Hinduism Before Reform

Brian A. Hatcher

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780674988224
• eBook ISBN: 9780674247116
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History

A bold retelling of the origins of contemporary Hinduism, and an argument against the long-established notion of religious reform.

By the early eighteenth century, the Mughal Empire was in decline, and the East India Company was making inroads into the subcontinent. A century later Christian missionaries, Hindu teachers, Muslim saints, and Sikh rebels formed the colorful religious fabric of colonial India. Focusing on two early nineteenth-century Hindu communities, the Brahmo Samaj and the Swaminarayan Sampraday, and their charismatic figureheads—the "cosmopolitan" Rammohun Roy and the "parochial" Swami Narayan—Brian Hatcher explores how urban and rural people thought about faith, ritual, and gods. Along the way he sketches a radical new view of the origins of contemporary Hinduism and overturns the idea of religious reform.

Hinduism Before Reform challenges the rigid structure of revelation-schism­-reform-sect prevalent in much history of religion. Reform, in particular, plays an important role in how we think about influential Hindu movements and religious history at large. Through the lens of reform, one doctrine is inevitably backward-looking while another represents modernity. From this comparison flows a host of simplistic conclusions. Instead of presuming a clear dichotomy between backward and modern, Hatcher is interested in how religious authority is acquired and projected.

Hinduism Before Reform asks how religious history would look if we eschewed the obfuscating binary of progress and tradition. There is another way to conceptualize the origins and significance of these two Hindu movements, one that does not trap them within the teleology of a predetermined modernity.

1

BEFORE REFORM

THE STORY OF religious reform in India is mapped across both space and time. In the last half of the nineteenth century—when the discourse of reform fairly exploded into view—a number of new metaphors were coined by a range of Indian intellectuals to capture a sense of optimism around visions of national progress. We find writers describing new religious and social movements in terms of waves (andolan) spreading across the land, signaling an awakening (jagaran) toward the values of general welfare and improvement (unnati); others speak of a slumbering subcontinental giant entering a new age (nava yug), as India came to a new awareness of itself (prabuddha Bharata).¹ In what would become a vast literature on religious reform, the process of change is routinely imagined in terms of the dispersion of modern actors, movements, institutions, and logics outward from vital epicenters like Calcutta; progress is plotted in terms of the gradual diffusion of new initiatives in education, social reform, and political awakening. Like a drop of ink spreading on a piece of blank paper, the passage of time sees the horizon of reform expand ever outward.²

When one stops to think about it, a good deal of the critical terminology around colonial modernity in South Asia draws on a related set of spatial tropes. We speak of the arrival of Europe, the epicenter of colonial rule, the spread of English education, the intrusion of modernity, and the impact of colonialism. That all these spatial metaphors appear to us as historical descriptors may be taken as evidence of the temporo-centrism of modernity. That is, we tend to think modernity is about time and forget how much it has been charted in spatial terms as well. Even after Mikhail Bakhtin taught us to appreciate how time and space register within discourse, our standard theories of religious change in modern India continue to trade on the temporality of progressive change without giving much attention to the spatialization of our central narratives.³ We do well, in fact, to consider how common colonial-era metaphors of reform actually work to construct modern India as a particular space with a particular history.

An important step was taken in this direction by Manu Goswami, who drew on the work of Bakhtin and Henri Lefebvre to explore how the production of the national space of Bharat (or India), relied on a kind of chronotopic imagination that drew on both South Asian and imperial conceptions of space and time.⁴ Goswami’s work demonstrates how the East India Company’s rise to power in South Asia was not merely predicated on the economic logic of mercantile expansion; it also rested on key tropes about India as the kind of space into which British economic actors could extend their investments and deploy their military-fiscal resources. Bolstered by eighteenth-century assumptions about India as rich in wealth but politically weak, the discursive terrain was cleared in advance for the British to extend their power. Colonial maps of India—indicating vast empty interior spaces—ratified imperial projects to control, improve, and reform South Asian space.⁵ While scholarship in religious studies has made strides toward understanding the discursive disciplining of religion in relation to imperialism, there is more to be said about how the spatiotemporal logics and tropics of reform have shaped—and continue to shape—reflection on religion in South Asia.

