Jenna R. Culver

An interview with Dr. Alexander Rocklin, author of The Regulation of Religion and the Making of Hinduism in Colonial Trinidad.

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Aegis - We have with us today, Dr. Rocklin. Dr. Rocklin is an assistant professor of religion and philosophy at Otterbein University. He received his PhD in the history of religions from the University of Chicago and in 2019, he released his first book, The Regulation of Religion and the Making of Hinduism in Colonial Trinidad. Thank you for agreeing to be interviewed for the 2021 edition of Aegis. Let’s just jump right into the questions.

Aegis -Can you give us some background into your interests that led to studying religion during your undergraduate and graduate years?

Alex - Sure. Starting out I was very interested in literature. In high school, I was an English nerd and did well in history. In studying literature, I saw that having a particular knowledge in the Bible would be useful. So, I was reading Dante and Flannery O’ Connor and James Joyce. I started taking classes at Harvard, I grew up in Massachusetts. And in [studying] things like the Hebrew Bible, I gradually got more interested in that stuff and was less interested in literature. And that’s how I ended up then majoring in Religious studies, I went to Wesleyan University in Connecticut and they have a fantastic religious studies program there. I got to take classes with Elizabeth McAlister, she’s an anthropologist who studies Vodou in Haiti and in the Haitian diaspora in the US and I got interested in religions in the Caribbean and took the introduction to religion with her. By my senior year of college, I thought [religion] was something I could [study] for the rest of my life. I went to the University of Chicago and their history of religions programs is supposed to be one of the best in the world and that’s how I ended up where I am today.

Aegis -In your New Books network interview, you say that you studied Hinduism and Buddhism abroad in Nepal during your undergrad, and then spent a year in Mexico before graduate school. In what ways do you think that such cultural immersion deepened or changed your understanding of religion?

Alex - When I was in undergrad, I really wanted to go somewhere very different from what I knew. And I was interested in Buddhism but didn’t know anything about it really. So, I wanted to take a class in Buddhism with Jan Willis, who used to be there, and her class was filled, and I couldn’t get into the class. Nepal was supposedly one of the places people say that Buddha was born, so I was like I’ll go

Aegis 2021 88 there and learn about Buddhism. When I got to Nepal, it really challenged my ideas about---t religions themselves. In the United States, we have this idea that religions are these separate things that are easily distinguishable. And that if you’re a Hindu, you do Hindu stuff, if you’re a Buddhist you do Buddhist stuff, and if you’re a Muslim you do Muslim stuff and that there isn’t overlap between them. It really challenged those ideas. After I graduated, I lived in Mexico. I was living in southern Mexico in Chiapas and working in Indigenous communities there that were in resistance to the government and that got me looking at questions of colonialism and the legacies of colonialism. I got a chance to research the history of Mexico and Spanish colonialism and see the forms of Christianity that Indigenous peoples were formulating on their own, certainly influenced by the Spanish but also were in places where there wasn’t stronger penetration by colonial officials and by the Catholic Church. People were able to take their indigenous traditions and Catholicism and create their own traditions.

Aegis -Many pieces of your work focus on the Caribbean and Hinduism specifically, could you explain how you first came to research this and what, if anything, keeps you passionate about this study?

Alex - When I was in graduate school, I was particularly interested in studying South Asia and I was very interested in South Asian Islam in particular. As a master’s student, I was focusing in on the British governments regulations of Muharram which is the commemoration of the martyrdom of Imam Hussein who is the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. I took a course on religion in Latin America and it was taught by historian Dain Borges, who specializes in Brazil and the Caribbean. When I was taking the class, I was like “How can I make this about South Asia?,” not really knowing what connections there were between Latin America, the Caribbean, and South Asia and found out about Trinidad which is where I ended up doing most of my research. I did research on this massacre that occurred in 1884 where indentured laborers were commemorating Muharram, and the British were not allowing them to go out on public roads in procession. They [indentured laborers] did it anyway and so the police backed by the military opened fire on the processions; many people died and were injured. After the course, I continued research on this massacre and eventually, went to India and studied Urdu and Hindi. And was focusing on the relationship between Hindus and Muslims and potentially the role of this commemoration, Muharram. At some point, after continuing research on Trinidad too, I asked my advisor if I could study Trinidad. So, I ended up focusing on the Caribbean. What ended up being my dissertation and what became my book, looks at the formation of Hinduism but there are parts that look at Christianity and Islam too. What is interesting about the Caribbean particularly is that it’s such a cosmopolitan place, it’s incredibly diverse because of its history of colonization, the history of slavery. In a place like Trinidad, you have Hindus, Muslims, Christians, people practicing African-inspired religions (Orisha) and these incredibly diverse people all living together in this place the size of Delaware. It gives me the opportunity if I’m interested to look at Hinduism one day, Islam another day and look at forms of Afro-Caribbean Christianity another day. I can look at a variety of different things and they’re all connected.

