Interview with Neena Mahadev

September 21, 2019

University of Toronto

Andrew Dade: Thank you for visiting Toronto and giving your excellent talk today, Dr. Mahadev. I appreciate your drawing attention to the pneumatic in the context of the Connaught Initiative’s themes of sovereignty, sanctity, and soil. For our readers, how do you articulate that relationship of the pneumatic with sovereignty, sanctity, and soil in your work?

Neena Mahadev: Thank you for the question. I have been thinking about a pneumatic theology as a way that Pentecostals think of the idea of the Holy Spirit (see de Abreu 2009; de Abreu 2021 ). The idea of being pneumatic goes back to a Greek idea of “air”, but also “soul” and “spirit”. For Pentecostals, one of the modalities of transmitting the Holy Spirit through the person is through the intaking of breath. The other way is through fire. It seems to me that the symbolism of “tongues of fire” captures the sense that glossolalia is ignited, and catches on, to sanctify the whole person. For Pentecostal Christians, tongues of fire are symbolically and metonymically destructive and regenerative. So that is the other aspect of the elemental analogy. There is an interesting way in which for Pentecostals, the Spirit – the Holy Spirit – is seen as moving through the air to democratically embrace the people within a congregation and overtake them, so that a convert does not convert by their own will, but rather through the will of God that seizes them, takes them over, and sanctifies them. This is what my interlocutors argue is at the heart of what causes their conversions. While many Buddhists in Sri Lanka contend that conversions to Christianity are happening “unethically” through the allure of material charity, the Pentecostals contend that, “it is neither the will of the proselytizer nor the will of the convert. It is actually the will of God coming through the Holy Spirit.” Now, what I was trying to argue in the paper is that the pneumatic idea of the touch of the Holy Spirit – the haptic touch – is believed to infuse the corporeal self, the body, as well as place and space; in their view, the sacred touch can infuse the land. And I described in the ethnographic portion of the paper how the soil is considered as becoming sanctified through the presence of the pastor. When he rolls up in his car, he’s seen as having grace and that grace is believed to be infused and emplaced into the soil by the tires of his car. The devotees in his ministry then pick up the soil from the tracks and take it home so that they could plant that soil in their gardens and let it flourish at their thresholds. They conceive of the soil as a materialized piece of grace to take home with them.

Andrew Dade: In my research, I’ve learned about how Buddhist communities, via conceptions of recitation and its sound, infuse water that is then sanctified as well. I like how we can think with these elements of water, fire, air, soil in broader relationship with one another instead of in isolation.

Neena Mahadev: Right, that is a really valuable observation. Perhaps also we can think about these things as different forms of transubstantiation. Or in taking in the Kantian idea of sublimation, conceiving how these transformations might happen.

Andrew Dade: And you used the idea of transduction as well to capture that which Webb Keane has written about in his article “On Spirit Writing“

Neena Mahadev: Yeah. In considering transduction, I’m interested in thinking about changing something from one state to another. Air into soil, for example. Within the anthropology of media, anthropology of religion, and what’s being called “religion and the media turn” several thinkers are doing some really productive things with this notion of transduction of form and shape, or the aesthetic of shifting from one modality of transmission to another. The reason I got interested in that idea of transduction is because of this very question of how to mediate the distance between the self and the divine, or the self and nibbana [nirvana] in the case of Buddhism. There’s a gap that needs to be mediated and this seems to be at the core of what scholars in the anthropology of religion and the media turn are trying to examine with the sensorial, theological, and ontological aspects of religiosity. With the idea of a pneumatic Christianity or Pentecostal Christianity, this gap between the self and the divine is mediated primarily through the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is conceived of as a mediating force that can traverse space and air, to very easily enter into the corporeal body and sanctify it, but also enter into the soil and sanctify that. Whereas in Theravāda Buddhist doctrine, as you know, there is a canonical idea that the Buddha himself is “Thus-gone” and “without remainder”—Thathāgata—and hence absent in the immediate sense; yet only in the presence of a living Buddha can one access the pure lucid insights of the Dharma, in all its accuracy and virtuosity. Thereafter, with his passing—parinibbāna, the final passing into ultimate nibbana—his obligations to the world are complete. Although while he is living, a Buddha can engage in the creation of miracles, there is not a strongly intercessionist idea within doctrinal Buddhism. Only the relics are left with the traces of Dharmic power; and in Sri Lankan Buddhism, guardian deities too remain with their temporal power. I discussed in my paper how it is the relics that sanctify the nation. In Sri Lanka, the nation—insofar as the nation is shaped by a Buddhist majoritarian conceptualization—is fortified by the Tooth Relic’s power. As a postcolony, this sovereign fortification is especially salient for Sinhala Buddhists. Even in the pre-colonial era of Sri Lanka, there was the practice of bounding by ritually circumambulating the Buddha’s relics, to consolidate the sovereign authority associated with the relic and the Sinhala Buddhists’ people’s commitments to that Mandala polity. I’m invoking the work of Stanley Tambiah here… In short, despite the “Thus-goneness” of an intercessory Buddha, devotions remain. Sinhala Buddhists do continue to access worldly, territorially bounded and sovereign ideas of Buddhism through veneration of the guardian deities too. In turn, I am interested in how the deities also mediate the relationship between the person and their karmic trajectory through their capacities to bless and offer boons in an intercessory manner for Buddhist devotees.

