Vedantic Hinduism in Colonial Bengal

Reformed Hinduism and Western Protestantism

Victor A. van Bijlert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000169973
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: 19th Century History

This book explores the ways in which modern Hindu identities were constructed in the early nineteenth century. It draws parallels between sixteenth and eventeenth Cecntury Protestantism and the rise of modernity in the West, and the Hindu reformation in the nineteenth century which contributed to the rise of Vedantic Hindu modernity discourse in India.

The nineteenth century Hindu modernity, it is argued, sought both individual flourishing and collective emancipation from Western domination. For the first time Hinduism began to be constructed as a religion of sacred texts. In particular, texts belonging to what could be loosely called Vedanta: Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. In this way, the main protagonists of this Vedantist modernity were imitating Western Protestantism, but at the same time also inventing totally novel interpretations of what it meant to be Hindu. The book traces the major ideological paths taken in this cultural-religious reformation from its originator Rammohun Roy up to its last major influence, Rabindranath Tagore.

Bringing these two versions of modernity into conversation brings a unique view on the formation of modern Hindu identities. It will, therefore, be of great interest to scholars of religious, Hindu and South Asian studies, as well as religious istory and interreligious dialogue.

1 Introducing modernity and Vedantic Hinduism

Modernity as state of mind

Modernity as a global normative mentality is characterised by respect for the autonomy of the individual person, the physical inviolability of the person’s body, and freedom for the individual to develop his or her talents and be able to flourish. All these can also be demanded for groups of individuals, for peoples, and for nations. Thus modernity has an individual and a collective aspect. But the flourishing of the collective is predicated upon the freedom and autonomy of the individual. This presupposes the collective acceptance of the liberty and equality of the individuals that make up the collectivity. Ideally a modern emancipated collectivity (be it region or state) consists of emancipated self-conscious and autonomous individual members of the collectivity and these members have put in place systems of decision-making in which everyone has an equal say. This normative mentality of modernity we may regard as strong moral beliefs held by many. Thus modernity is not primarily about tremendous technological advancements, new architecture, the instalment of rapid forms of transport or the mass production of consumption goods, not even about institutions like the nation-state or general elections. Modernity is primarily a mentality that informs the creation of these visible phenomena. It starts in the human mind, in the mind that is fundamentally changed and opened up to new unprecedented forms of thinking, to imagining novel possibilities of living. Modernity is the moral belief in the equal worth of all human beings, the belief that all human beings must be treated with the same respect and that they all have the right to fully flourish in freedom.

To many such ideas may seem self-evident truths, but they are by no means held universally and they certainly were not held at all times. That they are widespread is the result of historical processes. Nowadays, these ideas and moral beliefs would be considered to be secular in nature. They are deemed progressive and therefore are probably unrelated to religious traditions, for the latter are often seen as conservative and even oppressive. Secular moral beliefs and practices like treating everyone equally may not be what conservative religions and politics would endorse. Hence, searching for the lineage of modernity, one would not in the first place think of religious notions and traditions. And yet this seems precisely the domain where the mentality of modernity originated. Larry Siedentop (2015) has argued this case for what we may term Western modernity. Siedentop traces more in particular how the individual ‘became the organizing social role in the West’, the emergence of civil society and ‘the characteristic distinction between public and private spheres and its emphasis on the role of conscience and choice’ (op. cit.: 2). These were not rediscovered, Siedentop argues, by the Enlightenment in a somewhat spurious return to Greek and Roman antiquity; rather, they were the outcome of more than one-and-a-half millennia of Christianity.

Starting with the preaching of the apostle Paul, Christianity was a message of universal hope, a spiritual liberation from the idea of slavery which was deeply ingrained in the mindset of Greek and Roman antiquity. Individualism and secularism were not the hallmark of antiquity, but the hierarchical ordering of the family, and inequality in gender, in age and in social position. All these were questioned and ideologically undermined by early Christianity. Not Greek and Roman philosophy but the death and resurrection of the person of Jesus, according to Siedentop, offered a new picture of reality, providing ‘an ontological foundation for “the individual”, through the promise that humans have access to the deepest reality as individuals rather than merely as members of a group’ (op. cit.: 63). In other words: the worth of the individual and the equality of all humans were the underlying principles of early Christian preaching and tradition, thus these were literally gospel, ‘the good message’ (euaggelion in Greek). In sum, for Paul ‘belief in the Christ makes possible the emergence of a primary role shared equally by all (“the equality of souls”)’ (op. cit.: 62). Paul, Siedentop asserts, ‘overturns the assumption of natural inequality by creating an inner link between the divine will and human agency’; these two can be fused within each individual, ‘thereby justifying the assumption of moral equality of humans’ (op. cit.: 61).

