By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers
Modern Hinduism
A vigorous debate has
churned for at least a decade over the status of the label
"Hinduism," but the question at the heart of these debates-Is there any
set of pan-Indian practices and identities that one can meaningfully gather
under a single label?-has been around for much longer.
These disputes generally spring from the ambiguity and multivalency of the
adjective "Hindu." At least since the sixth-century B.C.E. reign of
Darius of Persia, the word "Hindu" has, by turns, signified regional,
religious, or cultural identifications, and from the early twentieth century,
in some contexts it has also been charged with nationalist connotations.1
On one side of the
debate over the appropriateness or utility of the term "Hinduism" are
the constructionists,2 those who claim that in scholarly practice the category
Hinduism vacuums up a miscellany of Indic traditions, ideas, and communities
that, at their core, have so little in common that their collective
identification under this umbrella is at best misleading and at worst an
exercise in ideological subterfuge. Stated succinctly, this line of reasoning
asserts that "there is hardly a single important teaching in `Hinduism'
which can be shown to be valid for all Hindus, much less a
comprehensive set of teachings."3 Some of the strongest statements
of these positions are well-known but worth repeating here. Robert Frykenberg
has put the matter this way:
There has never been
any such thing as a single "Hinduism" or any single "Hindu
community" for all of India. Nor, for that matter, can one find any such
thing as a single "Hinduism" or "Hindu community" even for
any one socio-cultural region of the continent. Furthermore, there has never
been any one religion-nor even one system of religions-to which the term
"Hindu" can accurately be applied. No one
so-called religion, moreover, can lay exclusive claim to or be defined by the
term "Hinduism." The very notion of the existence of any single
religious community by this name ... has been falsely conceived .4
More bluntly still,
Frits Staal has insisted, "Hinduism does not merely fail to be a religion;
it is not even a meaningful unit of discourse. There is no way to abstract a
meaningful unitary notion of Hinduism from the Indian phenomena."5
Many postcolonial
critiques of the same spirit finger some antagonist
whose interests the construction and deployment of the concept "Hinduism"have served. The earlier chapters of this
book pursue just such an argument with regard to
Christian polity in Britain, the colonial state, and Hindu elites. Christian
missionaries are often high on the list of those who charge that western
interests misperceived or falsified data for their own ends6 and produced a
systematized representation of disparate regional and caste practices to
different ends in both Britain and India in order to
counter that constructed tradition with the rational and moral character of
Christianity. The expansion of the colonial administration of India in the
nineteenth century also demanded a coherent and stable catalog of Hindu laws,
sects, ritual practices, and so forth, an end that an essentialized Hinduism
certainly furthered.7
Again, although it is
clear from my earlier arguments that I think there is more to the story, the
bureaucratization of the colonial state abetted the reification of Hinduism. In
the twentieth century, Hindu nationalists, it has been regularly observed, awoke
to the political fruits that the concept of a nationally and historically
cohesive tradition could yield.,, Nationalist groups have pieced together a
"syndicated Hinduism" in recent historical memory to suggest a
monolithic, ancient religion and have thereby sought to manufacture a certain
historical integrity and communal unity for all of India. Some observers find
that this nationalist revision of contemporary and historical religious
pluralism represents a problematic but politically effective assemblage of
practices and ideas intended to remake Indic traditions in the image of
Christianity and Islam.9
Others have recently
argued, in a general way about religion and also
specifically about Hinduism, that the categories serve today to justify
university religion departments and to legitimize the religious publishing
industry by rationalizing the trade in an entity of dubious ontological
status.'°
On the other side of
the issues echo a variety of voices that insist that, however diffuse,
variegated, multivalent, and internally contested, "Hinduism" as an
analytic category and descriptive label is both meaningful and reasonably true
to observed social and historical realities. Among scholars advocating a
version of this position are those such as David Lorenzen and Will Sweetman,
who argue that the scholar's employment of "Hindu" and
"Hinduism" derive from attention to the fact that precolonial and colonial-era
Hindus often could espouse a common religious identity long before European
bureaucracy and scholarship imposed one on them. "Hinduism" therefore
not only possesses some legitimacy with respect to the current era, but aptly corresponds to historically attested
indigenous self-understandings."
