GURU NANAK AND RATIONAL CIVIL THEOLOGY

Abstract

By the early sixteenth century, the conditions for a radical reorientation of Indic and Islamic religiosity and sociality had begun to crystallize with the simultaneous resurgence of antinomian rationalism and the expansion of mercantile capitalism across northern India. Combining insights about these dual processes, Guru Nanak formulated discursive and practical strategies for overcoming the social illusion of egoistic selfhood determined by the rise of commodity exchange, on the one hand, and the individualistic soteriological practices of existing faiths, on the other. Overcoming both required translating traditional religious concepts and categories into a framework of everyday collective life. The rational civil theology concertedly formulated in early Sikh scripture presents challenges for writing a contemporary universal history of reason. The essay concludes with an exploration of the incomplete dialectic of neo-Kantian notions of reason in the work of Georg Lukács by examining a point at which his writings intersect with early Sikh scripture – and what the reformulation of such a dialectic may mean for a postcolonial history of reason.