It took centuries for these thoughts to be thoroughly internalised and become widely accepted. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries ‘individual devotion’ through ‘real knowledge of the scriptures’ was combined with ‘deep-seated anti-clericalism’ (op. cit.: 331). Thus was born the amalgam of Christian reform movements better known as the Reformation. Siedentop deplores that the post-Reformation period, especially the Enlightenment, has obscured in the popular mind the fact that ‘liberal thought is the offspring of Christianity’ (op. cit.: 332). The Reformation laid great stress on the inner aspect of religion, on uncoerced belief, the private sphere of conscience. Individual conscience, personal intentions and the moral life of the individual led to self-reliance and the habit of forming associations. Egalitarian moral intuitions, thus Siedentop, were turned against the authoritarianism of the old church, thus ‘Paul’s notion of “Christian liberty” had returned with a vengeance’ (op. cit.: 338–9). Siedentop points to another remarkable aspect of this liberty and individualism: German and Dutch pietists as well as the followers of Wycliffe in England all harked back to Meister Eckhart, the late medieval German mystic who emphasised the mystical union of the individual soul with God. In this view religion was once again not about ritual and conformity but personal belief and moral convictions. The ‘innerness’ is what matters here (cf. op. cit.: 340). This mystical union and innerness bring us already close to certain individualistic aspects of Hinduism but more about these later.

Those with postmodern leanings could easily regard the foregoing as Eurocentric. For is seems to suggest that values of modernity such as individual autonomy, and individual and collective emancipation from oppressive forms of tradition or alien rule are of Western (i.e. European) origin and did not emerge in any other culture but the Western Christian one. On the other hand, Western Christianity was often the handmaid of various forms of oppression from the medieval crusades to the Western colonial expansion from the fifteenth century onwards until quite recently. Thus, to suggest that Western Christianity and no one else produced emancipatory values is uninformed and hypocritical to say the least; it may even reveal a spirit of white colonial feeling of superiority. The criticism is valid. As the Indian social theorist Partha Chatterjee once remarked in connection with Benedict Anderson’s thesis on the imagined community that is the modern nation-state:

History, it would seem, has decreed that we in the postcolonial world shall only be perpetual consumers of modernity. Europe and the Americas, the only true subjects of history, have thought out on our behalf not only the script of colonial enlightenment and exploitation, but also that of our anticolonial resistance… . Even our imaginations must remain forever colonized.

(Chatterjee 1993a: 5)

This criticism was levelled against historical interpretations of anti-colonial nationalism, thus it addresses Western ideas of historiography, but it could be levelled against any theoretical interpretation of non-Western modernity (granted such a phenomenon exists).

Within the context of Siedentop’s thesis about the origins of Western liberalism, we could critique this thesis by pointing out that the values of modernity which Siedentop extracts from Christianity can be extracted from other religions as well. In other words, the idea that modernity is of Western origin should be falsified, and it can be falsified. Indian Hinduism of the early nineteenth century offers interesting examples of this. The outcome of this Hinduism is not the perpetuation of some regional pure tradition unsullied by Western influences but an interesting case of Hindu self-realisation that has led to modernity in a mode different from the Western one in details but similar in overall effect. What the Indian Hindu case also shows is the religious origin of this modernity, in much the same way as Siedentop has traced the origins of Western modernity in Christianity. In order to trace the genealogy of part of Indian modernity, one has to look at the particulars of the Hindu reform movement that started in the early nineteenth century. It reveals a condensed and shortened trajectory that is comparable to the Western trajectory to modernity via the Reformation in the sixteenth century and the Enlightenment in the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. What took Western Europe almost three centuries was accomplished in India in less than a century. Or to put it differently: Europe needed four centuries to modernise itself, India did this in less than a century with about the same results. Europe ended up with independent nation-states, many of them constitutional republics by the end of World War One; India ended up a secular republic after World War Two.

