The Regulation of Religion and the Making of Hinduism in Colonial Trinidad

By Alexander Rocklin

How can religious freedom be granted to people who do not have a religion? While Indian indentured workers in colonial Trinidad practiced cherished rituals, "Hinduism" was not a widespread category in India at the time. On this Caribbean island, people of South Asian descent and African descent came together—under the watchful eyes of the British rulers—to walk on hot coals for fierce goddesses, summon spirits of the dead, or honor Muslim martyrs, practices that challenged colonial norms for religion and race. Drawing deeply on colonial archives, Alexander Rocklin examines the role of the category of religion in the regulation of the lives of Indian laborers struggling for autonomy.

Gradually, Indians learned to narrate the origins, similarities, and differences among their fellows' cosmological views, and to define Hindus, Muslims, and Christians as distinct groups. Their goal in doing this work of subaltern comparative religion, as Rocklin puts it, was to avoid criminalization and to have their rituals authorized as legitimate religion—they wanted nothing less than to gain access to the British promise of religious freedom. With the indenture system's end, the culmination of this politics of recognition was the gradual transformation of Hindus' rituals and the reorganization of their lives—they fabricated a "world religion" called Hinduism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Feb 7, 2019
• ISBN: 9781469648729

Alexander Rocklin

Alexander Rocklin is assistant professor of religious studies at the Otterbein University.

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The Regulation of Religion and the Making of Hinduism in Colonial Trinidad

The Regulation of Religion and the Making of Hinduism in Colonial Trinidad

ALEXANDER ROCKLIN

University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill

This book was published with the assistance of the Anniversary Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

© 2019 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Set in Charis by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rocklin, Alexander, author.

Title: The regulation of religion and the making of Hinduism in colonial Trinidad / Alexander Rocklin.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press,

[2019]

| Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018045500| ISBN 9781469648705 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469648712 (pbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469648729 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: East Indians—Religious life—Trinidad and Tobago—Trinidad. | Hinduism—Trinidad and Tobago—Trinidad—History. | Trinidad—Religious life and customs. | Freedom of religion—Trinidad and Tobago—Trinidad—History. | Great Britain—Colonies—Religious life and customs.

Classification: LCC BL1168.T753 R63 2019 | DDC 323.44/20972983—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018045500

Cover illustrations: Details from author’s photo of the goddess Draupadi and her five husbands, the Pandavas, in a Hindu temple in Trinidad; decorative round mandala ornament © iStock.com/Mashot.

Chapter four includes material from Obeah and the Politics of Religion’s Making and Unmaking in Colonial Trinidad, Journal of the American Academy of Religions 83:3 (2015): 697–721. Used here by permission of the American Academy of Religion.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1    Crossing the Dark Water

Part I

Religion

2    Converting Religion

3    Regulating Religion

4    Outlawing Religion

Part II

Hinduism

5    Standardizing Sanatana Dharma

6    Making World Religions

Postscript

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

With a project of this magnitude, I of course owe debts of gratitude for support and hospitality to numerous individuals and groups, stretching from the United States to the Caribbean to the UK, and I cannot name all of them here. Without all of the help, advice, and generosity I received, this project would not have been feasible.

My yearlong research trip in Trinidad and London was supported by an IIE Graduate Fellowship for International Study funded by the Mellon Foundation. Additional research trips were also supported by the University of Chicago’s Committee on Southern Asian Studies. My time writing was supported by a William Rainey Harper Fellowship, a Martin Marty Center Junior Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute: Challenges of Teaching World Religions. Later research trips were also supported by the Religious Studies Department at Willamette University.