Aegis -Your first book The Regulation of Religion and the Making of Hinduism in Colonial Trinidad came out in Spring 2019. Can you give us a brief overview of what the book is about?

Alex - The book looks at the role of the category of religion in the regulation of Indian indentured laborers in colonial Trinidad. The kinds of questions that I was most interested in when I was an undergraduate and still today is how something becomes a religion because what became apparent to me was that the way that we understand religion in the United States is often not how people see the world and live their lives in other parts of the world. The case of Trinidad becomes particularly interesting because in South Asia before British colonization, there was really no word for religion in any South Asian language. If you look at the vernacular languages, if you look at Sanskrit, if you look at South Asian languages that are influenced by Persian or Arabic, there isn’t any word that means religion in the way we view it in modern English. The idea of religion as a separate sphere of life, and how we distinguish the not religious and the religious, the religious and the secular are modern distinctions that historically haven’t existed and, in many places, don’t exist. Then these distinctions between the “world religions” that we assume there are Hindus and Muslims and there are Christians and there are Jains and Jews, and that often in places like India or in West Africa, for instance, those distinctions are rather fuzzy, and people will move across these boundaries. One of the things I was really interested in exploring in the book is how does this concept of religion get imposed on people? For indentured laborers, they were brought in and signed these contracts that usually ran 3-5 years and sometimes people would sign again, and they were treated similarly to how slaves were treated before them. They were stuck on plantations not able to leave and the only places they could be besides the plantation was jail or in the hospital. Even at the end of their contracts, they needed free papers to prove they were not indentured and that they were free people. The only time they were allowed off plantations to do their own thing was to do something they were calling religion. They were guaranteed religious freedom. That’s why in 1884, there was this massacre that I mentioned where they were practicing Muharram. This [Muharram] was the only reason they were allowed off on their own, off plantations. We see indentured laborers coming in from South Asia didn’t understand religion in the way British colonial officials did but had to rather quickly, learn what religion meant as the British colonial officials were defining that. In some ways that’s why the book is titled, The Regulation of Religion and the Making of Hinduism in Colonial Trinidad, because two-thirds of the book is looking at the processes of how Indian indentured laborers had to get religion; they had to figure out the appropriate way of dividing up their lives.

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Aegis -Do you have a favorite subject/ class that you teach? Do you have any classes you would hope to teach in the future?

Alex - One of the courses I enjoy teaching the most is the introduction to religion. It’s one of those classes where I can do whatever I want, and it becomes a hodgepodge. Most classes, professors have an argument that they’re trying to make throughout the course, but this course doesn’t have the restraints that

Aegis 2021 90 other sorts of classes have. It’s my chance to make a certain pitch to students, to try and---t challenge people’s expectations and push back on students’ preconceived notions about what religion is and what the “world religions” are. It’s also one of the courses I’ve taught the longest and have had the most chances to tweak. It’s one of the courses I feel the most comfortable teaching. Another course I haven’t taught as much but will be teaching more in the next semesters is a course on ghosts and zombies. Which allows me to teach material related to the Caribbean, stuff related to voodoo and Santeria and stuff related to Trinidad too but is also a chance to introduce students to histories of US imperialism and the US colonization of Haiti. I am teaching a course on race and religion next year in the fall, and I hope to in the future teach a course on religion and gender and sexuality, and a course on religion and science and technology too, which will be new courses that I haven’t taught before.

Aegis -Do you have any projects or future research ideas in the works that you’d like to share with us?

Alex - I have an article that looks at accusations of madness related to AfroCaribbean religions. There was this tendency among colonial officials, particularly in the British empire, to say that people who were practicing minority African-derived religions in the Caribbean were crazy or mad. It was one of the ways that colonized groups were being regulated from the time of slavery and for some folks still today. I also have a second book that I am still in the process of working on. That project looks at a series of case studies of people from different backgrounds in the Americas who call themselves Hindus in different times and places and tracks the way that Hindu identification has been used and how it has operated. Looking at examples of people of Indian descent but also people of African descent, people of Europeans decent all calling themselves Hindu and using that as a chance to think about ways in which the categories of race and religion have been intertwined with one another in the Americas, but also other places around the world. I track people who are traveling around in the Caribbean but also in the United States who are moving between those places but also into Central America and West Africa to South and Southeast Asia too. The chapter that I’m working on right now is looking at Panama and looking at Sindhi merchants who are from what is today, Pakistan who were selling exotic wares along the Panama Canal. They are being regulated by the Panamanian government and the government was saying they shouldn’t be allowed to continue coming there. The Sindhi merchants were making the argument that they were high-caste Hindus and therefore should be allowed. I’m also looking at Jamaican immigrants who came as laborers to work on the Panama Canal, who had their own ideas of what it meant to be Hindu, particularly because of their interactions with indentured laborers like the ones I study in my first book. So, we have these very different ideas about what it means to be Hindu.

For more information on Alexander Rocklin and his research, you can visit his website https://www.alexanderrocklin.com or https://otterbein.academia.edu/AlexanderRocklin