A few years ago, when I was travelling through Assam, I noticed that some songs associated with the spring festival of Bihu had become heavily infused with elements of technopop. I could still distinctly recognise the leitmotifs that I would have heard in my childhood years when watching staged performances of Bihu dances but the lyrics had been modulated with synthpop backgrounds. As I reflected on this highly synthetic blend, I realised that the performances that I had observed more than three decades ago were themselves a dynamic intermixture of past and present. It is possible that a hundred years ago, the very idea that such dances could be enacted on stages in the city, and in tandem with a fixed programme schedule, would have struck some dancers as strongly discordant with their wider sociocultural sensibilities. Be that as it may, when some people decided that Bihu dances could be transplanted from the open-air settings of paddy fields to the city stages, or when some others sought to inflect the melodies of Bihu with contemporary tunes of western origins, the protagonists who pioneered these transitions should be understood, in my estimate, not as traversing a massive gulf between âtraditionâ and âmodernityâ or between âEastâ and âWestâ, but as actively negotiating translations across their somewhat osmotic and overlapping boundaries.
This book is not about Bihu and not about Assam, but about certain transitions â and translations â within contiguous Bengal and across roughly the same timeframe on the landscapes of Hindu social, cultural, religious identities. But just as the subtle shifts in Bihu dances and tunes are best understood in terms of styles of interweaving precolonial and contemporary, the projects of the Bengali intellectuals whom we study here too were directed to the construction of ways of being Hindu that were simultaneously rooted in ancient Sanskritic materials and orientated towards contemporary universalist visions with western hues. By discussing the writings of some Bengali thinkers who were associated, in different ways and to different degrees, with the Brahmo Samaj (established in 1829), I argue that they sought to configure the socioreligious dharma of Hindus as egalitarian, universal, and spiritual. These formulations were shaped by dense dialectical engagements with three groups â certain members of the Bengali middle classes with sceptical and atheistic standpoints (âYoung Bengalâ), Christian missionaries, and Vaiá¹£á¹ava thinkers.
This intellectual history of some decisive moments in the construction of Hindu religious universalisms during the nineteenth century in colonial Bengal is partly an inquiry into the question: âwhen was Hindu modernity?â One distinctive marker of this modernity is said to be a universalist vision of the religious quest of humanity which is variously associated with figures such as Swami Vivekananda (1863â1902), S. Radhakrishnan (1888â1975), Sri Aurobindo (1872â1950), M. Gandhi (1869â1948) and others, most of whose writings were in English. Scholars of âHindu modernityâ have sometimes used these English writings as their primary, or sole, point of entry into the vast terrains of Hinduism in British India, and postulated a sharp rupture or abrupt discontinuity in Hindu religious imaginations across a putative âtraditionâ versus âmodernityâ divide (Hacker 1978). Thus, we hear about defenders or propagators of a âneo-Hinduismâ that, from around 1950 if not from around 1900, privileges spiritual experience, accords hermeneutic priority to reason and not revelation, configures socially activist forms of world-affirmative engagement, and promotes interreligious harmony. On the eve of the second world war, Radhakrishnan (1939: 24), later the second President of the Republic of India, commented that Christianity had âinherited the Semitic creed of the âjealous Godâ in the view of Christ as âthe only begotten son of Godâ, and so could not brook any rival near the throne ⦠Finality of conviction easily degenerates into the spirit of fanaticism, autocratic, over-positive, and bloodthirstyâ. Radhakrishnan emphasizes at several places in his writings that the different religions of the world, with the specific impulses and values that they embody, should come together in relationships of mutual friendship so that they are regarded ânot as incompatibles but as complementaries, and so indispensable to each other for the realization of the common endâ (1927: 43). What he looks forward to is not a âfeatureless unity of religionsâ in a world whose religious peoples are rapidly coming close in bonds of sympathy and warmth but a rich harmony which will preserve the integrity of each (Radhakrishnan 1967: 133â34). This is particularly so because, according to him, the specific ways in which human beings in different cultural matrices experience the real is coloured by their presuppositions, prejudices, and temperaments. Further, the âHinduismâ that he presents is not limited geographically to the subcontinent: âThere is nothing which prevents it from extending to the uttermost parts of the worldâ (Radhakrishnan 1948:102). Here Radhakrishnan was partly echoing the sentiments of Swami Vivekananda who had declared a few decades ago: âOurs is the universal religion. It is inclusive enough, it is broad enough to include all the ideals. All the ideals of religion that already exist in the world can be immediately included, and we can patiently wait for all the ideals that are to come in the future to be taken in the same fashion embraced in the infinite arms of the religion of the Vedantaâ (Swami Vivekananda 1972: vol. 3: 251â52).