Many people gave me guidance and hospitality during my time researching this project in Trinidad and the UK. In particular I must thank Brinsley Samaroo, whose generosity both intellectually and personally was invaluable. Brinsley helped to facilitate my work in Trinidad at all levels, giving me advice on sources and interview subjects, helping to arrange a place to stay, sustaining me with star fruit and zabocas, and carrying me down Mayaro. I want to thank Mahadeo and Vinod, for teaching me how to lime. They truly made me feel at home in Trinidad. I have to thank Nneka for her incredible generosity, for feeding me, teaching me to cook, giving me a place to stay during later research trips, and being patient with my questions. I also want to thank brother Farouk for our many long conversations in the evenings at the mosque in St. James, and for helping me to find interview subjects. I would like to thank Maarit Forde and the members of the Cultural Studies Research Workshop at the University of the West Indies St. Augustine for sharing their work with me and allowing me to share mine. I would like to thank Lindsay Harlan, after our chance meeting, for our conversations and for forcing me up on stage during Indian Arrival Day. For their assistance in a variety of venues I would like to thank Bridget Brereton, Premnath Gooptar, Ian Senior, Nirmala Harrylal and the community of the El Dorado Shiva Mandir, and H. H. Mason. I must also particularly thank the librarians at the University of the West Indies St. Augustine’s West Indiana and Special Collections, particularly Kathleen Helenese-Paul, Darron Small, and Glenroy Taitt. I note with sadness the passing of Darron in 2016. I benefited immensely from our casual conversations about Trini food and culture and our continued exchange of recipes. May he rest in power. I must also thank the archivists at the National Archives of Trinidad and Tobago. And in London I want to thank the librarians at the British Library and the National Archives for their assistance.

There are various people who have read and given feedback on this project. I would like to thank Wendy Doniger, Stephan Palmié, and Muzaffar Alam for their guidance and help in all stages of the book. I am grateful for their support and advice, their probing questions, and their careful eyes. I want to thank Brent Crosson, a true colleague and liming partner, for our many long conversations over roti, and for our continued collaborations and exchanges of work after we both returned to the States. It has been nice to have someone as excited about obeah and prone burial as I am. I thank Keith McNeal for his advice and support, both in Trinidad and in the States. I would like to thank the participants in the various incarnations of the Problems in the History of Religions seminar led by Wendy Doniger for their thoughtful feedback and camaraderie, particularly Chaz Preston and Alex Hsu. And I want to thank Emily Crews, for her time and enthusiasm in reading various drafts of chapters and for her friendship, always holding me accountable. I would like to thank my fellow participants in the Martin Marty Center for the Advanced Study of Religion seminar for their feedback, particularly Andrew Nicholson and Christian Wedemeyer. I thank the respondents from the Religion and Culture Web Forum at the Martin Marty Center, Aisha Khan, Paul Johnson, and Lindsay Harlan for their critical feedback and warm encouragement, both in and outside of the Forum. I would like also to thank the participants in the University of Chicago’s Workshop on Latin America and the Caribbean, especially Lee Cabatingan. I would like to thank my friends and colleagues in the Religious Studies Department at Willamette University, Shatha Almutawa, Stephen Patterson, Karen Wood, and Xijuan Zhou, for their encouragement and feedback during faculty colloquiums. Thanks to S. J. Crasnow, An Yountae, Amina Steinfels, and Mark Graham, for your feedback on the introduction. And I thank the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful feedback and insightful suggestions.

Finally, I want to thank Rachel, for her patience, support, and love during my work on this project and beyond, without which none of this would have been possible.

The Regulation of Religion and the Making of Hinduism in Colonial Trinidad

Introduction

He seems to infer thence—so many ceremonies, so many rights—to their free observance. But this rule—a rule of liberal governments only, has its limits.

—The Coolie ‘Hosay’ Fete, Trinidad Chronicle, March 27, 1871

Religion before Hinduism

The telegraph wires were blocking the route of the procession of tombs. In 1871 the newspaper the Trinidad Chronicle published a petition submitted by a group calling itself A Conbination

[

sic

].