Andrew Dade: In Myanmar, the contemporary recitation of the Pali Canon is used as a way of sacralizing space either nationally or more locally, around pagoda compounds for example. There is a sacralizing power of the words of the Buddha when recited.

Neena Mahadev: Right. That’s absolutely true in Sri Lanka as well. Buddhist chanting both by monks and by lay people—often oriented towards taking refuge in the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, and reinstantiating a Buddhist ideational presence – occurs on the daily. I don’t want to overstate the sense of the Buddha’s “absence,” but what I would argue is that sometimes, in some of their more adversarial assertions, evangelists emphasize “the absence” so that in turn they avow that they can infuse the “void” left by an “empty Buddha” with the presence of a Christian divine. In turn, there is anxiety among Buddhists that Born-again Christians endeavor to supplant of Buddhism in favor of a Christianity which creates a great deal of inter-religious tension. Buddhists push back against such contentious Born-again rhetoric in different ways. Sonic rivalries are a constant issue, certainly in Sri Lanka. One finds that religious sound creates contestations at the borders between Islamic and Buddhist space, and between Buddhist and Christian space. In my ethnographic interviews I discovered that installations of loudspeakers by a temple in close proximity to a church would offended the exclusivity of religious space. Christians in turn would sometimes try to use litigation to remove those loudspeakers because of the encroachment of Buddhist pirit chanting upon Christian space. I am further arguing in the paper that pneumatic Christianity, entailing a belief in the transmodal movement of the Holy Spirit, is oriented towards expanding Christianity in ways that Buddhists consider to be an encroachment upon Sri Lankan Buddhist space. This in turn creates a great deal of mutual hostility, and concerns about religious persecution as well.

Andrew Dade: How do you negotiate speaking to the anthropology of Christianity and the anthropology of Buddhism?

Neena Mahadev: I’m really working at the intersection of these two forms of religion to understand the practical theo-political and political-economic points of conflict between them, while also attending to occasional points of reconciliatory, inter-religious experience and activity. One of the primary things I am arguing in the book is that within the anthropology of Christianity, the idea of conversion, especially with Pentecostalism, in envisioned as a break from the past or a discontinuity or rupture. In contrast, I find that within Sri Lankan Buddhism, especially through the idea of karma, wherein karmic evolution takes place over many, many lifetimes, requires continuity and attachment to one’s social inheritances. What I am suggesting is that there is a clash between the two soteriologies, which in turn partly shapes these inter-religious conflicts that we see in contemporary Sri Lanka, with the arrival of new charismatic forms of Christianity.

Having said that, I think [of] what Valentina is doing with her thinking about Catholicism as an older Christian form, wherein contemporary Catholicism engages continuities and the centering of the longue durée. In Sri Lanka too, you find that Catholics and also mainline Protestant groups are compelled to align themselves with Sinhala Buddhist groups, saying [something along the lines of]: “we’ve been here, we’re established entities, we’ve rooted ourselves in the soil of the nation. It’s the new Christians that are parachuting in, and it is only new churches that are arising rhizomatically ‘like mushrooms,’ springing out into the earth out of nowhere and interrupting our inter-religious harmony.” Buddhists similarly contend that these new churches are “springing up like mushrooms” in predominantly Buddhist spaces, using such rhetoric so as to render new, apparently growing presences of Christianity invalid. The nationalistic Buddhist conception winds up being a relatively homogenous one. Yet the mainline Christian and the Catholic groups that arrived in the country at different periods are trying to establish that they are thoroughly nationalized entities and that they strive to become like “brethren” to the Buddhists.

Andrew Dade: Is there an issue you see in need of more attention these days for the anthropology of religion more broadly?

Neena Mahadev: What I have observed in my research is that there are strong inclinations towards religious exclusivism within major segments of these two traditions, which episodically clash with one another in the public sphere. Amid that overarching politicized clash, there are ways in which the religionists may impinge upon each other in everyday life. But I also do find that beyond the exclusivist demands of these particular forms of religiosity, and despite what religious practitioners say about themselves, a lot of people who I encountered in my fieldwork are experimenting with religion. They might convert, and then convert back. There is something interesting about that interplay between religions and the kind of religious leniency that people take with each other and negotiate difference. Maya Mayblin has described how while there has been a tendency to focus on sincerity in piety movements in the anthropology of religion, there is also, especially within Catholicism, a great deal of leniency among lay practitioners (see Mayblin 2017). What I found is that there is much more leniency and negotiation, and multiple belonging in Sri Lanka too, even as there are heavy imperatives towards exclusivist moral striving. In a context of sharp inter-religious contestation, I am keen to learn about how living with religious difference is practically negotiated. I think some of that attention can come to fruition when you look at the intersections between two different traditions; sometimes clashes, but sometimes also productive tensions. And sometimes that happens outside of institutionalized spaces. As such, what I am examining is a different phenomenon than programmatic interfaith practice, but it can be a complementary one. People find various ways not to feed the potential for conflict that might be right there on their door step.