In this fine-grained textual study of some nineteenth-century Bengali texts, I offer a genealogy of such Hindu religious universalisms and indicate how some of these post-1900 representations of the universalist compass of Hindu standpoints were already being enunciated â and also actively disputed â across various Brahmo circles from the 1820s. The vocabularies of âessenceâ, âunityâ, and âsynthesisâ â the stock-in-trade of Hindu universalisms throughout the twentieth century â are already beginning to emerge from the 1860s across the multiple vernacular worlds of the Brahmos. In the evolving spaces of these vernacular Brahmo contexts, we encounter intense debates relating to relative prioritization across the dyads of scriptural revelation and rational inquiry, ascetic withdrawal and social activism, spiritual experience and scriptural exegesis, meditative repose and devotional fervour, western conceptualities and Indic sensibilities, and particularity and universality â debates about the head and the heart, the temporal and the eternal, and the home and the world that continue to characterize the ongoing projects of Hindu modernities in our own times. And the Brahmo leitmotif â that the poles across all such dyads are to be sensitively âharmonizedâ â can also be discerned in some contemporaneous configurations of modernity where one often hears about the synthesizing power of Hindu visions which are said to promote inter-religious dialogue, peacemaking, spirituality, ecological sensitivities, and comparativist ways of thinking.
I thus seek to contribute to a steadily emerging stream of studies of vernacular reworkings of Indic materials which attempt to undercut projections of a sharp break between an Anglicised âmodernityâ presented as the dynamic intrusion of European forces and a precolonial âtraditionâ characterised as the static mass of Indian inheritances (Hatcher 2011). The chapters present some of the multiple ways in which key Brahmo figures were configuring visions of Hindu universality throughout the nineteenth century by interweaving patterns of modernist traditionalism and traditionalist modernity. Their complex negotiations between scriptural roots shaped by Sanskritic templates and contemporary routes inflected by western colonial modernities indicate that any proposed understanding of modernity as âwhatever is extraneously received in Englishâ and of tradition as âwhatever is indigenously propounded in the vernacularâ would be historically simplistic (Raychaudhuri 1988). Some of them were deeply conversant in contemporary European thought-forms but they expressed their modernist sensibilities precisely through the linguistic-conceptual media of Bengali. While the Brahmo Samaj is, generally speaking, classified as a neo-Hindu movement, suggesting some kind of an abrupt rupture that was supposedly instituted by colonial modernities, I argue that this classification can obscure the subterranean continuities of subjectivities and sensibilities that were sustained through the conceptual currencies of the Bengali language. Therefore, tradition and modernity should not be viewed as polarised entities and as diametrically opposed to each other; rather, both should be viewed as constituting a dynamic series of processes with distinctive responses to the problem of seeking continuities amidst historical change. Traditional societies too should be viewed not as monolithically structured but as possessing creative powers to encompass a wide range of beliefs which actualise alternative types of possible behaviour (Waldman 1986).
From this perspective, I revisit some of the vexed questions relating to historical origins, native agencies, and conceptual sources in the constructions of Hindu modernities by drawing attention to the significance of studying texts in the vernaculars such as Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Malayalam, Tamil, and others. As I have indicated, one of the reasons why a sharp split between Sanskritic âtraditionâ and Anglicized âmodernityâ continues to be defended, or suggested, in certain scholarly standpoints on Hinduism is because this âmodernityâ is associated primarily with the writings of figures such as Swami Vivekananda, Radhakrishnan, and others, which obscures the point that several influential contemporary figures were developing alternative ways of being Hindu through their vernacular writings. While it is possible to provide extracts from Swami Vivekananda or Radhakrishnan which suggest that their viewpoints are opposed to those of classical exegetes such as Åaá¹kara (c. 800 CE) and RÄmÄnuja (c. 1100 CE), in the vernacular writings of our Brahmo thinkers we encounter subtler styles of interweaving premodern Sanskrit materials and contemporaneous European motifs. Therefore, we should speak of the emergence, across Hindu socioreligious milieus, of multiple modernities from around 1850 such that English-inflected modernities and vernacularized modernities could often diverge in significant respects even if they were otherwise shaped by the social pressures of the colonial crucibles within which they were being forged.
