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We in the West have come to think of religious conversion as a deeply personal experience, bearing little or no relation to social structures and institutions. Stories of how people "come to faith" have more to do with "meeting God," deliverance from sin, or personal healing than they do with law or politics. Gauri Viswanathan's Outside the Fold compels us to consider religious conversion as a "worldly" event, which functions as a mode of social protest and challenges the very identity of a nation. Viswanathan does this by comparing and contrasting the significance of conversion within nineteenth-century England and India. The themes of this book speak not only to issues of religion and the public sphere here in the United States, but also to the heated debate being waged in India today over Christian evangelism.
Reader be warned: The book rides the currents of post-structuralist literary theory, in which the meaning of a given "sign" is not inherent, but consists only in its difference from something else in a system of signs (x is "not y"). Viswanathan uses this framework to overturn conventional wisdom about religious conversion. Her counterintuitive thesis is that the real meaning of conversion has little to do with assent to a set of beliefs or assimilation into a given community. Conversion's meaning lies in stead in the dissent or protest it voices against systems of authority, including the secular nation.
Viswanathan develops her argument by linking two seemingly unrelated developments: legislation in England (e.g., the Catholic Emancipation Bill of 1828) that endowed religious minorities with national "citizenship," and educational policies in India that Anglicized Indians in order to incorporate them into the imperial regime. Each of these developments, according to Viswanathan, belongs to the single, colonizing project of secular nationhood. And in each context, religious conversion becomes a mode of protest against the very organs of the state that purport to secure freedom of conscience and religion.
Remarkably comprehensive in its scope and multidisciplinary in its method, Outside the Fold draws upon sources ranging from law reports, public and judicial proceedings, nineteenth-century novels, diaries, and theological treatises. Brilliantly, Viswanathan harnesses these sources to shed light on the conversions of figures such as John Henry Newman, the most prominent Anglican convert to Catholicism; Pandita Ramabai, a learned Hindu woman who converted to Christianity; B. R. Ambedkar, a Dalit (formerly, "untouchable") convert to Buddhism who later helped draft the Indian Constitution; and Annie Besant, whose journey from English secularism to Theosophy to Neo-Hinduism continues to mystify students of religious experience. But how exactly Viswanathan understands the "worldly" aspect of religious belief, and the criteria she uses for evaluating the "work" performed by conversion, are questions that even the informed reader may find difficult to resolve.
In making her case for "conversion as protest" Viswanathan rejects the no tion that religious experience can be isolated from social and political institutions. Contrary to this myth of "autonomous religious experience" (developed in the work of William James), belief is by nature "world ly." It is not born in a vacuum but articulates itself in relation to political authority, culture, and law. Viswanathan's interest in belief that actually does things renders the purely spiritual testimony (one that is indifferent to social institutions) a disappointing retreat into subjectivism. If conversion can be de scribed independently of the political culture in which it oc curs, she argues, it is because conversion, in such instances, is fundamentally aligned with the goals of that political culture.
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