The petitioners identified themselves as coolies, Indian indentured laborers. They were writing to request the temporary removal of telegraph wires strung across the public roads leading into the city of San Fernando, in the south of Trinidad. The wires blocked the passage of their tadjahs, large bamboo and paper models of the tombs of Imams Husayn and Hasan, grandsons of the Prophet Muhammad, that were taken on procession during Hosay (or Muharram), the commemoration of the lives, struggles, and deaths of the Imams. A Conbination wrote:

We Coolies have conbined

[

sic

]

of preinforming you that, as our FETE DAY is rapidly advancing, we shall indeed be exceedingly joyous of beholding everything clear before us for the same purpose. Example, as there are varieties of Nations as well as Sexes: There are also a great diversification in their rites and ceremonies. For instance, take the first for granted: the English takes a great delight in attending to his Church, for he believes it pleaseth God: in like manner the Pagan, by paying his homage to his God Hosá, he also believes it pleaseth the same God. Hence we deem it necessary to strive all efforts of avoiding all obstacles which withstands or deters us from perpetrating that homage which is attribute

[

sic

]

to God.¹

These Indian laborers were engaging in a complex set of comparisons and translations between rites and ceremonies English and Pagan in order to render their practices enacted in what was defined as public space legible to colonial elites as religion, and therefore permissible. In so doing, though, they did not make recourse to recognized religions such as Islam or Hinduism. At the time of the petition, Hindu was often used as an ethnoracial term in Trinidad, leading to formulations such as Mahometan Hindoos.² Hosay is today identified as a Muslim commemoration. However, doing Hosay did not (and still does not) necessarily mean that one identified as Muslim. Many practitioners likely did not. The various conbined Indian petitioners in 1871 were all in some sense Hindus, then, and some were also Muslims and possibly Christians. This episode offers a glimpse of the central issues addressed in this book, revolving around the politics of the discourse on religion, the constraints and possibilities for what could be said and done through that category.

The colonial regime’s implicit definition of religion privileged private practice and interior belief. This definition spiritualized and Protestantized subalterns’ interactions with superhuman and other non-obvious beings. Commenting on a performance of Hosay in the mid-nineteenth century, a Port of Spain Gazette editorialist declared: "It would probably be a far more edifying sight, and to the Christian mind far more grateful, to see these misguided creatures quietly, and unostentatiously manifesting their devotion to the great Ruler of all things … And it is a fair dream to look forward with hope to the accomplishment—(when these and all similar outrages on decency and common sense shall be swept away), to give place to that sincere heart worship of the only true God, which, quietly in spirit and in secret, shall some day be paid alone."³ This excerpt fairly clearly demonstrated elite understandings of what true religion was, and what the colonial elite thought Indians’ religious practices ought to be like: quiet, unostentatious prayer, or heart worship, done in spirit and in secret, or out of the public eye, contained within the individual worshipper, within a private home (or perhaps the plantation barracks) or a church. This definition of religion, to paraphrase Talal Asad, separated religion from power,⁴ confining it to a proposed interior and private sphere, off public roads and out of the way of the working of the state and the economy controlled by the plantocracy. Indian laborers in Trinidad were meant to know their place, remaining busy with the work of agriculture, and their gods or God were a private matter, meant to be a focus of concern only during their time off (which was strictly regulated).

Religion, as colonial officials defined it, however, was not initially a self-evident way of dividing up the world. Subalterns pursued other ways of organizing life. There were no words for religion or secular in the languages of the peoples the British colonized in South Asia.⁵ Further, there was no Hinduism to speak of as a widely held collective identity and social formation before the late nineteenth century. Hinduism as a postulated world religion only began to emerge in India at the turn of the nineteenth century, and then only as an object of discourse in debates among Christian missionaries, colonial officials, and Hindu-identified Indian elites.⁶ If indentured laborers did not have religion or Hinduism, as we understand those terms today, when the indentured labor scheme began in the late 1830s, how then did it become thinkable to groups like A Conbination that they had a religion?

Religious freedom preceded religion for Indian laborers in Trinidad. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the East India Company institutionalized the discourse of the freedom of religion and religious toleration for its Indian subjects, something that was renewed when the British Crown took over governance of those Indian subjects, both in India and abroad, after 1857. This gave weight to the category of religion. For Indians signing on as laborers in the Caribbean, religious freedom and tolerance were specifically meant to be enshrined in their labor contracts. Plantation owners hoped this promise of tolerance and freedom would help facilitate the free flow of labor from India. However, as one outraged reaction from colonial elites to A Conbination’s petition suggests, the liberal ideals of freedom and tolerance had their limits.⁷ For liberal governments, freedom is never simply unfettered action.⁸ For practices to be eligible for freedom or tolerance, they had to be performed within the bounds of colonial norms for religion.