This contribution to the religious history of Hindu modernities is, then, primarily a textual study of how some Brahmos navigated, on dialogical registers and in some âcontact zonesâ (Pratt 1992) in colonial Bengal, the dynamic intersections of Indic and European cultural currents. In recent decades, scholars from various academic streams who theorise South Asian religions in the wake of Edward Saidâs criticisms of the propagation of romanticized images of the Middle East by British and American Orientalists, Foucaultâs excavations of the intimate relations between knowledge and power, and Derridaâs deconstructions of the metaphysics of presence have devoted their critical energies to the multiplication of histories and identities which had been consigned to the margins by the âdiscourses of modernityâ. Partly in this vein, the central arguments of this book are based on primary sources in Bengali which remain largely untranslated and also understudied. Some of these writings were extremely influential in structuring the religious sensibilities of their times but they have rarely received systematic scholarly study. They provide multiple windows into the emerging subjectivities of some prominent Bengali intellectuals between 1820 and 1900 as they are being shaped by various intellectual and socio-political milieus, some of which were distinctively stamped with western sensibilities. One of the most significant aspects of these milieus was the emerging British re-presentation of India as the pit of moral degradation. The guiding metaphor in the writings of both father and son, James Mill and John Stuart Mill, on Indian matters was that of a hierarchical âscale of civilizationsâ, which in the very moment of implicating the British and the Indian natives in the commonalities of an antiquarian origin also rigidly distantiated the formerâs progressive culture from the latterâs stationary desuetude. Whereas the former argued that the Hindus had never been in a high state of civilisation and had taken only a few steps towards it (Mill 1975 [1817]), the latter elaborated the details of a civilizational ladder, the lowermost rank of which was occupied by communities which required an absolutist ruler and the topmost by the Anglo-Saxons themselves. While the Brahmo Samaj, whose members sought to counter these Millian viewpoints, is often regarded as a âreformâ movement, where âreformâ is associated with the endorsement of certain west-imprinted motifs of social progressivism, a close reading of these Bengali sources indicates that even prominent reform-minded Brahmos often couched their socioreligious activism in the traditional vocabularies of the knowledge (jñÄna) of God and the love (prema) of God. The terms âreformâ and ârevivalâ, which are sometimes applied in a monolithic fashion to an individual (across the different phases of a lifetime) or to a social movement, do not quite stick to our authors. Their writings can frustrate our attempts to classify them in a modular fashion as either âreformistâ or ârevivalistâ, for different sections of the same text can alternately seek to retrieve Vedic themes and apply them to contemporary problems (a ârevivalistâ moment) or reformulate Vedic heritages in the light of European ideals after these have first been interrogated through Vedic lenses (a âreformistâ moment). They can selectively interweave âreformistâ themes into a ârevivalistâ backdrop or selectively foreground ârevivalistâ concerns even while emphasising âreformistâ goals (Sen 1993: 405). Here we see the gradual emergence of distinctive styles of Indian modernities which are simultaneously inflected with European idioms and rooted in indigenous subjectivities. In the words of Gyan Prakash, âIndian modernity has always existed as an internally divided process ⦠There is simply no way to tidy up this messy history of India and narrate it as the victory of capital over community, modernity over tradition, West over non-West ⦠It is thus that Indian modernity emerges as Janus-faced; crafted in the image of Europe, it is also ineluctably different â¦â (Prakash 1999:234).
