Vaiṣṇavism, religion, and culture in colonial Bengal
In a posthumously published book Bengali Vaishnavism in 1933, Bipin Chandra Pal (1858–1932) asserted that Bengali Vaiṣṇava traditions represented the “genius and character of the Bengalee people” (Pal 1933: 44). Pal’s statement represented what we would recognise to be a religious tradition in a cultural, almost civilisational, sense (Sartori 2005). Pal was participating in a hermeneutic gesture that was fairly well known in its time—and one that would continue to have resonances in later decades as well, with the strengthening of political Hinduism in India. A cultural understanding of Hinduism began to take place in Bengal as early as the appearance of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya’s Ānanda Maṭha (Abbey of Bliss), which drew upon the themes of asceticism, sacrifice, and sacred militancy to bring an end to “foreign” rule in the region. It found its moment of maturity in the cultural nationalism at the turn of the twentieth century, most prominently articulated in public debates around “the women’s question” (Chatterjee 1990) and it keenly informed Swadeshi articulations of nationalist resistance to colonialism in Bengal.
It is necessary to bear in mind in this context that reading religion as culture meant participating in the larger discourse around religion and modernity in colonial India. One distinct strain within Hindu responses to colonial modernity and the latter’s critique of Hindu doctrine and praxis consisted of a recognisably “cultural” one (Sen 2006). It was a response that invoked non-indigenous categories to defend an upper-caste Hindu religious world without necessarily engaging with the doctrinal aspects—aspects that would have been significant in any pre-modern debate over religious truth, whether the debate was between different sectarian traditions within Hinduism or between Hindu and non-Hindu traditions. This kind of Hindu cultural defence spoke a “language of disenchantment” (Yelle 2013) and borrowed its conceptual arsenal from an existing narrative around religion and modernity that had already taken shape in liberal discourses in Western Europe. This was a discourse of European Enlightenment that filtered into “pagan” lands through the language of Christianity, specifically Protestant Christianity. And there is no gainsaying that in the context of Bengal (not to mention substantial parts of South and Southeast Asia as well as Africa), the encounter with Protestant Christianity transpired specifically within a colonial milieu (Chidester 1996; Keane 2007; Pennington 2005; Yelle 2013; Mandair 2009).
Scholars who have examined this encounter between evangelical Christianity and indigenous religious traditions in the context of colonialism have variously drawn attention to the power relations underlying such an exchange. What is additionally significant, for our purpose, is the question of representation, on the one hand, and translation, on the other. Simply put, by representation I understand the power to authoritatively, objectively, and (increasingly) authentically speak about a subject in a way that reinterprets the subject for both the coloniser as well as the colonised. In the case of Bengali Vaiṣṇavism, as we shall presently see, by the late nineteenth century, the question of representation was inextricably tied to the issue of authenticity of the speaker in a manner that often came to a head with concerns over scholarly objectivity.
Representations, especially of the textual kind that concern me in this chapter, are a function of language in the first instance. This brings me to the next matter that interests me here—that of translation. In his rejection of the idea of Hindu-Muslim “syncretism” in the context of various forms of popular devotional traditions in Bengal, Tony K. Stewart proposes that scholars approach the idea of inter-religious dialogue through the lens of translation. “Translation in this context defines a way in which religious practitioners seek ‘equivalence’ among their counterparts”, Stewart writes, thereby offering scholars unique insight into religious discourse in the context of a plural religious world (Stewart 2001: 263). If Stewart focuses on religious interactions and transformations in pre-colonial Bengal, Arvind-Pal S. Mandair draws attention to the role that translation played in the context of religion in colonial India. He characterises Sikh attempts to translate existing devotional concepts from the Sikh tradition into a language of Western modernity as an exercise in “monotheolinguism”. This leads to the reduction of a rich, vibrant and long-lasting religious complex (such as Sikh devotion) into an “ism” of the kind that would allow it to fit into the paradigm of World Religions. Mandair’s interest lies in probing the “specifically linguistic nature of the ‘interaction’ or ‘dialogue’ ” around religion that takes place not only between the colonisers and the colonised, but also between the defenders and purveyors of particular religious traditions (Mandair 2009: 53).
