Several scholars have argued that the idea of religion homogenizes indigenous traditions in South Asia. This homogenization takes place through creating strict limits and internal boundedness to practices in a tradition. By extension, premodern traditions are narrated as loosely bound, internally plural, and thus heterogeneous. This article intends to offer a critique of how ideas of heterogeneity and homogeneity are understood and used by scholars of secularism, primarily in South Asia. We consider three major sets of arguments on religion made by different scholars over the past few decades as a case in point. We argue that the use of the categories of heterogeneity and homogeneity as dichotomous does not help to discern traditions and forms of life, as these categories are less internally related to a tradition than to the contemporary technique of describing it. Moreover, both ideas do not help us to adequately attend to the disclosures of a tradition. In fact, they conceal, rather than discloses, authoritative practices, attitudes, and sensibilities within a tradition. One of the linchpins of these arguments is the condemnation of the idea of limit. Following Talal Asad, Martin Heidegger, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, we argue that limit is a practice of power, not (only) a spatial imagery of a boundary, and tradition discloses those practices as part of distinct forms of life.
Siddiqui et al. (Thu,) studied this question.