Milind Wakankar Assistant Professor English Department Life Sciences Library Stony Brook University Stony Brook, NY 11794-5350 mwakankar@notes.cc.sunysb.edu

My work attempts to understand the ways in which the "precolonial" archive has been framed within "postcolonial" modes of reading, delving deep into the South Asian medieval Bhakti (or "religious" tradition as a whole. ) I attempt to look at the ways in which the idea of the anti-State in the early modern period is written out of the nationalist writings in the 19th century. My thinking is influenced here by recent South Asian debates on the question of the "premodern" (Subrahmanyam, Pollock, etc.); I am guided in my readings by the fundamental insights into these issues of Levinas, Rosenzweig and, before him, Schelling. My attempt is to see how the history of subaltern religious protest in the past enables us to help reactivate ethical reflexes in religion that are increasingly moribund and heavily compromised.