Political Deification in South Asia - Transcript

Intro [00:00:02]

This is the Nordic Asia podcast.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen [00:00:10]

Welcome to the Nordic Asia Podcast, a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region. My name is Kenneth Bo Nielsen. I'm a social anthropologist based in Oslo and one of the leaders of the Norwegian Network for Asian Studies. In this episode, we talk about South Asian politicians who are treated like gods and about gods who enter politics. In other words, we discuss political deification in South Asia. This phenomenon is the focal point of a new thematic issue of the journal called Religion, which just came out as issue 4 in 2022. I was fortunate enough to be one of the guest co-editors of that section. And I'm joined today by a panel of people who have contributed to it in various ways With me, our co-editor, Moumita Sen, the brainchild, one might say, behind the Political Deification Project, and also associate professor of culture studies at MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society. We have also editor in chief of the journal Religion and professor of the study of Religion in Bergen, Michael Stausberg. In addition, with us, two contributors to the thematic issue Praskanva Sinharay, who recently defended his PhD dissertation from the Center for Studies in Social Sciences in Calcutta. He's also a research consultant with the Election Commission of India. Last but not least, Sharika Thiranagama, associate professor of anthropology at Stanford University. Welcome to all of you. So let's just jump straight to it. Political defecation. What is that?

Moumita Sen [00:01:54]

It's a bit funny because, you know, as much as I do what political definition is because, you know, we worked on it together on the issue, but I'll keep a straight face and play my role of answering for the both of us. So just to make it clear, what I'm saying now is thought and written by the both of us. So, yes, what is the main idea in popular media in India? Political defecation refers to the phenomenon of political leaders being treated like Hindu deities. But we also include in our working definition of political defecation the related but slightly different process of established and emerging deities being invoked in political arenas. The term is used regularly in Indian media because it's a serious and common theme in Indian politics. It has also been a topic, as many of us know, in social and print media. You know, some commentators will warn their readers against, quote, the danger of defecation and all this, quote, culture of political veneration. And this from our perspective, it seems like a more normative position. But also, you know, you hear middle classes seeing such acts of obvious political defecation as an oddity or a scandal or an outright joke. You know, at the state of the Indian democracy, there are so many examples of this in India. Like Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister of West Bengal, she appears regularly as Durga that both Kenneth and I have explored quite a bit, or Sonia Gandhi, the leader of the Congress Party, is treated like Hindu goddess Lakshmi or Rahul Gandhi. Her son is portrayed as Hindu God, Shiva and so on, and have been discussing this issue for a number of years now. We organized this conference, as Kenneth said, in Calcutta, and then we began putting together this fantastic edited collection, which we are about to learn more about. We are really grateful for all the fantastic researchers who collaborated with us despite COVID and everything else. And we built the concept together and here it is now. So to really find out what on earth is political defecation, you have to check out the thematic issue in this issue of religion. You'll find the link in the show notes. So back to some examples. Let's think as recently as spring of 2022, when a number of Indian states went into election, Prime Minister Narendra modi was described by a minister in Madhya Pradesh, a state government as an avatar. PURUSHA So like an avatar or reincarnation of the Vedic cosmic man, you know, the guy Krishna becomes after reciting the Geeta on the battlefield to Arjun. Anyone my age from India brought upon Chopra's television series Mahabharat really remembers this. I think this minister said that Modi had been born into this world like a great Hindu god. Ramakrishna To end the despair caused by corruption and casteism of his predecessors. Now we can see, you know, how when an Anglophone elite person here says this is received mean almost with outrage or best humor, They might mock this as political gimmick. But we also understand for some, this could be a sign of sincere devotion. But overall, it is our contention that the Indian voter understands the forms, processes, the material, symbolic indicators of political defecation, almost as a matter of common sense. And certainly political workers, activists and leaders engaged with this as part of their political work. They embrace it or keep it somewhat at an arm's length, depending on the context of political action. In that sense, we see political deification, at least in part as an EMIC concept. But what's interesting is that it has not so far been interrogated academically. What we did in this issue is that we propose the notion of political defecation as a useful analytical concept. In the study of religion and politics. We felt that a lot is lost in the gap between disciplines such as political science, history, study, religion and political anthropology. Our aim was to explore this very gap between disciplines, and we felt that this is where political defecation would be found at the intersection of religion and politics. So in this thematic issue, we asked questions like what kind of efficacy of gods and their things are mobilized in the interest of community building and vote bank politics. We asked, How can we understand the processes through which political leaders, God, men, stars of all kinds and big and small deities? How do they mingle together in the public sphere as like special beings that are able to cohere communities of followers? And how can we really theorize the slippages between the divine and all this material business of money and power among political authorities, actors, Labour voters and so on? I think I'll stop now and let some others speak about this issue.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen [00:06:52]

