, and the whole wedding party started peregrinating in small groups over the stage to shower the newlyweds with flower pedals, congratulate them, drop off presents, and take the obligatory photo for the wedding album. In the chaos of hundreds

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of guests moving around the hall, “important persons” (pramukhulu) were invited to take to the microphone and address the gathering with their messages and wishes to the couple before everybody hurried to the dining hall to get a spot for lunch. After lunch and a “cultural program” with another magic show, a folk-dance performance, and the release of a new rationalist book (Gaurav 2014), a literary meeting organized by Vijayakumar’s own rationalist group, called “‘Pras´na’ Adhyayana Vedika” (“Study Forum ‘Question’”), concluded the day. The meeting consisted of a roundtable discussion on progressive literature and was attended by four distinguished figures of the Telugu literary scene as well as two local politicians. It was held in honor of the main speaker at the wedding, Satish Chandar, who had received an award for his latest short story collection titled Shame (Siggu). Sravanth and Sahiti’s reception is a typical example of what an Atheist wedding may look like, insofar as it was an intercaste marriage, no religious professionals were involved, and religious rites were replaced by oratory and the exchange of garlands as the core ritual elements of the ceremony. With direct reference to such ritual modifications, Atheist marriages are called “nontraditional” (sampradayetara) or “nonreligious” (matetara), and are also referred to as “garland-marriages” (dandala pelli) or, due to the metonymy of stage and oratory, “stage-marriages.” Under the label “self-respect marriage,” a similar format has also been widely propagated in the Tamil NonBrahmin movement (Hodges 2005). Furthermore, such ritual modifications are not exclusive to Atheists and have also been practiced in the Communist movement, where people speak of “Communist” or “party-marriages.” The following sections explore how Atheist weddings are not an autonomous or stable cultural form, but emerge through ambivalent relations of sameness and alterity to existing scholarly and popular typologies of marriage in South Asia. By negotiating the space opened up by this ambivalence, marriages become Atheist not by conforming to a predefined template or through the absence of religious elements, but instead by inhabiting a context-­ dependent positionality of ex-centricity. While Sravanth and Sahiti’s wedding can be considered nonreligious as far as its ritual elements were concerned, it was not therefore automatically an Atheist marriage, nor was it entirely outside the contemporary conventions of Indian marriages in general. In order to understand what makes a marriage Atheist—or rather, ex-centric with regard to existing conventions—it is necessary to move beyond the level of wedding rites by locating it within a larger typology and ideology of Indian marriage practices. Current sociological and

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anthropological scholarship in this domain is to a large extent organized along two interrelated axes: (1) analyses of changes in marriage ideologies and practices with regard to transforming local and global environments, and (2) analyses of the relationship between ideologies and practices manifesting in discrepancies or alignments between customary prescriptions, legal proscriptions, professed preferences, and actual practices (Palriwala and Kaur 2014). Moreover, the typology of Indian marriages consists less of fixed wedding types than overlapping ways of classifying marriage practices, the most significant criteria being (1) the social identities of the people involved, (2) relationships to the state, and (3) procedures followed to find suitable spouses. With reference to these criteria, an ideal marriage for most of my Atheist interlocutors is either intercaste or interreligious, registered under the “Special Marriage Act,” and an “arranged love marriage.” Atheist garland marriages are not officially recognized by the state and thus have to be registered under the “Special Marriage Act” in order to be legally valid. Introduced in 1954, this act is often understood as an important step toward a uniform civil code, because it enables people to contract, dissolve, and regulate civil marriages without reference to religious personal law. Atheist marriages are therefore not only ritually nonreligious but also legally secular—an attribute they share with interreligious marriages. The initial rationale behind the Special Marriage Act was to provide not an explicitly nonreligious marriage ritual but an option for couples from different religious communities who want to marry legally without having to convert to the same religion (Mody 2008). It is precisely because intercaste and interreligious marriages are neither uncommon nor novel that there was a felt need for this kind of legal provision. The Special Marriage Act is crucial for Atheists, because it enables them to not only condone intercaste and interreligious marriages, but also to actively encourage them as a strategically nontraditional yet legally viable option. As mentioned above, they thereby carry on an entrenched discourse of social reform that considers such marriages as the most powerful tool for overcoming religious and caste boundaries and communalism by the simple act of subverting one of their constitutive principles: endogamy. Surely, my interlocutors are aware that the prefix “inter” presupposes and thus reproduces boundaries and that it seems oxymoronic to assume that summating two religions or castes should equal their absence. This may be one of the most striking examples for how religion figures in Atheist discourse primarily as a social institution, and how the concept of mental slavery designates ultimately a form of psychological bondage

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to (certain) social compulsions, irrespective of whether beliefs associated with those compulsions can be identified in any straightforward sense as “religious;” in other words, interreligious marriages become admissible and, more importantly, significant as a form of lived secularity because of their practical transgressiveness, which in this particular context overrides the significance of discursive operations that may stipulate and police the social, cultural, or religious nature of the boundaries being transgressed. While it is hotly debated among Atheists whether intercaste and interreligious marriages should be actively aimed for or merely endorsed, it is undisputed that arranging such a marriage does qualify as a public sign of practical Atheism; even though it may be neither necessary nor sufficient. What is largely considered necessary, however, is that marriages should indeed be arranged. As is usual throughout India, Atheists distinguish between “arranged” and “love marriages,” the latter being characterized less by the fact that spouses choose each other on the basis of personal affection than by the fact that they do so independently of or even without the consent of their elders. In line with a larger trend in other communities, the preferred model for most Atheist parents and their children is a hybrid of “arranged love marriage,” where youths are either given a chance to reject or consent to a match proposed to them by their family, or arrange a marriage themselves and then run their decision by their elders to obtain approval, support, and advice (Fuller and Narasimhan 2008; Palriwala and Kaur 2014). Skepticism about love marriages is usually linked to a conservative family ideology that devalues pre- and extramarital love as lust (kamam) or infatuation (maikam), and posits that “real” love (prema) can only develop gradually within the confines of a lasting, monogamous, heterosexual, procreating marriage and patriarchal kin relations (Trawick 1990; Dube 2001a; Uberoi 2006). In this framework, it is for the sake of real love/prema, understood as the outcome rather than the precondition of a stable marriage, that love marriages are rejected and many parents as well as children prefer arrangements on the basis of what they consider a more reliable, sober, and collectively vetted compatibility than mere physical attraction, lust, or infatuation between spouses. Moreover, it is the involvement and consent of families before the wedding that is also considered to insure their support and a shared bearing of responsibility in case of problems after the wedding. Despite the growing importance of nuclear families and separate households, these are still integrated in larger kin networks, and the social security of both emotional and financial family support is commonly perceived to be

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crucial for the success or failure of marriages (Grover 2011). In the case of an arranged love marriage, the consent of the bridal couple is thus only one factor of a more holistic notion of compatibility referring to a complex set of both personal and social attributes, cultural and family backgrounds, economic and educational status, general mind-sets, worldviews, and so on. In this context, caste and religious belonging as well as astrological compatibility are widely recognized as well-tried and socially authorized, and in this sense “traditional,” indicators that operationalize and insure social, cultural, and individual compatibility. Hence, they do not necessarily override economic, social, or idiosyncratic factors, but are considered to encode and manifest them; in the managerial sense of the term, they may be used to “rationalize” vetting processes and minimize risks, especially in the context where caste or religious belonging may be understood as code-substance of a person’s very nature (Marriott 1976, 1989; Daniel 1984). This is a primary site where Atheists produce ex-centricity, namely by severing the dynamic integration of caste, religious, and astrological criteria, which inform the complex process of brokering and arranging marriages. Atheists categorically deny that caste, religion, or astrology have any real and effective connection to personal compatibility and thus single them out as signs of “irrational tradition.” In so doing, however, they conform to, ratify, and naturalize an utterly conventional and pragmatic framework for arranging marriages on the basis of shared mind-sets and socioeconomic status. These criteria for compatibility are certainly common, conventional, and traditional, but they do not appear as such in Atheist discourse: Atheist arrangements appear simply as “rational,” while tradition and convention are displaced onto astrology, caste, and religion, which become the markers of an entirely distinct logic—or rather the lack of logic—for arranging marriages. They are made to signify the irrational because they “blindly” follow tradition—regardless of the “rational” considerations that also go into arranging traditional marriages. Atheists can thus construe their tendency to deliberately arrange intercaste and interreligious matches as well as the practice of choosing astrologically inauspicious times for weddings not only as signs of their own progressiveness but also as acts of social activism: by arranging (successful) “nontraditional” marriages, they effectively prove the irrelevance and irrationality of astrology, caste, and religious endogamy. At the same time, Atheist practices remain entirely recognizable within a conventional but naturalized framework for determining spousal compatibility; as we saw above, they may even remain recognizable

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and indeed advertisable as interreligious marriages, precisely insofar as their practical manner of arrangement can be construed to evince both rationality and transgressiveness as two positive qualifiers of an Atheist nontraditionality that is more/other than merely the absence of tradition, religion, cultural custom, and so on. In a seemingly contradictory way, then, Atheist ex-centricity is conditional on achieving commonly accepted, conventional, and sometimes even conservative notions of what counts as a successful marriage. While Atheist discourse is deeply marked by a rhetoric of gender equality and emancipation, many Atheist activists, the majority of whom are men, are ambivalent about the growing financial independence and self-assertion of “urban” or “modern” women employed in formal labor relations. Some of them even speak out against progressive legislation against domestic violence and dowry harassment, insofar as they claim that legal provisions meant to protect women are systematically misused for blackmail and extortion and thus end up threatening, rather than protecting, the integrity of family life (see, for example, a special issue on IPC section 498a by one of the most widely circulating Atheist journals, Voice of Carvaka: Ayyanna 2014). Atheists’ overall conservative attitude regarding gender relations and (extended) family control over marital relations and household finances can be partly explained by the fact that they find themselves under considerable pressure to arrange stable and lasting marriages; after all, only a felicitous intercaste and interreligious marriage can convincingly prove that caste and religion are in fact irrelevant and thus irrational criteria for spousal compatibility. Atheist marriages are thus nontraditional not for a complete absence of tradition but for a particular way they relate to specific parts of tradition, which they, in so doing, transform into blind custom, irrationality, or mental slavery. However, this transformation as well as the concomitant production of transgressive progressiveness on the part of Atheists depends on them treading carefully on the border between transgression and convention. The felicitousness of their transgressions as a means of progressive social reform is eventually dependent on their selective compliance with, at times even surpassing of, conventional and conservative expectations (this is a theme we have already encountered in the individual life stories of Chapter 2); a reform marriage will have little (positive) reformative effect if it is perceived to be a failure or simply not recognizable as an acceptable form of conjugality. This is what I have been describing as a positionality of ex-­ centricity, which, in this case and in somewhat blunt terms, enables

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an Atheist critique and transcendence of caste and religion by reinforcing otherwise recognized patterns of what a successful marriage looks like, namely like a conservative and patriarchal extended family. Being ex-centric is thus conditional on being “discriminatorily” traditional, which means transforming some traditions into blind customs and mental slavery (marriages arranged on the basis of caste and religion) and others into merely natural or rational procedures (determining compatibility on the basis of socioeconomic criteria) or transgressive acts of progressive social reform (intercaste and interreligious arranged love marriages). However, this contrast between tradition and progressiveness becomes sensible and perceptible only by presupposing arranged marriages and the patriarchal extended family as the neither traditional nor progressive but “natural”—normal and moral—foil of what marriage and conjugality are supposed to be. As I will return to the question of gender relations in the second part of this chapter, I want to focus first on the fact that the category of Atheist marriage is inchoate, insofar as it is either defined negatively by the absence of certain religious rites, or positively by “nontraditional” traits (intercaste/interreligious, Special Marriage Act, arranged love marriage) that are consistently endorsed by Atheists but not exclusive to their community and, therefore, neither necessary nor sufficient for making a marriage Atheist. Atheist marriages cannot have fixed templates and compulsory wedding rites, precisely because their main function is to make publicly perceptible that those involved in the wedding act from a position of ex-centricity toward the fixities and compulsions of tradition—traditionality as such, not just specific religious traditions. The challenge for Atheists lies once more in the fact that they aspire to more than just the replication of existing cultural practices minus explicitly religious content in order to then assume a place within Indian pluralism as a “nonreligious” alternative. Instead, they aim to transcend prevalent notions of pluralism and adopt a position of ex-centric cultural autonomy that can enable a transformative, humanist engagement with tradition and society—in other words: a mental revolution. The speeches and messages delivered during Atheist weddings are of course opportune occasions to verbally articulate ex-centricity visà-vis and also within tradition. Besides general discourses on family values and Atheist philosophy, wedding speeches usually incorporate criticism of specific traditional practices, rites, and rituals. Such criticism either devalues certain ritual practices as mere habits, devoid of any efficacy or social functionality, or it adamantly rejects them

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as blind customs of irrational sectarianism, economic exploitation, and mental slavery. One of the most important topics of Atheist critique in the context of marriage practices is dowry (i.e., the transferal of economic assets from bride’s family to grooms’ family), which is embedded in a larger context of producing and expressing social and symbolic inequality between “bride givers” and “bride takers.” The issue of dowry is also prominent because it relates to a central aspect of Atheist critique of traditional customs, namely the considerable economic expenditure involved in most life cycle rituals, and weddings in particular (see also Quack 2012: 228–31). After all, even potentially harmless habits and customary practices—like a nonreligious wedding reception celebrating a marriage with friends and family—may degenerate into instances of mental slavery, if they are turned into an occasion for flaunting wealth and socioeconomic status. For my interlocutors, forms of conspicuous spending, which they call “adambaram” or “attahasam” (pomp and ostentation), are interpreted as acts of selfishness and vanity that are harmful not only for irrationally squandering resources but for using them, rather rationally, to display, sanction, and therein impel socioeconomic rivalry and inequality. As Sravanth and his parents have stressed repeatedly: parsimonious and rational spending are important attributes of an Atheist wedding.

