The Late Colonial Sublime
His current project draws together a constellation of cultural forms generated by the rejection of modernity in postcolonial locations over the twentieth century. The project concentrates specifically on the way in which different belief forms begin to mediate social and political contradictions in this period. While in Berlin, he will look at two points of this constellation in particular: 1) Muhammad Iqbal’s doubts about the West within the context of his engagement with Goethe, his reading of German romantics, and parallel forms of “late” romanticism in Germany at the time, i.e., Nietzsche, Klages, and the Munich Cosmic Circle (Muenchener Kosmiker Kreis); the aim is to better understand whether—or how—romantic critiques of Enlightenment informed Iqbal’s elaboration of Islamic politics in the subcontinent; 2) the minoritarian religious politics of Sikhs in postcolonial India; here the question will be: What shape did political ideology take in the movement for Khalistan vis à vis the majoritarian Hindu liberal secular order.