But this is a great pitch for the thematic issue as a whole. Thanks so much for this Moumita. It's been a great concept to work with also along the way. As you say, it's an EMIC term. It appears in the press every now and then it pops up in social media and all of a sudden there's this attempted transformation of what begins as an EMIC term into more of an analytical category.

Moumita Sen [00:07:18]

Yeah. And I think that our ambition has been to lift the concept of political deification to the level of the ETIC. Right. And to use it as a prism for cross-cultural analysis. So I feel like what we were most occupied with is not so much what political deification is or means, but rather to understand comparatively what political defecation does. That is, what is it productive of? And that's also what our collaborating authors made us think about. So basically we were more interested in a functionalist definition, and the main argument that runs through the collection of articles is that political defecation is fundamentally productive of political communities at different scales. That some forms of political defecation operate at the scale of the nation and sovereign authority. Then there are other forms which operate at the scale of, let's say, a more localized, caste based community within relatively established political orders. And then there are other forms that are scaled in ways that enable people to partake in countercultural formations that work to bring new political communities in opposition to the established order as well. But across all scales, all processes of political defecation constitute political communities. I think that's the argument that we have been able to make throughout this issue.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen [00:08:46]

Michael Stausberg, as mentioned. You are the editor of Religion, the Taylor and Francis Journal that has published this collection. Not all listeners may be familiar with Religion. What is this Journal's mission?

Michael Stausberg [00:08:58]

First, thank you for having me. And of course everybody should have heard about this journal. The Journal has been published since 1971. So your thematic issue is issue four in volume 52. The Journal started in a period when the study of religion was reinventing itself. It kind of shook off the heritage or the legacy of philosophy and theology, or purely textual studies that had dominated the field or some kind of an essentialist phenomenology of religion. So a group of young scholars in the UK started this journal, which initially was very much run as a collective effort and later became more streamlined into a professional journal. It then internationalized, so the journal soon started to get an American editor and editorial board and we, the present generation of editors, kind of continued this development, me being German by nationality, working in Norway on the one side of the ocean, and my co-editor, a Canadian on the other. We are the first ones who are not tied to Britain academically or by nationality. And in recent years, the trend has continued to involve scholarship and scholars from other parts of the world. So we try to expand our reach. So this year, for example, besides your political deification thematic issue, we have two more thematic issues that also have predominantly contributors from the South and from Asia, one on COVID 19 and another thematic issue on EMIC concepts, that is concepts emerging from non dominant languages that could potentially enrich our scholarly vocabulary when studying religion. So this is a short outline of the history and the journal then has a fairly broad range in terms of theory, method and cases. And we welcome basically all relevant research that is not tied to normative agendas on how religion should be.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen [00:11:33]

I wanted to ask you why you think a collection of papers on political deification was a good match for the Journal?