“Pomplessness” and the Aesthetics of Ex-centricity By describing another Atheist wedding, this section pays closer attention to how the ideal of rational parsimony and its perceptible manifestation as an “absence of pomp and ostentation” (niradambaram) register the material and, more specifically, aesthetic intricacies of Atheism as an ex-centric way of life within the moral framework of practical sincerity. This will elucidate how the concept of ex-­ centricity describes less an antagonistic relationship to tradition and material culture than an agonistic positionality within it. It will furthermore bring us closer to understanding how the metonymic link between weddings and an Atheist way of life is grounded in gender complementarity. When I visited the Atheist Centre for the second time in 2013, Gora’s great-granddaughter Subha happily announced that she was going to marry in a couple of months. Subha had arranged the marriage with her soon-to-be husband Varun herself via the Internet; but in the meantime, their families had met each other in person,

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approved the match, and the wedding preparations were well underway. In total, there would be several wedding functions because a marriage under the Special Marriage Act must proceed in at least two steps. The Atheist Centre first celebrated the couple’s filing of the official notice of their intention to get married, which then had to be displayed publicly at the local registrar’s office for at least thirty days. During that time, anybody could object to the wedding on legal grounds (e.g., if bride or groom were underage or already married). The second celebration was the actual solemnization of the marriage one month later. The third event was a wedding reception, which the families had decided to postpone for yet another month in order to hold it right after the Atheist Centre’s “International Conference” in January 2014, celebrating its seventy-five-year anniversary. Since the registration itself is mainly a bureaucratic act of signing a document, it is sometimes considered merely an addendum to the “real” wedding: the public reception. In Subha and Varun’s case, however, the registration itself became the main event. The festive mood of the spruced-up wedding party seemed to jar a bit with the sober, dust-dry atmosphere of the small registrar’s office in Vijayawada, which could hardly contain the wedding guests spilling out of the tiny office into the hallways of the building. During the whole process of the registration, the registrar kept on reading his newspaper while the bridal couple and their witnesses signed the papers and exchanged a vegetable, a woolen, and a flower garland under a thunderstorm of flashlights. The whole party left after offering some sweets to the registrar, which he accepted reluctantly. After the registration, the wedding celebration continued at the Atheist Centre where a modest, “pompless” wedding stage and a live stream for friends and family abroad had been set up. A couple of family members performed songs, poetry, and dance before guests were invited to climb the stage in order to congratulate the couple and exchange gifts and pieces of fruit. As usual, the event was concluded with a festive lunch. The reception, on the other hand, was a grander event one month later on the stage of the main auditorium of Siddhartha Engineering College in Vijayawada, which had also been the venue of the Atheist Centre’s International Conference. Only family members and close friends had been present at the previous celebrations, but this was a more public event to which a larger circle of guests as well as conference delegates had been invited. After a few very short messages and congratulations by special guests, the usual process followed: flower pedals and felicitations, presents, photographs, and dinner. With its temporal and spatial contiguity to the International Conference, the reception,

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just like the wedding in Rajahmundry, took on a hybrid character between family event and Atheist program. On the day after the function, it felt as if the whole Atheist Centre had taken a deep breath after the stressful double-strain of preparing a wedding and a large conference with many delegates from all over India and abroad. In the afternoon, I sat with Subha, Varun, and some other family members in the dining room of the Atheist Centre reviewing the past days. Subha mentioned that some of her friends had reproached her for her big reception and the exquisite sari she had worn. The Atheist Centre had always propagated and projected Gandhian ideals of frugality and voluntary poverty, and it had become famous for its satyagrahas against political pomp and ostentation during the 1950s and 1960s. The Atheist Centre has adopted Gandhian sartorial and aesthetic politics of khadi (Tarlo 1996; Trivedi 2007; Nakassis 2016: 37–40), and some of the seniors in the Gora family continue until today to wear nothing but plain, white khadi cloth. Subha herself stressed how much importance Gora, Saraswathi, and their children had placed on sartorial austerity and the politics of dress: “Their clothes are not a joke to them.” Mythrie, who was sitting next to us, had switched to synthetic or mixed fabrics because, she explained, they were easier to handle. Due to her poor health, she could no longer take care of her clothes herself and thus did not want to burden the family with complicated khadi. In any case, Mythrie does make sure that her clothes are at least “made in India.” Subha suggested that I should use this attitude of flexibility and readiness for change in everyday matters in my research, namely as an example of Atheism as a way of life. Without openness for change and an eye for what is rational and pragmatic in everyday life, she argued, Atheism would turn into a religion—“just another orthodoxy.” As I have mentioned in Chapter 1, the category of “orthodoxy” as one of the possible translations of “astikatvam” is intricately involved in the translatedness of Atheism. With regard to her own wedding ceremony, Subha had intentionally chosen fabrics that were less gaudy than usual wedding saris, so that she could wear them again for special occasions or even in everyday life. Her main wedding sari for the second reception was a gift from a befriended designer, so she only had to bear the cost of the fabric. After all, there was a big difference between acceptable and excessive expenditure, and she felt it was necessary to show that there are alternatives to religious functions by demonstrating that it is indeed possible to have a wedding that is beautiful and Atheist. Change had to come gradually, she explained, so you might wear

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jewelry or comply with some conventions of wedding ceremonies as long as you did not go for a Hindu ritual; “That,” she maintained, “is already a step forward, isn’t it?” It was then that Niyanta, Subha’s great-uncle, joined us. Under much laughter, he related to us what had happened to him the previous night: an apparently “mentally unstable” stranger had found his way into the auditorium, approached Niyanta, and asked what kind of seminar or event was going on there. He refused to believe that it was in fact a wedding, because, normally, at weddings everything is gold and pompous and people are all dressed up. In his utter confusion, which was mentioned several times during the account, he asked where the marriage parties were from. Niyanta responded that they were locals, the Gora family. He used Gora’s full name, Goparaju Ramachandra Rao, which the deranged stranger seemed to have misunderstood, because he then conjectured that they were from the Ramakrishna Mission. That was the last straw, and the whole room was roaring with laughter because the Ramakrishna Mission is one of the biggest religious social service organizations in India, founded by the well-known Hindu reformer, nationalist, and monk Swamy Vivekananda. I am recounting these conversations in detail because the hilarity of Niyanta’s story and the seriousness of the discussion about clothes and expenditure are directly speaking to each other. I understand Subha’s explicit justifications and Niyanta’s humor as attempts to diffuse a certain anxiety about the felicitousness of the previous night’s event in terms of an Atheist wedding. The stranger’s initial failure to even recognize the function as a wedding and his subsequent associations with Vivekananda’s Ramakrishna Mission and monastic asceticism could be taken almost as a compliment: the wedding excelled in pomplessness to the extent that it could be mistaken for a seminar of a social service organization; yet, only almost, because the stranger’s failure to recognize the event as both a wedding and an Atheist event put in question the goal of demonstrating that it is indeed possible to have a beautiful and Atheist wedding. This failure, however, could be attributed to the man’s mental instability and thus be defused by humor. Allegations of too much pomp voiced by Subha’s friends, by contrast, required a more serious refutation and an elucidation of the difference between an orthodox and an Atheist way of life as well as the delimitation of excessive from expedient spending. Like Sravanth, Subha justified the expenditure for her wedding as acceptable cost by framing it as an investment in the Atheist movement. Both weddings were construed as means to strengthen the movement by creating an occasion for demonstrating publicly (i.e., making perceptible) the

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nature, viability, and desirability of Atheism as an ex-centric way of life. The concrete material and aesthetic details of how to do so, however, remained a matter of strategic reflection and anxiety, and the discourse of pomplessness/niradambaram marks the semiotic site where the demand for ex-centricity once again meets the moral ideal of practical sincerity. I want to further illustrate this argument with a conversation I had with an Atheist writer and intellectual called Dr. Malayasri from Karimnagar district. During our conversation, he commented on the bleak future he foresees for Atheism in India. When I inquired about the reason for his pessimism, he explained that there was “too much social pressure” and that “people are like sheep: following blindly.”1 He spontaneously— and, as I argue in this chapter, not at all coincidentally—gave an example concerning the celebration of marriages. He narrated that he had married off all his children in nontraditional ways, but they, in turn, had started arranging and celebrating religious marriages for their own children. When he had questioned them on this issue, they had responded that it was merely a question of “culture” or “style” for them. In Malayasri’s opinion, however, they were succumbing to the pressures of social competition in a situation of increasing globalization and consumerism, which he summarized thus: “Poverty has gone, now money has come”—and this money, he seemed to imply, wants to be spent conspicuously. After all, he knew that his children “don’t feel about god, really.” Malayasri thus argued that his children’s actions were neither a question of religious piety nor of merely innocent style, but an instance of the pervasive insincerity that accompanies mental slavery (see Chapter 1). Sociological and anthropological studies have explained a consistent rise in wedding-related expenses across India, including dowry transactions, as a means to express or increase social status, especially among lower castes and middle classes (Kapadia 1995; Bloch, Rao, and Desai 2004). What sociologists describe as strategies for social mobility, Atheists like Malayasri or B. B. Shaw (see Chapter 2) see as a symptom of weakness and heteronomy: a submission to material vanities and social status symbols leading to selfish competitiveness that threatens social harmony and cooperation. Subha argued in a very similar way when I asked her during one of our interviews about her opinion on why senior Atheists frequently lament that younger generations turn away from Atheism and toward religious ways of life: I think society has become more religious in three ways. One, there are many youngsters who don’t believe it from their heart, but they do it just for the heck of it—all those religious ceremonies and all. Two, it has

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become a fashion, these days. And that’s what I personally think. Three, because they are unable to cope with the present lifestyle; because of globalization and all, they have too much materialistic demands. They don’t know how to balance their lives, so they seek; they become too orthodox. That’s my observation, the three reasons. I just don’t believe people who say they’re religious. They follow all this. I observe them. I can know to which category they belong. Seriously, I will immediately tell you. And I know who is really religious, who understood the spirit of religion. I know such people also; but mainly it has become a fashion. . . . Now, people say it has become more religious, because it has become an outward show now.2

Where Subha leaves room for the possibility of a genuine “spirit of religion,” other Atheists relegate authentic devotion or godliness to an irretrievable, primitive past. And probably the largest group among my interlocutors argues that religion has never been and cannot be anything but insincere mental slavery or outward show. It is in the differences of individual opinions about religion that the shared grammar of Total Atheism reveals itself as being anchored in a concept of practical sincerity; what is at stake in both Malayasri’s and Subha’s accounts is not primarily the “religiousness” of certain practices—for instance, whether they are related to particular cosmologies, traditions, or communities historically and culturally marked as religious—but an insincerity that derives from a more or less unquestioning submissiveness to social compulsions and pressures. Differences of opinion about religion are secondary, because the crux of the abstraction of Theism/orthodoxy/astikatvam and mental slavery (bhavadasyam) in terms of insincerity is that it can pertain to virtually anything; and this includes intercaste, interreligious, arranged love marriages registered under the Special Marriage Act, were they to indulge in pomp and ostentation. The discourse around pomplessness/niradambaram as not only an economic but also an aesthetic ideal for Atheist weddings reveals a constitutive semiotic ambivalence internal to the concept of Atheism as an ex-centric way of life: a way of life based on finding ­aesthetic—i.e., publicly perceptible and socially sanctioned—and semiotic forms capable of demonstrating independence from and rational autonomy toward such sanctioned or even prescribed, and therein potentially insincere, aesthetic and semiotic forms. Such an ex-centric way of life must be made aesthetically perceptible precisely because, in its everydayness, it cannot be authenticated by verbal commitments or singular, programmatic acts of activism alone. The discourse of ­pomplessness/niradambaram as an injunction to rational spending encodes this ambivalence as a problematizing of the material form

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of wedding practices but simultaneously points to a larger semiotic predicament of the project of Total Atheism as an ex-centric and practically sincere way of life. As mentioned in previous chapters, scholarship on the secular has approached this predicament primarily in relation to a specifically modern ontological and epistemological regime and a “moral narrative of modernity” (Keane 2013b). The secular is here premised on a purificatory dichotomy of spirit and matter that construes agency and sincerity as questions of autonomy from and absence of material, bodily, sensorial, and traditional constraints. The critical impetus of this scholarship derives from showing how discourses of secularism produce reductive and ideological concepts not only of religion but also of themselves, because the secular discourse of autonomy from matter and tradition is undercut by “the inescapably social and material character of the representational practices by which that ideal autonomy is meant to be inhabited” (Keane 2002: 65). From this perspective, the relationship of materiality and the secular is from the start set up as a problem for the latter’s integrity and even its possibility. In an essay on funeral practices of British humanists, for instance, Matthew Engelke has shown how material objects, in his example coffins and corpses, are a source of uneasiness and anxiety for his humanist interlocutors; regardless of the fact that they, like Indian Atheists, reject the notion that material objects and the ritual practices in which they are involved have any efficacy or agency beyond what human subjects project onto them. However, as “heavy symbols” (2015a: 36) and sensual objects, coffins and corpses point beyond their sheer materiality and thus represent an affective challenge for humanists’ intellectual commitment to an “immanent frame” and a “closed world structure” (2015a: 36). While my interlocutors in the Atheist movement may display a certain anxiety regarding the material and aesthetic dimensions of wedding celebrations, their concern about pomplessness does not derive from an intrinsically disruptive potential of sensuality and materiality for inhabiting an Atheist cosmology. Jacob Copeman and Johannes Quack (2015) have pointed out the irony that secular materialism has usually been treated primarily as an abstract and therefore immaterial doctrine. They have examined instead how Indian rationalists and atheists do not necessarily recoil from materiality, but instead develop their own material culture for both pedagogic and evidentiary purposes. Within the framework of Total Atheism as a practical project, anxieties and discussions around pomplessness participate in an Atheist

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representational economy where the aesthetic properties of wedding practices figure not only as a problem but also as a possible solution for producing practical sincerity. In other words, rather than focusing on the semiotic uninhabitability of philosophical and ideological narratives of materialism, autonomy, or sincerity, an anthropology of the secular needs to retrace how these are in fact practically actualized and embedded in “an entire ‘way of life’” (Asad 2011a: 47; see also Hirschkind 2011). The purpose of this chapter is to show how the significance of Atheist marriages derives from the extent to which they can be made to represent—to both signify and make ­perceptible—such “an entire way of life” and cope with its inherent semiotic ambivalences. To recapitulate, the main argument of this chapter is that the semiotic capacity of Atheist marriages to signify an ex-centric way of life is grounded in a metonymic link between weddings and family life as the domain of the everyday. This metonymic link is nicely illustrated by the following quote from an essay authored by a rationalist activist called P. Nagalingesvara Rao, whose take on Atheist marriages is widely shared within the Atheist movement: [Many Atheists] are giving speeches, are writing essays, are publishing books about how they oppose all religions and how thinking [in terms of] caste and religion has to go. But, it is very strange and painful that a majority of those working in these movements bid goodbye to the principles and theories they themselves are promulgating. . . . As if moral principles were only there in order to be professed in front of others they roam the country saying, “We will reform and uplift society,” all the while there is no change in the mind-set of their own family members. . . . As an activist at the district level of the rationalist movement, I have had not only my own children’s weddings conducted in a nonreligious manner, but I could also make my close relatives have weddings of that type in their homes. But I am ashamed when I see the way in which some leaders, who assume leadership at the state level of rationalist and atheist movements, are marrying off their children. (2014: 8–9)

Without discussing the concrete aesthetic intricacies of “weddings in a nonreligious manner” (mata prameyamleni ritina pellillu), P. Nagalingesvara Rao simply posits them as a taken-for-granted indicator of a form of practical sincerity that goes beyond (verbal) practices of public profession and propagation. This is made possible by juxtaposing the public activism of “roaming the country” (des´atana ceyatam) with the realm of the family—signified by wedding types— as the crucial domain where mind-sets are to be changed. In other words, the practical sincerity of a (male) Atheist activist, all the more so if he pretends to leadership status, depends on his family members changing their mind-sets as a result, it is implied, of his agency. And

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this change would manifest most clearly in him making them marry in a nonreligious manner. Hence, if marriages are a suitable semiotic form to metonymically signify everyday ways of life, they do so from the perspective of a male Atheist who extends the reach of his public activism to the private realm of his family. The following section retraces how the project of Total Atheism is centrally structured around a historically shaped family and gender ideology that allows male activists to discharge the responsibility and anxiety of materializing an ex-centric Atheist way of life onto their female family members, who have to literally embody their husbands’ and fathers’ ex-centricity and thereby enable—for male Atheists—the metonymic linkage between weddings and Atheism as an everyday way of life.