This study of diverse configurations of universalisms and distinctive styles of vernacular modernities in colonial Bengal also addresses a lacuna in the existing scholarship on the Brahmo Samaj and, more generally, on religious life in nineteenth-century Bengal â namely, the agonistic interrelations between the Brahmo Samaj and Vaiá¹£á¹ava lifeforms. The secondary literature on the Brahmo Samaj occasionally presents Bengal Vaiá¹£á¹avism as its socioreligious other but usually does not systematically explore the dialectical interrelations across their conceptual, experiential, and institutional divides. The leitmotif running through the chapters of this book is that even while some of the key leaders of the Brahmo Samaj sought to distance its institutional spaces from the worship of the God Ká¹á¹£á¹a â routinely berated in various contemporaneous circles as a devious, crafty, and immoral divinity â they consciously assimilated and creatively reworked some of the stock vocabularies, imageries, and concepts of Bengal Vaiá¹£á¹avism relating to God, the world, and humanity. These Brahmo figures and their Vaiá¹£á¹ava contemporaries were thus inheritors of, and participants in, the millennia-old debate across the Hindu religious traditions over whether the divine reality is so utterly ineffable that any attempt to apprehend it through the prisms of human-shaped images is a lamentable corruption of the spirit or whether the ineffable divine reality is ontologically constituted of a transcendentally perfect form which is somehow mirrored in the images constructed with human hands and glorified with human songs (Lipner 2019). In marking out the Brahmo quest for the formless eternal as disjoint from the densities of Vaiá¹£á¹ava concepts, imageries, texts, disciplines, and rituals, several Brahmo intellectuals sought to de-mythologise these traditional elements and also re-mythologise them with the Brahmo vocabularies of the universal spirit. Far from becoming an accidental footnote to the Brahmo text, however, it is precisely the premodern Vaiá¹£á¹ava somatic-experiential registers of self-abasement, self-reproach, restless yearning for God (byÄkulatÄ) from within the impermanent world, cultivation of a living friendship with God, seeking refuge at the feet of God, passionate devotional love (bhakti), and ecstatic joy (Änanda) that repeatedly return to the Brahmo life-worlds during the nineteenth century marked by active contestations over the nature and the structure of Hindu religious universalism. Even as Brahmo worldviews continued to be stamped through the nineteenth century, and thereafter, by distinctively Advaita emphases on the nonduality between the human self and the divine self, this nonduality also begins to be inflected, from around 1860 onwards, by the effusive vocabularies of the devotional servitude of the devotee to the deity. In this sense, premodern Vaiá¹£á¹ava religious imaginations constituted the wider milieus within which some of the prominent modernizing Brahmo intellectuals lived, moved, and had their sociocultural being. While Hindu universalism is today usually associated with organisations such as the Ramakrishna Mission and ISKCON (Hare Krishna), I highlight some of the underlying continuities between their vocabularies and the Vaiá¹£á¹ava-shaped religious imaginations of some writers within the Brahmo Samaj in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Along this conceptual pathway, I also highlight the point that the motifs of âHindu universalismâ and âAdvaita VedÄntaâ should not be regarded as conceptually interchangeable (Inden 1990: 130). At the dynamic conjunctions of various crisscrossing currents between Indic and European streams, including the writings of figures such as Radhakrishnan and the voyages of Hindu gurus to Euro-American locations, the âmonismâ of Advaita has often been presented as the Hindu template for universalizing the religious expressions of humanity. T. M. P. Mahadevan (1977: 124) states the point clearly: âAdvaita ⦠is the culmination of all religious sects and philosophical schools. It is the common end of all philosophical endeavour and religious practiceâ. However, as we will see in the chapters of this book, the religious landscapes of the Brahmos are characterised by a great diversity of viewpoints on the divine reality, the human self, and the relation between God and humanity, and this diversity cannot be neatly summarised by the classical motif of ontological nonduality in Advaita VedÄnta. Furthermore, several textual, historical, and anthropological studies of Hindu ways of thinking and living have pointed to a more complexly diverse picture on the ground. For instance, Elaine Fisher has pointed out that the religious landscape of early modern south India was characterised by a range of devotional groups such as Åaiva, Vaiá¹£á¹ava, MÄdhva, SmÄrta, and others whose public theologians defended their particular worldview as the culmination of Hindu orthodoxy (Fisher 2017: 48). She notes that â[b]y the sixteenth century, Hindu religiosity in South India was fundamentally mediated by the boundaries of sectarian identity. Networks of religious institutions â monasteries and temple complexes, which attained a new social prominence as regionâwide landlords and powerbrokers â were radically polarized along Åaiva and Vaiá¹£á¹ava linesâ (Fisher 2018:4). Here the term âsectarianâ indicates not a lamentable lapse from a putatively unified essence embodied by Advaita VedÄnta, but dense affiliations to distinctive Åaiva or Vaiá¹£á¹ava communities whose members, marked by particular socio-ritual insignia, interacted in public spaces. In the religious milieus of late nineteenth-century Bengal too, one encounters multiple projections of universalism from specifically âsectarianâ Vaiá¹£á¹ava standpoints and the deep impress of these theistic standpoints is discernible also in the writings of some Brahmos. The claim that Advaita VedÄnta encapsulates and expresses the spiritual essence of human religiosity was thus already being contested in late nineteenth-century Bengal. According to modernist variations on the classical templates of the Advaita of Åaá¹kara, transcending the culturally-shaped and the historically-grounded factities of the religious traditions of the world lies a mystical essence. From around 1880, we find some Bengali Vaiá¹£á¹avas claiming precisely this higher ground, though here the mystical summit is not the truth of nonduality (advaita) but the unalloyed love of the supremely personal God (Sardella 2013). In making this claim, they were aware that Vaiá¹£á¹avism was one token of the degraded type of religiosity that was routinely characterised in Orientalist literature as idolatrous, superstitious, and regressive â and thus begins the great struggle to reconfigure, through traditionalist Vedic lenses, modernised forms of Vaiá¹£á¹avism which would offer a devotional theism purged of its perceived aberrations. It is to such a Vaiá¹£á¹avism that Swami Prabhupada (1896â1977), the founder of ISKCON, points when he declares: âA directly Ká¹á¹£á¹a conscious person is the topmost transcendentalist because such a devotee knows what is meant by Brahman or ParamÄtmÄ. His knowledge of the Absolute Truth is perfect, whereas the impersonalist [follower of Advaita] and the meditative yogÄ« are imperfectly Ká¹á¹£á¹a consciousâ (1972: 318).
