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Scholars in International Relations concerned with religion and its relations to world politics are rhetorically constructing a powerful modern myth. A component of this myth is that religion is inherently violent and irrational unless controlled by the secular state, which is inherently rational and only reluctantly violent. Timothy Fitzgerald discusses how, in this modern myth, 'religion' appears as a force of nature which either assists or threatens the sacred secular order of things, and how religion is portrayed as a kind of universal essence which takes many forms, its recent most danger

This review discusses Arvind-Pal S. Mandair's Religion and the Specter of the West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Translation (hereafter RSW), published in 2009 by Columbia University Press.

The debates among academics over whether Religious Studies belongs within Faculties of Theology, the Social Sciences or The Humanities is a distraction from a more fundamental issue, which is the pervasive and largely unquestioned assumption that religious experiences, practices and institutions are universally distinct in kind and essentially separate from non-religious ones. Theologians and non-theologians alike have contributed to constructing a modern discourse on 'religion' and 'religions' that tacitly embeds its distinction from 'non-religious' or 'secular' practices. What is assumed as a commonplace is best understood as a rhetorical construction, which historically has had the ideological function of subverting a much older understanding of 'religion' that inhibited class mobility and the growth of capital- ist institutions. The most notable feature of the study of 'religions' lies in the tacitly distinct and embedded 'secular' or non-religious ground from which the study is assumed to be conducted. It was this wider rhetoric that made possible a basic part of the warp and woof of modern consciousness, the non-religious state and the ubiquitous arena of 'secular politics'. Keywords: theology, religion, politics, secular, economics, state, sacred and profane

My purpose in this paper is to present an ethnography of a specific untouchable conversion movement in such a way that it clarifies theoretical issues relevant to understanding this kind of phenomenon more widely. It is therefore a contribution, however small, both to research on Buddhism in Maharashtra and also to the wider issues of untouchability and politics in India. There are many cases of untouchable castes converting to Islam or Christianity, and the Mahar conversion to Buddhism may in some respects belong to that wider group. What makes it of special interest, however, is firstly that it was Buddhism that was chosen to express the social, political and soteriological aspirations of this group; and secondly that it was Dr. B.R. Ambedkar himself who directly led this movement. Throughout his political career from the 1920s up to his death in 1956 he offered the scheduled castes the most incisive alternative to Gandhian high-caste paternalism, and his social and political thinking has been inherited most directly by the Buddhists, and by the Dalit movement with which the Buddhists have had a strong association. My ethnography suggests that egalitarian rhetoric involves a reconceptualisation of the relation between ritual status and power. It may well have been true that untouchables have traditionally internalised, conformed to, and even reproduced, the value of hierarchical ritual status defined by relative purity, but increasingly status is seen by untouchables as itself an idiom of power which can be challenged politically. In this sense the Buddhists, and Ambedkar himself as their articulate spokesman, provide important insights into the changed relationship between status and power in India.

Dumont has been criticised by writers such as Appadurai, Dirks and Inden for placing caste at the centre of his analysis of Hindu ideology, and arguing for the subordination of power to ritual status in India. This formulation is supposedly orientalist. In this article I reject the accusation that Dumont is guilty of orientalism, and I suggest that the case of B. R. Ambedkar and the Buddhist/Dalit movement which he initiated gives some support to Dumont's analytical categories. Ambedkar's own analysis of Hindu ideology was similar to Dumont's in two important points: he identified Untouchability as an essential feature of caste and Hindu ideology; and he argued that political power is subordinated to religious values. This would help to explain, for example, his public conversion to Buddhism, the religion of the renouncer, after a lifetime in politics. However, the picture is complicated by the political intention of Ambedkar and the contemporary Buddhists to transform the relation between religion and power, so that what traditionally had been an internalised conformity by Untouchables with a divine hierarchical order has now become a struggle between two contradictory value systems, as a result of which ritual status has itself increasingly been re-represented as an idiom of political power.