The Gendered Nature of Total Atheism As I have shown throughout the preceding chapters, Atheist activists act and talk about themselves in their practical endeavors less as abstract, autonomous subjects than as concretely contextualized individuals who seek to balance freedom with social responsibility and therein articulate autonomy as ex-centricity. So far, I have addressed this notion of contextualization mainly in terms of the relationship between individual and society (Chapter 2) and as unequal distributions of sentiments, agency, moral accountability, or intellectual capacity within a triadic social imaginary structured by the subject positions of the Atheist, the People, and the Villain (Chapters 3, 4, and 5). While I have sporadically alluded to the empirical fact that the overwhelming majority of Atheist activists in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana are men and that my presentation has therefore been based to a large extent on the accounts, experiences, and opinions of male interlocutors, it is now necessary to retrace in a more analytically focused manner how gender is inscribed into the social imaginary and conceptual grammar of Total Atheism. At a more general level, critical scholarship on secularism has demonstrated that a “triumphal plotline” (Cady and Fessenden 2013a: 5) of sexual and gender emancipation notwithstanding, secularist discourse based on a secular/religious binary has historically developed in conjunction with a demarcation between the public and the private that “rests on a vision of sexual difference that legitimizes the political and social inequality of women and men” (Scott 2013: 27). Secularism as a political regime is also a form of sexual governance that has historically been based on representations of women

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and female sexuality as threats to public order and rationality. Like religion, women were thus excluded from the public sphere, which in turn constituted a private/female/religious sphere in need of patriarchal control and state regulation in the form of family law (see also Mahmood 2016: 111–48). Here, I will focus on how this larger historical framework has taken concrete shape in discourses of social reform and Indian nationalism and, mediated by the concept of contextualized individuality, continues to inform the gender dynamics and aesthetics of everyday Atheism. In his analysis of life stories in Tamil Nadu, Mattison Mines (1994) found a crucial difference in the way men and women contextualized themselves in relation to society. In men’s narratives, “meaning is closely associated with honor and prestige, with leadership, with public reputation, with service to one’s community” (1994: 153), whereas women tend to identify the domestic realm and family life as the main domain of their responsibility and individuality. This does not mean that women are excluded entirely from the public realm, but rather that their understanding of themselves as women tended to be articulated in relation to their domestic roles as wives, mothers, or daughters, whether in public or in private. In a study of the AntiLiquor Movement in Andhra Pradesh, Marie Larsson (2006) found that women construed their participation in social activism as being motivated primarily by the wellbeing of their family members rather than a concern for society in general or universal human rights—let alone their own individual rights as women or citizen-subjects. This domestic contextualization of women, which extends to the highest echelons of the political system in India (Mines 1994: 16; see also Dickey 1993), has historical roots in projects of social and religious reform and the anticolonial nationalist movement. These have set the terms that to this day haunt public debates about gender equality, violence, and indeed what it means to be “appropriately female” in postcolonial India. Since many of the problems besetting Indian colonial society seemed to somehow pertain to women,3 their solution ­consequently consisted in nationalist/reformist projects of remaking a “new woman” whose image was fashioned in accordance with the ­middle-class values of either Hindu upper-caste or Muslim Ashraf communities (Chatterjee 1993; Pernau 2013). The “new woman” was charged with the burden to restore and carry forward the lost glory of not only the traditional woman, but of the Indian nation as a whole. This also implied a reconfiguration of middle-class domestic life as the locus of the spiritual essence of Indianness, as the last resort of

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the nation’s cultural sovereignty and as an essentially female domain. Furthermore, the submission of male subjects in the colonial public sphere was inversely mirrored and compensated by them subjugating their wives at home (T. Sarkar 2013: 37–44). Whereas nationalist ideology construed outer, colonial subjugation as involuntary, violent, and imposed by foreign powers, it conceptualized domestic subjugation as a voluntary act of love, nurture, and self-sacrifice supposedly grounded as much in Indian tradition and spirituality as in a natural complementarity of the sexes—and hence in the ideal nature of the “Indian woman.” Again, the burden to uphold Indianness through domesticity, femininity, and spirituality did not automatically lead to a confinement of women to the home. With regard to the Gandhian movement, for example, Madhu Kishwar argues, “The role of the educated, middle class woman in public life was to be an extension of her domestic role of selfless service. Women were to enter public life as ‘sisters’ and ‘mothers’ in the same garb of pseudo-veneration which had hitherto masked their exploitation in the family” (1985: 1701; see also Forbes 1996). In other words, to uphold “Indianness” through female domesticity and spirituality was essentially a burden of public signification inscribed onto the female body: Once the essential femininity of women was fixed in terms of certain culturally visible spiritual qualities, they could go to schools, travel in public conveyances, watch public entertainment programs, and in time even take up employment outside the home. But the “spiritual” signs of her femininity were now clearly marked—in her dress, her eating habits, her social demeanor, her religiosity. (Chatterjee 1993: 130)

As the female body, its habitus, and its attire took center-stage as the primary locus of Indian tradition and nationhood, men assumed the role of benevolent patriarchs charged with facilitating the refashioning of women, thus creating a situation of “ideological-aesthetic meddlesomeness” (Bannerji 1995: 71; see also Tarlo 1996). At stake was after all not only the capacity of female bodies and habitus to signify the nation, but also their duty to vouch for their husbands’ claims to modernity and national representation: Because of the symbolic load which woman was required to bear, any signs that this project [of remaking the “new woman”] was failing not only testified to the continued backwardness of the Indian home, and thus of the would-be nation, but also, and more fundamentally, seemingly disqualified the educated élites’ claims to being the modern vanguard of an ancient nation. Incapable of transforming their homes, how could they transform the nation they wished to lead? (Seth 2007: 12)

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It is striking how closely Sanjay Seth’s assessment resonates with the way contemporary Atheist activists use the changing of mindsets within families and their visible manifestation in marriage practices as indicators for authenticating or contesting a man’s practical sincerity and his claim to leadership in the Atheist movement. As I will show in more detail below, the close association of women with domesticity persists in Atheist discourses and practices, as different kinds of agency, motivation, and responsibility are allocated to men and women. The crucial difference between genders is that for men, domestic everyday life is a specific domain for producing eminence as Atheist activists, whereas for women, it is a supposedly “natural” and primary context for social and personal identity. Accordingly, most of my interlocutors—irrespective of their gender—conceptualize the role of women in the Atheist movement essentially as wives, daughters, or sisters of male activists, and their Atheism is consistently represented as deriving from and relating to their male family members. However, it is once again through its ex-centric relationship to precisely those discursive and aesthetic resources that justified the female burden of signification within the nationalist reform project that an Atheist positionality with regard to gender relations gains contour. While the link between femaleness and domesticity is reaffirmed, my interlocutors would hardly invoke tradition or spirituality to give weight to whatever they have to say about the relationship between men and women and their respective roles in society. Similar to the encouragement of nonreligious wedding rites, one central solution proposed by Atheist semiotic ideologies is to signify Atheist ex-­centricity through the removal of the material signs of tradition on women’s bodies. While male Atheists are not exempt from the duty of removing the material signs of tradition from their lives, the crucial point is that they were historically never forced to embody them to a similar extent to begin with. As a consequence, the cost of embodying Atheist ex-centricity is disproportionately higher for women than for men, as the aesthetic and sartorial practices this way of life requires of them profoundly affect their contextualization as individuals; they pertain to their “social skin” in the sense of “a common frontier of society, the social self, and the psycho-biological individual” (Turner 2012: 486). These practices bear upon what it means to be “appropriately female,” namely being contextualized within a family as a mother, daughter, wife, sister, and so on. A closer look at a concrete example of sartorial practices relating to jewelry in the Gora family and the Atheist Centre will help to further unpack this argument.

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As already mentioned above, residents and collaborators of the Atheist Centre used to adhere to a rather strict regime of sartorial and aesthetic frugality. A central part of this was a “no jewelry policy” for women, which was linked to the Atheist Centre’s association with the Gandhian movement where a specifically female form of contributing to the nationalist struggle consisted in women selling and donating their jewelry. Ornaments were often the only form of personal property granted to women in the form of wedding gifts, bride-price, or dowry; so by encouraging women to sacrifice their sole source of economic security for the sake of the nation, Gandhian aesthetics of frugality reinforced the existing ideal of the self-denying woman: “The real ornaments for any woman were her virtues” (Kishwar 1985: 1696). The Gora family and associates of the Atheist Centre adopted this practice, but also tried to resignify the removal of jewelry as an act of emancipation from the patriarchal clutches of Hindu tradition. In nearly all biographic and autobiographic narratives I have collected from and about women, the decisive moment of becoming Atheists was indicated by the act of them removing their jewelry. A certain moment of sacrifice was nonetheless carried over into this resignification, because female adornments like bangles, tilakam, or man˙galasutram4 are not only economic assets, but also what Engelke (2015a: 36) calls “heavy symbols”; they are central objects in Hindu wedding practices and are thus emblematic of married status and adult womanhood. The removal of jewelry becomes an act of ex-­ centricity precisely because it leaves the traditional contextualization of women within the family intact but rejects its visual and aesthetic signs as blind and harmful “Hindu” custom. It was striking that whenever I spoke to women who had married into or out of the Gora family, they spontaneously and in a remarkably consistent way mentioned matters relating to jewelry as an example for the challenges of transitioning into or out of the family.5 For some women, it had even been a reason for an initial rejection of marriage proposals; a marriage and a life without jewelry seemed unappealing and quite unimaginable to them. Similarly, women marrying out of the Gora family described how they had experienced pressure from their in-laws and their larger social environment because of their sartorial habits. When I met Subha around a month after her wedding, she recounted to me how her mother-in-law had recently asked her if she would consider to start wearing a tilakam, or if not an actual man˙galasutram, then at least a golden necklace. Her mother-in-law was concerned because people had started raising questions about her, wondering whether her son had married a Christian or a Muslim.

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Subha told me that she had refused her mother-in-law saying: “Good, let them think that. Even better! They should understand that we are all humans and it doesn’t matter which religion. Let them think I’m a Muslim.” I did not quite understand why it was so problematic that people ask questions, but Subha explained: “Because they don’t have an answer.” It seemed to me that “She is an Atheist” would be a perfectly reasonable answer, especially since Subha’s in-laws had known about and approved of the Gora family’s Atheist background and had themselves ties to the Communist movement. Yet, the problem seemed to pertain less to Subha’s adherence to Atheism as an ideology than to certain expectations about what it means to be, act, and look like a married woman. Her mother-in-law had warned Subha before the marriage that she would experience how difficult life could be without the supportive environment of her family and the protective environment of the Atheist Centre. With a nod toward the main building of the Atheist Centre, Subha mused that she could not even imagine how hard it must have been for previous generations of Atheists who had to go through all this “without any role models.” Since Subha’s main role models are her grandmother Mythrie and her great-grandmother Saraswathi, I want to take a closer look at how the latter described her own removal of the man˙galasutram in her Telugu autobiography. The man˙galasutram is the most iconic sign of wedlock in Hindu South India, and according to Hindu custom, it must not be removed under any circumstances as long as one’s husband is alive. It is a sign of wifely love and devotion, and its removal is often construed as a gesture of emotional indifference if not outright malevolence regarding the husband’s wellbeing. If a wife outlives her husband, however, the compulsory removal of the man˙galasutram is part of the rituals that mark her transition to widowhood and thereby the loss of auspiciousness ascribed to married status. Many women describe this as a violent and traumatizing event, which is why Atheists regard the man˙galasutram as a particularly characteristic symbol of the cruel and degrading framework of patriarchal oppression operative within Hinduism. Here is Saraswathi’s account: I had discarded all jewelry. Yet, I still kept the man˙galasutram. Since before coming to Mudunuru [the first location of the Atheist Centre], Gora has kept insisting that I discard the man˙galasutram. Is not the husband as important for the woman as the wife is important for the man? That being so, why do only men put unilaterally a man˙galasutram on their women? . . . In the same way as they put a bridle string around the neck of a she-buffalo, around the neck of a cow, around the neck of a bullock in order to say “This is my animal” when driving them home, a man puts the man˙galasutram around the neck of a woman

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and considers her his lawful right. He makes her into a slave. Thereby, the man˙galasutram is a heavy blow to a woman’s self-respect. Gora convinced me very much, saying that a man˙galasutram is not proper because as atheists we think women and men are equal. I wholly agreed with his argument. Regardless, at that time the influence of tradition was so strong on me that I could not even speak up why I would not remove the man˙galasutram. Gora and I used to frequently discuss this topic. Even while I was accepting it in theory, in practice I became weak and was not able to remove the man˙galasutram. Gora had noticed this, and one day while talking about this topic, he said in the middle of the conversation, “If you cannot cut it, I will cut this thread myself,” and he cut off the man˙galasutram from my neck. I startled. Not a word passed my lips. My internal Hinduness stupefied me for an instant. Isn’t it that only if the husband died, a Hindu woman would remove the man˙galasutram? On the one side, the influence of traditional beliefs had nested [in me] as a sentiment. On the other side, [there was] the new thought about the equality of man and woman: I am an individual. I am no slave to a man. . . . Speechless, tears trickled down from my eyes. If on the one side, there was fear in these tears, on the other side, there was the joy that my husband, standing in front of me, recognizes me as an individual equal to him and is making me recognize this as well. Therefore, what came with these tears were tears of joy that wiped away the tears of panic. (S. Gora 2003: 104–5)

Saraswathi gives here an account of a mental revolution in the sense of an emancipatory liberation from “Hinduness” (hindutvam), by which she does not mean a religious social identity or specific traditions of religiously sanctioned conjugality, but above all a form of mental slavery manifesting in her inability to practically transgress those traditions despite being already persuaded by Gora’s explanation (this also parallels her narrative of superstition in Chapter 4). I want to draw attention to how this account of emancipation from patriarchy unfolds entirely within her conjugal relationship to Gora and is premised on a starkly unequal distribution of agency and sentiment, which nonetheless leads to a reciprocal recognition of equality. This reciprocity, however, is neither synchronous nor between two abstractly equal, autonomous subjects, but the outcome of an evolving interaction between two concrete individuals who contextualize each other as husband and wife. By removing the man˙galasutram, Gora “is making her recognize” (gurtiñcetatlu cestunnaru) her equality and self-respect—not just in theory, but in a complementary relation to him. Francis Cody coined the term “reciprocal agency” (2013: 71) to describe a gendered mode of action among female participants in literacy campaigns in Tamil Nadu. While women were intended to develop emancipatory autonomy through literacy, their regular attendance in