Michael Stausberg [00:11:41]

We that is us editors, the editorial board members who initially read your proposal and then the readers of the individual contributions welcomed the originality and relevance of the topic and also the range of analytical perspectives that were first promise and then actually also provided. And of course, your proposal resonated with our ongoing initiative to remain committed to cross-disciplinary work and to feature also the excellent scholarship of colleagues from different parts of the world.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen [00:12:25]

If you don't mind me getting just a little bit personal. This is the last question for you before we move on to the other participants. When we were first in touch with you about the possibility of perhaps your journal publishing this collection. I remember one email in particular where you warned us to be mindful of the risk of simply ending up with a collection of articles that were and now I quote my memory vaguely about religion and politics in South Asia. Probably a very real risk. Now, looking back now that we know the final result, did we succeed in this?

Michael Stausberg [00:12:59]

Well, you think we would have gone for publishing the the issue if you if you hadn't? No, really. I mean, this initial suspicion as an editor, you have to be kind of suspicious because often you are getting promised things that then in the end don't really materialize when it comes to thematic issues. But in our case, I think we had a very good and effective and fruitful dialogue first between us in these initial conversations and then between you and the contributors. So one saw things converging in a certain manner then between the referees and the contributors and in the end, in a final round also between me and the contributors. So it was kind of an interlocked dialogue that proceeded on different levels. I also began to like this idea of picking a term that originated in a certain context, and that initially was one of critique and of a normative agenda. But then reading it in a way against the grain and doing something analytical with it so that it would offer a new perspectives on the dynamics of religion and politics in South Asia and maybe even beyond. I do think that was all in all, a very productive process.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen [00:14:31]

Let's turn now to some of the individual contributions to the thematic issue. Praskanva Sinharay, first of all, congratulations on the successful defense of your PhD only yesterday.

Praskanva Sinharay [00:14:43]

Thank you.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen [00:14:45]

The PhD is on the Matua, a religious community in West Bengal. And this group is also the focal point of your article in this thematic issue. It's a group or a community that might not be all that well known outside of the state of West Bengal. Who are the.

Praskanva Sinharay [00:15:05]

You are right. The motorways have remained outside the purview of academic inquiry for the longest time, in spite of being a numerically strong and politically and culturally significant community in the history of modern Bengali. The most was, I'll tell you, the followers of a distinct anti caste religion called the drama that emerged in the 19th century in the eastern parts of pre partitioned Bengal. And the religion became extremely popular, particularly among the normal shooters who are formerly untouchable caste community within the Hindu society. And the reason behind the popularity of the religion is its egalitarian philosophy and promise of a costless social religious order. And in fact, the initial mobilization of the normal movement, which we know from this work, for example, actually started around this community. And in the recent past, the community has become politically and electorally very important in the state of West Bengal and also in other parts of India. And that's it. I mean, their emerging political force.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen [00:16:09]

What is the importance of mature symbols in the electoral politics of West Bengal, but also elsewhere?

Praskanva Sinharay [00:16:17]

The use of mutual symbols, which I actually concentrate on in developing my article. It's very important in the domain of elections, especially in today's times. And mostly the symbols they use are the images of the two founders of the religion, Richard and Tucker. Especially more important in the areas which are more populated in the districts bordering Bangladesh. This is a very recent phenomena, let me tell you, and which started since the late 2020 years back, the two icons were completely unknown to the mainstream politics of the state. It was limited. The consumption of these iconography was limited within the community in their print literature or in the festivals. But now the symbols have a much wider audience. The development of this is because of movement, which was led by their main organization called the Sanga. And now that the authors have become an electorally salient community that no political party can ignore them. And in fact, political parties across ideological line, as I witnessed during my fieldwork, have started using symbols in their campaigns that are giving. One example, like at present is very common during election campaigns to use the images of each other and Green Party posters or banners or to carry the most religious flags in political rallies. Another example, if I can mention, is the recent visit of the Indian Prime Minister Modi to the temple of Richard Tucker in Bangladesh in 2021, at the time when the West Bengal State Assembly elections. What's going on? And actually these examples testify, the growing salience of symbols in the domain of politics.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen [00:17:58]

You've been working on the motor for a long time. They are, as we heard before, the subject of your PhD, I think it's now at least ten years ago that I first saw one of your publications on the motor, a shorter article, I think, in Economic and Political weekly. So this is clearly something you've been thinking about working through for at least a decade now. I wanted to ask to what extent this idea of political deification has changed your way of thinking about this community compared to how you've thought about the motorway and some of your earlier work?