This association, or equivalence, between âHinduismâ and âAdvaitaâ which was common in various circles of British and European Orientalism also points to the intensely debated question of whether the multiple modernities that begin to appear from around 1850 should be regarded primarily as expressions of native agency or largely as reactions to western instigations. In certain forms of postcolonial theory, the emphasis falls squarely on highlighting the intricate nexus between British imperial conquest and manufacture of knowledge about India. Against the notion of âdisinterested knowledgeâ, Said (1978) demonstrated that the processes through which knowledge is produced are enmeshed in a complex matrix of technologies of power the study of whose configurations is vital in understanding how ideas and values are propagated and perpetuated. Because of the asymmetrical power relations between western nations and colonised groups, Said sought to unearth the intersections between the western quest for mastery over eastern religions, languages, and cultures, on the one hand, and the imperialistic imperatives of establishing stable modes of political domination, on the other hand. Following a broad Saidian trajectory, Bernard Cohn has pointed out that colonial conquest in India had a mutual relationship with its forms of knowledge which were produced through âinvestigative modalitiesâ including âthe definition of a body of information that is needed, the procedures by which appropriate knowledge is gathered, its ordering and classification, and then how it is transformed into usable forms such as published reports, statistical returns, histories, gazetteers, legal codes, and encyclopediasâ (1996:5). During the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, the painstaking labour of several generations of British scholars constructed, partly through the study of Sanskrit-based texts, âHinduismâ as a singular religious system centred around certain canonical editions and priestly commentators (Von Stietencron 1991). This recovery of a âcanonical Hinduismâ resulted not only in the conception of a unified community of the Hindus whose authenticity was to be measured in terms of their fidelity to these texts but also in the consequent repudiation of the masses saturated by a âpopular Hinduismâ whose retrogressive beliefs and stagnant customs were viewed as stalling their entry into British modernity. Even though some these Orientalists were guided by a humane desire to understand and respect the customs of the natives instead of condemning them to one extreme end of a civilisational spectrum, they thus created their own set of differences centred around a temporal alterity between the glorious past and the decadent present. Just as the Spanish enforced on the Aztecs in Central America a uniform culture from which the richness and the ambiguities associated with the local divergences of their homeland had been eviscerated, the British, who grappled at home with the contextual applications of the common law, instead sought in India to excavate the âeternal lawâ from the Sanskrit texts which in turn reinforced the notion of a timeless India.