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literacy classes was premised on a gender-specific interpellation into relationships of obligation, duty, and unequal exchange. Saraswathi’s account evinces precisely such a pattern of reciprocal agency, and I am here interested in further pursuing how this “female” mode of action is dependent on notions of gender complementarity. These are deeply entrenched in South Asian gender ideologies and percolate through various imaginaries of generative processes from cosmogony to biological reproduction to nation building (L. Dube 2001b; Uberoi 2006; T. Sarkar 2013). Gender complementarity postulates maleness and femaleness as fundamentally distinct but related, co-dependent, and countervailing principles forming a larger whole; since maleness is usually conceived as active, dynamic, and violent, it needs to be balanced or complemented by a passive, nurturing, and receptive female principle. In order to retrace the significance of this sort of complementarity for the conceptual and moral grammar of Total Atheism, I want to draw attention to how it structures biographic and autobiographic narratives of male and female Atheists. Atheist men tend to portray their mental revolution as emerging spontaneously, often in early childhood. As I have shown in Chapter 2, their narratives hinge on a notion of heroism that derives from their steadfastness in following through with this nascent defiance of traditional beliefs and customs. In the case of female Atheists, however, much more emphasis is put on initial compliance with orthodox and traditional environments, and women’s heroism lies in overcoming their Theism in a more abrupt and decisionistic fashion. Although their mental revolution is a deliberate act, it is usually described as being brought about by the intervention of one of their male family members, often at the time of or soon after marriage. The rhetorical framing of Saraswathi’s portrait in a collection of biographic essays by Tumma Bhaskar on notable Atheist leaders in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana can serve to illustrate this point: “Just because her husband died in 1975, Mrs. Saraswathi, wife of the famous atheist Gora . . . did not stay put, crying like other married women, but shouldered and carried on the propagation of atheism he [Gora] had conducted” (2012: 34). After listing some of her achievements and the programs she has “carried on” throughout her life, the text, which is the only portrait of a woman in the entire book, ends thus: Understanding that her husband’s scientific thoughts are a way of life and a way for society, Saraswathi Gora not only supported her husband but also participated in his programs, and even continued them after he had passed away; and by habituating her offspring to it, she has carried on the atheist movement. . . . Even though she was

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born and had grown up in a traditional family she understood, after being married, that her husband’s footprints were the truth and it must be said that, by putting it into practice until the last breath and participating in the movement, Saraswathi Gora has shown the way for a great many atheist and rationalist women. (36)

It is precisely in juxtaposing this male perspective on Saraswathi’s life with her own autobiographic account below that the notion of complementarity will gain contour. Saraswathi is considered an exemplar for Atheist women—nota bene not for Atheism as such— because her Atheism is considered a prolongation of her husband’s agency and activism, especially, though not exclusively, within the family. Her achievement consisted of “habituating her offspring.” The crucial difference between Bhaskar’s and Saraswathi’s accounts is that the former configures agency as a question of understanding Atheism whereas it will emerge in the latter as a question of bearing its consequences (i.e., as responsibility). The point, however, is not whether “real” agency lies in making others understand or in bearing responsibility; rather, the point I am driving at is that within the framework of Total Atheism, one requires the other in a relationship of complementarity. While this is already adumbrated implicitly for a reader familiar with the specific symbolic meaning of the man˙galasutram, it becomes clearer in another excerpt from Saraswathi’s autobiography. The following episode took place in the early 1930s, when the Gora family lived in Machilipatnam and the Atheist Centre had not yet been founded (see Chapter 5). At that time, Gora’s maternal aunt Jogamma, who had been staying with them to help Saraswathi with the children, passed away. Since Gora had already started publicly propagating Atheism, he considered it an important demonstration of his family’s practical sincerity that they desist from any last rites or Hindu rituals for his aunt. While Jogamma’s husband had consented too, Saraswathi had difficulties with the decision: I was asked by some women, why we did not perform any funerary rites. I did not know what to say. I remembered something from my childhood; I said my uncle-in-law had made a pindibomma6 and had funerary rites performed in Kakinada. But in truth, the uncle-in-law had done no such thing. . . . Yet, many people came to me [saying:] “They might have done something in Kakinada, but you have four children and she has died in your home.” Day after day, they were saying to me: “If you do not perform last rites something baleful will happen to your children.” Again and again, they told me to at least collect the ashes from the cremation ground. Gora used to go to college. Nobody had the courage to talk to him. Therefore, it was I who had to bear a lot of pressure. Even though I was not able to give proper

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answers, I at least withstood these pressures. No evil has befallen my children. All four of them . . . are still healthy. With this being my first experience [of Atheism], I was in utter confusion for days on end. (S. Gora 2003: 82)

This sort of unequal distribution of agency, sentiments, and responsibility emerges consistently as a central theme in Saraswathi’s autobiography, which demonstrates palpably that for women, more is at stake than the question of how to aesthetically authenticate the practical sincerity of Atheism as an ex-centric way of life; they have to face the additional semiotic challenge that embodying ex-centricity in everyday life risks unsettling their contextualized individuality as an “appropriately female” woman. Saraswathi’s “being in utter confusion” (ayomayan˙ga vundedi) should not be understood as referring to her beliefs, convictions, or understanding of Atheism. Echoed by the inability of Subha’s mother-in-law to give answers, her speechlessness indicates a situation where her role as a practically sincere Atheist— more precisely, her role as the wife of such an Atheist—threatened to unsettle her identity as a woman and mother. If anything were to happen to her children, she would take the blame for it, not her husband. By not performing last rites for Jogamma, she acted as an Atheist but jeopardized her identity as a caring mother; by taking off her man˙galasutram, she acted as an Atheist but jeopardized her being a respectful wife—hence her confusion. Men, by contrast, need not and in fact cannot embody everyday ex-centricity for the simple reason that the burden to uphold and constitute tradition in/as everyday domesticity—whether valued positively as Indianness or negatively as patriarchal mental slavery—has never been inscribed onto their social skins in a comparable way. For men, realizing Atheism as a way of life is a question of signification, because they need their female family members to embody everyday ex-centricity as a sign of their own practical sincerity. This is possible through the allocation of agency to men and responsibility to women. At the same time, and this is the crux of complementarity, assigning agency to her husband was also a means for Saraswathi to reconcile the conflicting expectations attached to ex-centricity and womanhood: the detailed descriptions of her tribulations and emotional turmoil reinforce her womanhood, because her being a wife and mother was so deeply ingrained in her that she could only bring herself to disrespect her husband (removal of the man˙galasutram) or jeopardize her children’s safety (omission of funerary rites) by being practically coerced to do so by her husband; even though she had already understood intellectually that no “real” disrespect or danger

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was involved. Her heroism and status as an exemplary for other women lies in bearing the pressure and emotional turmoil of the ex-centric distinction—thrust upon her by her husband—between appropriate femaleness and “Hinduness.”

Conclusion Saraswathi’s account mirrors the situation in Gurajada’s poem at the beginning of this chapter, where it is also the wife who must bear the everyday consequences of her husband’s activism. Yet, Gurajada evokes a different outcome, as the narrator’s wife rejected the burden of complementarity. In the poem’s imagery, the celestial bodies of the morning star and a comet symbolize the male reformer’s hope for the dawning of an age of enlightened social reform, while his wife’s angry refusal to bear its everyday consequences is compared to a stroke of lightening. This (feminist) lightening replaces the seemingly peaceful luster of the comet and alerts us to the violence inherent in social reform. The unattributed question about people’s ability to make distinctions between good and bad at the end of the poem thus leaves the reader with a sense of ambivalence that could just as easily be applied to making ex-centric distinctions. The conspicuous lack of female activists and the dearth of Atheist families seem to indicate that many women do frequently choose the option of rejecting complementary distributions of agency and responsibility. My interlocutors—of both genders—tend to consider this to be regrettable and devastating proof of their own failure to deliver on one of their core ideological tenets and major social reform objectives: gender equality and female emancipation. They tend to explain the paucity of female Atheists with the fact that it is more difficult for them to “extricate” (bayatapadu) themselves from tradition or forms of innate Hinduness, Muslimness, and so on, as they are simply more exposed to them; besides so-called “untouchables,” women are usually considered the foremost victims of mental slavery and Theism. This kind of explanation exposes very real patriarchal structures of gender inequality in specific religious traditions, but it conveniently elides the burden placed on women by Atheism’s own ideology of emancipatory equality, which is grounded in complementary difference within the framework of contextualized individuality. Critics of the Atheist movement, especially from within the feminist and other progressive movements, point out that this ideology does in fact frequently justify factual inequality, not just complementary

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difference. By juxtaposing ideological commitments to gender equality and emancipation with practices of patriarchal discrimination, these critiques themselves resonate with the ideal of practical sincerity; after all, the moral demand of matching words and deeds is not exclusive to Atheists. However, what is specific to Atheists is how they use the moral and conceptual grammar of practical sincerity for engaging with the semiotic and aesthetic challenge of making an ex-centric way of life publicly perceptible. This use is based on a larger culturally and historically shaped metonymic link between domesticity, femininity, and tradition that enables men not only to distribute the burden and responsibility of embodying ex-centricity to women but also to establish Atheist wedding celebrations as a semiotic form and condensation of this metonymic link. Through negotiations of aesthetic properties like pomplessness/niradambaram or the absence of religious rites, largely conventional Atheist marriage practices can nonetheless produce a positionality of “nontraditional” (sampradayetara) ex-centricity by transforming some conventions into blind custom and others into transgressive rationality. However, this “solution” for the semiotic ambivalence at the heart of a publicly perceptible realization of an ex-centric way of life is essentially androcentric: the process of metonymic signification works only from a male perspective, namely by displacing the semiotic problem onto women’s social skins while reclaiming the agency for its solution. As we have seen in P. Nagalingesvara Rao’s quote previously, to arrange an Atheist marriage becomes an index for a male activist’s success in “changing his family” and thus in practically realizing Atheism in and as an everyday way of life. It is androcentric because even the failure to change one’s family can be reinterpreted as a sign of respect for one’s family members’ autonomy and a commitment to domestic equality and democracy. If families (i.e., women) refuse to be persuaded into gender complementarity, there is nothing much one can do, because sincere Atheism cannot be enforced externally. Moreover, when it is already considered heroic and ex-centric to be an Atheist in India, how much more so without even the support of one’s own family? It is androcentric because the exacerbated difficulty of everyday Atheism for women enables those men who can successfully claim to have changed their family to enhance their status as exceptional and eminent Atheists. Androcentrism is not about an absolute distinction between a male realm of activism and a female realm of family life, as Total Atheism requires women to become activists and men to extend their activism into the family. Rather, its effect lies in making complementarity “costlier” for women than for men.

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For men, extending their activism into the private realm is additive; it heightens their practical sincerity to become Atheist husbands, fathers, brothers—and even failing in this can, to a certain extent, do the trick. For women, by contrast, it is corrosive because becoming an Atheist threatens their being respectable wives, daughters, or sisters; for women, it is enough—and difficult enough—to simply be an Atheist and nonetheless remain an “appropriately female” woman, which they must do in order to authenticate not only their own practical sincerity but that of their male relatives as well.

Notes 1. Malayasri, Karimnagar, 21 January 2015; recorded interview in English. 2. Subha, Vijayawada, 24 January 2014; recorded interview in English. 3. The most famous of these are the often typically upper-caste problems of child marriage, (self-)immolation of widows, prohibitions of widow-­ remarriage, and education for girls. 4. The man˙galasutram, also called tali, is a sacred thread with a small gold locket (puste or talibottu), which the groom ties around the bride’s neck during South Indian Hindu wedding rituals. 5. Seen against the background of patrilineal kinship systems and virilocal residence patterns, which have historically predominated in most parts of Hindu India, it is not surprising that problematic relationships between families are narrated more frequently by women and with a focus on “women’s problems”: for many women, marriage means—if not in practice then at least in theoretical, ideological, or legal terms—a change of residence and also a change of social identity, as they technically cease to be full-fledged members of their descent group and acquire membership in their husband’s family. Ideologically speaking, it is therefore a wife’s duty to adapt to her new family’s ways and customs (Trawick 1990; Dube 1997). 6. A pindibomma is usually an object used for casting spells in practices of “sorcery” called cetabadi or banamati in different regions of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. Saraswathi’s account, however, would suggest that they may also be used as objects for a sort of vicarious ritual.

CONCLUSION

In this book, I approached the Atheist movement in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana as a form of lived secularity, which meant engaging it not primarily as a unified worldview with secular attributes, but as a practical project of producing and inhabiting secular difference. I proposed the concept of positionality as a methodological tool to analyze how the process of becoming an Atheist consists of claiming and occupying a certain place and attitude of both belonging and alterity, both rootedness and aloofness within a given environment. Within this process of becoming an Atheist, secular difference emerged as a desired performative effect and aesthetic quality of a variety of contested strategies, practices, and negotiations about what such acts of positioning entail, how they are to be carried out, and, above all, what they are supposed to “look like.” By conceptualizing secular difference as an aesthetic quality, I do not intend to posit it as a readily observable or definable attribute that Atheists—or other people who “live” secularity—“possess,” but as a quality they aspire to, whose definitional properties they argue about, and whose perceptibility depends on concrete contexts and constitutes a challenge or a problem to be solved. The positionality of Total Atheism is invested in a larger moral narrative of secular modernity, insofar as it is based on the idea of “extricating” (bayatapadatam) oneself and helping others to extricate themselves from Theism, understood as a condition of “mental slavery.” While it is certainly the case that many of my Atheist interlocutors seek to propagate what they consider to be scientific truths and ultimately envision a world where all people are free from Theism, I did not approach the Atheist movement as a “missionary” project with the primary purpose of spreading a worldview and making others adopt it, as if it was a preexisting entity one could transmit into the

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minds of others by “disenchanting” them. The guiding question of this book was neither how Atheist activists relate to actually lived religion nor whether they manage to convert others to a secular way of life, but rather how they relate to their own secularity and try to become Atheists themselves by making their claim to secular difference publicly perceptible. From this perspective, becoming an Atheist in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana is not conditional on making others disbelieve—which would presuppose understanding “correctly” what belief is and how it “really” works—but on cognitively, affectively, and practically realizing what I described as a triadic sociohistorical imaginary: a social arena structured by the three ideal typical actors of the heroic Atheist, the guileless People, and the villainous Theist as they are configured by the Non-Brahmin civilizational narrative of “Aryan invasion.” Put differently, Atheism hinges in its practical implementation on positioning oneself and interpellating others into one of those three structurally available positions. To describe Atheist activism in terms of positionality is to describe it not primarily as an antagonistic relation to something else but as an agonistic position within a socially structured context. Positionality refers to a perspectival directionality from within the Atheist movement so that secular difference is not a structuralist effect of the relation between elements in an abstract conceptual space but the aesthetic effect of a cultural politics of difference on the basis of which Atheists inhabit a specific—culturally, religiously, historically, affectively, politically configured—environment. Throughout the chapters of this book, I described this aesthetic effect and quality as a sense and attitude of ex-centricity that seek to produce difference in and out of sameness and negotiate a dynamic, fragile, and always contestable balance of belonging and alterity. By juxtaposing positionality with relationality and proposing a perspective from within the Atheist movement as a methodological starting point, I do not mean to imply that the Atheist production of secular difference should be studied in isolation or exclusively “on its own terms.” On the contrary, the quality of ex-centricity is both produced and encountered; it emerges precisely where “internal” and “external” perceptions of the Atheist movement coincide, where they are made intelligible as such to one another, and where their friction becomes the experiential ground on which Atheists make their bids to secular difference and “mental revolution” (bhavaviplavam). I used ex-centricity as a descriptor for the way my interlocutors place themselves within existing discourses and imaginaries and simultaneously try to cultivate a sense of uniqueness and difference. Atheists

