Report on My Presentation and Experience at the Spalding Symposium, Oxford University

I recently arrived back from the 38th Spalding Symposium on Indian Religions held at Merton College, Oxford University, England. My paper presentation explored the unexplored ground of prison letter writing as a theology of presence. To make my case, I compared numerous letters written between the time of the Raj in colonial India and those in Nazi Germany. I opted for this comparative analysis to press the point of the ubiquitous nature of the phenomenon while at the same time locate this theological analysis precisely in its historic context, as opposed to say a fixation with a transcendental universalism.

Overall, the conference was largely taken up on the issue of secular peace building, where the religions in question were simply the historical realities wherein various problems presented themselves. Those theologians, including myself and Hindi theologian, who attempted to speak through the traditions, were perhaps the odd-men-out, as our approaches tended to call to mind that the religious basis of the conference was more than simply an opportunity to speak, but that the religious language of a conference based on religion can appropriate its own language to confront the challenges at present.

Concerning my own paper, the topic elicited a few positive comments. The one negative comment, which I believe failed to grasp the paper as whole, was concerned with my use of one individual, Veer Savarkar, whose jail letters I used briefly to suggest the way in which the penology of censorship was often confronted by various individuals. The commenter suggested that Savarkar can only be understood in his historical niche, and therefore to abstract him into such a project did not seem to exist in the realm of possibility. I simply responded that I choose from Savarkar prison letters that were not themselves political charged, and therefore, to accuse in Savarkar a political motivation that underlies all that he thought, wrote, and spoke, would be to turn him into a one-dimensional caricature. Rather, the point of choosing politicians, religious figures, and social activists, and pointing out the similarities in their writings despite their historical occasion, was precisely the point of a theology of presence, which, while historical, is not bound to the historical modus operandi.

Despite this, my paper was largely an attempt at speculative theology in the context of peace building. I’m hoping to address the comment that was brought up by the one commentator, and did indeed address most of it in a preliminary draft, but opted to remove it because of space and time considerations. The hope is to present the paper for publication through the conference’s journal ROSA (Religions of Southeast Asia).