Rethinking Religion in India

The Colonial Construction of Hinduism

Esther Bloch, Marianne Keppens, Rajaram Hegde, Esther Bloch, Marianne Keppens, Rajaram Hegde

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781138895928
• eBook ISBN: 9781135182786
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book critically assesses recent debates about the colonial construction of Hinduism. Increasingly scholars have come to realise that the dominant understanding of Indian culture and its traditions is unsatisfactory. According to the classical paradigm, Hindu traditions are conceptualized as features of a religion with distinct beliefs, doctrines, sacred laws and holy texts. Today, however, many academics consider this conception to be a colonial 'construction'. This book focuses on the different versions, arguments and counter-arguments of the thesis that the Hindu religion is a construct of colonialism. Bringing together the different positions in the debate, it provides necessary historical data, arguments and conceptual tools to examine the argument. Organized in two parts, the first half of the book provides new analyses of historical and empirical data; the second presents some of the theoretical questions that have emerged from the debate on the construction of Hinduism. Where some of the contributors argue that Hinduism was created as a result of a western Christian notion of religion and the imperatives of British colonialism, others show that this religion already existed in pre-colonial India; and as an alternative to these standpoints, other writers argue that Hinduism only exists in the European experience and does not correspond to any empirical reality in India. This volume offers new insights into the nature of the construction of religion in India and will be of interest to scholars of the History of Religion, Asian Religion, Postcolonial and South Asian Studies.

Part I
HISTORICAL AND EMPIRICAL ARGUMENTS

1
HINDUS AND OTHERS

David N. Lorenzen

How can we best study religious movements? What makes a religious movement religious? How can religious institutions be distinguished from secular institutions? Is Hindu religion or Hinduism a coherent concept? Can Hindu religion be accommodated within the general category of the so-called world religions like Islam, Buddhism and Christianity? Is Hindu religion more a ‘way of life’ or a culture than a religion per se? How do Hindus themselves define and negotiate their Hindu identity? Any scholar who studies religious movements in India and their migration abroad inevitably has to adopt at least implicit presuppositions and hypotheses about these questions.

A further set of questions relates to how a scholar’s own life experience may condition his or her views about specific religions and religious movements. Can a scholar who was raised outside of India and Indian culture have an authentic understanding of what it means to be a Hindu? Can a Christian, a Buddhist, a Muslim, or an atheist, even if raised in India, have such an understanding? What is the impact of colonialism and neocolonialism on the points of view of both Indian scholars and European and American scholars on these questions? Is it possible for scholars of different national and cultural backgrounds to establish a meaningful dialogue about these questions? Can they arrive at something resembling an international consensus about the possible answers? If not, what is the point of attempting the dialogue in the first place?

Obviously, this chapter cannot attempt to seriously engage with all these questions. Much research is done without any explicit considerations of them at all. Nonetheless it is sometimes useful to try to make what is normally implicit more explicit. Here I want to briefly discuss three of these related foundational issues. First is a look at how religion is being studied in modern universities, particularly in the United States, and the influence of Mircea Eliade on this study. Second is a discussion of the historical construction of the concept of Hindu religion or Hinduism. Third is an examination of how three medieval Indian religious poets – Gorakh, Kabir, and Guru Arjan – negotiated their own religious identities in a way at least partly independent of both Hindu religion and Islam.

Eliade and the study of religions

Most academic studies on the world’s major religions over the last fifty years owe much to the ideas of the Romanian scholar Mircea Eliade. Although a good part of Eliade’s best work was done in Europe in the 1940s and early 1950s, much of his influence stems from his presence as a distinguished professor in the University of Chicago where he arrived in 1956 to teach courses in the field he called ‘The history of religions’. This is particularly true of the studies done in the religion departments of American universities, but the influence of his ideas on studies of religions has, directly or indirectly, extended to scholars in other departments and in other countries including India.