Thus, an army of the East India Companyâs servants devoted their labours to translating texts from Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit and producing grammars and dictionaries, and the reports published in journals such as the Journal of the Asiatic Society (1832) began to reach a diverse range of people in Europe such as Max Mueller in Oxford and Schelling in Germany. The guiding impulse behind the acquisition of such linguistic skills was both a curiosity to unlock the treasures buried in the mysterious past safeguarded by the Brahmin priests and a necessity, especially after Warren Hastingâs Plan of 1772, to develop tools of communication with the natives for efficient systems of law and administration. Their writings strengthened the romanticised perception of India as the âchildhood of Europeâ, and indeed as frozen in the hoary unchanging traditions of antiquity, so that it needed the benevolence of the British to set it onwards on the path of progress. As the British gained stronger footholds in the country, this notion of an âessential Indiaâ continued to be operative in the indefatigable officials associated with the census compilations, cartographical projects, antiquarian collections, archaeological findings, official commissions, and ethnographic surveys which amassed a wealth of information on the people through classificatory schemes and social categories such as caste, religion, place of birth, and occupation. At the same time, however, British administrators often remained crucially dependent on a variety of Indian intermediaries (dubash) and frequently complained that they were virtually at the mercy of these interlocutors in their tasks of dispensing justice and collecting revenue. For instance, Governor General Lord Cornwallis (1738â1805) wrote that the servants of the East India Company were âobliged, both from habit and necessity, to allow the management of their official, as well as their private business, to fall into the hands of dubashes â¦â (Mukherjee 1968: 118). Again, in response to the view that colonial projects tried to systematise various aspects of Oriental culture through classificatory systems such as the census, thereby producing substantive and essentialist constructions of Hinduism, Michael Haan has argued that the census reports show that the British officials involved were, in fact, unable to arrive at any modular definitions of âHinduismâ. The census officials used numerous tests such as reception of instruction from a Brahmin priest, acceptance of the Vedic texts, caste affiliation and so on, none of which were sufficiently discriminatory. Certain systematised pan-Indian structures began to appear through such complex processes of negotiation between European categories and Indian figures who interrogated, appropriated, and elaborated the former. In other words, rather than remaining passive onlookers of a âHinduisation projectâ, Indians often challenged the classificatory frameworks of the colonial bureaucratic machinery. For instance, the members of the Arya Samaj (established in 1875) began to claim in 1890 that they should be classified not as âHinduâ but as âAryanâ, and around a decade later, voices could be heard from Muslim sections arguing that if groups such as the âAnimistsâ were removed from the category of âHindusâ, the proportion of âMuhammadansâ to the âHindu majorityâ would be significantly increased (Haan 2005:23).
I therefore concur with postcolonial theorists who have contested in recent decades the notion that a âtraditionalâ India was suddenly awakened from its Oriental slumber by colonial interventions and led across the thresholds of âmodernityâ after the birth-pangs of the nation-state. Much of postcolonial literature has sought to dismantle the essentialist binaries that were constructed by colonial forms of knowledge which sought to draw clear demarcations between the social identities of the colonisers and the natives. Such criticism seeks instead to delineate the localised spaces of the in-between where the renegotiations, disseminations, re-articulations, and translations of the colonial discourses produced not neat replicas of the colonisers but a peculiar array of dislocations on highly contested terrain. Thus, while agreeing in some respects with writers developing broadly Saidian perspectives who have argued that the British epistemological strategies for acquiring knowledge of India were impelled by a colonial thirst for domination over the country, C. A. Bayly has also stressed the âdialogicâ nature of the processes through which this colonial knowledge was created. Such understanding, without which the mundane tasks of administration would have been impossible, was grounded to a significant extent in everyday forms of knowledge which were, however, uprooted from their local contexts and re-inscribed within European discourses coloured by racial evaluations. Through such dense transactions, Indians began to increasingly produce âtheir own knowledge from reworked fragments of their own tradition melded with western ideas and conveyed through western artifactsâ (Bayly 1996: 371â72).
In this vein, our study of Bengali texts will highlight certain transactional dimensions of East-West encounters by presenting an array of Hindu thinkers who often consciously navigated the sociocultural streams structured by colonial asymmetries precisely by reworking Sanskritic theological motifs that predated these encounters by several centuries. For them âtraditionâ is not a static set of antiquated categories but a toolbox whose resources can be hermeneutically reconfigured to engage with questions of life and death against the backdrop of the gradual entrenchment of colonial power. The scholarly literature on the colonial production of Indic knowledge tends to be shaped by an examination of texts produced in English by Hindu intellectuals, so that by highlighting their re-envisioning of Hindu worldviews through Anglicising lenses, it is argued that neo-Hinduism is largely a series of passive native responses to active western provocations. In search of a way through this theoretical thicket, we need to distinguish between two standpoints which are often conflated in these strands of reflection about the origins and the modalities of modern Hinduisms.
MH1: British colonial modernities generated the institutional backdrops within which multiple modernities were gradually configured by Bengali Hindu intellectuals.
MH2: British colonial modernities supplied the conceptual vocabularies with which multiple modernities were gradually configured by Bengali Hindu intellectuals.