There is room to ask, in particular, how modern representations of Hinduism are implicated in the spatiotemporal imagining of India. One could say that modern Hinduism is in fact an allomorph of modern India in this respect. This is to say that representations of modern Hinduism offer another kind of a spatiotemporal mapping of India. To develop this point, I want to look briefly at two influential authors who wrote about Hinduism in the mid-twentieth century, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and R. C. Zaehner. Each author understands the story of Hinduism in relation to the coming-into-being of modern India in the wake of imperial rule; they each present Hinduism as a chronotope for India. We need to give some thought to influential accounts like theirs because, if the story of modern Hinduism maps onto the history of modern India, any project to rethink modern Hinduism must begin by reimagining India as well. This explains why Hinduism Before Reform is oriented toward the space-time of the early colonial moment. If we drop back to the early colonial it is not simply because this was the time period in which Sahajanand Swami and Rammohun Roy happened to live. More importantly, it is because by rethinking the significance of the early colonial moment we have an opportunity to rethink and rewrite the subsequent history of late colonial and postindependence India. In order to demonstrate how this may be possible, let me quickly bring forward these two influential representations of Hinduism as chronotope.

Hinduism as Chronotope

Writing in 1962, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan felt confident enough about India’s progress toward social reform to assure his readers that “we have overcome” the need for caste distinctions.⁶ His claim represents the sort of thinking I want to highlight, an approach that yokes the depiction of modern Hinduism to the viability of the modern Indian nation. For Radhakrishnan, recent developments around the reform of religion had fostered an Indian public in which “it is not the color of the skin but the conduct of the person that counts.”⁷ When he wrote these words, he had just been named president of the Republic of India; his understanding of Hinduism gave him full confidence that the public then being created by “legislative enactments” was also perfectly “consistent with our tradition.”⁸ That the new president of the republic was the author of such widely read books as The Hindu View of Life (1927) is not unimportant.

Radhakrishnan’s use of the inclusive first-person plural in the two quotations above is significant. He speaks of what “we” have overcome and the work “we” are doing to link reflection on India to “our” tradition. For a politician to speak this way might not seem all that striking; but since we are talking about a Brahmin intellectual and spokesperson for India’s grand spiritual heritage, the implications are more profound. Today we understand the political import of claims like this—in relation to both official projects around national integration after 1947 and populist initiatives to promote Hindu unity (sangathan).⁹ The politicization of Hinduism and the history of saffron politics are too familiar to need rehearsing here, as are the myriad acts of exclusion, marginalization, and fragmentation that accompanied the creation of the modern Indian nation-state.¹⁰ Indeed, the rise of Hindu nationalism from the late imperial moment of Bankimchandra, Vivekananda, and Aurobindo through Savarkar and the Hindu Mahasabha occupies a large and secure place in today’s scholarly canon and university curricula. If anything, it can be a challenge to read the proclamations of someone like Radhakrishnan without hearing in them a reminder of the unintended consequences of Hindu leaders promoting inclusivism and tolerance.¹¹

That said, scholars of Hinduism still remain handicapped by a kind of “genesis amnesia,” a condition that makes it difficult for intellectuals to recover the conditioning factors behind our critical categories.¹² This is not to say scholars of Hinduism have not attended to contemporary modes of criticism; that would be unfair and inaccurate. I have in mind a particular kind of failure, which we can think of as the inability to reckon with the ways historical narratives and spatial imaginings work together to generate illusions of national community.¹³ Writing in the wake of the Cold War, Michael Shapiro stressed the need for new moral geographies capable of undoing the normalizing discourse of the nation-state; he called for “map alteration” to address the “structures of nonrecognition built into modernity’s moral geography.”¹⁴ Shapiro’s call remains salient, especially if we are to address “narrativized forms of forgetfulness” that shape persistent linkages between Hinduism and the modern Indian nation.¹⁵

Such linkages depend on a kind of moral prolepsis that operates like this: first, one assumes there is an Indian nation-space that exists to be reformed; next, one assumes that Hinduism is the one unitary tradition that ought to map onto this space but that has in fact hitherto failed to achieve its full identity with the Indian nation-space; finally, one assumes that what is required is a reformation of existing tradition, so that Hinduism may finally realize itself in these terms—as a nation that will in turn reflect the truest Hinduism as well as the truth of Hinduism. This, I would argue, is the very teleology that informs Radhakrishnan’s views of Hinduism and the Indian public. For him, independent India had finally realized democratic inclusivity because that had been the goal of Hindu reformation all along.¹⁶

This kind of thinking is hardly unique to Radhakrishnan. The same logic informs another influential treatment of Hinduism, namely R. C. Zaehner’s Hinduism, first published in 1962, the same year as Radhakrishnan’s remarks on caste quoted above. The very first words of Zaehner’s introduction present the case for the mapping of Hinduism onto India through a claim most will immediately recognize: “ ‘Hindu’ is a Persian word: it means simply ‘Indian.’ Hinduism is thus the ‘-ism’ of the Indian people.”¹⁷ The claim is couched in terms of a familiar ambiguity promoted by the fluid phonemes in place-names like Sind, Hind, and Ind. But, for that very reason, our attention is distracted from the deeper import of the passage; Zaehner encourages us to forget—in Shapiro’s terms—the kind of moral geography that would equate Hinduism and India.