Subaltern Trinidadians were not using the category religion in ways that we typically use it today: as an individual’s private or personal feeling or as a distingushable group (a so-called world religion), defined as a discrete textually oriented community of belief. Practitioners of Hosay like A Conbination, as well as of other ritual groups dedicated to various other superhuman beings, had very different ideas from colonial officials about the possibilities for social formation within the constraints of religion. They were bringing together other kinds of communities that were challenging to religious and racial regimes on the island. Laborers often came together not necessarily because of a shared creed or doctrine, but through shared experiences of plantation labor, hardship, and illness. Groups mobilized the category religion, at least provisionally and in more or less formal fashion, in order to authorize not any religion among the world religions, but rather temporary ritual communities of purportedly incompatible religious and racial constituents. These communities united by parading model tombs for Imams, walking on hot coals for goddesses and saints, or summoning spirits of the dead, all practices that they did not necessarily define as part of particular religions. These groups featured diverse membership, including peoples of Indian and, at times, African descent, who would have been identified as Hindu, Muslim, and Christian. This was religion before Hinduism.

As the following chapters track, only gradually, over the course of the indenture scheme and after, did a certain elite model of religions as social entities clearly distinguishable from one another and other aspects of life begin to become the taken for granted view of the world for subalterns. Within the regime of colonial plantation discipline, one of the few spaces that could be constructed outside of the driving concerns of industrial agriculture was that which fell under the name of religion. Adoption of the category religion was a way for the colonized to authorize experimentations in social formation within the constraints and possibilities of colonial norms. Within the strictures of life on plantations, Indians, regardless of caste, sectarian, linguistic, or regional identifications, were thrown together, making new lives with one another and other groups on the island, and these new modes of social formation were adapted as Indian Trinidadians moved off plantations and formed villages when their indenture contracts ended. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as a consequence of coming under the discipline of colonial institutions such as plantations, schools, orphanages, courts, and jails, Indian Trinidadians incorporated and began to gain a mastery over the category religion and its attendant norms, at the same time that, through the discipline of colonial institutions, they were mastered by them. Colonial institutions could not completely reshape Indians’ prior relationships with superhuman beings. However, those social relations had to be compacted into colonialism’s newly changing rhythms of life. The category religion was not simply a superimposed product of the West in the colonies. Rather, it was a joint—if highly contentious and unequal—venture on the part of both colonizers and colonized. By incorporating and repurposing the category of religion, Indian Trinidadians engaged in what we might call (following Foucault) a reverse discourse, speaking back to the colonial regime in the name of religion.⁹

In crossing the boundaries constructed through colonial norms for religion and race, subalterns did not see borrowing, adapting, and combining cultural forms and personnel from various sources as necessarily contradictory or hypocritical (the view of colonial officials). Subalterns, through their participation in the ritualizing processes of ritual formations such as Hosay, cultivated a sense of the world as including exchanges and borrowings across reified lines, what we might call, following A Conbination’s lead, combinative dispositions that were not resonant with the exclusivist logics of colonialism.¹⁰ We need not think of these combinations of people and practices as simple mixing or syncretism, a term with its beginnings in Christian theological polemic that suggests the existence of discrete and whole religions that can then be mixed.¹¹ As Aisha Khan has argued, there are no pure cultures; cultural forms are always already mixed. We must, then, be attentive to the politics of claims of purity or mixedness, what Khan calls mixing metaphors.¹² It is important to keep in view who is claiming purity or mixture, unity or plurality, identity or difference, continuity or change, and for what audiences those claims are being made, when, where, and with what valuation and potential consequences, while also analyzing the politics of differing modes of the articulation of discourse and practice.¹³

