Social Identities, Volume 10, Number 5, 2004 mm Carfax Publishing The Unbearable Proximity of the Orient: Political Religion, Multiculturalism and the Retrieval of South Asian Identities ARVIND MANDAIR Hofstra University ABSTRACT: The phenomenon of religion — specifically its recent return as 'political religion', and its seeming incompatibility with the demands of multiculturalism — continues to be a vexed issue in attempts to rethink retrievals of South Asian identity beyond a neo-colonial imaginary. This move 'beyond' has routinely followed a decon- struction of the 'religious effects' of Orientalism whose conceptual matrix, some argue, can be located in Hegel's writings on history and religion. Taking its cue from Derrida's enigmatic remark — 'what ifreligio remained untranslatable?' — this paper re-examines Hegel's writings on India, revealing the workings of an ontotheological matrix which underpins not only the recent resurgences of religious nationalism or political religion in South Asia and the South Asian diaspora, but also, paradoxically, the secular frameworks of contemporary multiculturalism and anti-imperialist critique. Despite sharing the same onto-theological matrix, these bastions of secular modernity still refuse to recognise that retrievals of religious identity might constitute a significant reorientation of the political, instead continuing to put into play a series of well rehearsed distancing techniques which serve merely to sanitize the 'religious effects' of the Orient. Introduction A certain repetition of the colonial event seems to haunt the very manner in which South Asians have attempted to engage the political present. This repetition can be visualised in terms of an aporia: on the one hand the possibility of refiguring their subjectivity, and on the other hand, the impossi- bility of avoiding objectification of their subjective experience. It is the seem- ingly inevitable and reductive nature of this event — the reduction of experience to subject/object, self/other relations, indeed the automatic process of othering — that constitutes what I shall refer to as the repetition of the colonial event. This paper explores the possibility of connecting past imperial- isms with their repetition in the lives of post-colonials today. Specifically my aim is to trace the circuit of repetition to the nexus of ideas feeding the main site where the subjectivity of diasporic South Asians is formed, namely the site where religious tradition is retrieved and reproduced, projected and intro- jected. Based on the assumption that subjectivity is founded on the ability to 1350-4630 Print/1363-0296 C)n-line/04/050647-17 © 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/1350463042000294287