Andrew Dade: How are you approaching the question of “ethical and unethical conversions” in the context of Sri Lanka or South Asia more broadly?

Neena Mahadev: I am really interested in the historical emergence of that question; of the attempt to criminalize and curb what nationalists in South Asia are calling “unethical conversions.” I am probing what ethics are considered to entail and how those ethical conceptions are constructed with reference to foundational religious doctrines and conditions of the local political economy. The notion of “unethical conversions” is really a response to, I would argue, conceptions of religious freedom stemming from places like the United States. Implicitly, the argument on religious freedom implies that the terrain should be clear for religious freedom; and that religious freedom stems from an individual’s personal convictions. But Buddhists in Sri Lanka are saying, and also what Hindutva nationalists are alleging in India, is that it is the “allure” of Christian charity which is associated with global capital, and they allege that it is the materiality of charity that unfairly propels conversions. While in India conversion has, in a big way, operated around the question of Dalit politics and the problem of casteist discriminations, in Sri Lanka, that is rarely the case. Buddhist nationalists who want to keep other socio-economically ‘vulnerable’ Buddhists from converting from their natal religion, these conservative activists contend, will ensure a “freedom from” imposition by other religious groups. It is freedom from, as a “negative freedom,” that is at stake for Buddhists, as opposed to the “positive freedom” of the freedom to proselytize. The latter generally [refers to] the notion of freedom of religion as espoused from entities in the US, and so forth, and [is supported by] evangelical entities that are lobbying for that notion of religious freedom (see Castelli 2007).There is a clash then between these two distinct notions of freedom. There are other scholars examining the politics of freedom from the legalistic side. I am trying to do so from the point of view of the practices, discourses, and doctrinal propensities among people on the ground, and what that means for Christians and differently, for Buddhists. In a context like Sri Lanka, religious differences create an impasse over any effort to create a capacious and mutually agreeable definition of religious freedom.

You previously asked about this idea of reconversion or converting back to Buddhism as something I have taken up in some of my other research. One of the main figures is S.W.R.D Bandaranaike, one of the first prime ministers of Sri Lanka who came to power on a wave of majoritarian nationalist support in the 1956 election. In an earlier phase of his life, before his election, he had converted. He had been born as a Christian and converted “back” to Buddhism. He is Sinhalese, but Oxford-educated. He attempted to learn Sinhala so that he could speak to a Sinhala Buddhist audience. There was this idea of recuperating Buddhist authority, reinscribing Buddhist authority, but that meant he had to become a Buddhist as if it was going back to something that was native to him. Some of his Sri Lankan critics have said, “well, he didn’t perform well as a prime minister precisely because he wasn’t born as a Buddhist; it didn’t come naturally to him.” In other words, for Sinhala Buddhists, the idea of conversion from Christianity to Buddhism too can be unsettling. I would argue that this is because it is not nativism at work, but what I’d call karmic natalism in the invigoration of a truly skilled Buddhist political virtuoso, in the Sinhala Buddhist conceptualization. His supporters of course would say [something along the lines of], “actually, no, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike did help Sinhala Buddhists to recuperate the singularity of our religion in the nation. He brought back the Sangha to the forefront and provided free university education for the monks,” and so forth. Generally, Buddhists, even in Sri Lanka, don’t conceive of Buddhism as a tradition that engages the practice of converting other people. Yet, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike did have a kind of reinduction ceremony because he was to be made into a quintessentially politicized national figure. More generally though, in Sri Lanka, rather than a ceremony to mark a “return,” most people in practice just go back to doing what they were doing. Which is precisely what evangelical Christians might characterize as “backsliding.” In Singapore though, one does find a ceremonial marking of Buddhist conversion. Chinese Singaporeans actively partake in ceremonies to “take refuge” in the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, marking their conversions, or recommitment to their natal religion so that it matches the religion denoted on their identity cards. Many reformist Singaporean Buddhists recount the moment at which they committed to Buddhism, much as Born-again Christians recount the moment in which they know they were saved.

My point in elaborating all of this is only to say that empirically, there can be a wide spectrum of possibilities of how religious plurality and relationalities between proximal religious rivals may play out through religious conversion.

Andrew Dade: Thank you again for discussing your projects with us today and for visiting Toronto.

Neena Mahadev: Thank you so much for having me. It was great talking to you.