Paper short abstract:

Through an un-erasing of the primary documents (under)utilized in Homi Bhabha’s classic postcolonial essay, “Signs Taken for Wonders,” I rectify a much-perpetuated and now-prevalent (mis)reading, thus restoring history to its proper significance in theorizing Indian Christianity’s “Indianness.”

Paper long abstract:

As observed already by Bill Bell of Homi Bhabha's "Signs Taken for Wonders," the historiographical flaws of this classic of the postcolonial studies canon have largely gone unnoticed. Based upon "an anecdote taken from history" (that is, out of context; New Literary History 43 [2012]: 325), the gap between the evidence adduced and the author's macrotheoretical claims seems almost impossible to bridge. That "anecdote," truncated in Bhabha's retelling, was originally told by one Anand Masih, a CMS (Anglican) catechist, about the marginal-caste adherents of a non-Brahmanical 'Hindu' sect—the Sadhs—and their eventual 'conversion' to Christianity. Drained of their particularity, "Signs and Wonders" tells us almost nothing about the Sadhs, either before or after their encounter with Anand Masih "under a tree outside Delhi, [in] May 1817" (as the subtitle of Bhabha's essay reads). Most troublingly, much of the plausibility of the argument for two of the author's most distinctive and durable concepts—"hybridity" and "mimicry"—hinges, counterfactually, upon the Sadhs' resistance to Anand Masih's missionary overtures. Overall, the subjectivity of the Sadhs never really emerges; instead of being allowed to speak, they are spoken for, being of mainly instrumental value for a theory-driven argument with a pre-determined outcome. Similarly, Anand Masih, the CMS catechist, portrayed as having capitulated to Christianity's "colonial authority," assumes an emblematic status as the quintessentially "Indian" Christian. Through an un-erasing of the primary documents, I hope to rectify a (mis)reading, thus restoring history to its proper significance in theorizing Indian Christianity's "Indianness."