Essays of a Lifetime

Reformers, Nationalists, Subalterns

Sumit Sarkar

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781438474328, 9781438474311
• eBook ISBN: 9781438474335
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Theory & Criticism
• Index: History

A distillation of the historian's finest writings on modern Indian historical themes.

For the past forty years or more, the most influential, respected, and popular scholar of modern Indian history has been Sumit Sarkar. When his first monograph, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal 1903–1908, appeared in 1973 it soon became obvious that the book represented a paradigm shift within its genre. As Dipesh Chakrabarty put it when the work was republished in 2010: "Very few monographs, if any, have ever rivalled the meticulous research and the thick description that characterized this book, or the lucidity of its exposition and the persuasive power of its overall argument."

Ten years later, Sarkar published Modern India 1885–1947, a textbook for advanced students and teachers. Its synthesis and critique of everything significant that had been written about the period was seen as monumental, lucid, and the fashioning of a new way of looking at colonialism and nationalism.

Sarkar, however, changed the face not only of modern Indian history monographs and textbooks, he also radically altered the capacity of the historical essay. As Beethoven stretched the sonata form beyond earlier conceivable limits, Sarkar can be said to have expanded the academic essay. In his hands, the shorter form becomes in miniature both monograph and textbook.

The present collection, which reproduces many of Sarkar's finest writings, shows an intellectually scintillating, skeptical-Marxist mind at its sharpest.

1

Rammohun Roy and the Break with the Past

ON THE BICENTENARY OF his birth, the title of “Father of Modern India” bestowed on Rammohun by many might appear utterly sacrosanct; an exploration of the assumptions lying behind such a statement still seems not unrewarding. If this ascription of parentage is to mean anything more than a rather pompous and woolly way of showing respect, the implication surely is that something like a decisive breakthrough towards modernity took place in Rammohun’s times and in large part through his thought and activities. I propose to investigate, in the first place, the precise extent and nature of this “break with the past”. Second, the unanimity with which a very wide and varied spectrum of our intelligentsia – ranging from avowed admirers of British rule through liberal nationalists to convinced Marxists – has sought a kind of father figure in Rammohun and a sense of identification with the “renaissance” inaugurated by him remains a historical fact of considerable importance. Subsequently I will try to analyse some of the implications of this well-established historiographical tradition based on the concept of a break in a progressive direction in Bengal’s development at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

For the sake of clarity it would be convenient to begin by stating in a very schematic and somewhat provocative manner the propositions I intend to try and establish.

1.Rammohun’s writings and activities do signify a kind of a break with the traditions inherited by his generation.

2.This break, however, was of a limited and deeply contradictory kind. It was achieved mainly on the intellectual plane and not at the level of basic social transformation; and the “renaissance” culture which Rammohun inaugurated inevitably remained confined within a Hindu-elitist and colonial (one might almost add comprador) framework.

3.What may be loosely described as the negative aspects of the break became increasingly prominent as the nineteenth century advanced. The Bengal Renaissance from one point of view may be presented not as a “torch-race”, as Nirad C. Chaudhuri once described it, but as a story of retreat and decline. And perhaps a certain process of degeneration can be traced even in some of Rammohun’s later writings.

4.The limitations and contradictions of Rammohun can be traced back ultimately to the basic nature of the British impact on Indian society. The conceptual framework required for the proper analysis of this impact is not the tradition-modernisation dichotomy so much in vogue today in Western historical circles, but the study of colonialism as a distinct historical stage.1

5.With few exceptions, history-writing on Rammohun and on the entire Bengal Renaissance has remained prisoner to a kind of “false consciousness” bred by colonialism which needs to be analysed and overcome in the interests of both historical truth and contemporary progress.

I

It is generally agreed that Rammohun’s true originality and greatness lay in his attempt to synthesise Hindu,2 Islamic, and Western cultural traditions; the precise character of this “synthesis”, however, has often been obscured by a flood of laudatory rhetoric. Synthesis has often meant either eclectic and indiscriminate combination, or a kind of mutual toleration of orthodoxies. H.H. Wilson in 1840 quoted the Brahman compilers of a code of Hindu laws under Warren Hastings as affirming “the equal merit of every form of religious worship; … God appointed to every tribe its own faith, and to every sect its own religion, that man might glorify him in diverse modes …”3 Ramakrishna Paramahansa was saying very similar things a hundred years later, and both Mughal tolerance and early British non-interference were grounded upon a politic acceptance of the need for a coexistence of orthodoxies. Such attitudes seem very attractive when compared to early-modern European religious wars, but they also have certain fairly obvious conservative implications.4 It needs to be emphasised that “synthesis” with Rammohun, at least in the bulk of his writings, meant something very different; it implied discrimination and systematic choice, directed by the two standards of “reason” and “social comfort” which recur so often in his works. This is the true Baconian note struck, for instance, in the famous letter to Lord Amherst in 1823. Here, as elsewhere, panegyrists and debunkers alike have tended to miss the real point. The entire debate on the foundation of the Hindu College seems more than a little irrelevant as the “conservatives” were also quite intensely interested in learning the language of the rulers on purely pragmatic grounds, and there is surely nothing “progressive” in English education per se. What remains remarkable is Rammohun’s stress on “Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, Anatomy and other useful Sciences”,5 a bias totally and significantly lost in the ultimate Macaulay-style literary education introduced in 1835 mainly under the pressure of financial needs!6