Rather than equal mixture resulting in the dissolution of difference, we can instead think of such combinative groups in part—to adapt a phrase from Édouard Glissant—as being in relation. In conceptualizing this mode of difference and exchange, Glissant does not want to use the genealogical tree, a colonial form of knowledge that privileges origin (root) and discrete difference (branch).¹⁴ Instead of the tree, Glissant speaks of the gardens of slaves in Martinique, tended outside of their time working in the slave masters’ fields.¹⁵ As Glissant describes it, in a very narrow space of the garden, slaves were able to grow a whole variety of different plants, and they did it in such a way that the plants mutually protected each other. These creole gardens offer a different model with which to think of modes of social change in which you can exchange with the Other while being yourself, you are not one, you are multiple, and you are yourself.¹⁶

We might contrast the creole garden with the botanic gardens of the British Empire, which were more in line with the model of the tree. Botanic gardens methodically cultivated plants from every accessible part of the earth’s surface.¹⁷ The plants in the botanic garden were systematized and segregated, planted by genus and species, with many gardens labeling them with the scientific name, order, and authority, the indigenous name, and place of origin.¹⁸ Like other idealized images of the colonial tropics, the botanic garden worked to blot out the shudders of life of the plantation system, to maintain a pristine and idealized order, homogenizing the messiness of the world and erasing colonial violence.¹⁹ In like fashion to the order of knowledge produced through the botanic garden, the colonial discourse on religion produced what Tomoko Masuzawa calls the striated differences of the taxonomy of the world religions system, defining discrete and separable species of religion and so ordering and managing the colonized world.²⁰

There was a Royal Botanic Garden in Trinidad and the exertions of Indian laborers helped to maintain this performative emblem of British imperial supremacy enacted through the conquest and presentation of absolute biological order. Under prison rules in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Indian indentured laborers in Trinidad, as part of their punishment for breach of indentured labor contract, were forced to work on government lands, including the Royal Botanic Garden, an ideal unfree workforce for an idealized colonial microcosm.²¹ But also, like slaves in Trinidad before them, Indian laborers were allotted garden plots of their own on plantations to cultivate, either near their barracks or on waste land.²² D. W. D. Comins, in his inspections of indentured laborers’ conditions in the early 1890s, described seeing laborers at different times growing in their own gardens corn, bananas, and rice,²³ as well as cassava, pepper, tomatoes, ladies’ fingers, daal, pineapples, plantains, pumpkins, climbing beans, granadilla, lemon grass, turmeric, and corilla.²⁴ Indian laborers planted together crops from Africa, South Asia, Europe, and the Americas. But they gardened not according to colonial taxonomy but with the seasons, taking advantage of what plants and seeds happened to be available and that could get on good together in interspecific cooperation and also competition, grafting and cross-pollinating. Yet multiple individuals with differing interests could be doing the cultivating, and they did so at the whim of the plantation owners, subject to their caprice and indifference, and at times in contravention of their dictates.²⁵

Following Glissant, rather than using the botanic garden–like taxonomies of the world religions system, we might think about ritual groups in relation in Trinidad using the model of the gardens cultivated by indentured laborers. Such groups were recurring but temporary, coming together and apart for specific purposes at particular times and places, whether annually for ten days during Hosay’s lunar calendar, for the ten days of a ritual theater performance of Ramlila, or at a moment’s notice to repay a vow to the Virgin La Divina Pastora. Members could maintain distinctions while recognizing relative change and interdependence of their parts, drawing cultural materials and personnel from what were defined as different groups and traditions, Hindu, Muslim, and Christian, Indian, African, and European. But these groups were also contested both from within and without, marked by shifting hierarchies. Hosay bands jockeyed for priority, and fire walkers competed for prestige as they walked the coals. Their combinations, ruptures, and exclusions were variously performed, conceptualized, and justified. Postulated racial and religious differences between groups and individuals in relation could be elided as people came together, but they could also be maintained and amplified,²⁶ at times characterized by agonistic intimacies.²⁷ Different groups had different roles in ritual. For instance, Muslims ritually consecrated and ministered to the representations of the bodies of the martyrs for the benefit of mostly non-Muslim participants in Hosay. Differently racialized bodies were at times imagined as having special efficacy or abilities, as, for instance, Afro-Trinidadians took on the roles of the black rakshasas (ogres or demons) in some performances of the ritual play Ramlila, celebrating the ancient Indian hero and god Rama. Relation is not static or frictionless, but rather emerges out of dynamics of power. Trinidadians’ ways of being in relation were shaped by colonial governmentality and discipline, fractured by multiple discourses, ritualizations, and exchanges.