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understand themselves as a community within the landscape of Indian religious pluralism, yet they insist on a “different difference.” They understand Atheism as the basis for a humanist community whose difference transcends the “human-made” differences of sectarianism, isolation, and social inequality, which they perceive as foundational for the pluralism of castes–and–religions (kulamatalu) at the heart of a hegemonic narrative of Indian civilization. At the same time, they do not simply “reject” that narrative or expulse “religion” from it; rather, they try to reinscribe and position Atheism within that narrative as its true center, origin, telos, and substance by creatively appropriating, reinterpreting, and revaluing the cultural repertoires, tropes, symbols, and customs that structure it. These may comprise notions of eminence, renunciation, or gender complementarity that regulate the production of individuality and personhood (Chapters 2 and 6); popular lore, rhetorical conventions, and traditional xenologies (Chapters 1 and 3); “traditional” marriage practices (Chapter 6); or tropes of national modernization, scientific temper, the annihilation of caste, or gender equality (Chapters 4 through 6). To assume a positionality of ex-­ centricity is not to establish a relation from an “outside” but to occupy an ambiguously marginal position—an ex-centric center—“within.” I call ex-centricity a secular quality of difference because its performative realization thrives on diffuse and heterogeneous yet constitutive notions of negativity associated with Atheism in particular and a globally entangled discourse on secularity in general. The negativity of Atheism is diffuse and heterogeneous because it may refer to semantic and morphological structures of words and concepts (a-theism, na-astikatvam, nir-is´varavadam, dis-belief), to the predominantly exonymic and pejorative function of those words, to an emphasis of incommensurable translations across historical or cultural ruptures, to the social and cultural marginality or “foreignness/Westernization” of those who ascribe to it, or to attitudes and practices of critique, antagonism, or denial, and, last but not least, to moral deprecations of various kinds. In the Introduction, I also described a specific critical impetus as an academic form of negativity deriving from a methodological “invisibility” and “immateriality” of the secular within functionalist and current aesthetic approaches to religion. However, many of these forms of negativity are also constitutive, insofar as they propel and give shape to my interlocutors’ practical project of mental revolution and their endeavor to revalue and transform notions of negativity into a positive yet ex-centric way of life. The notion of “way of life” (jivitavidhanam) is crucial here, because it encodes a double imperative of practical implementation and

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totalization. In Chapter 1, I retraced in detail how my interlocutors’ understandings of Atheism as mental revolution are based on a moral ideal and conceptual grammar of “practical sincerity” (dvikaranas´uddhi or nijayiti), which requires Atheism to be put into practice not only in word and deed but also in all spheres of life; sincere Atheism is that endeavor of total implementation and, therefore, a continuous and fragile process of becoming. In the Introduction and Chapter 6, I took issue with Webb Keane’s argument that secularism as a moral narrative is based on a semiotic ideology that makes it ultimately an “impossible project, one that cannot be fully inhabitable in the terms it often seems to propose” (2013b: 162). I argue instead that my interlocutors’ ideal and imperative of total implementation thrives on a dialectic relationship between negativity and totality, on a project of sublating or translating the former into the latter, which renders their project of Total Atheism not necessarily impossible but productively incomplete, inevitably processual, unfinished, and always yet to be concluded. The moral ideal and conceptual grammar of practical sincerity does not foreclose Total Atheism but regulates how Atheists define and disagree over appropriate domains and means to realize and “inhabit” it as a process of becoming. As such, it does not only regulate the implementation of Total Atheism but also the potentially endless deferral of its totalized completion, because it allows a number of conceptual slippages between the domains, media, and means of mental revolution. Mental revolution can refer to words or deeds; it can refer to the transformation of individuals, to the transformation of their families, to a person’s participation in associational activism, or to the larger social effects of that activism; it can also refer to either deconstructive practices of critique or to formative programs of social reconstruction. While the structure of this book may suggest a linear or cumulative process of putting Atheism into practice from words to deeds— starting with personal professions, moving to oral propagation and constructive programs for society in order to culminate in a way of life in the domain of domestic relations—I tried to show that those different modes and domains of practical implementation can also be pitted against each other in continuous practices of critique. Verbal professions and propagations of Atheism are considered powerful and indispensable acts of realizing Atheism, but they are also criticized for being “mere talk” to which nobody listens anyway. Programs of social activism meant to eradicate superstition or annihilate caste, by contrast, are considered more tangible than mere talk, but they can be faulted for being both insincere and ineffective if they lack either

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an express verbal commitment to Atheism or a basis in the everyday and especially the domestic lives of those who carry them out. Everyday life, in turn, is certainly considered the ultimate touchstone for Total Atheism, but it is vexingly difficult to publicly represent or authenticate for others. It furthermore remains moot or even betrays insincerity, unless it leads to or comprises both practical activism and public verbal professions of Atheism for the sake of a general social reconstruction. The challenge of making the totalness of Total Atheism perceptible is an ever-receding horizon because people’s words, deeds, and ways of life remain subject to continuous hermeneutics of insincerity. The moral ideal of matching words and deeds, of putting ideological commitments into practice by totalizing them is, in its generality and abstractness, by no means unique to Atheists. What is unique to them, however, is the specific and historically contingent conditions in which they use the moral and conceptual grammar of practical sincerity for transforming an encountered negativity of Atheism into ex-centricity as a perceptible quality of secular difference. Secularity is not necessarily or essentially ex-centric, because it is not a preexisting, ontological attribute. Other qualities and sensibilities like triumphalism, arrogance, or ontological certainty are thinkable and historically existing alternatives. It is precisely the confluence of a globally circulating discourse on secular modernity with the concrete historical, cultural, and social environments of the Atheist movement in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana that affords, enables, and constrains the perceptibility of secularity as ex-centricity. The quality of ex-centricity crystallizes a multidimensional positionality of Atheism within a larger imaginary of Indian civilization as well as the positionality of “Indian Atheism” within the larger world and human history. In his ethnographic study on “Arivoli Iyakkam” (The Enlighten­ ment  Movement) in Tamil Nadu, Francis Cody (2013) argues that this progressive literacy movement is not simply the result of a globalization-cum-vernacularization of a supposedly original template of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment. Instead, he uses the concept of “retrospective incorporation” (2013: 58) to describe how the members of Arivoli Iyakkam position their experiences of activism as the center from which to interpret not only the here and now but also the temporally and geographically distant elsewhere: The [European] Enlightenment itself, then, can be rendered as a prior instance of what activists already know through their encounters with science and literacy activism. Note, however, that this sense of priority is temporal and not necessarily prior in the sense of being somehow

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more foundational in the eyes of village-level activists. The very act of retrospection can be understood as an agentive enlistment, preserving the philosophical priority of the present. (59)

In the Introduction, I proposed the concepts of ethnographic presentism and translatedness as methodological principles necessary to grasp this kind of “philosophical priority of the present.” Acts of retrospection are a central aspect of what I described as occupying a positionality, because they establish the contemporary Atheist movement as the very position from which it becomes possible to acknowledge temporal asynchrony and cultural differences between “Indian” and “European” Atheisms and to simultaneously flatten them into a universal dialectics between mental slavery and mental revolution. If my interlocutors frequently reference what they consider a “prior” European history of Atheism—the burning of Galileo Galilei or Giordano Bruno, the Enlightenment, the scientific revolution, etc.— they invoke that history not as the origin of Atheism, but in order to confirm that, anywhere and anytime, being an Atheist means essentially being ex-centric: being courageous enough to go against the stream and to stand firm in what one knows to be true, no matter the consequences. The positionality of the ex-centric Atheist enlists, retrospectively incorporates, and thus simultaneously retains and makes insubstantial the differences between India and Europe, between the past and the present, between the local and the global. The condition of possibility for such retrospective incorporations of the temporal and cultural other into the philosophical priority of the present is what I called a historical a priori of translatedness and the productive incompleteness of ongoing processes of translation. Their analysis requires ethnographic presentism as a methodological strategy. An example of this process is the claim of the Atheist conjurer and leader of People’s Atheist Society, GDS (see Chapter 4), that it was by conducting so-called mass meetings during the 1970s and 1980s in rural Andhra Pradesh and Telangana that the Atheist movement made the word “nastika” known to the people. By this, he hardly meant to suggest that people had never heard of this word before, but rather that they had not heard of it other than as a term of abuse. What was made known was the word “nastika” having gone through a translation into “atheist”—and back again. Such processes of ­circular translation are not conditional on actual acts of linguistic translation, as they can operate entirely within monolingual discourse. This can be illustrated by a quote from one of Gora’s autobiographic essays, published first in 1951 in Telugu, where he elaborates on the

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distinction between nastikatvam and niris´varavadam (both of which are commonly translated as atheism): In niris´varavadam we are criticizing things like superstitions. In nastikatvam we are proceeding constructively. Niris´varavadam is a destructive act, nastikatvam is a program for progress. In nastikatvam the purpose of benefitting the people is evident. In niris´varavadam showing defects of an opponent and criticism predominate. Opposition grows due to niris´varavadam. Devoted concern for the people grows due to nastikatvam. (1990: 96)

In the Introduction, I reproduced a conversation I had with my friend Devi, where she explained that she followed the Buddha’s atheism/ niris´varavadam, as opposed to atheism/nastikatvam, because the latter was “against the people.” I am returning here to Devi not primarily to show that Gora defines nastikatvam in exactly the inverse way (“devoted concern for the people”), but in order to show how both statements, made in English in 2014 and in Telugu in 1951 respectively, make sense only in a situation where nastikatvam as well as niris´varavadam have already been translated into “atheism” and then—and this is crucial—retranslated into Telugu. The point of translatedness is not that supposedly “European” discourses of atheism are incommensurable with “Indian” notions of either nastikatvam or niris´varavadam— which they are—but that their incommensurable translations are productive; they enable not only diametrically opposed attitudes, as illustrated by Devi and Gora, but also the production of something new: in the case of the Atheist movement, the novel and historically contingent concept of bhavaviplavam (mental revolution) as well as the specific quality of secular difference I call ex-centricity. While the productivity of translatedness is intrinsically related to relations of unequal power between languages—in both colonial and postcolonial contexts where some languages do the translating and others are translated—my primary focus in this book was not to determine the extent to which mental revolution and the project of Total Atheism are hybridized or vernacularized translations of the powerful conceptual grammar of secular modernity. Monika Wohlrab-Sahr and Marian Burchardt have proposed such a framework for studying “multiple secularities,” where multiplicity appears merely as the variation of an ideal type of social dynamics that “always focus on specific ways of drawing boundaries and distinctions between religion and other spheres of social practice” (2012: 905—my emphasis). In a later publication, coauthored with Matthias Middell, they further argue that “a fundamental aspect of global interconnectedness and transcultural diffusions of secular concepts is their translation into

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local languages, and the result is almost by definition semantic hybridity” (Middell, Burchardt, and Wohlrab-Sahr 2015: 8). Within such a framework of hybridization, multiplicity is conceptualized as an essentially derivative translation of an already established contour of secularity modeled on the “European” genealogy of the secular/ religious binary. In the preceding chapters, I tried to show that ex-centricity as a specific quality of secular difference is not always or solely dependent on a boundary or negative relation to practices, ideas, or institutions that are, can be, or have been discursively construed as “religious;” this relation can, under certain circumstances, recede to the background or become reconfigured, as the examples of interreligious marriages in Chapter 6 or the trope of monastic renunciation in Chapter 2 demonstrated. With the concept of ethnographic presentism, I proposed a methodological perspective from where the historicity and multiplicity of secularity are not limited to the history of the word “secular” or the secular/religious binary but also include genealogies of the discourses, imaginaries, and practices that function as the conditions, context, and/or outcomes of its translations. Rather than focusing primarily on translations of “atheism,” like nastikatvam or niris´varavadam, a historiography of Atheism in India would have to pay more attention to the conceptual history of terms like bhavaviplavam, renunciation, dvikaranas´uddhi, monarchical eminence, jivitavidhanam, aucitya, and so on. Rather than presupposing discourses on religion, science, epistemology, or cosmology as “natural” sites of the secular, a genealogy of bhavaviplavam, for example, would lead into the domain of literature, poetics, and rhetoric. As mentioned in Chapters 1 and 2, bhava is a key term in theories of the mind and emotions in Sanskrit aesthetics (Chari 1990; Pollock 2016), and it reappears in an important stream of modernist twentieth-century Telugu poetry called Bhavakavitvam (Narayana Rao 2003, 2008). This is significant since many of the leading figures in the Atheist movement were either themselves literary writers or were closely connected to a milieu of modernist and so-called progressive poets who profiled their progressiveness among other things by rejecting the romanticism of Bhavakavitvam. This adds another layer of literary history to the notion of mental revolution within Atheist vocabulary. Finally, the connection between bhavadasyam (mental slavery) and the concept of dasyabhava in devotional theology and poetry opens up new perspectives on the relationship between Atheism and bhakti movements. The latter may be important precolonial predecessors of Atheism not only for their discourses of religious critique and reform (Klimkeit 1971; Burchett

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2009; Quack 2012), but also for their role in shaping topographies of the self, concepts of emotional relationality, or the social poetics of communication, which inform present-day practices of mental revolution and Total Atheism. Rather than limiting the history of Atheism to a history of a colonial (epistemic) rupture or hybridization, a historical approach grounded in ethnographic presentism would enable more complex models of rupture and continuity. The ethnographic identification of culturally and contextually contingent histories of secularity can also open up new perspectives for a comparative anthropology of lived secularity beyond the conceptual history of the secular/religious binary. Sherman Jackson, for example, proposed a working definition of an Islamic secular as a form of “cultural literacy” (2017: 16–17), which is not organized around an antagonistic distinction from a domain of religion but around discussions of the limits of the sharia to regulate the concrete details of all aspects of life. In a similar way, Jonathan Sheehan has suggested the need to pay more attention to “the ways that alternatives to the secular have been written into the historical record” (2010: 242). Focusing on European history and the example of Giambattista Vico, he proposed the category of the mundane as a form of secularity that is not constituted in contradistinction to religion or, in this case, Christianity. The mundane, the Islamic secular, or ethnographic categories like mental revolution or ex-centricity may be novel starting points for developing an empirically grounded and comparative category of an expanded and indeed multiple secularity. Beyond these general historiographic and comparative aspects, which are here only adumbrated and await systematic research, my argument concerning the translatedness of Atheism as a historically contingent positionality of lived secularity also impacts how we locate the Atheist movement in the present and future context of Indian society.