I contend that in any sort of inter-religious dialogue in the colonial period, the coloniser’s idiom serves as the dominant framework, offering and determining the terms over which such an exchange could possibly take place. It compels the spokespersons of indigenous traditions to speak in the colonisers’ language and deploy their terms and concepts. The key concept that I am concerned with is reform—religious reform, to be specific. Historically, this term is a product of the Protestant Reformation. It contains within its ambit related processes that were mainly drawn from the Reformation’s critique of Catholic Christianity—a critique of priestcraft and ritual, an emphasis on rational and monotheistic religion mediated through belief and articulated in moral acts and lawful discipline. In the nineteenth century, Protestant Christianity made the most far-reaching claims of “true” religion by universalising the language and experience of Religion, eventually leading to the formation of the category of World Religions in the latter part of the century. These claims depended upon certain markers that all religions purportedly shared: sola scriptura, a transcendent and rational divinity, and faith or belief at the centre of all human religious experience. In the process, myth, ritual, and performance were discredited and the polyvocality of non-Protestant forms of religiosity were severely curtailed and evened out (Yelle 2013).
In standard historiography of modern religious movements in colonial India, such a notion of religious reform stands in stark contrast to revivalist and traditionalist trends. My deliberations here indicate that such dichotomy between reformist and revivalist or traditionalist responses breaks down if we view the process of colonial religious modernity in the subcontinent through the lenses of representation and translation. For, irrespective of their propensities—reformist, revivalist, or traditionalist—the defenders and purveyors of religious traditions must, in the first instance, participate in a field of discourse where Protestant Christianity operates as a paradigm for true religion (and not one amongst many equal World Religions), history in its Rankean sense works as the benchmark of nationhood, and a common language and its literary pasts invoke a shared sense of selfhood.
The Bengali Luther
Martin Luther, the Protestant reformer from fifteenth-century Germany, emerged as a powerful figure in the context of Hindu traditions in the colonial period. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, a host of Hindu leaders, both contemporary (such as Dayananda Saraswati) and historical (such as Caitanya), were favourably compared to Luther (Dobe 2015: 59). Of the bhakti saints, Caitanya was perhaps the first (though he is certainly not the only) figure to be subjected to such a comparison. The comparison to Luther was not merely a rhetorical utterance; it was a brilliant tactic, a tour de force that enjoyed an enduring life within the larger narrative of the purported egalitarian and democratic dimensions of the so-called Bhakti Movement. This particular comparison also laid grounds for the integration of particular religious figures into the larger framework of Protestant-style religious reform and, thereby, into religious modernity.
The earliest example of an explicit comparison between the Protestant theologian Martin Luther and Caitanya that I have been able to find in print hails from the mid-nineteenth century. Rajendralal Mitra (1823/24–91) made this comparison in his English preface to the publication of a Sanskrit hagiography of Caitanya—the Caitanya-candrodaya-nāṭaka of Kavi Karṇapūra—as a part of the Bibliotheca Indica series. However, in this instance, comparison sought to underline differences, and not the similarities, between these two contemporary historical figures. In his English preface, Mitra noted, “[a]bout the time when Luther was engaged in reforming the Church of Christ in Europe, a Bráhmaṇa in Bengal employed himself in a similar mission with regard to the religion of the Hindus” (Mitra 1854: i). To this, Mitra added a further caveat. Unlike Luther, he claimed, Caitanya’s attempts at reform remained largely unsuccessful and merely resulted in a form of “gloomy mysticism” (Mitra 1854: i).
One of the earliest congratulatory interpretations of Caitanya as a successful reformer appears in the writings of Kedarnath Datta Bhaktivinod (1838–1914), a modern Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava theologian and thinker. Datta was almost singlehandedly responsible for reformulating Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava doctrine in a manner that sought to modernise the tradition. Datta was well-read in various Enlightenment, Unitarian, and Transcendentalist thinkers, if his own testimony in his autobiography is to be believed. As a Gauḍīya theologian, he deployed his familiarity with Enlightenment debates on God and religion to bear upon Vaiṣṇava principles. Evidently, from his writings, he was interested in translating concepts from one tradition to another. Or, at the very least, to interrogate Enlightenment concepts in light of Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava theology, and vice versa. His earliest deliberations on Gauḍīya theology—a lecture on the Bhāgavata Purāṇa that he gave as a young bureaucrat in 1869—demonstrates this quite well. In this lecture, he tried to posit Gauḍīya metaphysics of acintya-bhedābheda against the Kantian notion of God as an idea and as a rational principle. Invoking the Transcendentalists (Emerson, in this case) over the rationalists, Datta concluded that
Certainly [the knowledge of the truth of God] is beyond our comprehension. It is so owing to our nature being finite and God being infinite. Our ideas are constrained by the idea of space and time, but God is above that constraint. This is a glimpse of Truth and we must regard it as Truth itself: often, says, Emerson, a glimpse of truth is better than an arranged system and he is ...
