Empire, Secular Materialism, and Alternative Knowledges

Abstract: This essay probes the ways that secular thought worked in tandem with the imperial management of colonized peoples. Colonial policies of religious neutrality could not fully obscure the judgmentalism toward the religions of colonial subjects, exposing the power dynamics within which secular discourses of empire operated. A case in point is the rationale for the introduction of English literature into the colonial curriculum as a secular surrogate for Christian values. No writer of the imperial age was more attuned to the complex workings of the secular imagination and the conflictual languages of tolerance and intolerance than Rudyard Kipling, for whom India served as a backdrop for probing the unsustainable power of colonial legislative reforms in altering the religious mindset of Indians. His fascination with technology and its conceptual relation to occultism enabled him to probe the intersections between religion and science, highlighting his imaginative reinterpretation of secularism's fragility as a mechanism of colonial power.