Moreover, Glissant writes of colonial governance that the more it works in favor of an oppressive order, the more it calls forth disorder as well. The more it produces exclusion, the more it generates attraction.²⁸ Subaltern Trinidadians could tactically use to their advantage the contradictions and ambivalences within and between colonial discourse and enacted policy on religion in order to cross what colonial elites defined as hermetic and inviolable religious and racial boundaries. Hosay, for instance, an ostensibly Muslim ritual commemoration, was the only Indian holiday Trinidadian laborers officially had off from work, regardless of religious identification, meaning that everyone across reified religious (and racial) lines participated. In a sense, then, colonial structures of regulation at times encouraged subaltern Trinidadians’ purported religious and racial admixture that colonial officials found so puzzling and potentially threatening. When such norm-bending ritual groups like A Conbination were confronted by colonial officials and challenged to justify their continued practice, particularly when such practices were public and potentially disruptive of commerce and the running of the state (for instance, rendering telegraph wires inoperable), subaltern practitioners had to mobilize arguments in the idiom of religion. They invoked their right to toleration and freedom, they made comparisons between normative Christian practices and their own, they drew on the authority of myth and colonial knowledge on the differences between religions and races, and they contested the assignment of supernatural agency.

Hinduism, then, did not arrive in Trinidad on the boat with the first Indian laborers. Indian Trinidadians certainly reproduced sectarian identifications and interacted with superhuman beings brought from South Asia (and reformulated in the Caribbean) that could be described as part of what is now called Hinduism. However, Hinduism in Trinidad was discursively produced and performatively enacted with urgency and fervor by a range of actors beginning only in the early twentieth century, as the striated differences of the world religions model gradually became taken as given on the island. Into the twentieth century, after the end of indenture, and interconnected with the decline of practices such as Hosay and fire walking, middle-class Hindu-identified Indian Trinidadians began the complicated and contentious work of making Hinduism. They incorporated colonial models into their programs for Hindu reform and social formation. In extending and reworking these processes, they adopted and adapted structures and practices from Christian institutions, as well as critiques and social reform programs from Hindu (and also Muslim) missionaries from India, and so set about making Hinduism a social fact on the island, one among other separate and separable religions of the world. They also set about de-ethnicizing the category Hindu, accentuating the term’s religious connotations. Various Hindu associations organized in order to standardize and rationalize Hindu practices and regularize the heterogeneous groups participating in them, to purify ritual groups in order to make them into a modern, coherent, even global, Hinduism. The following chapters examine this transition from combinative modes of social relation featuring diverse constituents enacted in the idiom of religion (religion before Hinduism) to both Orthodox and Reform Hinduisms based on a model of religions as separate and separable groups brought together by shared belief.

Religion-Making and the Colonial Secular

What becomes interesting then is the definition of historian of religions or religion; after all,

[this]

is what the fight used to be about … We spent twenty years on whether it’s plural or singular … I’ll still go to the wall on the singular. I refuse the word [in the] plural. That suggests there really are such things. Singular keeps it in doubt.

