Imperial Encounters

Religion and Modernity in India and Britain

Peter van der Veer

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781400831081
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Hinduism

Picking up on Edward Said's claim that the historical experience of empire is common to both the colonizer and the colonized, Peter van der Veer takes the case of religion to examine the mutual impact of Britain's colonization of India on Indian and British culture. He shows that national culture in both India and Britain developed in relation to their shared colonial experience and that notions of religion and secularity were crucial in imagining the modern nation in both countries. In the process, van der Veer chronicles how these notions developed in the second half of the nineteenth century in relation to gender, race, language, spirituality, and science. Avoiding the pitfalls of both world systems theory and national historiography, this book problematizes oppositions between modern and traditional, secular and religious, progressive and reactionary. It shows that what often are assumed to be opposites are, in fact, profoundly entangled. In doing so, it upsets the convenient fiction that India is the land of eternal religion, existing outside of history, while Britain is the epitome of modern secularity and an agent of history. Van der Veer also accounts for the continuing role of religion in British culture and the strong part religion has played in the development of Indian civil society. This masterly work of scholarship brings into view the effects of the very close encounter between India and Britain--an intimate encounter that defined the character of both nations.

CHAPTER ONE

Secularity and Religion

SECULARITY AND RELIGION, more than anything else, is the site of difference in Britain’s and India’s close encounters. As this chapter attempts to show, notions of progress, liberty, tolerance, democracy, civil society, and public sphere converge in the all-embracing notion of secularity. In secularity one finds the essential and irreducible difference between modernity and tradition. The usual way to approach the cipher of secularity is by means of the secularization thesis.¹ Till recently, this was the most successful element of any sociological theory of modernization; however, it has come under increasing criticism over the past two decades, especially in response to the growing significance of political Islam after the Iranian Revolution of 1979.² On the one hand, the secularization thesis offers a master narrative that attempts to explain everything concerning religion in the modern world; on the other hand, it leaves major historical developments, such as the emergence of the national form of societies, outside the picture. Jose Casanova’s recent summary of the thesis describes its three essential features: (1) the separation of religion from politics, economy, and science; (2) the privatization of religion within its own sphere; and (3) the declining social significance of religious belief.³ Casanova rejects the second feature but maintains that the first and third are still viable. I suggest that all three features be thoroughly historicized, that they not be understood as a unilinear teleology but as a number of diverse developments related to the rise of nation-states. One pitfall of the secularization thesis is that it subsumes divergent genealogies of secular modernity in one narrative of secularization.

In the European discussion of secularization, decline in church attendance and in the number of churches are good indicators of change. Starting with the last decades of the nineteenth century, such a decline seems evident in England, although there is considerable debate about the periodization and interpretation of that decline. Catholicism, for instance, continues to grow substantially till the Second World War. In the Netherlands—to take another European example—decline begins only in the 1960s. Again, in the United States there is a somewhat different picture. American churches have always been very creative in recruiting church members, as evidenced over the last decades by “televangelism.” For Christianity, church membership and church attendance are good indicators of change, and these factors indicate that the historical picture differs among Western societies. Thus a generalized secularization story will not do. This is true not only for the facts and figures of church attendance and membership but also for the causal explanations of industrialization and rationalization, offered by secularization theory. For example, there is more evidence during the Industrial Revolution in England for religious expansion than for secularization.⁴ Similarly, a consensus now exists among historians that the impact of scientific discoveries, such as those of Darwin, on the decline of religion has previously been much exaggerated.

If the secularization thesis does not account for the history of Western Christianity, it is even less applicable to the history of Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and most other religions. In the latter cases, the question about church attendance and membership cannot even be raised since there are no churches, and congregational worship in temples or mosques either does not exist or differs significantly from that in Christianity. The organization of religion, the place of religion in society, and the patterns of recruitment are so different that not only does secularization theory itself become meaningless but so, too, do the empirical and theoretical problems derived from it in the context of Western Christianity. This has not prevented social scientists from universalizing this ill-founded story about the West to include the rest. The rhetoric, dressed up as argument, goes as follows: Since all societies modernize and secularization is an intrinsic part of modernization, than all societies secularize.⁵

