Missionary Education and Empire in Late Colonial India, 1860-1920

Hayden J A Bellenoit

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317315063
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

Contributes simultaneously to both British imperial and Indian history. This work demonstrates that missionary understandings and interactions with India, rather than being party to imperial ideologies, often diverged from metropolitan and imperial norms.

1 KNOWLEDGE, RELIGION AND EDUCATION IN EARLY MODERN INDIA

One of the underlying arguments central to much recent scholarship on South Asia, empire, and missionaries in particular, is that the creation of an ‘other’, whether via the templates of gender, race or religion, was somehow unique to and a handmaid of colonialism. Whilst admitting that the creation of difference was indeed a part of the wider missionary experience within the empire, it was never absolute. This chapter takes a more nuanced understanding of both its uniqueness to colonialism and its overall significance. Its main aim is to put missionary engagements with India and Hinduism in a much wider context. Specifically, it argues that missionary disparaging of Hinduism and India were part of a much wider and longer tradition which existed both before the coming of the British and the crystallization of hardened racialist attitudes in the latter nineteenth century. Missionaries differed rather in degree and not in essence from their predecessors, and were utilizing the means and approaches of Arab, Persian and Indo-Muslim scholars before them. Anglican missionaries, though initially confrontational and disparaging of Hindu tradition, ‘Brahmanical tyranny’, and ‘repulsive and odious’ Indian social customs, had by the 1870s begun to settle down and more constructively engage with Indian religious traditions and knowledge systems. This was partly due to the moulding influence Indian society had exerted upon visiting holy men and religious scholars in the precolonial period. Yet at the same time, this was also informed by larger ideological and social shifts after the period of the Indian Mutiny. This chapter argues that the context of engagement with Hinduism after the mid-nineteenth century was not purely introduced by missionaries, but was reflective of debates which, in varying forms, had been taking place prior to the establishment of formal British dominion over the subcontinent. By giving the missionary experience a much wider chronology, this chapter aims to set the context for the remaining analysis in this book, which addresses the interactions between Indian tradition and Europeans.

Religious Discussion and Indian Knowledge in Early Modern and Pre-colonial India

Inter-religious discourse, debate and scholarship were neither entirely new to South Asia nor did they only become condescending and rebarbative during colonialism. Scholars, politicians, philosopher-kings and holy men from abroad, had for centuries engaged with Indian philosophies and religions, all with varying degree of intensity, success, failure and disparagement. With the piecemeal arrival of Islam in the subcontinent and its slow penetration of the Indian hinterland via Sufi wandering mendicants, saints, mystics and preachers, Islamic scholars and eccentrically curious politicians gained increasing access to both Brahmanical knowledge and larger Hindu philosophical systems, moralities and cosmic worldviews. These Muslim scholars and chroniclers, rather than Protestant missionaries, were the first ones to attempt to appropriate Indian religious knowledge systems.

The primary way of capturing the religiosity of early, medieval and late-medieval India was through the mode of spiritual anthropology which characterized many early travelogues on India. Writers commented on the nature, customs and general religious beliefs of those whom they observed. This mode of observation had a strong pre-colonial tradition. Islamic and Buddhist scholars, in particular, had been compiling diary notes, recording religious conversations and making observations for centuries. These intrepid wanderers and keen observers were already categorizing, criticizing and appropriating Indian religions and their traditions. In doing so they were also writing universal histories of Islam which sought to establish a chronological and theological superiority.

The enterprise of comparative religion, in the Indian context, could be said to have been immediately manifested after the Arab conquest of Sindh (c. eighth century). Muhammed ibn Qasim, a general in the early conquest, encountered religious rituals and particulars which, aside from his own iconoclast proclivities, he felt were not entirely alien. Qasim drew connections between Indian fire rituals used in both daily puja (prayers) and Hindu funeral pyres, with the burning bush in which God manifested himself to Abraham, as found in the Quran, Bible and Torah.¹ Qasim observed that this fire ritual could, in fact, be traced back to the prophet Abraham, and that Brahmans themselves were connected to Abraham from a common ancient source. Qasim effectively used this comparison to establish a chronological superiority for Islam and an appropriation of Indian religious systems.²