The Location of Atheism in Contemporary India The Atheist movement itself is acutely aware of its own marginality and makes this awareness a constant theme in both its internal dealings and in debates with its environment. This has transpired in different ways throughout the previous chapters, for instance when Atheist activists are criticized for having withdrawn from social activism and for merely talking to and for themselves at their own conferences. There is also a constant critical baseline among Atheists about the lack of female and young activists. Many of my

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interlocutors evoke an atmosphere of crisis: while male Atheist activists have foundered, women have become increasingly superstitious, and youths have turned their back on social responsibility seeking instead selfish pleasure in a world of globalized consumerism depleted of cultural values. The crisis of Atheism is thus perceived to be as much a failure of Atheists themselves as it is a symptom of the times and a result of a perceived general degeneration of progressiveness in Indian society. Some argue that the current weakness of progressive movements, both Atheist and leftist, is due to the fact that they have lost their “glamour.” This English word was used by several of my interlocutors to explain why their movements had become incapable of attracting young people. Atheists in particular have a clear understanding and often personal experience of the fact that their attempt to “extricate” themselves from social conventions and mental slavery requires not only the exercise of individual freedom but also some kind of social support. While senior Atheists received such support from various progressive movements, they find that these no longer appeal to the generations of their children and grandchildren. I have argued that an awareness and cultivation of marginality is part of the productive incompleteness at the heart of Total Atheism; yet, the topic of Atheism’s negativity seems to emerge here not only as an intrinsic trait of its conceptual set-up, but also, and increasingly so, as its present historical condition. Especially senior Atheists contrast the current situation with former times, when their own and other progressive movements were not necessarily less marginal numerically but were at least able to attract young people and could, therefore, see themselves as the vanguard of imminent and inexorable change. While Indian society in general may still have been in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “waiting-room of history” (2000: 9), it seemed clear in which direction it would eventually exit that room, and the Atheist movement could consider itself as holding the door from across the threshold. While the large majority of my interlocutors harbor no doubt about the directionality of progress, they cannot fend off the impression that the rest of society is not just behind the times, trying to catch up, but is in fact moving in the wrong direction. According to Atheists and many other progressives, this is epitomized most prominently, but not exclusively, in the success of an increasingly powerful Hindu nationalism in politics and public discourse. The larger vector of social change seems to have turned, and especially since the momentous political and economic reconfiguration of India in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Atheists increasingly find themselves moving against

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the current. That reconfiguration is usually understood as the demise of the so-called “Nehruvian Consensus” (Sharma 2014), which constituted an important turning point for a whole range of progressive movements. With regard to the aforementioned Tamil Enlightenment Movement (Arivoli Iyakkam), Cody argues that: From a . . . macrosociological perspective, we can see that the Arivoli Iyakkam and similar [progressive] efforts of the 1990s and early 2000s were the products of a particular political conjuncture. The demise of a state structure that had long sought to monopolize claims to material development, and even to modernity itself, coincided with the rise of vast social movements making demands on behalf of people who felt they had never been adequately cared for by the paternalist Nehruvian state. (2013: 208)

The significance of this political conjuncture may even exceed the awareness that the Nehruvian state has failed to live up to its promises and point to the fact that the very promises it has embodied may no longer be able to “consensually” signify progress and modernity. Many factions within the Atheist movement in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana have existed and been critical of the Nehruvian state since long before the 1990s; but their criticism could be founded on the claim that they, rather than the state, were the true representatives of the Nehruvian project of modernization as well as the real successors of the independence movement. Even if this claim was granted, and perhaps precisely to the extent that it may have been true, the Atheist movement finds itself somewhat out of sync with the current post-Nehruvian dispensation. It seems to me to be unnecessary, and anyway rather problematic, to ascertain “objectively” whether or not the Atheist movement has ever been an actual historical cause of large-scale social transformation. What matters is whether the Atheist movement is able to position and inscribe itself into the fabric of Indian culture and civilizational history in order to retrospectively incorporate not only the origin but also the telos of that history, as well as the forces that drive its evolution. It is this ability of inscription and incorporation that currently seems to be in jeopardy. I argue that notions like “lost glamour” suggest very correctly that what is amiss are not solely or even primarily the ideas or principles of progressiveness, be they of a Communist, Atheist, anticaste, or feminist hue, but the conditions, modes, and aesthetics of their implementation. At stake is not Atheism as a nonreligious or materialist worldview in a supposedly postsecular age of resurging religion, but the practical modes of being an Atheist in word and deed, its mode of being ex-centric.

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I want to illustrate this briefly with the relationship between so-called new media and the Atheist movement’s politics and aesthetics of oratorical propagation. In Chapter 3, I argued that a main function of telling the history of Atheism has not primarily been to produce novel historical knowledge, but rather to create a situation where narrators of that history could become part of their own narrative—a narrative, moreover, that the audience had already heard many times before. This sort of oral propagation is part of an overarching genre of political oratory that was entrenched during the independence movement and thus remains an important reference-point—for very senior Atheists, even a personal memory. The generation of twentysomethings, however, has been socialized into different forms of oratorical politics, as they have grown up in a radically altered, “post-Nehruvian,” representational economy marked among other things by an immensely rapid growth of private television channels and Internet access since the early 2000s. Among senior Atheists, there is an almost unanimous consensus that things have gotten much worse since television has entered the scene. Some even go so far as to identify communication technologies like television, mobile phones, or the Internet as the main cause for the current weakness of the movement. They vividly remember better days when they used to conduct rural “mass meetings” that were attended by hundreds of people from surrounding villages. A comparable mobilization is no longer possible nowadays because, it is surmised, rather than coming to the village square for a mass meeting, people sit at home in front of their TV sets watching telenovelas and “Bhakti TV.”1 Whereas Atheist conferences, Miracle Exposure Programs, or anticaste programs are understood as a socially responsible combination of entertainment, community building, and, above all, education, television and other forms of digital media consumption are often criticized as part of a culture industry in the service of global forces of capitalist and cultural imperialism fostering vulgar “spectacle” (tamasa), selfish individualism, and consumerism. At the same time, however, there are also positive—at the very least ambivalent—stances toward mass media, because Atheists recognize their potential for conveying messages to unprecedented numbers of people. Especially religious television channels are often considered a prime example for an advance or head start of “religious forces” in the sphere of media propaganda—a topos reaching back to the narrative of Aryan invasion and the invention of Hinduism as a frighteningly efficacious propaganda campaign. Some senior activists, like Shariff Gora for example, are enthusiastic users of the communicative possibilities afforded by the Internet; but

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most Atheists see themselves as lagging behind as far as the necessary media savvy is concerned. Apart from the Atheist Centre in Vijayawada, none of the organizations I have worked with had web presences that went beyond informal Facebook groups or private profiles. However, there is a small number of what I call “TV-activists” (i.e., people who appear regularly as spokespersons for the Atheist movement or allied movements in talk shows and roundtable discussions on Telugu-language news channels). Topics of discussion can include themes related quite straightforwardly to religion, like astrology, ritual practices, communal violence, or secularism, but also current political or social issues, like moral policing or corruption scandals. At the time of my fieldwork, there were around twenty Telugu news channels broadcasting via satellite, and all of them had their recording studios in Hyderabad, creating a tightly connected “media community” in the city. Without proper ties into this community and the particular skillsets required to navigate television’s particular logic of “mediatisation” (Hjarvard 2011)—including, for instance, appropriate rhetoric and habitus—it was not possible to become a successful TV-activist, irrespective of one’s social status or repute as a gifted orator within the Atheist movement. As GDS once told me rather laconically: “I would do TV, but nobody is calling me.”2 Spontaneous availability and being on the telephone directory of producers and program directors are crucial, as televised debates are often arranged only a few hours in advance. At times, participants learn about the topic of the debate only minutes before the show starts. The few TV-activists I have met are personally acquainted with program directors, anchors, and most of the other guests at talk shows, which is an important asset for judging the likelihood of prevailing in a given debate and thus for assessing whether participation in it is worth the risk. The Atheist movement’s ambivalent attitude toward new media is therefore not only due to ideological reasons but also to very concrete economic and social entry requirements. While Atheists have of course tried to penetrate the sphere of new media, they had to learn, after an initial phase of euphoria, that the new possibilities and the massive outreach promised by commercial mass media come with a price: the subordination of the priorities of a movement for mental revolution to the agendas of profit-oriented, privately owned media networks. Especially experienced TV-activists have told me that, lately, they had begun to withdraw from televised debates rather than trying to increase their participation. One notable exception is a television show for science popularization called “The Big Question with Babu Gogineni,” which is conceived, written, and anchored by Babu

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Gogineni, a famous Hyderabad-based rationalist and former executive director of International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU). The show has been airing successfully from 2014 to 2015 on 10TV, a private news channel with close ties to the Communist movement. This is not only an example for the close cooperation of Atheists and Communists within the larger ambit of a shared “progressive” milieu, but also for a fortuitous confluence of interests. As some observers within the Atheist movement have pointed out, 10TV needed to prove its rationalist credentials, and Babu Gogineni needed a channel. While this particular venture proved successful, it is to my knowledge the only endeavor of its kind within the larger Atheist movement, and it is entirely dependent on Babu Gogineni’s private effort, time, experience, and resources; something very few activists within the Atheist movement could afford. These cursory remarks may suffice to indicate why Atheists’ engagement with “new media” is not only a question of transferring or adapting previous forms of propagation to new media formats; it is a question of an altogether new form of propagation with very different circumstances and relations of production, criteria of appropriateness, modes of interpellation, and conditions of felicity, to which the Atheist movement has only started to adapt—and which would require its own ethnography. Moreover, it might turn out that Atheists “lag behind” in the world of new media not because they have started to adapt their modes of propagation too late, but because they try to adapt something that is not compatible. Together with a fundamental reconfiguration of regimes of mediatisation, the very politics of oratory have changed: to be a Total Atheist in the world of new media poses novel challenges that many long-time activists and even current leaders within the movement are literally and figuratively not being “called” to meet. In fact, the topic of lagging behind in media links up with a related discussion among my interlocutors about a supposed crisis of leadership. During my fieldwork, there was an obvious generation gap within the Atheist movement—or rather a lack of a young generation— which many senior activists attributed to a failure of their leadership to recruit a successor generation. They admitted to having proven incapable of embodying and reproducing the glamour that had once attracted them to join the movement and become part of progress and change. Many felt they had fallen short of bringing their message across successfully—in particular in new media but also in general. I want to reproduce here part of an interview I conducted with a feminist activist in her late twenties in order to illustrate that the notion of

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a crisis of leadership cuts across various progressive movements and seems indeed to be more profound than a mere time-lag in communication strategies. Geeta (name changed) explained that most progressive movements currently struggle with an ageing demographic because young people get easily disillusioned and tend to feel stifled by the protocols and hierarchies of seniority. Together with like-minded peers, she founded her own group, which is loosely organized as a Facebook group. While she has intense respect and gratitude for senior feminists who have fought for the freedom she and her agemates are able to enjoy today, there were also strong disagreements with her elders when she first joined the feminist movement: Geeta: I got very frustrated in that phase, and I just wanted to get out of it. You have to have space where you are comfortable, and you should surround yourself with people from your own age group . . . . Otherwise, all the time you have to watch for what you’re saying, as I try to not offend somebody. . . . The generation gap is not so easy to bridge . . . Stefan: . . . Some of the people in the Atheist movement, they say they have not been able to produce inspiring leadership, you know, to attract younger people to join their movement. G.: Well, I think that’s a wrong way of looking at things. I think the world has moved on; we don’t need leaders anymore. We don’t need an inspiring charismatic leader. I think we get irritated with inspiring leaders, with charismatic leaders; and they have not understood that yet. What you need is a space for everybody to be a leader or not to be a leader, whatever that is. Everybody has an opinion. . . . That thought [of] being a very charismatic person, that’s not going to work. Like, [our group] really doesn’t have any leaders, or any one person we look up to. There are some of us who are a lot more active than others and have more time or are more dedicated, but it’s not like what they say is the final word. We all provide ideas, we all discuss. Unless you have that equal space, I don’t think younger people want to join us. And I think, a lot of other groups haven’t figured that out yet.3

While senior Atheists call for better, more glamorous leaders, who they remember from their past, younger generations imagine a future with a “space for everybody to be a leader or not to be a leader, whatever that is.” This disjunction of perspectives on the crisis of leadership seems to mirror the demise of the “Nehruvian Consensus,” insofar as it exceeds the merits or shortcomings of concrete leaders and touches upon the very idea of leadership itself as well as, I would argue, notions of individuality and eminence. It refers not necessarily to intergenerational disagreements about what is being said or fought for, but about how one gains the right to say something and fight for it. It thus points toward a more profound transformation of the social and

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cultural fabric within and in relation to which forms of progressive social activism take place. Against this background, the discrepancy between the perceived crisis of Atheism and the seemingly unstoppable rise of the Hindutva movement—surely one of Atheism’s principal foes—might be analyzed in relation to the social aesthetics through which notions and claims of progressiveness are articulated. What is at stake for the Atheist movement is the capacity to inscribe the style or vector of its imaginary of change and its ex-centric positionality into the actual transformations that are currently taking place in Indian society. Or, from a different perspective, Atheist as well as other progressive movements have to face a situation where younger generations have become incapable or unwilling to inscribe their visions of change and ex-centricity into the structures, aesthetics, and functioning of their elders’ movements. As a movement whose very self-identity is based on extolling and propelling social change, the Atheist movement seems more and more overtaken by changes around it, many of which it finds hard to condone—let alone steer or control. The talk of a loss of “glamour” among senior activists indicates an awareness that the style or aesthetics of their progressiveness, especially as far as politics of hierarchy and gender relations are concerned, may be perceived as backward-looking, nostalgic, or, quite paradoxically, conservative. And yet, I want to conclude by emphasizing that this is not necessarily the swansong of Atheism. Young activists may found their own organizations, like Geeta and her feminist network, or they may try to transform existing movements from within, like B. B. Shaw (Chapter 2), or they may turn away entirely from associational activism and the format of “new social movement” in order to explore other modes of living secularity. Whether there will be anything recognizable as an “Atheist movement” in the future depends not on the existence of “disbelief in god” or nonreligious worldviews, because there is plenty of it; it depends on the ways in which younger generations engage with the translatedness of Atheism, with the negativity of the secular, and with the specific conceptual resources, social imaginaries, and cultural repertoires that are within reach and deemed appropriate for occupying their positionality in India and the world.

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Notes 1. Bhakti TV was launched in 2007 as the first Telugu-language satellite channel broadcasting 24 hours of Hindu devotional content, and for many Atheists, it has become a sore symbol for increasingly successful and proliferating religious TV programming. 2. G. D. Saraiah, Bellampalli, January 26, 2015; recorded interview in Telugu. 3. Geeta, Hyderabad, November 20, 2014; recorded interview in English.