Modernity in the Indian Subcontinent

India became an independent nation-state after an increasingly radical anti-colonial struggle that lasted from the beginning of 1900 till Independence in 1947. Based on religion India had split up in two states in 1947: secular India and Muslim majority Pakistan. The anti-colonial struggle had ended in the bloodbath of the infamous Partition during the months leading up to Independence in the middle of August 1947. Religions had allegedly caused this dramatic splitting up. The majority of Hindus were now living in the secular Republic of India, while a large section of Indian Muslims now found themselves in two wings of Pakistan: the West-wing west of India and bordering Afghanistan and Iran, while the East wing was the large Bengali enclave surrounded by India in the East. Pakistan itself was once more partitioned in 1971 with the creation of independent Bangladesh out of the East wing and the state of Pakistan was now limited to the West wing.¹ All these struggles for independence in South Asia have both a cultural and a religious component. The nationalisms that inspired these struggles had many contributing factors such as language, economy, politics, but especially the first Partition in 1947 was largely due to religious identity-politics. In any case, political movements made use of religious identities as rallying points and thus marked out who belonged to the in-groups and who didn’t. Religion, specifically Hinduism as the religion of the British-Indian majority as against Islam which was the religion of the largest minority, was made into a major factor in the Partition. In Indian politics it remained a lasting cause of political friction and polarisation to this day. The polarisation, these days, is not only between Hindus in India and Muslims that remained in India, but also and perhaps even more so between Indians that strongly adhere to the principles of secularism embedded in the Indian Constitution and those who regard themselves as Hindu nationalists, some of whom would like to turn India into a Hindu state. Then there is the matter of caste and the social disadvantages it causes to the Indian underclasses. Caste is a religious category with a socio-economic component. From all this it should be obvious that religion is an important social and political issue with a long history, going back centuries. Nationalism, however, is not so old, and yet the influence of Hinduism on Indian nationalism is significant.

Indian nationalism was born in the early nineteenth century as a result of British paramountcy in the Subcontinent. Its first breeding ground seems to have been among Bengali upper-caste Hindus, more in particular the Brahmin pandits whose expertise in Sanskrit learning was sought by the officials of the East India Company. The latter effectively acted as the government of Bengal from the late eighteenth century until 1858. In his analysis of the emergence of Hindu nationalism, Zavos makes the case that the modern concept of Hinduism as a world-religion was largely formed by the colonial state: ‘The conception of Hinduism as a religion was an area in which the power of the emerging state was undoubtedly influential’. Furthermore, during ‘the nineteenth century … movements towards the articulation of Hinduism as a single religious tradition, to be compared with other “World Religions”, are clearly evident’ (Zavos 2002: 25). The idea that this Hinduism needed to be based on original textual sources, in effect on Sanskrit dharma literature preferably as ancient as possible, Zavos attributes to the perceived need for such texts in the Company’s courts of law. The British judges wished to possess authoritative versions of the source-texts the Brahmin pandits allegedly referred to in their formal legal opinions (vyavastha). British judges regarded the ancient texts as classical and pristine, whereas contemporary Hinduism was perceived by them as degenerate (cf. op. cit.: 30–2). Most of Zavos’s monograph deals with the later development of Hindu organisations and their propagation of Hindu nationalism as a set of intimately connected ideologies. Zavos’s focus is actually on what in India from 1920s onwards was called sangathan, ‘organisation, formation’, which Zavos calls ‘a central feature of Hindu nationalist ideology’ (op. cit.: 16). Organisation is not characteristic of traditional forms of Hindu religiosity but distinctly modern. The forming of organisations was mostly linked with the Hindu reform movements and owed to Christian influence (cf. op. cit.: 16). Hindu reform movements, also the so-called orthodox ones, emulated some form of church organisation. This meant that people could voluntarily opt for membership and attend meetings and religious gatherings like in a Christian church community.