Praskanva Sinharay [00:18:34]

Yeah, actually a lot. When I started working on the metaverse during my infill, actually, I was particularly interested in the movement for citizenship rights of Dalit refugees who migrated from Bangladesh after 1971 and the participation of leadership in electoral politics to achieve their very specific demands. And also I looked at the major shifts that was happening at the time in the larger politics of West Bengal, the rise of caste. It was Bengal politics in some sense. But while I continue to closely study the movement for citizenship rights and the voting behavior of them, what was my fieldwork actually introduced me to the more complex world of motor politics. I observed how motor deities and religious symbols were invoked in the realm of politics, and particularly for the purposes of dimension for community building and identity formation, both by two organizations, other Dalit organizations, as well as by other political parties, mainstream political parties. And these phenomena of political deification of deities that I witnessed in my field actually gave rise to what I call a mature political public. This mature, political public is a counter political public that stands in opposition to the upper caste establishment. It's heterogeneous in its character due to its internal tensions, but also have a shared goal towards achieving dignity, substantive citizenship recognition and sharing the development agenda of the state. And thanks to the conference, like Gods in the public sphere organized by you and others in Calcutta in 2019, that actually motivated me to think more seriously about the idea of political division. So thanks to you.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen [00:20:14]

You're most welcome. You're most welcome. One moment to the cases you've given us. Now they're all from India. No, but the scope of the issue is actually South Asia, its political deification in South Asia. And there's also one paper on Bangladesh by our Oslo based colleague, RL Root, but also contributions on Sri Lanka, Sharika Thiranagama, as an anthropologist, you've worked on Sri Lanka now for many, many years, including on a range of issues related to civil war and political violence. The Tamil militant organization, the LTTE, that you write about in your chapter is famous for its emphasis on death and sacrifice. Could you tell us more about what the relationship is between this emphasis and then the figure of its leader, Prabhakaran?

Sharika Thiranagama [00:21:01]