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INDEX

activism, 4, 8, 11, 26, 33, 39, 58, 61–64, 67, 68, 94–101, 103n6, 104, 112, 143, 153, 158, 159, 164, 166, 169–75, 184, 185, 191–93, 197 198, 204, 212–16, 223, 225–27, 229, 231, 232, 236, 243 Adivasi, 28, 69n1, 179, 181–82 aesthetic form, 34, 105, 120, 139, 142, 143, 146–48, 157, 160–63, 199 aesthetics (as methodology), 2, 5, 6, 8–15, 69, 87, 106, 114, 120, 131–33, 138, 163–65n2, 170, 177, 186, 191, 212–16, 226, 228–30, 238, 239, 243 affect, 11, 52, 66, 145–50, 159–61, 167, 168, 170, 176, 177, 186, 187, 191, 194n9, 213, 229. See also emotion; feeling and Atheism, 32, 38, 41, 50–57, 101, 116, 134, 181, 183 (see also odium of Atheism) differential allocation of, 33, 34, 100, 105, 114 and relationships, 145, 147, 164 and space, 170, 174, 178, 181–83 agency, 6, 7, 25, 42, 43, 59, 71–75, 88, 101, 105, 112, 114, 115, 151, 213

differential allocation of, 34, 117, 159, 160, 170, 182–85, 190, 191, 214, 215, 218, 221–26 All India People’s Science Network (AIPSN), 155 alterity, 18, 20, 49, 50–55, 58, 69, 84, 201, 228, 229. See also otherness Ambedkar, Bhimrao R., 42, 91, 94, 95, 108, 188, 198, 199 androcentrism, 34, 71, 199, 226 Appadurai, Arjun, 60, 68, 81, 82, 127, 128, 132 appropriateness (aucitya), 38, 56, 72, 75, 84, 100, 110, 111, 119, 120, 122, 123, 127–32, 130, 133, 135n5, 158, 166, 225, 231, 235, 240–43 Aryan invasion, 33, 50, 112, 125–27, 130, 133, 229, 239. See also Aryan migration theory Aryan migration theory, 30, 31 Asad, Talal, 6–8, 11, 19, 37, 139, 141 Atheist Centre, 62, 75–77, 92, 136, 137, 143, 146, 148, 151, 152, 170–81, 184, 185, 187, 188, 190, 193, 194n1, 207–9, 218, 219–20, 223, 240 Atheist Society (Nastika Samajam), 107, 108

272

Ayyanna, 107, 108, 111–14, 119, 123, 134 Babb, Lawrence, 160, 161 Basava Premanand, 143, 148 Bate, Bernard, 114, 115 Bauman, Richard, 128 becoming (Atheism as process), 33, 37, 38, 50, 59, 67, 68, 71, 77, 79, 80, 83, 84, 100, 105, 219, 227, 228, 229, 231 Bhagavatapurana, 124 bhakti movement. See devotion (bhakti) biographic narratives, 17, 33, 76, 77, 88, 101, 138, 147, 185, 219–24, 233 and gender, 222 “black magic” (banamati). See magic blind belief/custom, 90, 102, 118, 145–48, 154, 204–7, 211, 219, 226. See also superstition (mudhanammakam) Bloch, Maurice, 115, 132 body/embodiment, 9, 60, 67, 81, 96, 224, 241 female body, 7, 34, 217, 199, 215, 217, 218, 224, 226 secular body, 13, 16 boycott (of Atheists) 54, 84, 85 Briggs, Charles, 128 Buddha/Buddhism, 23, 32, 44, 45, 47, 97, 103n4, 108, 109, 111, 121, 126, 146, 234 Burchardt, Marian, 234 Campbell, Colin, 5, 6, 8 caste, 18, 27, 30, 32, 34, 41, 46, 50, 51, 56, 57, 69n1, 70n6, 72, 73, 86, 91–93, 97–99, 109, 111, 122, 123, 126, 131, 138, 145, 152–54, 157, 166–69, 172, 174, 176–206, 214, 216, 227n3, 239 annihilation of, 42, 91, 188, 190, 195n11, 198, 230, 231

Index

anticaste movement, 28, 154, 238 casteism, 183, 188–90 and castelessness, 34, 91, 92, 169–71, 177–82, 186, 188, 190–92, 199 disavowal of, 34, 50, 56, 57, 65–67, 169, 178, 182, 186–91 Charvaka, 32, 44, 45, 47, 103n4, 107, 108 Charvaka Ashram, 63, 108, 112 Christian missionaries, 18, 28, 31, 46, 48, 51, 56, 115, 124, 134n1, 156, 168 civilization (Indian) 4, 30, 31, 41, 51–53, 57, 73, 106, 127, 131, 174, 181, 230, 232, 238 and Non-Brahmanism, 31–33, 112, 113, 127, 133, 168, 229 Cody, Francis, 221, 232, 238 colonialism, 1, 4, 8, 13, 16–19, 28, 30, 34, 48, 56, 83, 98, 126, 128, 129, 132, 156, 176, 182, 189, 195n10, 216, 217, 236 and knowledge, 8, 18, 30, 48, 50, 128, 134n1, 167–69, 234 and modernity, 7, 18, 72 and precolonial continuity, 19, 28, 32, 72, 165n2, 235, 236 (see also continuity and rupture) communalism, 1, 34, 35, 69n1, 76, 167–69, 177, 188, 191, 202 Communism, 24, 27–29, 38, 42, 50, 152, 201, 220, 238, 241 Communist Party of India (Marxist), 21 community (of Atheists), 27, 33, 45, 60, 76–80, 83, 84, 86–88, 92, 99, 171, 185, 206, 230, 239 conjuring (entertainment magic), 33, 117, 136–45, 148–51, 156–64, 233. See also Miracle Exposure Program continuity and rupture, 18, 19, 32, 45, 94, 126–29, 132, 133,

Index

165n2, 188, 189, 193, 226, 236, 237, 241, 243 conversion, 31, 37, 38, 69, 78, 115, 121, 156, 169, 176, 202, 229 Copeman, Jacob, 56, 57, 71, 100, 138, 213 critique of religion, 2, 39, 40, 67, 109, 112, 117–20, 127, 140, 143, 160, 180, 206, 230, 231, 235 culture (of Atheism), 17, 22, 32, 40, 72, 87, 111–113, 119, 131, 144, 167, 211, 238. See also civilization (Indian) and cultural repertoire, 45, 46, 52, 101, 124, 126, 230, 243 and lack of Atheist culture, 87, 88, 111, 112, 119, 128 and material culture, 87, 112, 138, 144, 207, 213 Dalit, 27, 28, 32, 33, 38, 69n1, 91, 92, 95, 99, 108, 116, 172, 175–88, 192–94n8 Das, Veena, 197 demon (raksasa), 22, 24, 45, 46, 52, 54, 110, 126, 131, 140, 181 Deshpande, Satish, 189 devotion (bhakti), 21, 32, 42, 124, 126, 131, 135n4, 136, 147, 159–61, 165n3, 212, 220, 235, 239, 244n1 Dhareshwar, Vivek, 189, 190 dharma, 45–49, 51, 70n4, 103n7, 181 disbelief, 23, 24, 67–68, 77, 79, 83, 157, 162, 180 and excess (Atheism as more than disbelief), 2, 18, 40–44, 49, 50, 54, 55, 58, 69, 74, 75, 85, 89, 91, 92, 100, 112, 137, 166, 171, 180, 188, 196, 206, 229, 243 disenchantment, 34, 139, 140–142, 159, 163, 164, 229 dogmatism, 1, 29, 47, 152 Doniger, Wendy, 132

273

dowry, 200, 205, 207, 211, 219 Dr. Malayasri, 211, 212 Dumont, Louis, 70n6, 72, 97 duplicity, 51, 60, 61, 79. See also insincerity efficacy, 33, 38, 105, 106, 114, 116, 120, 122, 127, 134, 139, 144, 145, 158, 161–64, 174, 176, 177, 193, 197, 206, 213, 239 Emergency rule, 154, 155 eminence. See under individuality emotion, 41, 42, 53, 60, 69n2, 78–82, 100, 101, 103n4, 203, 220, 224, 225, 235, 236. See also affect; feeling courage, 53, 64, 79, 101, 113, 114, 146, 147, 171, 183, 223 fear, 51–54, 146, 147, 154, 156, 171, 178, 221 heroism, 7, 114, 134, 183–87, 191, 222, 225, 226, 229 Engelke, Matthew, 12, 213, 219 enlightenment, 7, 17, 28, 47, 49, 104, 106, 129, 132, 185, 196, 198, 225, 232, 233, 238 entertainment magic, 137, 138, 140, 144, 149, 239. See also conjuring entextualization, 128–33 equality (as Atheist value), 34, 40, 91, 110, 157, 166, 167, 173, 182–87, 192, 205, 221, 225, 226, 230 and contextualized individuality, 73, 170, 184–86, 216, 221 ethnographic presentism, 14, 17, 19, 56, 233, 235, 236 ex-centricity, 3, 4, 25, 27, 32–34, 35n5, 69, 71, 75, 84–88, 102, 106, 114, 119, 127, 128, 131–34, 164, 167, 169, 174, 178, 188, 191, 193, 198, 199, 211–15, 218, 219, 229–36, 238, 243 and deviance, 25, 84–87

274

ex-centricity (cont.) and revaluation, 4, 33, 181, 182, 230 and tradition, 25, 71, 75, 102, 182, 200–7, 211–13, 218, 224–6, 230 and transgression, 25, 171, 181, 203, 205, 206, 226 failure (of Atheism), 29, 62, 66, 98, 119, 122, 133, 134, 150, 157, 162, 163, 168, 175, 191, 205, 225–27, 237, 238, 241–43 family (and Atheism), 26, 31, 61, 65, 67, 78–80, 84–88, 91, 94, 96, 99, 101, 137, 147, 153, 170, 183, 197–99, 203–7, 209, 214–26, 231 Farman, Abou, 16 Federation of Indian Rationalist Associations (FIRA), 26, 121, 158 feelings, 7, 9, 41, 58, 60, 66, 76–79, 86, 91, 100, 160, 168–171, 176, 183–87, 190–93, 211. See also affect; emotion femininity/femaleness, 71, 215–27, 236 and domesticity, 34, 216–18, 224–26 feminism, 28, 38, 154, 225, 238, 241–43 freedom (sveccha), 29, 43, 59, 72, 73, 88, 102, 166, 182, 215, 237, 242 Frykenberg, Robert, 177 Fuller, Christopher, 130 functionalism, 5, 8, 10, 230 G. D. Saraiah (GDS), 152–54, 156, 157, 233, 240 Gandhi, Mohandas K., 57, 58, 61, 172, 183 Gandhian movement, 28, 172, 217, 219 and Gandhian values, 61, 172, 173, 209, 217, 219

Index

gender complementarity, 199, 207, 217, 221–26, 230 Gogineni, Babu, 240, 241 Gora (Goparaju Ramachandra Rao), 37, 43, 57–64, 66–68, 146, 147, 170–85, 194n3, 194n5, 209, 210, 220–23, 233, 234 Halberstam, Jack, 35n6 hierarchy, 30, 34, 70n6, 72, 92, 100, 110, 111, 115, 129, 131, 158, 159, 170, 185–91, 242, 243 Hinduism, 18, 30–32, 46–52, 95, 97, 126, 130, 157, 167, 220, 239 “Hinduness” (hindutvam), 61, 65, 67, 221, 225 Hindutva, 95, 183, 243 Hirschkind, Charles, 11–13, 16 humanism, 12, 27, 34, 63, 64, 68, 86–89, 93–102, 166, 169, 170, 178, 183–86, 191, 192, 206, 213, 230 Humanist Youth, 89 ideology, 2, 12, 25–29, 47, 56, 59, 63, 68, 72, 80, 83, 93–95, 99, 100, 115, 186–91, 198, 199–203, 215, 217, 220, 222, 225–27n5, 232, 240 religion as ideology (bhavajalam), 32, 46–55, 70n6, 72, 111, 126–28, 168, 181 secularity as ideological claim, 2, 5–10, 15, 25, 106, 114, 213, 214 semiotic and language ideology, 7, 20, 39, 55, 56, 105, 106, 112, 115, 128–31, 134n1, 138, 159, 164, 218, 231 imaginary. See social imaginary Inden, Ronald B., 73 independence movement, 171, 172, 187, 238, 239 Indian Atheist Society (Bharata Nastika Samajam), 62–64, 107

Index

Indira Gandhi, 155 individuality, 29, 55, 64, 67, 71–75, 86, 97, 102, 115, 167, 194n3, 230. See also personhood and contextualization, 67, 72, 74, 80–83, 100, 185, 199, 215–18, 221–25 and eminence, 74, 79–88, 91–94, 96–102, 110, 156, 185, 187, 218, 226, 230, 235, 242 and gender, 67, 80, 101, 199, 216–18, 221 insincerity, 2, 51–54, 59, 64–66, 76, 95, 114, 168, 211, 212, 231, 232. See also duplicity International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), 26, 241 interpellation, 33, 105, 115, 119, 120, 127, 133, 191, 222, 229, 241 irreligion, 1–6, 8, 17, 29, 35n3, 72, 156, 169 Islam, 48, 69n1, 78 Islamic secular, 236 Jackson, Sherman, 236 jewelry, 210, 218–20 Jones, Graham, 150, 159 Katti Padma Rao, 121–24, 192, 193 Kaviraj, Sudipta, 18, 126, 190 Knott, Kim, 181 Kovoor, Abraham T., 143 Larsson, Marie, 216 Lavanam Gora, 166, 194n5, 194n8 Leach, Edmund, 132 liberalization (economy), 158, 192, 193, 237 linguistic anthropology, 55, 105, 106, 128 literacy, 39, 128–33, 155, 236 Tamil literacy movement, 221, 222 232, 238 literature (Telugu), 39, 40, 45, 53, 111, 112, 129, 196, 201, 235

275

Macdonald, Helen, 142 magic, 6, 47, 106, 137, 139–41, 145, 153, 154, 159–64, 227n6 magic show, 89, 137, 153, 157, 158, 160, 201 (see also Miracle Exposure Program) magic trick, 109, 137, 143, 144, 148–53, 159, 161–64, 197, 200 (see also conjuring) Mandal Commission Report, 189, 190 marginality, 4, 27, 33, 35n3, 74, 79, 84, 87, 88, 97, 99, 101, 102, 112, 114, 126, 133, 134, 181, 182, 230, 236, 237 marriage, 34, 54, 65–67, 76, 83, 86, 91, 93–98, 109, 111, 144, 145, 147, 172, 188, 194n8, 198–226, 227nn3–5, 230, 235 Marriott, McKim, 73 Marx, Karl, 58, 108 Marxism, 21, 29, 43, 51, 70n3, 108, 155 masculinity/maleness 27, 33, 39, 71–77, 80, 81, 84, 88, 94, 99–102, 196, 214–18, 222–27 materialism, 16, 29, 32, 43, 44, 88, 103, 107–9, 111, 113, 137–39, 142, 155, 159, 161, 164, 212–14, 238 materiality (and anthropology), 7, 10, 69, 112, 159, 177, 213, 230 Mauss, Marcel, 72, 73, 81 media/mediation 45, 63, 144, 153, 160, 163, 171, 174, 178, 187, 231, 239–41 Facebook, 75, 76, 240, 242 Internet, 75, 76, 207, 239 media turn (in anthropology), 8, 9, 138, 141, 142, 164, 216 newspaper, 89, 137, 155, 174, 208