In recent years, much doubt has been thrown on the secularization of India and the ultimate triumph of secularism. The anthropologist T. N. Madan has, for instance, argued that “secularism as a widely shared worldview has failed to make headway in India.”⁶ Since Indians are Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, or Sikhs, the majority are not Protestant Christians (although some are). They cannot and will not privatize their religion.⁷ Madan points out that in sociological theory, especially that of Max Weber, there is an essential linkage between Protestantism, individualism, and secularization. He argues, accordingly, that secularism is a “gift of Christianity to mankind” and that it is part of the unique history of Europe.⁸ Madan expresses what appears to be a general consensus among both social scientists and the general public that the modern West is uniquely secular and the East uniquely religious. The problem with this consensus is that it reduces complex and diverse histories to the binary opposition of secularity and religiosity. We have already seen that the history of secularity in Western societies is varied and complex; the same can be said about the development of religious institutions in India. Nevertheless, the appeal of these essentializations cannot be dismissed by providing ever more complicated narratives of social change. It is, in fact, hard to go beyond theories of modernization and secularization, however much one tries to get away from them. One is compelled to address the conceptual complexities and contradictions contained in them.

Historically, it is important to understand the secular and the religious as mutually interdependent. Their definition cannot be separately reached but depends on this structural relationship. This interdependence is crucial in the formation of the nation-state, but that formation follows different historical trajectories in different societies. In the next chapter I look more closely at Indian and British processes of state formation, but here I limit the discussion to what I see as the central feature of the idea of secular modernity, the separation of church and state.

THE SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE

According to the historian Owen Chadwick, Britain developed a “secular” atmosphere of public life between 1860 and 1890.⁹ The question is not whether in this period we find the three elements of the secularization thesis, as outlined by Casanova, because we do not. The question is rather what a “secular” atmosphere entails in this period of high nationalism and high imperialism. Perhaps the most significant historical development in this regard is the building of a “wall of separation” between church and state, to use Thomas Jefferson’s language.¹⁰ The European wars of religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were concerned precisely with the question of the relation between political and ecclesiastical authority. They were fought around the central issue of political loyalty: Can one be loyal to the state when one is not following the religion of the state?¹¹ As Hobbes and other political thinkers realized, it was the nature of the state that was at issue here. The outcome of the political revolutions of the late eighteenth century was that political loyalty could rest on citizenship instead of membership in the state church. The relationship between these two, however, was decided differently in different societies depending on their historical trajectories. Both the American and the French Revolutions put an end to the association between royal absolutism and the established church. The French Revolution developed into something decidedly anticlerical in its secularism (laicité) and carried a direct attack on religious institutions. The American Revolution carried the spirit of religious dissent from Britain to the American shores and was aimed at gaining religious freedom from oppressive state interference. In Britain itself, disestablishment has not even been carried out fully today, although the early nineteenth century saw the gradual enfranchisement of Catholics and Dissenters. The location of religion is therefore different in these societies, and the expression “secular society” does not do justice to these differences.

Secularism, as a set of arguments in favor of separation of church and state, has a genealogy in the Enlightenment, but these arguments work out quite differently in a variety of historical formations. If it does so already in the interconnected spheres of philosophical and political radicalism of France, Britain, and America, one should not be at all surprised that it also does so in the interconnected spheres of Britain and India. The separation of church and state is often conceptualized in relation to liberty, and a way to approach the secular is thus through the question of freedom as posed in the liberal tradition by John Stuart Mill (1806-1873).

In his celebrated essay On Liberty (1859), Mill argues for complete liberty of opinion and the expression thereof and thus advocates a free exchange of ideas, close to what Jürgen Habermas has called "bürgerliche Öffentlichkeit” or “bourgeois public sphere.” Critics of this view have generally objected that the liberal public sphere excludes certain groups of people. In that connection it is interesting to read the motto of Mill’s famous essay, taken from Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Sphere and Duties of Government (1792): “The grand, leading principle, towards which every argument unfolded in these pages directly converges, is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity.”¹² This in fact contains the principle of exclusion in Mill’s views on liberty:

It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to say that this doctrine is meant to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties. We are not speaking of children, or of young persons below that age which the law may fix as that of manhood or womanhood. Those who are still in a state to require being taken care of by others must be protected against their own actions as well as against external injury. For the same reason, we may leave out of consideration those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered in its nonage. The early difficulties in the way of spontaneous progress are so great, that there is seldom any choice of means for overcoming them; and a ruler full of spirit of improvement is warranted in the use of any expedients that will attain an end, perhaps otherwise unattainable. Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end. Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion. Until then, there is nothing for them but implicit obedience to an Akbar or Charlemagne, if they are so fortunate as to find one. But as soon as mankind have attained the capacity of being guided to their own improvement by conviction or persuasion (a period long reached in all nations with whom we need here concern ourselves), compulsion, either in the direct form or in that of pains of penalties for noncompliance, is no longer admissible as a means to their own good, and justifiable only for the security of others. (78-79)

