Sounds Taken for Wonders: Revivalism and Religious Hybridity in the British Women’s Suffrage Movement

Abstract

In his now classic essay, “Signs Taken for Wonders,” Homi Bhabha elucidated the ways in which a material object—in this case, the English Bible—could mediate the formation of colonial relationships.¹ By tracing the shifting and unpredictable meanings ascribed to the Bible by both the British and Indians in 1817 Delhi, he revealed the processes of “displacement, distortion, dislocation, repetition” that shaped the transmission of Western ideas, and more specifically Christian religious beliefs, to colonial peoples. Bhabha’s highly nuanced reading of this cultural exchange illuminated how objects—especially ones attributed with sacred meanings—were (and are) never quite what they seem. The object presented was not the object received; and the object received was reworked across cultural differences; even within a homogenous community, an object’s meanings were (and are) unstable. The British missionaries believed that the Bible contained the Word of God, but they also hoped it would establish “a mode of civil authority and order”; the Indians may have been awed by its stories, but they also reacted in ambivalent and unscripted ways.² In this context, the Bible became a site of contested authority and an arbiter of a new cultural hybridity.