Centuries later, Abu Rayhan al-Beruni (c. 973–1048) stepped into this tradition. His famed Ta’rikh-al-Hind (Chronicles of India), a reflection upon his extensive travels throughout the subcontinent during the tenth and eleventh centuries, reknowned for his acute observations of India as a social and spiritual anthropologist.³ Yet even more relevant to our discussion here, he demonstrated an impressive knowledge of Hinduism, Judaism and Christianity.⁴ Beruni himself was greatly influenced in his comparative religious mindset by his Indian travels and found himself conversing with holy men, itinerant preachers and ascetic wanderers. In particular, he drew connections between the Indian concept of moksha (liberation of the soul) and the Koranic understanding of fana (the place of the soul’s annihilation),⁵ noting similarities between Indian and Islamic religious conceptions of the soul, afterlife and metaphysics. In particular, Beruni noted a strong tradition of Hindu theistic understanding of the Divine. A spiritual anthropologist, with knowledge of the rational sciences of the Koran, Beruni observed that ‘the [educated] Hindus believe with regard to God that He is One, Eternal … this is what the educated people believe about God’.⁶ This sat rather easily with Beruni’s own understanding of the rational sciences and a latitudinarian form of monotheism. This, however, he contrasted, as missionary scholars did some six centuries later, with what he considered the superstitious pantheism of the countryside.⁷ Here, Beruni was clearly taxonomizing between the ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ schools of Hinduism.

The enterprise of comparative religious scholarship and discourse was given further impetus and energy after the establishment of Mughal political dominance across north India. This opened the wider north Indian religious landscape to scholars of the house of Timurid and other wandering Indo-Muslim intellectuals. More famously, the Sufi mystic Kabir⁸ had an immense influence upon Indo-Muslim syncretism. Yet beneath the surface there was a strong and wider – albeit inconsistent – tradition of pre-colonial comparative religious scholarship and efforts at appropriation. The Mughals’ religious policies certainly did wax and wane according to the vagaries of the political landscape and the padshah (emperor) himself,⁹ yet there was always an undercurrent of religious exchange and interaction. The Mughal emperor Jahangir was one such example. Partly influenced by a degree of religious tolerance on the one hand, and on the other hand by the need to establish the Mughal emperor as a universal and legitimate monarch in a largely Hindu country, he held ecumenical debates with pundits in his court. These involved debates over comparative Hindu and Islamic doctrines and their connections.¹⁰

The Mughal court chronicler and vizier (an administrative official) Abul Fazl (d. 1602)¹¹ was another example. He was influenced by the Iberian mystic and Islamic scholar Ibn Arabi (c. 1165–1240), and the Persian founder of the Islamic school of illumination (hikmat al-ishraq), Shihab al-Din Yahya al-Suhrowardi (c. 1154–91). This linked the Islamic intellectualism of the Iberian Peninsula with the subcontinent of Asia. This wider intellectual template greatly influenced Fazl and, later, Dara Shukoh. Fazl felt that religion could only be understood from a comparative perspective; this set him down the path of studying Hinduism and other religious traditions. Fazl studied Zoroastrianism intensely and what he termed ‘Hindu theism’, which in turn strengthened his own belief in ishraq and Arabi’s and Suhrowardi’s very influential wirings.¹² He made connections between Ibn Arabi’s concept of wahdat-ul-wujud (Unity of Being) and the concept of advaita (oneness; monism). Fazl drew strong connections between Sufi Islamic mysticism and the bhakti (devotion) tradition of Hinduism, and downplayed the importance of doctrine and ritual beliefs (taqlid), emphasizing the need to understand religion from a comparative perspective.¹³ He obtained a sophisticated knowledge and understanding of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and conversed with holy men from Syria, Europe, Mongolia, India and Turkey.¹⁴ In his studies, he saw what her termed ‘truth’ in other non- Islamic religious systems and sought to draw these out in his understanding.¹⁵

Fazl also held, partly in line with contemporary Mughal practice, comparative religious debates. Fazl saw himself as merely continuing the courtly religious debates of the Tughluq Sultanate, serving as patron of men of the law, letter and scripture.¹⁶ Fazl’s Thursday night religious debates were often held in his Idabat Khana (House of Worship) in Fatepur Sikri, and were attended by Sunnis, Shias, Pundits, Zoroastrians, Jains and Christian Padres.¹⁷ Pundits and Jesuit missionaries, such as Julian Pereira and Antony Montserrat, were also invited as more recent guests.¹⁸ This undoubtedly stemmed from an innocent intellectual and spiritual curiosity. Yet Fazl, like Shukoh later on and most Indo-Muslim religious scholars, also sought to use these debates to prove the superiority of Islam’s rational Koranic foundations over other systems,¹⁹ which were still considered ‘superstitious’. In a way, Fazl’s desire to prove Islam as a superior religious and ethical system was not terribly different from the efforts of later Protestant missionaries and scholars.