I have reproduced this long quotation from Mill’s essay because it lays out so clearly that his concern is with liberty in the service of progress. It depends on the notion that some societies are at a lower stage of evolution. Such a notion of evolutionary stages had already been developed in the Scottish Enlightenment and is the basis of all historical thought in the nineteenth century. Societies at lower stages of evolution have to be educated like children to make them capable of enjoying freedom. Mill is not in any simple way prejudiced in racial or religious terms, as evidenced in his position in the controversy over the behavior of Governor Eyre in Jamaica and in his response to the Indian Mutiny shows. For instance, in a long footnote on the British response to the Mutiny later in the essay he accuses both evangelicals and the state of persecuting Muslims and Hindus. His position allows for the toleration of diverse religious opinions, but only if they already belong to modern civilization and thus contribute to the moral principle of progress. One has to be free to be able to express oneself freely; that is the idea. Mill’s view allows him to be, at the same time, a radical advocate of freedom and a supporter of enlightened (progressive) imperialism. It is not insignificant to remember here that it is not only evolutionary theory that leads him to claim freedom at home and support despotism in the colony but also his lifelong employment in the service of the East India Company where, at the end of his career, he held the highest administrative position, a post previously held by his father, James Mill. Evolutionary theory is therefore not just a grand narrative of progress and modernity but belongs to the joint predicament of nationalism and imperialism.

The evolutionary difference between metropole and colony is simply asserted by Mill, not argued. His argument is about progress and liberty, and it uses religion as its foil. Both the Roman Catholic Church ("the most intolerant of churches") and Calvinist churches are depicted by Mill as intolerant institutions which only when they cannot convert others to their opinion by force or persuasion reluctantly accept a difference of opinion (76). It is of great concern to Mill to defend the right of atheists and blasphemers to express their opinion, and he defends that right by arguing that Christ was put to death as a blasphemer (93). The persecution of Christians as heretics is his main historical example in his argument for liberty. He firmly rejects the idea that Christian doctrine provides a complete morality, while at the same time arguing that the recorded teachings of Christ contain nothing that contradicts what a comprehensive morality requires (118).

As remarkable as his defense of unbelief and blasphemy and his attacks on Calvinism are Mill’s examples from comparative religion. He cites the Muslim prohibition of the eating of pork and the tendency to prohibit the eating of pork in a society in which the majority is Muslim. He compares that to the Puritanical prohibition of dancing and music in regions where Puritans are in the majority and to Sabbatarian regulations. Mill’s conclusion is unequivocal. Individuals and minorities have to be protected against the religious sentiments of the majority. Again, this line of argument has a history in the persecution of dissenters by the state and the established church in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the response to that in America by Jefferson (as well as Madison and other “founding fathers") with the separation of church and state.

The idea that religion especially is a threat to freedom of thought and expression and therefore to an open public sphere as the basis of a democratic nation-state thus has a history in the Enlightenment and is firmly established in the liberal tradition, and indeed is expressed till the present day. An example is a recent argument by the philosopher Charles Taylor. According to Taylor, “Secularism in some form is a necessity for the democratic life of religiously diverse societies.”¹³ In his view, democracy needs “what used to be called patriotism, a strong identification with the polity, and a willingness to give of oneself for its sake.”¹⁴ The legitimacy of modern nation-states depends on participation and a relatively strong commitment on the part of citizens. When groups are systematically excluded from the process of decision making, the legitimacy of rule is challenged. That is why the nation, according to Taylor, should not be defined in religious terms, since that definition would exclude groups with religious allegiances that differ from those of the population’s majority. He suggests that exclusion by religious majorities often goes from barely tolerating the presence of a minority to its expulsion.

The “secular atmosphere” in the second half of the nineteenth century, to which Owen Chadwick refers, may indicate that the question of political loyalty does not immediately emerge when citizens follow different religions in the modern nation-state. The loyalty to one’s king and state does not follow from one’s religious affiliation but from one’s national identity, of which religion may be one ingredient among others. It is nationalism that replaces religion in this regard, and one can come to nationalism via a variety of religious affiliations. Another way of expressing this is that in the modern era religions are nationalized. Regarding the treatment of minorities in a modern, democratic polity, there is not much reason to fear a religious majority more...