276

mental revolution (bhavaviplavam), 37–42, 50, 52, 54–56, 61, 64–69, 75, 78, 79, 84–87, 101, 114, 126, 133, 134, 167, 176, 182, 184, 191, 206, 221, 222, 229–31, 233–36, 240 mental slavery (bhavadasyam), 41–43, 47, 51–54, 59, 64–67, 79, 85, 86, 100, 102, 104, 114, 126, 130, 148, 149, 156, 159, 167–69, 176, 184, 191, 202, 205–7, 211, 212, 221, 224, 225, 228, 233, 235, 237 Meyer, Birgit, 160 Middell, Matthias, 234 Mines, Mattison, 72–74, 81, 216 Miracle Exposure Program, 89, 117, 118, 136–39, 143, 144, 148, 151–53, 156–67, 239 miracle, 137, 139–45, 148–152, 157–61, 164, 165n3. See also magic M. N. Roy, 29, 61, 194n5 mundane, 198, 236 Muslim, 17, 28, 33, 45, 50, 65, 70n5, 75, 78, 84, 85, 88, 111, 124, 126, 146, 168, 174, 176, 182, 216, 219, 220, 225. See also Islam Mythrie Gora, 178, 179, 184, 185, 209, 220 name, 19, 27, 57, 60, 179, 74, 172 and atheism as abuse, 3, 53, 63, 64, 75, 233 and atheism as selfdesignation, 3, 27, 32, 38, 56–66, 83, 179 and onomastics, 33, 38, 40, 55–64, 67, 70n3, 71, 74, 81, 83, 86, 100, 101, 179, 183, 192 personal (secular) names, 56–59, 61, 63–66, 75–77, 89, 100, 111, 179, 182 and practical implementation, 38, 40, 56–66

Index

Narayana Rao, Velcheru, 129, 196 Nau Gora, 187 Nayak, Narendra, 143, 158, 159, 162, 164 negativity. See under secularity Nehru, Jawaharlal, 154 Nehruvian values, 17, 29, 154–58, 238, 239, 242 Ngai, Sianne, 186, 189 Nicholson, Andrew, 19, 44, 46 Niyanta Gora, 77, 137, 180, 210 Non-Brahmanism, 22–24, 28–32, 49, 50, 108, 111–14, 122, 123, 125–28, 168 195n10, 201, 229 nonreligion, 11–13, 35n4 odium of Atheism, 3, 54, 57, 64, 83, 84, 87, 91, 114, 134, 183 onomastics. See under name oratory, 65, 104, 109, 110, 114–24, 127, 143, 152, 192, 201, 239, 240, 241 and oratorical mode of address, 33, 105, 115–20, 123, 127, 132, 133, 239 Orientalism, 1, 4, 30, 39, 47, 72 orthodoxy (chandasam), 22, 23, 29, 47, 70n7, 103n7, 146, 209–12, 222 otherness, 4, 15, 25, 40, 44–46, 50, 87, 88, 102, 106, 140, 142, 164, 190, 205, 233 Pandian, M. S. S., 50 Parry, Jonathan, 129 parsimony/pomplessness (niradambaram), 200, 207–13, 226 Pasala Bhimanna, 136, 137, 148–52, 156, 199, 200 patriarchy, 34, 50, 198, 199, 203, 206, 216–21, 224–26 patronage, 74, 81, 82, 91, 93, 97, 110, 135n4 Penmetsa Subba Raju (PSR), 64–68, 198

Index

People’s Atheist Society (Praja Nastika Samajam/PAS), 117, 118, 153, 154, 157, 233 perceptibility, 2, 3, 8, 9, 15, 17, 26, 33, 34, 37, 38, 56, 60, 67–69, 71, 139, 142, 143, 146, 148, 150, 156, 159, 161–64, 171, 176, 177, 186, 191, 206, 207, 210, 212, 214, 226, 229, 232 as problem, 6, 11, 15, 25, 38, 198, 199, 226, 228, 232 performativity, 3, 13, 15, 33, 81, 83, 98, 105, 110, 127, 128, 134, 139, 148–52, 157–63, 167, 185–87, 192, 228, 230 personhood, 2, 16, 33, 71–75, 80, 230. See also individuality Plessner, Helmuth, 14, 15, 35n5 political economy, 6, 30, 48, 50, 99, 105, 135n4 Pollock, Sheldon, 45, 81, 189, 190 positionality, 13–16, 24, 25, 33, 35n5, 38, 68, 78, 88, 97, 102, 106, 114, 119, 127, 133, 163, 164, 166, 167, 182, 188, 201, 205, 207, 218, 226, 228–33, 236, 243 Positive Atheism (Gora), 58, 59, 61, 170 postsecular, 6, 10, 34n1, 34n2, 141, 163, 164, 181, 238 practical implementation 2, 4, 10, 11, 30, 55, 68, 104, 166, 170, 197, 198, 229, 230, 231, 238. See also putting into practice and matching of words and deeds, 33, 37, 38, 40, 59, 60–67, 76, 85, 102, 138, 172, 226, 232 modes of, 68, 104, 105, 138, 163, 164, 191, 192, 197, 238 and totalization, 198, 231, 232 practical sincerity (dvikarana´suddhi), 33, 34, 38, 55, 60–68, 71, 79, 84, 85, 87, 98, 100, 102, 104, 106, 114, 134, 138, 158, 164,

277

166, 178, 182, 191–93, 197, 198, 207, 211–14, 218, 223, 224–27, 231, 232 Prasad, Leela, 111 print, 39, 129–33 productive incompleteness, 49, 54, 68, 231, 233, 237 program (karyakramam), 26, 62, 89, 95, 137, 138, 143, 158, 166, 171–81, 187, 188, 191–93, 196, 197, 209, 212, 222, 231, 234, 239 progress, 41, 43, 138, 168, 174, 234, 237, 238, 241 progressiveness, 25, 41, 43, 52, 57, 99, 155, 181, 182, 196, 200, 201, 204–6, 235, 237, 238, 241–43 progressive movements, 28, 38, 119, 132, 175, 196, 225, 232, 237, 238, 241–43 propagation (pracaram), 33, 55, 62–68, 104–6, 112–20, 124, 127, 131–34, 138, 143, 144, 171, 172, 180, 187, 191, 192, 197, 214, 222, 223, 228, 231, 239, 241 and dialectical victory, 119–25 Protestantism, 56 publicness, 1, 27, 33–35n3, 37–39, 48, 55–62, 65, 67–69, 74, 75, 81–84, 99, 109–11, 114, 115, 135n4, 143, 170–79, 183–86, 188, 191, 192, 195n10, 198, 203, 206, 210–17, 226, 229, 232 purification, 7, 9, 57, 213 putting into practice (acaranalo pettatam), 2, 4, 11, 15, 30, 32, 33, 40, 56, 68, 94, 104, 105, 113, 134, 138, 158, 163, 178, 183, 186, 191, 192, 223, 231, 232. See also practical implementation Quack, Johannes, 12, 13, 28, 32, 104, 105, 138, 213

278

Radical Humanism, 28, 29, 61. See also M. N. Roy radicalness, 18, 24, 25, 29, 37, 79, 101, 126, 127, 171, 172 Ramakrishna, B., 39, 40, 43, 52–55, 57, 62, 65, 66, 68, 108, 111–13 Ramasami, E. V., 31, 32, 108 Ramaswamy Chowdary, Tripuraneni, 108 Rationalism (hetuvadam), 1, 12, 16, 26–29, 56, 57, 63–66, 68, 84, 86, 93, 94, 104, 108, 121, 124, 132, 135n2, 142, 143, 148, 149, 158, 160, 188, 192, 200, 201, 213, 214, 223, 241 Rationalist Society of India, 61–64, 188 reenchantment, 140, 141, 161–63 reflexivity and anthropology, 6, 10, 12, 141 and project of Total Atheism, 2, 3, 33, 37, 38, 55, 57, 58, 69, 101, 151, 159, 161 reform (social and religious), 8, 18, 21, 28, 32, 34, 46, 49, 50, 61, 68, 95, 98, 99, 108, 111–15, 124, 138, 167–69, 173, 192, 196–98, 202, 205, 206, 210, 214, 216, 218, 225, 235 relationality. See under secularity religious nationalism, 1, 4, 22, 131, 176. See also Hindutva religious pluralism, 35n3, 37, 87, 88, 102, 167, 206, 230, 235 renunciation, 96–102, 103n7, 103n8, 230, 235 representational economy, 33, 82, 128, 130, 199, 214, 239 resignification, 87, 101, 158, 159, 161, 219. See also signification rhetoric, 29, 33, 84, 114, 125–33, 135n4, 162, 163, 205, 222, 230, 235, 240 Richman, Paula, 124, 125 ritual, 17, 23, 30, 44–46, 78, 82, 97, 106, 115, 124, 132, 142,

Index

145, 193, 194n4, 197, 207, 213, 227n4, 277n6, 240 Atheist rituals, 12, 109, 201, 202, 206, 210, 213, 220–23 Roberts, Elizabeth, 141, 142 Roy, Srirupa, 87, 154, 158 Samaram Gora, 137, 152, 180, 181 Sambasiva Rao, B., 62–64, 67, 68, 91 Sanskrit aesthetics (alan˙kara´sastra), 69n2, 81–83, 111, 135n5,n235 Saraiah, G. D. (GDS), 152–57, 233, 240 Saraswathi Gora, 146, 147, 170, 171, 179, 187, 209, 220–25, 227n6 Sathya Sai Baba, 160, 165n3 science, 6, 18, 28, 41, 77–79, 89, 90, 109, 137–42, 145, 149, 154–56, 159, 160–64, 222, 228, 232–35, 240 scientific temper (vijñana drsti), 34, 91, 137, 139, 151–59, 161–64, 165n2, 230 secrecy, 40, 60, 138, 140, 148–51, 157 secular difference, 2–6, 11–16, 25, 27, 33, 34, 38, 69, 71, 75, 84, 106, 133, 134, 139–43, 161–64, 165n3, 228, 229, 232–35 secular/religious binary, 6, 10, 12, 16, 140, 141, 164, 215, 235, 236 secularism (political) 1, 2, 7, 10, 11, 34n2, 35, 56, 91, 158, 199, 213, 215, 231, 240 in India, 22, 35n3, 37, 69n1, 87, 155–58, 169, 175 secularity and academic critique, 6–10, 16, 106, 230 and lived secularity, 2, 3, 5, 10, 11, 13, 17, 35n6, 69, 75, 203, 228, 236

Index

and methodology, 4–19, 36n6, 56, 69, 106, 141, 228–30, 233, 235 as moral narrative, 7, 9, 105, 139, 213, 228, 231 and negativity, 3, 4, 8–13, 16, 20, 24, 25, 32, 40, 58, 69, 74, 75, 84, 101, 181, 230–32, 235 and postcolonial perspective, 2, 7, 13, 18, 19, 103n6, 163, 165n2, 169, 234 as quality of difference, 2, 3, 13–16, 25, 27, 38, 69, 71, 84, 102, 133, 163, 164, 228–235 (see also secular difference) and relationality, 8, 10–15, 69, 181, 229 and space, 14, 158, 177, 178, 181–83, 191, 208 secularization, 1, 5–7, 34n1, 34n2, 161 self-respect, 30, 31, 52, 85, 89, 91, 184–87, 191, 201, 221 senses/sensorium, 7, 8, 14, 42, 82. See also perceptibility sentiment, 60, 64, 66, 84, 86, 100, 134, 174–78, 182–92, 215, 221, 224. See also affect; emotion; feeling religious sentiments, 34, 132, 168, 169, 174–78 and defferential allocation of, 170, 171, 182–91, 215, 221, 224 Seth, Sanjay, 218 Shariff Gora, 53, 54, 71–89, 92, 93, 96, 99–102, 170, 178, 182, 183, 185, 187, 193, 200, 239 Shaw, B. B., 71–75, 88–103, 182, 211, 243 Sheehan, Jonathan, 236 Siegel, Lee, 140 signification, 46, 48, 70, 106, 158, 189, 204, 214–18, 224, 226, 238. See also resignification Simmel, Georg, 73, 100 slave-mind, 42, 43. See also mental slavery (bhavadasyam)

279

social imaginary, 17, 24, 25, 33, 42, 45–48, 55, 75, 98, 99, 105, 111, 119, 121, 181, 191, 215, 222, 229, 232, 235, 243 and triadic structure, 54, 114–19, 127, 133, 163, 164, 168, 170, 183, 184, 186, 191, 215, 229 social outlook (san˙ ghadrsti), 57, 85, 91, 102, 194n3). See also social responsibility (badhyata) social reconstruction (san˙ ghanirmanam), 2, 53, 57–59, 62, 64, 78, 86, 101, 112, 127, 138, 166, 172, 231, 232 social responsibility (badhyata), 40, 58, 80, 83, 86, 102, 147, 215–18, 223–26, 237 social service (san˙ ghika seva), 28, 79, 91, 95–102, 138, 166, 169, 172, 187, 210. See also social work social work, 89, 91, 92, 98, 101, 173, 192. See also social service (san˙ ghika seva) Society for the Eradication of Caste (Kulanirmulana San ˙ gham), 75, 76 Special Marriage Act, 202, 206, 208, 212 speech act, 19, 55–59, 105, 120, 122, 165n2 Srinivas, Mysore N., 193 Srivastava, Sanjay, 16 state bifurcation., 19, 26, 122 Subba Raju, Penmetsa (PSR), 26, 64–68, 70, 198 Subha Gora, 207–12, 219, 220, 224 superstition (mudhanammakam), 6, 21, 22, 25, 33, 40, 41, 61, 109, 114, 116–18, 135n2, 137, 139, 145–48, 151–62, 165n2, 166, 167, 171, 221, 231, 234, 237. See also blind belief/custom

280

Index

Surepally, Sujatha, 154, 157 Swamy Vivekananda (Narendranath Datta), 48, 94, 95, 99, 210

truth, 54, 71, 82, 90, 93, 105, 133, 138, 139, 147, 155, 165n2, 165n3, 223, 228 Tumma Bhaskar, 41, 222, 223

Taussig, Michael, 141, 162, 163 Theism, 32, 36n8, 43, 51, 54, 59, 61, 76, 100, 111, 114, 128, 130, 188, 197, 212, 222, 225, 228, 229 translation, 19, 20, 23, 24, 35, 38, 50, 148, 151, 234 of Atheism, 23, 24, 40, 41, 46, 47, 49, 58, 234, 236, 243 concept of translatedness, 14, 20, 23, 24, 33, 35n7, 44, 49, 50, 56, 58, 60, 68, 69, 103, 121, 146, 168, 169, 190, 209, 233–36, 243 and incommensurability, 20, 24, 44, 48, 49, 230, 234 Trawick, Margaret, 100, 101

unity in diversity, 35n3, 87, 88 Vemana, 39, 40, 52, 54, 65, 108 Venkatadri, Ravipudi, 61–64 Vijayam Gora, 137, 179–81, 185, 193, 194n5 Viswanath, Rupa, 168, 177 way of life (jivitavidhanam), 2–4, 11, 34, 41, 49, 58, 59, 64, 65, 67, 77, 94, 98, 101, 104, 112, 134, 170, 171, 192, 193, 197–99, 207–15, 218, 222, 224, 226, 229–31 wedding, 76, 84, 199–219, 226, 227. See also marriage Wohlrab-Sahr, Monika, 234