Yet perhaps the most exemplary case was the son of the Mughal emperor Shahjahan, Dara Shukoh. Shukoh’s latitudinarian proclivities are well-known, and seen as anomalous for his period. But they did represent an instructive tradition of comparative religious engagement before the British. A latitudinarian with Sufi proclivities, he devoted a good deal of his life to searching for ‘truth’ in the largely Brahmanical Hinduism he encountered. Shukoh himself was an interesting case. Well versed in the canons and scholarship of Islam, he studied numerous Hindu oral and textual traditions and sought out commonalities between the world’s major religious faiths. For his labours, he had the Upanishads translated into Persian during the mid-seventeenth century,²⁰ and was even said to be more often found in the company of Brahmans²¹ rather than with fellow Muslims. In one sense, importantly, Shukoh was very much a scholar of the Indo-Islamic realm. He conversed with pundits and sannayasis regularly, especially after he found the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic conceptions of God’s nature to be ‘compendious and enigmatical’.²² And again, anticipating the methods of missionary educationists during the colonial period, Shukoh spent much of his time searching for Hindu ‘truth’.²³ This was clearly appropriating. Anticipating the rhetoric of Fulfilment-inspired missionaries by over two centuries, he still placed Islam at the top of all religions, but felt that Hinduism possessed elements of what he termed ‘truth’. A prolific writer and translator, Shukoh composed a treatise on comparative religion, Majma-ul-Bahrain (The Meeting of Two Oceans; Sanskrit, Samudra-Sangama),²⁴ which he termed ‘the collection of the Truth and wisdom of two Truth-knowing groups’.²⁵

One particular manner whereby Shukoh sought to establish commonalities was by engaging with what can be termed ‘theist studies’. Undoubtedly familiar with the so-called ‘high’ schools of Hindu philosophy, he considered these to be Hindu devotionalism (bhakti) and Vaishnavite in essence. He himself was immersed in the study of bhakti and saw it as a way of drawing connections between mystical Islam and Hinduism. He held particular reverence for the Upanishads, claiming that they were ‘undoubtedly, the first Heavenly book and the fountainhead of the ocean of Monotheism, and in accordance with or rather an elucidation of the Quran’.²⁶ This was a clear example of appropriating Hinduism, notwithstanding his perceived tolerance of other religious systems. He defined truth universally, but it was still on an Islamic pedestal with the Koran being the sole source of divine revelation (tanzil) and reason. Yet Shukoh was nevertheless prolific in his drive for comparative religious debate and discourse. He invited the Jesuits and Brahmans to debates on comparative religion.²⁷ Here, again, was a practice which missionary educationists inherited, built upon and moulded. Shukoh was also a close confidant of the Bhakti-marga (devotional path, associated with Kabir) figurehead Baba Lal, who instructed him in Indian conceptions of God, the cosmos and reincarnation.²⁸ Shukoh found Lal and fellow Vaishnavite devotees to be more amenable to theism and, by extension, easier with which to make connections.²⁹ He even used the term ‘Indian monotheism’ as a way of connecting mystical Islam with Hinduism.³⁰ What was telling, for our purposes here, was that Shukoh was employing a particular school of Hindu thought, bhakti, to make connections; this he studied intensely.³¹ Again, this was a method picked up and employed by missionaries later during colonial rule. As a result of such scholarship and deep, intimate study of Hinduism, Shukoh made more specific connections between Islam and Hinduism. He compared the Islamic concept of the soul (ruh) with the Vedantic conception of atman (soul; being), arguing that they were remarkably similar.³² He also found little contradictions between the Vedanta view of creation-lila (an act of sport on the part of God – and the Islamic concept of creation as an act of the will of Allah.³³

Mirza Zulfigar was another prime example of a strong pre-colonial tradition of religious taxonomy and comparative religious scholarship. Zulfigar (pen name ‘Mubed’) was born to Persian parents³⁴ in Patna. He travelled across India for thirty years and composed a massive treatise in 1645, the Dabistan-i-Mazahib (School of Religions/Manners). Witnessing the downfall of his contemporary Shukoh, Mubed was part of this wider ecumene of religious discussion, exchange and, at times, invigorating debate and comparative scholarship. He himself, much like Shukoh and Abul Fazl, was very much a proto-Enlightenment figure, and constantly searched for what he termed the ‘truth’ in all religions. His taxonomical treatise, in which he utilized Ibn Arabi’s influential concepts of hikmat (philosophy) and ishraq (illumination, usually divine), was a result of his travels to Kashmir, Persia, Lahore, numerous place between, his conversations with Muslims, Hindus, Sufi mystics and Zoroastrians. His compilation was voluminous. It touched upon nearly all existing religious systems and was one of the first major comparative religious treatises in t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Glossary
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Knowledge, Religion and Education in Early Modern India
• 2 British Fears and Indian Society in the Emergence of North Indian Education, c. 1860–1920
• 3 Between East and West: Orientalism, Representations of and Engagements with India
• 4 The Failures of Education and its Sociological Bearings
• 5 Religious Interaction, the Curriculum and Indian Contestations of Late Colonial Knowledge
• 6 Maintaining Missionary Influence: Nationalism, Politics and the Raj c. 1870–1920
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index