Thank you. And I just want to start off actually by thanking both Kenneth and Momager for inviting me to be part of this issue. And I also learned a lot from using political deification. Let me start off by saying I don't think that there's anything uniquely Tamil about the importance of death and sacrifice and martyrdom, because I think we see that the sacrifice and circulation of death is central to nationalism, and martyrdom is in most political movement. But death and sacrifice and martyrdom in the elaborate and institutionalized in ways that are very, very unique and they're very centrally focused exactly on the leader Prabhakaran. And you can see that in two ways in relation to the movement and in relation to the public. And I'm sure anybody listening in will know what I mean, because it's a very phenomenal Tamil diaspora in Scandinavian countries. Actually, the LTTE, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, they went from a militant movement, among many others, in the 1980s to banning other Tamil militant movements and seizing power as a kind of hegemonic force in Tamil nationalism. And it had this internal skeleton that really shaped it. It was an emphasis on hierarchical militarization, obedience and absolute loyalty, and it was able to manage this very violent transition through making this call for Tamil Eelam a Tamil homeland, into article of faith synonymous for itself and through the figure of the leader Prabhakaran. So Prabhakaran became the very personification of the LTTE and all ritual slogans and imaginaries of Tamil Eelam became mobilized around his kind of retaliation and deification. And so you can see this in a number of ways is both internal and external. So fairly early on, LTTE cadres wore cyanide capsules, occupy around their neck and, you know, young cadres would say, just a thought of prabhat and help you strengthen your heart and quench their thirst and suicide, which is known as that color. You know, the killing of oneself was renamed that the gift of oneself by the LTTE and at the same time as this kind of routine possibility of death for all cadres. You also had the Special Suicide Squad, the Black Tigers, and the kind of aesthetic surrounding the Black Tigers is also kind of heightens the special chosen nature of death in the world. And this kind of chosen ness is centered on the figure of Prabhakaran. You know, if you're a black tiger, you're supposed to have a meal, your last meal with Prabhakaran. So what the LTTE really did was it came up with these two concepts of martyrdom, both around the leader. One of them is the theory. In Tamil, it means abandonment. It's the abandonment of life. You die, both men and women, while killing. And the other concept is a very the great hero, which actually the maverick is much more as a popular purchase. And both of them kind of valorize the sacrifice of your life as the heroic act. The death of the self is valorized over the death of the other. And most of this was elaborated after 1990 when the entity became supreme. They set up this office called the Office of Great Heroes to develop meteorology and symbology and big public festivals. And it was all about Prabhakaran too. So from that point onwards, like cemeteries, even for a mostly Hindu cadre, became more elaborate. Family funerals were no longer allowed. LTTE cadres Stones only had their movement names the details. And then you had these two big festivals, So internal to LTTE territories is the current. Now that's a Black Tigers day in July that was never celebrated in the diaspora because obviously it's a celebration of Suicide Squad. But that's a very important festival within territories where you'd have all these posters of all the the suicide squad's and memorials and so on, and then Ma Verna, which is very, very big. And that's very well known in the diaspora too. That's the public festival in November, which is on Prabhat birthday and on March. Ranulph families within Sri Lanka were allowed to enter LTTE cemeteries because they weren't allowed otherwise. But on those days they could mourn their lost ones. But all these public occasions center these matters in relation to Prabhakaran. Give it begin the ceremony of marriage and he would light the sacred flame. He would ritually deliver a speech broadcast around the world on TV stations. And the speech was supposed to be like this planned for the year forward. And then along with this kind of videos of this which were screened everywhere else, you'd have all this kind of proliferation of aesthetic photographs of martyrs, the LTTE flag, its colours, red and yellow. There are screensavers. You can't imagine how much memorabilia days and so much of it, almost all of it focuses on Prabhakaran and these kind of big Calendrical public occasions perform the LTTE claim to be Tamil to create humbleness to create new. Families around the organization and around loyalty to the leaders. Prabhakaran was sanctified as the one who embodies sacrifice and the one who sacrificed for. One of the really important things to know about that is that the only martyrs for the only death and sacrifice their counted were those who were cadres or associated with the movement. So civilians and those from other movements killed by the state or those the LTTE killed couldn't be counted as martyrs because you had to die sacrificing for Barbara. And that's very different. In Palestine, for example, anybody who dies as a result of Israeli state action is a martyr. But that was never the case for the they controlled it around sacrificing for Prabhakaran. And one of the interesting things you see after the end of the war and basically the killing of Prabhakaran by the Sri Lankan state, is that for the first time you really see Tamil media in the last ten years talking about civilians who died at the end of the war as martyrs. That's a very new use of actually understanding martyrdom as it applies to the ordinary Tamil public, not only to the cadres.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen [00:27:13]

What do you think the lasting impact of the political deification of Prabhakaran even after his death is going to be?