During the last fifty years there has been an enormous increase in the number of scholars who teach and do research on most of the non-Christian religions in the religion departments of American universities. Russell T. McCutcheon’s book, Manufacturing Religion (2003) argues convincingly that a key idea that has justified and promoted this increase and its location in religion departments is Eliade’s idea that religions are sui generis institutions, institutions that cannot be properly analysed using ‘reductive’ strategies that discuss religions, particularly their origins, in terms of their economic, social, and political motives and consequences.

I myself was first introduced to Eliade’s work when I was still an undergraduate. In about 1960, one of my professors, the psychoanalytic historian N.O. Brown, suggested that I read one of Eliade’s books, The Myth of the Eternal Return (2005). I found it fascinating and proceeded to read all of his books that were available in our university library. Eliade’s excellent study of Yoga, entitled Yoga: immortality and freedom (1970) was one of the readings which helped turn my own academic interests toward India and Hinduism. Today, looking back on all this, I think the thing that most attracted me to Eliade was the vision he offered of exotic new worlds of ideas: the world of archaic man and the world of Hinduism. Ironically, much of the rest of my academic career has been dedicated to learning and showing that these exotic worlds are not, after all, so exotic or different from the world in which I grew up.

Eliade claims that all religions share a unique point of origin, a personal experience of the sacred, the experience that Rudolf Otto (1970) earlier called the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. It is this experience that allowed Eliade and others associated with the history of religions to make the claim that religion is sui generis and needs to be studied by its own methodology and not reduced to secular history, sociology, anthropology, philosophy or psychology. Although religion is necessarily manifested in historical time as specific, organized religions – each with its own history, churches, rituals, beliefs, customs, and social, economic and political programmes – nonetheless, behind all this empirical prolixity lies the experience of the sacred, the phenomenon that makes religions religious.

In terms of its consequences, the idea that Otto and Eliade promoted has proved to be a powerful idea. By concentrating his research on the effects of religious experience and not on its cause, Eliade offered a way to create an allegedly ‘scientific’ mode of studying religion, and this possibility in turn helped to legitimate the creation of new or expanded departments of religion in most American universities. Since Otto’s and Eliade’s idea also posited a common origin for all religions, these same religious departments were also now free to expand into studies not only of Christianity, Judaism and maybe Islam, but also other so-called ‘world religions’: Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Shinto and the like.

The idea and study of ‘world religions’ did, of course, exist in Europe and America well before Eliade and Otto. The field known as ‘comparative religion’ was a direct precursor. Tomoko Masuzawa (2005) has written an excellent account of the history of the idea of ‘world religions’ among European and American scholars in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most of the earlier discussions of these world religions arranged them in hierarchical subcategories such as universal and national, historical and ahistorical, ethical and ritualistic, monotheistic and polytheistic. In these arrangements Christianity always came out on top. These unequal evaluations were eventually dropped by most scholars, although traces of preference for Christianity or for other religions sometimes survive in implicit form. The scholar who did most to eliminate such bias was Max Weber who defined ‘world religions’ simply as those with the largest number of adherents.

Eliade’s approach made possible a new and expanded effort to study world religions, an effort that at least partly freed the study of these religions both from a narrow-minded Christian or Jewish ideological focus and from the reductive methodologies of the secular historians, anthropologists, philosophers and psychologists. A new academic enterprise was born, one that had clear affinity with the general need of the new post-war American empire for more information about the cultures of the Asian and African countries where the political and economic involvement of this empire was growing rapidly.

This does not mean, however, that the young scholars, myself included, who worked on Hinduism and other Asian religions during the 1960s and 1970s, were simply the dupes and stooges of Eliade and the new American Empire. We were simply following our own hearts and our own curiosity, but the fact that the American universities were now willing to hire persons who worked in such fields certainly made things much easier. Nonetheless, my own enchantment with Eliade’s history of religions approach did not last long. I began to support the view that the chief function of religions was to ideologically express the economic, social, political and psychological needs of their adherents, needs that were often distorted by the priestly elites that usually managed and controlled the religions. This, of course, is an idea quite at odds with the view of Eliade that such material and psychological needs are purely incidental to the uniquely religious or spiritual foundation of all religions in the experience of the sacred.