Our study will indicate that while the modernist projects of several Bengali Hindus, from around 1850, were shaped by subtle intertwinings of MH1 and MH2, their modernities should be understood primarily through the register of MH1 and not MH2. That is to say, the gradual entrenchment and institutionalisation of aspects of western values, norms, and concepts generated or facilitated certain socio-cultural milieus within which distinctive ways of being Hindu were developed, but the idioms for these distinctively newer ways of being were not imported wholesale from Europe to these colonial conjunctures. One key dimension of these milieus, as we have seen, was an Orientalist imagination of Indic socioreligious worldviews as steeped in the primordial past of an uncorrupted purity. Characteristic of this imagination are the views of William Clarkson: âIndian civilization is original and independent because of its antiquityâ (1850: 24) and âtheir language is the voice of antiquity. Their dress, their manner, their religions, their institutions, their social habits, the produce of their soil ⦠are but the exemplars of past agesâ (1850: 32â33). A delightful example of this projection of India as an antique land comes from George Trevelyanâs response, in 1864, of utter astonishment at the âhorrendous dinâ that roused him from his bed on the morning of the festival of Cali (Kali): âDuring a few minutes, I could not believe my eyes; for I seemed to have been transported in a moment over more than twenty centuries, to the Athens of Cratinus and Aristophanes. If it had not been for the colour of the faces around, I should have believed myself to be on the main road to Eleusis in the full tide of the Dionysiac festivals ⦠It was no chance resemblance this, between a Hindoo rite in the middle of the nineteenth century, and those wild revels that stream along many a Grecian bas-relief, and wind around many an ancient Indian vase â¦â (1864 [1907]: 210â11). Around eleven years later, Henry Maine was to argue, in a lecture delivered at the University of Cambridge, that although Britain and India had emerged from a common origin in the archaic past, indeed from the âvery family of mankind to which we belongâ, this affirmation of similarity was riven by a sharp bifurcation between the Aryan customs, beliefs, and practices of India which had fallen into decrepitude and the civilizing influence of British institutions which would direct the former on the road towards development. Thus, putting forward the question, âWhy is it that all things Aryan are older in India than elsewhere?â, he supplies, almost in a conspiratorial tone, this answer: âThe chief secret, a very simple one, lies probably in the extreme isolationism of the country until it was opened by maritime adventureâ (Maine 1875: 8). Another dimension relates to the socio-economic shifts associated with the entrenchment of the colonial apparatus â as the British Raj began to make deeper inroads into the âheartland of Hindostanâ, it brought about a series of upheavals which had various types of dislocational effects on traditional village communal existence (Srinivas 1968: 192). With the gradual disintegration of the jajmani system within which the interchange of goods took place among different castes, members of the lower castes had to find new patrons and often found themselves cut off from more established means of occupation, especially during times of famine.
However, at the same time, it would be historically inaccurate to view British colonial re-presentations of the land in monolithic terms, for as Thomas Metcalf has demonstrated, the British did not possess a consistent imperial strategy; at times they accentuated the differences and at other times they highlighted the similarities between them and their subjects. And at times, âthey simultaneously accommodated both views in their thinking, making it perilously difficult to discern any larger system at allâ (Metcalf 1994: x). Such variations across the polarities of identity and difference are particularly clear in the gendered constructions of the âmanly Englishmanâ and the âeffeminate Bengaliâ which were mutually implicated in each other and which emerged from the intersections of the multiple axes of race, religion, ethnicity, and sexuality as British administrators, male Indian nationalists, Englishwomen and Indian women responded to the various tensions and anxieties thrown up by contemporary social and political currents (Sinha 1995). Again, while diffusionist understandings of the history of science in colonial India presented the spread of scientific notions and technological advance in a largely one-directional manner in which European modernity rooted out primitive indigenous traditions, Indian scientists such as Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858â1937) and Prafulla Chandra Ray (1861â1944) â both of them associated with Brahmo institutions â often negotiated complex interweavings between European science and traditional scientific and medical systems, and made highly significant and internationally acclaimed contributions in the fields of physics, chemistry, and mathematics (Arnold 2000). Thus, while after the British, Hindus were not the same again, their divergences from the premodern were often mediated precisely by premodern vocabularies â the complex narratives of Hindu modernities are thus shaped by marked discontinuities across subterranean continuities. Such complex navigation of newer forms of the old is by no means a distinctive feature of Hindu modernities â in fact, they are the warp and weft of all living religious streams (Kitagawa 1987; Fuller 1992; Biardeau 1989). Perhaps no scholar of religion would characterise present-day Pentecostals in Brazil as neo-Christians, if the prefix suggests some sharp breach from the messages of the New Testament. In that vein, we too can begin to exorcise the spectre of the binary âEither Out of India or Westâs import into Indiaâ that seems to have haunted the study of modern Hinduism. In this connection, we can invoke Percival Spearâs âsee-saw principleâ which, according to him, has guided western perceptions of India, especially during the period of the colonial encounters: the preconceptions that some individuals held about the country were partly modified on the basis of the reports of those who had spent some time in the country, and these ideas were then applied to matters of Indian administration only to be adapted again in the light of new experience, and so on (Spear 1961: 404â5).
