The concept of 'world religions' circulates in contemporary discourses as a natural category dividing universal phenomena. It frames debates on everything from the Iraqi constitution to the Chinese regulation of Falun Gong. It forms the basis of most Religious Studies curricula and has even taken its place on the hallowed shelves of used bookstores. However, as a wide range of scholarship has recently shown, these categories are far from natural. They have very specific histories that are surprisingly recent. In this project, I hope to show how the very idea of world religions evolved in relation to the development of photography, the growth of the British Empire, and the systems of travel and exchange on which both of these relied. I will focus on the exchange between India and England from the mid nineteenth century through the decades of high colonial rule. It is here that the very categories of several of the 'world's religions' were formed, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikhism. Even the understanding of Islam was radically rethought in this context.
While there have been a number of studies exploring the 'invention' of Hinduism, the solidification of boundaries in the Sikh community, and the 'discovery' of Buddhism, most of these focus on the tracts of historians and theorists in England or on colonial officials. In these narratives, the classification of religion is tied to the Linnaean urge to order or to the managerial prowess of colonial bureaucracy. While these studies have unearthed the mutual implications of categorization and power, they have left out the visual intercourse that colonial power, photography, and international travel made possible. Professional photographers, geographers, pleasure seekers, surveyors, Indian princes, and even audacious swamis all used photography to bridge the cultural divides between England and her empire. The photographs brought home were published in popular magazines and journals. They were displayed at World Fairs. They were reprinted in works of fiction and collected in encyclopedias or other compendia, such as the monumental The People of India (1868-1875). In short, they were the images connecting the British people and their empire.
My work explores the multiple entanglements of photography, travel, and religion. I attend to the clear and overwhelming evidence that photographs were colonial forms of knowledge integral to the articulation of religious difference and the management of religious communities. This was facilitated by the travel of colonial officials and photographers across the empire and the collection and redaction of this information in colonial digests, administrative reports, and archives. In this section of the project, I attend to the ways that the development of specific religious traditions informed and buttressed colonial rule.
The second focus of my work examines how traveler's photographs circulated at home. Here I move from focusing on the bureaucratic advantage of photography to the seductive capacities of the image. I am interested in how these images spilled out of the colonial archive helping people imagine religious worlds inhabited by thousands of little Buddhas. By the 1860s, visitors to India returned to London with a standard portfolio of images: burning bodies in Benares, pious saints in the Himalayas, and erotic temples in Khajuraho. These images and their accompanying narratives solidified the idea of radical difference while at the same time carving out a separate space for religious traditions within the growing family of world religions. These photographs helped facilitate a distinct transformation of earlier perceptions, which insisted that Christianity was the only religion to transcend 'national' or 'determinate' boundaries. The expansion of photography and travel reports allowed people to see this short-sighted view in an entirely new light, to literally envision new worlds.
While scholars have amassed an impressive body of work on travel literature and the implications of colonialism over the past two decades, my study offers a novel contribution. Among the many fine studies examining the birth of world religions or particular examples of these (Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism) there is little or no attention to the visual realm as a creative space of construction and exchange. By contrast, this study offers a visual history of the concept of world religions. I am not explicitly concerned with whether or not Hinduism or Buddhism in particular was 'invented.' I am interested in the visual forms of world religions the social lives of these images. I am interested in the creative interplay between what Christopher Pinney has called the 'penetrating certainty' of photography and what Martin Heidegger refers to as 'the gigantic.'
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