Others defending the
Hinduism category take a slightly different tack. Wendy Doniger tries to
liberate it from the expectation that it will correspond to a fixed set of
consistent, noncontradictory beliefs and rituals. She suggests the term be used
to invoke the idea of a common Hindu conversation on caste, karma, asceticism,
and a divine pantheon. Hindus, she holds, share distinctive concepts among
themselves but also vigorously debate their meaning. Hinduism is therefore best
imagined not as a closed circle of beliefs and practices with a clear boundary,
but by means of a Venn diagram of partially overlapping circles to indicate
those shared but contested categories.- Doniger
concludes, "it has proved convenient for us to call this corpus of
concepts “Hinduism” have served. The earlier chapters of this book pursue just
such an argument with regard to Christian polity in
Britain, the colonial state, and Hindu elites. Christian missionaries are often
high on the list of those who charge that western interests misperceived or
falsified data for their own ends and produced a systematized representation
of disparate regional and caste practices to different ends in both Britain and
India in order to counter that constructed tradition
with the rational and moral character of Christianity. The expansion of the
colonial administration of India in the nineteenth century also demanded a
coherent and stable catalog of Hindu laws, sects, ritual practices, and so
forth, an end that an essentialized Hinduism certainly furthered.' Again,
although it is clear from my earlier arguments that I think there is more to
the story, the bureaucratization of the colonial state abetted the reification
of Hinduism. In the twentieth century, Hindu nationalists, it has been regularly
observed, awoke to the political fruits that the concept of a nationally and
historically cohesive tradition could yield.,, Nationalist groups have pieced
together a "syndicated Hinduism" in recent historical memory to
suggest a monolithic, ancient religion and have thereby sought to manufacture
a certain historical integrity and communal unity for all of India. Some
observers find that this nationalist revision of contemporary and historical
religious pluralism represents a problematic but politically effective
assemblage of practices and ideas intended to remake Indic traditions in the
image of Christianity and Islam.9 Others have recently argued, in a general way
about religion and also specifically about Hinduism, that the categories serve
today to justify university religion departments and to legitimize the
religious publishing industry by rationalizing the trade in an entity of
dubious ontological status.'°
On the other side of
the issues echo a variety of voices that insist that, however diffuse,
variegated, multivalent, and internally contested, "Hinduism" as an
analytic category and descriptive label is both meaningful and reasonably true
to observed social and historical realities. Among scholars advocating a
version of this position are those such as David Lorenzen and Will Sweetman,
who argue that the scholar's employment of "Hindu" and
"Hinduism" derive from attention to the fact that precolonial and colonial-era
Hindus often could espouse a common religious identity long before European
bureaucracy and scholarship imposed one on them. "Hinduism" therefore
not only possesses some legitimacy with respect to the current era, but aptly corresponds to historically attestesindigenous self-understandings."
Others defending the
Hinduism category take a slightly different tack. Wendy Doniger tries to
liberate it from the expectation that it will correspond to a fixed set of
consistent, non contradictory beliefs and rituals.
She suggests the term be used to invoke the idea of a common Hindu conversation
on caste, karma, asceticism, and a divine pantheon. Hindus, she holds, share
distinctive concepts among themselves but also vigorously debate their meaning.
Hinduism is therefore best imagined not as a closed circle of beliefs and
practices with a clear boundary, but by means of a Venn diagram of partially
overlapping circles to indicate those shared but contested categories.12
Doniger concludes,
"it has proved convenient for us to call this corpus of concepts Hinduism;
naming is always a matter of convenience of the namers, and all categories are constructed."13
Gabriella Eichinger
Ferro-Luzzi's defense of the term is similar. She describes Hinduism as a
polythetic concept, one for which we can easily identify prototypical features
such as worship of major Hindu gods, pilgrimage, and the invocation of certain
concepts like dharma, that crisscross and overlap in different combinations in
any particular variant of Hinduism."
