Okay, so some of you may have seen my post last March where I started thinking about my thesis topic. At the time I declared that I had chosen a topic and was ready to move forward.
Well, that's just not always how life works.
I haven't posted since then about my thesis because not much has happened. I began skimming books on my topic to get a general sense of what I would be writing about, but I've been busy and the real thesis work doesn't begin until the fall so I didn't do too much thinking on it.
Then, yesterday, I had a meeting with my advisor. He asked me to articulate my topic again and as I was talking about the things that interested me, I realized I was all over the place. My topic was too general, had too many moving pieces and I couldn't put together a coherent idea of what I wanted to talk about. So we talked things out. It took about an hour, and at the end we could sum up my general interests. I'm definitely interested in bringing political philosophy of the Enlightenment into conversation with the colonial project in India. I'm interested in how the Enlightenment posits the relationship between faith and reason. I'm interested in changes in religious practice in India under colonial government. I'm interested in how women came to the fore in many of these changes, although the debates were never really for women.
My advisor made a good point. Basically, he told me that if I don't pick something specific to ground my work and narrow my ideas, I'm just going to waste my time reading a bunch of books that won't really help my thesis. In terms of timeline, he wants me to have a draft by the end of the semester, so I know I can't waste any time. I also need to find a second reader for my thesis (a professor who will help advise me in addition to my thesis advisor) and I need to know what I'll be talking about so I can ask somebody who actually has expertise in what I'm writing about.
So I walked out of his office freaking out a little bit. I thought I had everything under control, and I thought I knew what I wanted to do. It felt like starting over.
I did what I always do when I'm freaking out about research - I went to the library and took out a bunch of books. Then I started skimming. I looked for holes, things people weren't talking about that I would be interested in talking about. I soon found that while many scholars write about how contact with India impacted Europe, very few scholars detail the ways in which the colonial project, directly or indirectly, changed local religious practices through the influence of its ideas. I also found connections between the Enlightenment and colonialism that could be explored more.
Without further ado, here is my second (and hopefully final) attempt at a topic for my thesis: I'm planning to explore how the Enlightenment valorized and linked the concepts of liberty and secularism while painting the East (notably India and China) as having exactly opposite cultures to these new values. Then, I will explore how the perceived lack of freedom and reason in India was used to justify colonialism. Finally, I will use an example of an indigenous religious reform of some kind that attempted to create an Indian identity that was both free and religious. I still have to figure out exactly what that's going to be, but at least I know what I need!