Conversion as Translation and Transference

Abstract This article proposes viewing practices of religious conversion through the conceptual optics of translation and transference. To view conversion as such directs attention to the dialectic of the everyday and the evental and the mixing of temporalities involved in movements between forms of life situated across sectarian divides and religious borders. The temporalities and temporal scales of conversion mix spontaneity and calculation, the sudden and the scheduled, which is to say that conversion practices reflect everyday ambivalences and contingencies. Yet the quotidian practices entailed in conversion draw their semiotic relevance and affective force by repeatedly citing some life-transforming, sometimes self-shattering, event. The dual focus on translation and transference highlights the analytical affordances of a dialectical picture of event/structure and everyday/process. This picture problematizes purist, syncretistic, reductive, and triumphalist ideas about conversion and Islam in South Asia. To that end, the article closely reads two conversion stories from colonial India that flesh out the ontology of translation and transference across religious divides.