On balance, I find
these defenses persuasive and reflective of the evidence provided by the Indian
testimony on the matter found in places such as the Samacar
Candrika. In fact colonial-era sites on which the modern notion of
Hinduism was erected-in nineteenth-century Anglican polity, among Christian
missionaries working in India, and in an infant print media among Indian
elites-has shown clearly that the constructionists, for all their disregard of
such testimony and their often intractable attributions of immeasurable power
and creativity to colonialism, have one thing right: colonial modernity
decisively altered the character and evolutionary course of Hindu religion. The
early nineteenth century displayed an accelerating drive to codify what, by the
last quarter of that century, was commonly known among English speakers as
"Hinduism." The question cannot simply be put to rest by
demonstrating the ways that Hindus conceived their common identity before the
arrival of European powers, an important qualification recently offered by
Lorenzen and Sweetman. New religious institutions, new forms of religious
subjectivity, and new markers of religious identity, all definitely
emerged in some manner from the creative agency of Hindus in the context
of early nineteenth-century developments, especially the consolidation of the
colonial state and the introduction of Protestant missionaries to British
India. These social and religious transformations are so significant and so
widespread that it seems unnecessarily fussy to insist that Hinduismin
the sense of a cohesive and reasonably uniform religion comparable to
contemporary Abrahamic or Semitic traditions-was not the offspring of
nineteenth-century colonialism.
This is, however, not
the remarkable claim it might seem at first blush. Something similar could be
said of all modern religious forms. A bit too much, it seems to me, has been
made over the ruptures and discontinuities of the early nineteenth century. Hinduism
as we conceive it today is indeed the creation of the nineteenth century, but
so are a host of modern religions and modern social institutions.
Constructionists are only making a more specific daim
about the effects of modernity that have impacted many social formations and relations the globe over.
Continuity and the triumph of historical memory over sustained, deliberate, and
widely dispersed interventions are also parts of the story we must not
overlook. There is, first of all, the matter of what
we might regard as the sheer mass and inertia of embodied and embedded
tradition. It defies common sense to maintain that a relatively small band of
scholars and other observers could virtually invent a religious tradition from
fragments of insight and re-present it to its presumed practitioners without
inviting an incredulity that is absent from the historical record. Robert Frykenberg, in a move that seems to undercut his major
thesis about the constructedness of Hinduism, points
out in a footnote that the ratio of Europeans to Indians in the civil services
was over I:I,000.15
He maintains that [d]enigrators of Orientalism give too much credit to Europeans
and too little to hosts of Native Indians (mainly Brahmans and others imbued
with Brahmanical world views; but also Muslims imbued
with Islamic world views) for the cultural constructions (and reconstructions)
of India. These Indian elites did as much to inculcate their own views into the
administrative machinery and into the cultural framework of the Indian Empire as
anything done by the Europeans whom they so outnumbered and with whom they
worked so closely.16
Western
historiography itself has also intervened to deny Hindus their history. The
habit of casting competing groups as either "reformers" (e.g., the
Brahmo Samaj) or "orthodox" (e.g., the Dharma Sabha) has for too long
obscured the modern character of emerging Hindu organizations; their mutually
shared goals, interests, and strategies; and their common passion for
preserving and embodying the ancient past.17
Constructionist
arguments work also to bolster the weight given to missionary or imperial
formulations of Hinduism and to undermine an appreciation of prior indigenous
awarenesses of a pan-Indian Hindu identity." I agree, in this context,
that too much blame or credit has been assigned to colonialism and share the
exasperation of those who cannot accept that "everything was invented in
the nineteenth century."19 Such purportedly anticolonial arguments
inevitably end up undermining themselves by assigning all things modem and
Indian to foreign influences and nurturing a neo-nostalgia for a pristine,
precolonial India that scholarship more sensitive to both western and Indian
political exercises in purism would guard against.20
There are, I am
arguing, powerful historical and political reasons for resisting the most
sweeping claims of constructionists. The utter discontinuity with the past,
both European and Indian, that a strict constructionist reading of the
historical record entails is unwarranted. The body of evidence of precolonial
iterations of a Hindu identity is growing. More telling, I believe, is the
absence of contemporaneous Hindu contestation of the clearly developing
category "Hinduism." Reforming and orthodox groups did not
unreflexively borrow or strategically recast a half-cooked British idea .21
The very articulation
of the colonialist concept "Hindu" was already a collaborative
undertaking; discursive interactions between Britons and Indians contributed to
the dialogic and heteroglot production known as
"Hinduism."22
The largely