—Jonathan Z. Smith, Hermeneutics in History Conference, November 4, 2006²⁹

Religions are made. Religion-making is a set of collective, performative processes groups enact based on the specific norms for religion (as well as race, class, gender, and sexuality) naturalized in the particular contexts in which the category religion has been operationalized.³⁰ Beginning in the modern period, groups have produced and reproduced religions through particular unequal and recyclical processes of social formation. Religions are also unmade. Those practices and groups identified as religion, in moments of insecurity and contest, have been liable to be construed not as religion but rather as some one of religion’s others, such as primitive superstition or impure politics, as part of ongoing attempts at social management. Colonialism and imperial expansion were two major engines of religion-making. Religions have emerged from the accidental cultural debris of expanding and contracting empires; through the self-conscious work of colonizers producing knowledge about colonized natives; through the colonized’s resistance to colonial domination and at the same time their acquiescence to its ways of knowing, its modes of life; and through the self-conscious social formation of diasporic communities in colonial and postcolonial contexts.³¹ This is my argument.

In colonial contexts, on scales macro and micro, religions have been produced through law and regulation, models for social life becoming models of social life,³² worked and reworked through struggle, agreement, and imposition; but colonial religion-making had broader ramifications. The metropole shaped the colony, but the colony also shaped the metropole. Frantz Fanon has written that Europe was literally created by the global south—as a wellspring of material and intellectual resources made available through the exploitation of land and people of the colonies—and Homi Bhabha has written that the history of Europe’s colonies is a supplement (in the Derridean sense) to European national histories, that European history happened elsewhere.³³ Nineteenth-century experts working on colonial technologies of theory production attempted to use the ethnographically rendered lifeworlds of the peoples of Africa, Asia, and the Americas as the raw materials for imperial religion-making, what David Chidester has called the Empire of Religion.³⁴ Yet subaltern groups had stakes in these processes and made their own interventions in theorization, somewhat more limited but at times equally translocal in scope. In the struggles with and over colonized peoples, their land, and its fruits, those lifeworlds were made and unmade again and again as religion and not-religion through the processes of colonial secularism.³⁵ In the following pages, then, I strive, following Jonathan Z. Smith’s suggestion, to keep these terms in doubt. I keep in focus the particularity, contingency, and idiosyncrasy of religion in singular and plural, in general and in particular.³⁶

Talal Asad, in Formations of the Secular, argues that the very categories religion and secular are the twinned co-products of modernizing projects, and so inseparable from them.³⁷ These terms are shifting and polyvalent. Asad, Saba Mahmood, Elizabeth Hurd, and John Modern, among others, have argued that secularism need not involve the separation and decline of religion in society, as that is commonsensically defined,³⁸ but primarily has involved the definition and management of what counts as religion and not-religion.³⁹ Colonizers authorized their violent extractive work of colonization in part through the very production and hierarchization of religious differences, making colonies secularizing projects. Following these theorists, I argue in this study that colonial secularism was the constellation of (at times contradictory) colonial policies and institutions including, but not limited to, policies mandating religious tolerance, freedom, or equality; the enactment of the separation of religion and government; the apportioning of government funds to religious (church) institutions; the regulation of subaltern labor in part through the definition of true and appropriate religion and not-religion in governmental edicts regulating ritual on public roads and in anti-vagabondage and obeah laws; and the work of institutions that enforced and augmented those policies and their ruling categories, including police, courts, jails, and schools. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd defines secularism as a matrix of discourse and practice that involves defining, managing, and often remaking religion in public space.⁴⁰ In this sense, the colonial regime in Trinidad engaged in secularism. It played the major role in the production of the secular and religious in the colony. Yet it is important to note that its reach—for instance, in obeah cases, where police officers monitored subaltern practices through informants in ostensibly private homes—went beyond public spaces, meaning that colonial secularism was not restricted to the public, even as it claimed ultimate authority in defining those differentiated spheres.