From this beginning, Zaehner’s narrative unfolds in equally familiar fashion: Indian history can be understood in terms of four grand phases of development, culminating in the era of modern reform when Hinduism-as-India realizes itself. If we fast-forward to the modern moment, we are reminded at once of the spatial. When thinking of modernity, Zaehner is chiefly focused on transformations taking place in the colonial era. He tells us the reformers of modern India imbibed new ideas from the West; but he also wants us to appreciate that Indians avoided the deracinating effects of cultural borrowing through their own concerted efforts at cultural preservation. Echoing the opening words of his book quoted above, he reminds his readers, “After all they were Hindus, and ‘Hindu’ is simply the Persian word for ‘Indian.’ ” In other words, if the modern reformers had sought to repudiate Hinduism, it would have meant repudiating “India itself.”¹⁸

The prolepsis here is evident: the end is present in the beginning. What falls in between is Zaehner’s lively story of a nation struggling to harmonize the spiritual and the worldly, dramatized by mapping mythic characters onto historical lives. The indecisive Yudhishthira of the Mahabharata meets the conflicted modern hero Mahatma Gandhi. Both struggle—as Indians and as Hindus—to look past an obviously “degraded” dharma in order to realize a higher truth.¹⁹ The ultimate telos for Hinduism is prefigured early on, when Zaehner informs his readers that it was to be in only the final phase of Indian history that Hindus would finally reach their goal. This they were able to do thanks to Gandhi’s embrace of tradition; it was Gandhi who assured that the noble goals of Hindu reform found a place in the hearts of the “Indian people.”²⁰ With Gandhi, both Hinduism and India reach their long-cherished goal.

Zaehner’s attention to India’s ability to address the threat of Western influence and deracination helps us appreciate how the chronotope of Hinduism is cast in global space. Waves of reform and awakening constitute the leading edge of global reform; India’s awakening depends in part on the impelling force of European imperial expansion. Agitations within India are figured as a kind of force for change radiating from colonial metropolitan centers like Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay, the original loci for rationalization, secularization, and demystification. From them the waves of change ripple outward, upsetting the placid backwaters of tradition. It is important to appreciate how, in the process, remote places tend to become distant pasts. The spatiotemporal diffusion of reform overcomes the “yawning gap” between the “higher manifestations” of religious thought found in urban centers and the “frankly superstitious and magical practices” characteristic of the “rural masses.”²¹

The approach taken by Zaehner recalls patterns around the discursive mapping of Hinduism and India that had been set in place by earlier colonial-era authors who came to speak for what I refer to as the empire of reform. A good example is Monier-Williams’s Hinduism from 1877, which opens by calling to mind the space of Hindustan as peopled by a vast a “assemblage of beings” who, even though inhabiting a shared subcontinental space, could not be said to constitute a “nation.”²² This denial of an Indian national identity in turn echoes the thought of imperial apologists like James Fitzjames Stephen, who, just one year after Monier-Williams, drew on claims about the fractured character of India to justify imposing the stabilizing and ordering hand of empire. In Stephen the British Empire is likened to a “vast bridge” leading an “enormous multitude of human beings” from the “dreary land” of India’s past to an “orderly, peaceful and industrious” future. Here we clearly see how spatial metaphors work in tandem with the teleology of imperial modernity.²³

From Monier-Williams and Stephen we can jump to John Nicol Farquhar’s 1915 monograph, Modern Religious Movements in India, which, even as late as the 1960s, Zaehner was content to view as a “standard work” on religious change.²⁴ In Farquhar too, the age of reform is yoked to a distinct spatiotemporalism; reform commences dramatically with the “penetration” of India by the West—a forceful and troubling image but one entirely consistent with the logic of empire.²⁵ Zeroing in on the arrival in Bengal in 1794 of the Baptist missionary William Carey, Farquhar also linked reform to the diffusion of European Christianity. In this account, Carey serves as a pebble thrown into the torpid waters of Indian religious life; he and his fellow missionaries are ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Before Reform
• 2. Fluid Landscapes
• 3. Polities before Publics
• 4. On the Road with Nilakantha
• 5. Upcountry with Rammohun
• 6. The Guru’s Rules
• 7. The Raja’s Darbar
• 8. The Empire of Reform
• 9. Old Comparisons and New
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index