More recently, however, I have come back to a position partly akin to that taken by Eliade, namely that religions are associated with a particular emotion or emotional experience that corresponds to Otto’s mysterium tremendum et fascinans. I would argue, however, that Otto probably overemphasized the ‘terror’ and ‘awe’ aspects of this experience. Religions other than Christianity, Judaism and Islam usually describe what must be roughly the same experience without the same degree of terror and awe. We must assume, after all, that this is a human experience and that different religious cultures can have only a limited role in shaping how it is perceived. Sigmund Freud (1958: 1–12), in his Civilization and Its Discontents, called the experience an ‘oceanic feeling’ and this description may be closer to what is common to it in all religious cultures.

In any case, it is the association with this experience that makes religious institutions religious. Furthermore, it is this association that imbues religious institutions and their leaders with an aura of authority that helps them to legitimate and prescribe the rules of the social, moral and political order among their followers. Against Eliade’s view, however, it also seems to me to be more useful to seek the source of this experience in human genetic predispositions and not in an ineffable, empirically unverifiable encounter with a supernatural ‘sacred’ identified as a god, a spirit, or some absolute reality. Several recent books by prominent geneticists, most notably Dean Hamer and Marc Hauser, point in precisely this biological direction.

The problem with Eliade’s approach to the study of world religions and of religion as a general category was not just its affinity to the practical needs of the American empire in the second half of the twentieth century. Another difficulty was that Eliade was never able to fully divorce his history of religions methodology from the theistic and ultimately Christian biases that were built into his and Otto’s intellectual visions. In practice, the writings and teaching of many historians of religion in American universities have tended to offer too much religion, often surreptitiously Judeo-Christian religion, and too little history.

In India, both the political and religious problems of the history of religions approach were illustrated, making allowances for obvious differences, during the recent period of national rule in India by the Hindu nationalist BJP political party. Although Indian universities, unlike American ones, have no tradition of religion departments, efforts were made under the BJP to promote the creation of centres for Vedic ritual and astrological studies within Indian universities. Studies of such topics can, of course, be undertaken for strictly academic purposes, but in this case the main purposes seem to have been religious and political, namely the promotion of Hindu nationalism, and not academic. Certainly religion should be more and better studied in Indian universities, but a strong case can be made that this study is best left where it is: namely, dispersed among history, social science, literature and philosophy departments.

Inventing Hinduism

In an essay entitled ‘Who invented Hinduism?’ (Lorenzen 2006), I attempted to trace back the history of the terms ‘Hindu’, ‘Hindu religion’, and ‘Hinduism’ and their near equivalents in a variety of earlier texts written by both Indians and Europeans (and also the Central Asian scholar al-Biruni). The main motive for writing the essay was to contradict the view of several recent scholars who had claimed that Hinduism was in some sense first invented, imagined, constructed or fabricated by European scholars, principally those associated with the academic current known as orientalism.

As far as the specific English word ‘Hinduism’ is concerned, the earliest published uses of the term that I had found were written by the early nineteenth-century Hindu reformer, Ram Mohan Roy (see Killingley 1993: 62–63). The Australian scholar, Geoffrey Oddie (2006: 68–72), has since noted that ‘Hinduism’ was earlier used by the evangelical writer, Charles Grant, in a text said to have been written in 1792 that was first published in 1797, as well as in some still earlier private letters by Grant. Although this fact overrules my suggestion that Roy might have been the first to...

Table of contents

• ROUTLEDGE SOUTH ASIAN RELIGION SERIES
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CONTRIBUTORS
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• Part I HISTORICAL AND EMPIRICAL ARGUMENTS
• Part II THEORETICAL REFLECTIONS
• INDEX