At the same time, the institutions of colonial secularism inculcated embodied schemes in colonized subjects, patterning actions, the cumulative effects of power, of surveillance and training, all of which served to produce bodies and minds.⁴¹ In Trinidad, these techniques made certain sorts of secular bodies that incorporated segregated spheres of religion and secular, public and private.⁴² Rather than simply being demystified, these secular bodies were incorporating schemas for determining the appropriate assignment of supernatural agency and the containment and appropriate display of affect deemed religious. Asad distinguishes the secular from the political projects of secularism, placing the former as conceptually prior to the latter.⁴³ Yet the production of the domains of religious and secular created the limits within which modern life for colonized populations was required to take place, working to help shape their sensibilities, and guarantee their experiences.⁴⁴ The secular brings together certain behaviors, knowledges, and sensibilities in modern life.⁴⁵

The development and inculcation of the logics of the colonial secular within the body involved their naturalization as habitus, the accumulated, sedimented effects of repeated practices, giving a practical sense of the religious and not-religious. The habitus, a durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations, Pierre Bourdieu writes, allows individuals to respond appropriately and within the given taken for granted norms of a situation.⁴⁶ But within these bounds, there is room to maneuver, including subaltern’s self-conscious work of self-formation and their tactical work of religion-making and -unmaking.⁴⁷ Keith McNeal, in his comparative study of Kali and Orisha devotion in Trinidad and Tobago, has helpfully termed some of these processes subaltern liberalization.⁴⁸ The formative press of the liberal promises of the British Empire and the work of global capitalism facilitated the liberalization of colonial subjects. This subaltern liberalization involved the development of senses of individualism, of the distinctions between public and private, and of a right to religious freedom.⁴⁹ Religion, I argue, did not precede subaltern liberalization. Subaltern liberalization through colonial secularism was a primary process through which religions were made in Trinidad.

Given the dynamics and politics of the history of colonial secularism, the un-self-reflexive use of religion risks uncritically reproducing the discourses of such projects. Human social words are filled with and authorized by all kinds of non-obvious or superhuman entities and powers (whether gods or states, forefathers or ghosts, heavens or black holes). The politics of picking out one set of such beings as being religious, the logic of this colonial secular history, must be kept in view.⁵⁰ Therefore, in my analysis I am not attempting to discover true subaltern religion that existed prior to and (partially) survived the processes of colonial secularism. Yet I am not advocating eschewing the category of religion wholesale. I try to take Smith’s introduction to his Imagining Religion seriously, not as history or neutral description, but as imperative (and perhaps polemic). Insofar as religion is a product of the scholar’s imagination (though it neither is nor has ever been only a category of scholars), we must be self-conscious about its use. Religion is an ordinary category, like any other in our repertoire, and we should treat it as such. Scholars can, therefore, define and redefine it given their own questions and interests.⁵¹ Yet we must always hold in view the fact that what we are doing is an act of translation, a transformation during which something is lost and also gained. Translations are never neutral. And part of this must involve tracing the histories of this category, including its role in colonization, race-making, and empire building. In what follows, I analyze the contested and contradictory conceptions of religion that emerged in the everyday processes of life in Trinidad, the micro-practices of the interactive making of religions on the island.

Part of the colonial government’s work of secularism involved what David Chidester describes as colonial comparative religion: the manufacture of knowledge about the origins of, beliefs and rituals constituting, and similarities and differences among religions, delineating and so helping to confect religions as a mode through which colonial power was produced and maintained.⁵² David Scott argues that colonial power had the task of not only regulating acts of resistance and inspiring acquiescence but ensuring that both were done in relation to the categories and structures of modern political rationalities,⁵³ among which we can include religion. Through their formation as colonial secular subjects, the colonized gained what I call, adapting Chidester’s terminology,⁵⁴ varied aptitudes in subaltern comparative religion: forays into often contentious (and sometimes violent) negotiations over the translating (and so transforming) of subaltern practices into terms that rendered them intelligible according to colonial comparative religion. I take seriously the ways in which subalterns in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Trinidad began to accept (and not accept) as given colonial norms for religion. Subaltern subjects had their own projects of producing religion, which operated within the colonial discourse on religion yet at times moved counter to most colonial elites’ taken for granted understandings of what religion was and should be.

The category religion is inseparably interlinked with the histories of forced labor migration in the Caribbean. How religion has been defined, what has gotten to count as religion or not, has been an important element in authorizing the management and repression of slaves and indentured laborers in the Americas. Achille Mbembe writes, following Foucault, that, as the flip side to imperial liberalism’s freedoms, "one of the motors of liberalism is