Moving beyond the conceptual straitjacket of sharp East-West binaries, we can then also highlight the co-constitution of multiple Hindu modernities and western modernities, where against the backdrop of the gradual entrenchment of colonial power in Bengal, Hindu thinkers and western interlocutors become entangled in processes of borrowing each otherâs vocabularies to forge their own worldviews. For one instance of this form of co-constitution, we can turn to the complex interactions between Christians missionaries and native Hindus that were partly responsible for the emergence and the acceptance of the term âHinduismâ as referring to a system of closely integrated beliefs and practices. While the term âHinduâ was used in pre-British times by Persians and Muslims in a geographical-ethnic sense to refer to those who lived on the âotherâ side of the Indus (sindhu in Sanskrit), early missionaries such as William Ward and William Carey, and administrators such as Charles Grant (himself an Evangelical), often made references to âHindooismâ, and âthe Hindoo systemâ, taking these to be a set of creeds and philosophical arguments. These missionaries usually perceived âHindooismâ as an âotherâ to their own Christianity, and projected the notion of a unified homogenous system into which local divergences were somehow submerged or assimilated. This conception of an overarching religious system that could somehow weld the diverse elements of the country into an integrated whole was taken up by some members of the educated upper classes who were beginning to respond to the routine denunciations of this system, and the urgency to put up a united front of Hindus against the common enemy was further impressed upon them when many of these Hindus began to migrate, through conversions, to the other camp (Oddie 2003). A case in point is the home-spun version of âbiblical criticismâ that Rammohun Roy (1772â1833) â the fons et origo of various Brahmo motifs â levelled at the Baptist missionary in Serampore, Joshua Marshman. Rammohun tracked down certain âpolytheistic sentimentsâ not just in his own Hindu traditions, routinely berated by Christian missionaries for their âidolatryâ, but also in the very Christianity that Marshman himself was espousing. Indeed, skilfully turning the charge of âheathenismâ on his Christian critic, he declared that âthe idea of a triune-God, a man-God, and also the idea of appearance of God in the bodily shape of a dove, or that of the blood of God shed for the payment of a debt, seem entirely Heathenish and absurd â¦â (Carpenter 1833: 57). In response to some Christian militaristic metaphors, an article in Bengali published in 1844 referred to those who âprofess to believe that they alone are the select and beloved children of our common Almighty Fatherâ, and commented: âWe thank the great Architect of the universe that such are not our own doctrines, â that it is, on the contrary, our chiefest source of comfort and happiness, firmly to believe, and zealously to inculcate, that all mankind are morally and spiritually equal in the eye of a beneficent, an impartial, and an eternal Deityâ (Hatcher 2008:95). Some six decades after Rammohun, missionaries began to re-think in the 1880s their evangelical strategies in the wake of the emergence of âa counter-confrontationalism from a strident, neo-orthodox and more highly organized Hindu oppositionâ (Copley 1997: 251), which, as we will see, had a significant impact on the contours of Hindu modernities. Thus, writing in 1903, the missionary John P. Jones (1903: 68â69) referred to the significant change of opinion in the âlast quarter of a centuryâ as a consequence of which the contemptuous attitude towards the âbenighted Hinduâ was giving way to respect and admiration for the speculative powers of the Hindus, the loftiness of their thought, and their âsystem of ontologyâ.
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I glimpsed the contours of many of the arguments developed here during lunchtime discussions with Professor Emeritus Julius Lipner at Clare Hall, Cambridge. Questions he has put to me over the years have set me on intellectual trails which I have partly retraced in these chapters.
This book is for all my undergraduate and postgraduate students at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge. That waves of young men and women should be able, after only a few years of study, to acquire a deeply empathetic, conceptually sophisticated, and historically informed understanding of Hinduism, Buddhism, Indian Christianity, or Indian Islam is a living testimony to the claim that the Brahmo authors studied in this book would have endorsed â in the true republic of ideas there is no East or West but only an unfinished quest in response to the irresistible call of the eternal unknown. My students defy the generalisation that people who live on an island (Latin: insula) are particularly prone to insularities, and their restless minds and inquisitive spirits constantly remind me of the truth that the self gradually begins to re-cognise itself only through its long journeys within and across the lands of the other. In many ways, this book has been inspired by them and written for them â and therefore it is also dedicated to them.