Hinduism as a religion

Both Hinduism and religion need to be discussed in the context of the nineteenth century introduction of these terms in India and in European scholarly writing about India, and regarding the modern use of Hinduism as a term for one of the great world-religions. Let us start with religion, a term that can hardly be avoided in Western scholarly parlance, for instance when one speaks from the perspective of anthropology, sociology, philosophy or religious studies. ‘Religion’ has led and still leads to much heated debate, especially in the context of South Asian religions.

A good representative summary of the most recent discussions on Indian religion is found in Bloch et al. (2010). Some scholars represented in this volume hold that ‘religion’ is a ‘category of the imagination’ and a product of Eurocentrism and the ‘cultural imperialism of Christianity’ (cf. Bloch et al. 2010: 97–9). This Christian influence is emphasised for instance by Richard King who draws on the work of the often cited historian of religions Jonathan Z. Smith. King also holds that the concept of religion is predominantly Anglo-Protestant in origin (cf. op. cit.: 105–6). Timothy Fitzgerald on the other hand argues that the word ‘religion’ is a misleading ‘reification’ (op. cit.: 115) and that contemporary ‘usages misleadingly suggest that “religions” are observable things in the world, which is a form of misplaced concreteness’ for, according to Fitzgerald, ‘religion is an act of the imagination which we are persuaded to believe in by the rhetoric of academics, politicians, media people, and by general discourse’ (op. cit.: 115). John Zavos agrees, claiming that religion as ‘a network of phenomena’ is implicated in the ‘epistemic violence of post-Enlightenment thinking exported to the rest of the world through European expansion’ (op. cit.: 56). For Buddhism Zavos makes a remarkable exception, for according to him Buddhism is ‘virulently anti-essentialist’ (ibid.) and thus quite in line with postmodern thinking.

S. N. Balagangadhara holds that Hinduism and Buddhism ‘exist … but they do so only in the Western universities’ (op. cit.: 138–9). Religion for Balagangadhara is a typically ‘Semitic’ affair which he defines as ‘explanatory intelligible account of both the cosmos and itself’ (op. cit.: 144). Balagangadhara miniaturises his elaborate argument which he presented in Balagangadhara (1994). In this large and extremely erudite book he argues that ‘religion’ is not a universal category found in every culture on earth, but derives from (mainly) Protestant Christian theology (as far as modern times are concerned). Due to the successful secularisation and globalisation of Protestantism, this concept of ‘religion’ gained global currency. In reality, however, neither Hinduism nor Buddhism is a religion, nor do they exist under these designations (except in the books of Western scholars). In other words, ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Buddhism’ are constructions made by Western Indologists and anthropologists for the convenience of colonial civil servants (for instance those that were responsible for taking the first censuses in British India in the late nineteenth century).

Jacob de Roover and Sarah Claerhout, both following Balagangadhara, summarise their own position on Hinduism and Buddhism as follows: both are Western constructs that are mistaken for empirical realities, ‘not only by Western scholars and laymen, but also by the Western-educated classes of India and elsewhere’ (op. cit.: 170). Perhaps the only dissenting view on religion is put forward by David Lorenzen to the effect that religion is ‘any set of normative ideas about how society should behave’ and ‘so long as the source of authority for these normative ideas is considered to be supernatural or at least beyond reason’ (op. cit.: 36).

It is beyond the scope of this chapter to analyse these observations (to some extent inspired by postcolonial theory) in great detail. They do seem to fairly represent views that are nowadays quite commonly held. For instance Dalmia and von Stietencron (1995) has a chapter arguing that nineteenth-century Vaishnavism was constructed as a real religion within Hinduism (Dalmia and von Sti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introducing modernity and Vedantic Hinduism
• 2 Western modernity and religious ethic
• 3 The beginning of the Hindu reformation: Rammohun Roy
• 4 The ‘Further Reformation’ of Hinduism: Debendranath and Keshub
• 5 The narrator of militant modernity: Bankimchandra Chatterjee
• 6 Propagating and fighting: Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo
• 7 Rabindranath Tagore: the reluctant Hindu nationalist
• Concluding remarks
• Bibliography
• Index