Thursday January 16, 2025 – 5pm, Foster 103
J. Barton Scott, Associate Professor, Department of the Study of Religions, University of Toronto
In 1925, Pandit Chamupati went on an Arya Samaj mission tour of British East Africa—presumably to
avoid the scandal that was brewing in India around his controversial tract, the Rangila Rasul or “Merry
Prophet.” His tour lasted around a year, and during it he published a series of articles in English and Hindi
about ostensible Vedic influences on Africa. Claiming Black Africans as “Aryan,” Chamupati both asserted
a form of Hindu empire and also revealed that incipient empire’s conceptual instabilities. This talk uses
this microhistory to query the broader genealogy of our contemporary categories of race, caste, and
religion