It would be quite unhistorical, however, to attribute Rammohun’s rationalism entirely to a knowledge of progressive Western culture. His earliest extant work, Tuhfat-ul Muwahhidin (c. 1803–4), was written at a time when, on Digby’s testimony, Rammohun’s command over English was still imperfect;7 yet this “Gift to Deists” was marked by a radicalism trenchant enough to embarrass many later admirers.8 Here the criteria of reason and social comfort are used with devastating effect to establish the startling proposition that “falsehood is common to all religions without distinction.”9 Only three basic tenets – common to all faiths and hence “natural” – are retained: belief in a single Creator (proved by the argument from design), in the existence of the soul, and faith in an afterworld where rewards and punishments will be duly awarded – and even the two latter beliefs are found acceptable only on utilitarian grounds.10 Everything else – belief in particular divinities or “in a God qualified with human attributes as anger, mercy, hatred and love”,11 the faith in divinely inspired prophets and miracles, salvation through “bathing in a river and worshipping a tree or being a monk and purchasing forgiveness of their crime from the high priests”,12 and the “hundreds of useless hardships and privations regarding eating and drinking, purity and impurity, auspiciousness and inauspiciousness”13 – is blown up with relentless logic and shown to be invented by the self-interest of priests feeding on mass ignorance and slavishness to habit. Such beliefs and practices are condemned as both irrational and “detrimental to social life and sources of trouble and bewilderment to the people.”14 We have come perilously close, in fact, to the vanishing point of religion, and the logic seems to have frightened even the later Rammohun himself. Prolific translator of his own works, he never brought out English or Bengali editions of the Tuhfat.

In Rammohun’s later writings, too, the concepts of reason and social comfort or utility tend to crop up at crucial points in the argument. The illogicalities of the orthodox Christian doctrines of the Trinity and atonement through Christ are brilliantly exposed. The prefaces to the Upanishad translations and the Brahma-Pauttalik Sambad15 ruthlessly analyse the irrationalities of contemporary Hindu image-worship, and religious reform is urged time and again for the sake of “political advantage and social comfort”.16 From 1815 onwards, Rammohun tried to anchor his monotheism on the Upanishads as interpreted by Sankara, yet there is never really any question of a simple return to the Vedanta tradition. Vedantic philosophy had been essentially elitist, preaching Mayabad and monism for the ascetic and intellectual while leaving religious practices and social customs utterly undisturbed at the level of everyday life. Rammohun’s originality lay firstly in his deft avoidance of extreme monism. Mayabad in his hands gets reduced to the conventional idealist doctrines of dependence of matter on spirit and the creation of the world by God,17 and the Vedantic revival is thus reconciled with a basically utilitarian and this-worldly approach to religion. Even more striking is Rammohun’s scathing attack on the double-standard approach so very common in our religious and philosophical tradition – this is bluntly attributed to the self-interest of the Brahmans:

Many learned Brahmans are perfectly aware of the absurdity of idolatry, and are well informed of the nature of the purer mode of divine worship. But as in the rites, ceremonies, and festivals of idolatry, they find the source of their comforts and fortune, they … advance and encourage it to the utmost of their power, by keeping the knowledge of their scriptures concealed from the rest of the people.18

The “purer mode of divine worship” should be open to householder and ascetic alike.19 The practical relevance of all this for social reform becomes clear through a reading of Rammohun’s tracts on sati, where concremation with its shastric promises of heavenly bliss is proved inferior to ascetic widowhood which may lead to “eternal beatitude” and “absorption in Brahma”.20 Mrityunjay Vidyalankar had anticipated this argument in 1817,21 but the author of the Vedanta Chandrika obviously could not relate his humanitarian stand on a particularly gruesome abuse to a general philosophy. And surely only Rammohun in his generation could have written the deeply moving closing section of the Second Conference with its passionate repudiation of the unequal treatment of women “thus dependent and exposed to every misery, you feel for them no compassion, that might exempt them from being tied down and burnt to death!”22

In sheer intellectual power, Rammohun stands far above his contemporaries, and a comparison with Ramram Basu, for instance,23 is utterly ludicrous. Yet certain limits and qualifications need to be emphasised.

In the first place, the uniqueness of Rammohun’s rationalism cannot be taken as finally settled till much more is known about the intellectual history of eighteenth-century India, and particularly perhaps about its Islamic components. Brajendranath Seal found in the Tuhfat clear evidence of the influence of early Muslim rationalism (the Mutazalis of the eighth century and the Muwahhidin of the twelfth);24 what remains unexplored is the precise way in which this tradition was transmitted to the young Rammohun studying Persian and Arabic at Patna. A comparison of the Tuhfat with the Dabistan-i Mazahib of the mid seventeenth century – of which there does not exist as yet any adequate English translation – might prove quite illuminating. The “remarkabl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• I. Bhakti and Samaj: Social Reform and Religious Modernity
• II. Nationalists and Subalterns
• III. Tributes
• Index
• Back Cover