Defining the Religious Sphere: The Administration of Religious Sites in Colonial India

This essay will explore the ways in which the colonial public sphere was configured as secular vs. religious through the debate over the administration of religious sites in colonial India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the British Crown had attempted to reconfigure its relationship with religious sites which, according to the various regulations passed in the presidencies in the beginning of the 19^th century, it was obligated to manage. An Act in 1863 was designed to allow the Government of India to, in the words of Cecil Beadon, “divest itself of all direct concern with the management of religious endowments.” The goals of the 1863 Act remained an ideal; the Government maintained an interest in religious sites on an ongoing manner, and exercised direct influence in some cases, such as with the Golden Temple. The ideal however remained, and proved powerfully influential in colonial policies towards religious and political mobilization. In particular, after this time the Government was obligated to define administrative mechanisms for religious sites that would allow it to divest itself of direct control, and at the same time provide for (and indeed, enforce) machinery that accorded with colonial formulations of the distinctions between religious and secular public institutions. The overall debate over the management of religious sites thus allows entry into the formative definitions of the colonial public sphere, and how South Asians were able to gain entry into this sphere in religious and non-religious terms.  Sikh sites will be considered in particular, in relation to all-India debates and legislation, to excavate how the Sikh religious site was formed within the colonial logic of the religious sphere.