Sharika Thiranagama [00:27:21]

It's quite phenomenal. I began the article I did for your special issue by recounting how I was at a Catholic mass and I was kneeling and listening to the sermon. And then the priest spoke of Jesus as Tulliver. Now Tulliver, for everyone who knows, is a Tamil word for leader, but were Tamils called Prabhakaran. And I was listening to and thinking. Okay, so what does it mean to call Jesus after the name that everybody thinks of for Papa? And what are the connotations? Is it a way of in a repressive context, also sneaking in references to Papa because the priests are saying, We must listen to Talavera, we must listen to his word. And in a Tamil public where everybody, including myself, I'm a dissident, I would very much say, but recognizes the charge of what it is and that world. It's very clear to me that Prabhakaran is not going to shape the way we think about gods and goddesses in Sri Lanka because there's a very complex religious landscape which also these religious leaders tried to make sure that they didn't take over because the sanctity of the threatened to kind of overtake all these other sites and bases. But the kind of aesthetics and the structure and the shape of the entity will shape does shape how Tamils think about political leaders. It continues to shape how the Sri Lankan state persecutes Tamils because it's insistent that it needs to keep the alive in order to continue its repression. But culturally, aesthetically, you can see the way in which what the LTTE set up these aesthetics, these deification continues to shape just how people even consciously or unconsciously put up yellow flags, for example, at memorials, which are the LTTE colours, or the way that children in the diaspora don't realise that the kind of humbleness they get is one crafted by the LTTE. There's many ways to be Tamil, but for the last 20 years the LTTE has dictated what it means to be Tamils. That is a very profound shaping of political and social life.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen [00:29:36]

Moumita Sen, we're approaching the end of this episode. But there's one final thing I'd like to ask you about, and it has to do with the fact that both in the introduction, but also in the conclusion to this collection, we kind of speculate that political deification may be one of those concepts that travels quite well in the sense that it may, as an analytical category, also resonate beyond South Asia. What's going to be next for political deification?

Moumita Sen [00:30:05]

Our hope was that even though we were all working in the tradition of grounded theory and ethnographic thinking that this would be possible outside, that it would be possible to apply this. I'm currently working on a research project which looks at political defecation at the level of Asia with different Asian polities. So I'm looking at things like red tourism in China, where travellers visit sites of revolutionary significance, including sites connected to communist leaders, the Imperial Cult of Japan, the reverence of the remains of Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. But, you know, these cases are all over the world, though. I mean, just think about the treatment of the image of Lenin in Russia or the reburial of dead bodies in both socialist Europe. We also found this interesting while we were doing research that in popular and media discourse, the concept of defecation is now applied to describe the relationship between political leaders and their dedicated followers in a great variety of contexts, both in Europe, America, in the global North and the global South. We found that the relationship between Donald Trump and his following among the white evangelical Christians was seen like that in Germany. Angela merkel's handling of the refugee crisis some years back, the kind of led her to almost near defecation of Merkel, a savior kind of thing. The fact that the trope of defecation circulated so widely in popular discourse on politics in many parts of the world, and it apparently appeals intuitively as a way of understanding political processes, it may be taken as an invitation to further careful empirical research. For me, this was a very important point. I would like to see the analysis of political defecation comparatively across contexts in the global north and south, because I feel we don't gain much from seeing this as an example of, quote, radical alterity in the usual kitty of Eurocentric political theory. It's not like people in the global South are all weird and irrational and full of religion, and they haven't learned secularism in the Colonial school correctly. It's not like these processes are pre-modern or pre-colonial, right? They're born of post-colonial modernity, and they coexist in the same terrain with so-called Eurocentric constitutional democracies. I think that such concepts built from the global South may actually serve to reveal the gaps that exist between liberal political theory and the actual practice of politics. And much of current scholarship in the global South is actively pursuing this need to decolonize by building on hybridized EMIC concepts. And this is a long and difficult project. It's a hugely important task of building and recentering categories from our fields in the global South. We wanted our special issue to be part of this work to foreground concepts from the Global South in conversation with cases from the Global North.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen [00:33:13]

Moumita Sen, Michael Stausberg, Praskanva Sinharay, and Sharika Thirana gama. Thank you all so much for joining me today to talk about political deification in South Asia. You can read more about this in the latest issue of religion. That's volume 52. Number four, just out fresh off the press. My name is Kenneth Bo Nielsen. And thank you for joining the Nordic Asia podcast showcasing Nordic collaboration in studying Asia.

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