unacknowledged pandits who interpreted text and rite for British travelers,
traders, and rulers were themselves promoting specific ideas about Hinduism's
unifying principles, historical trends, soteriology, and so forth. A
spokesperson such as Bhabanicaran Bandyopadhyaya
might have located its core in caste and rite; a reformer such as Rammohan Roy
might locate it in a Vedic monotheism. What the contested nature of the
category among these indigenous theologians indicates is not (or not merely) a
rearrangement of power under a colonial administration but, more fundamentally,
the clear fact that the category madesense; the
emergent concept Hinduism resonated with some prior self-understanding. There
would have been no basis for an intercultural debate (i.e., between British
rulers and Indian subjects) or an intracultural one (between opposing Indian
groups) on issues related to Hindu teaching without some implicit acceptance of
the very category already in place. There were loud and vociferous debates in
both registers in the early nineteenth century over what properly constituted
Hindu society and rite. To my knowledge, however, there was no corresponding
debate either among Indians or between Indians and Britons about the
appropriateness of the category itself. One would expect to find Hindus raising
some objections to the privileging of an imputed unity over a diversity that
was manifest to Hindus and Europeans alike in popular newspapers of the day, in
the reproduction of Indian public opinion included in virtually every
English-language newspaper in India, or in Hindu tracts that answered specific
Christian charges about Hindu belief and practice, but I have come across no
such discussion, nor has any scholar to whom I have posed the issue. As we have
seen, as the idea of Hinduism slowly took shape, Hindus themselves could resist
western proposals about the content and character of the ideas and practices
that would define such an entity, and they could also debate one another about
specific Hindu matters, but they did not argue for the incommensurability of
what were coming to be understood as Hinduism's
variants. Hindus themselves informed and countered missionary and Orientalist
constructions of Hinduism, but they did not call the project itself into
question. The deafening silence among indigenous elites on this issue, an issue
which, it is critical to remember, had occupied Europeans for centuries at this
point, cannot be accounted for by attributing only the basest political
opportunism to those elites who did mobilize around the idea. A gaping absence
of indigenous critique of the category "Hindu" itself must suggest,
at the very least, a ready acceptance of the label among many Hindus and that
the concept itself corresponded to some elements of Indian self-understanding.
It seems even more likely that the idea, if not the label, was already common
Indian currency. The British did not mint this coin; they traded in it because
Hindus handed it to them. The historical role of the colonizer was not to
invent Hinduism either by blunder or by design, but to introduce an economy of
concepts and power relations that dramatically enhanced the value of such
identity markers.
Behind some
constructionists' antipathy to the term "Hinduism" is a conviction
that any essentializing of Indic traditions functions in a hegemonic manner.
Many have voiced an opposition to essentialism on the basis
of its capacity to deny Indians historical or social agency and to
augment the West's sense of its own superiority. These were the two major
concerns of Inden's 1990 book Imagining India. In deconstructing the
multiple ways that the West has essentialized India, Inden
was attacking "the idea that humans and human institutions . . . are
governed by determinate natures."23
The academic practice
of representing India by imputing essential natures to it obscures the activity
of "relatively complex and shifting human agents" who "make and
remake one another through a dialectical process in changing situations."24
Any characterization of a human institution by reference to its essences must, Inden argues, describe a static, ossified entity.25 His
challenge to western representations of India has reflected a much wider
movement. From the postmodern celebration of difference to subaltern studies'
resurrection of non-elite knowledges, the scramble to
denounce the identification and deployment of essences freighted with
ideological weight has been a very noticeable feature in the recent study of
Hinduism and religion as a whole. From many corners
there has risen an effort to deconstruct and undermine such essences in the
interests of restoring agency and giving voice to subaltern formulations of
religious identity that may be lost in the imposition of homogenizing wholes.
The attack on
essentialized representations of Hinduism, whether those of a brahmanical elite or of western academic discourses, has
led to important advances in the field of religious studies and
also trained our gaze on religious minorities and communities that might
embrace understandings of a tradition that do not reflect dominant interests.
What I suggest, however, is that essentialism in and of itself is neither the
gravest of descriptive sins nor the loyal servant of hegemony. To paraphrase
Talal Asad, some things really are constitutive and essential to a social
formation, but they are nonetheless potential targets of subversion and the
certain future victims of historical change.26
The rush to condemn
all essentializing discourses also threatens the historian's responsibility to
name a social phenomenon's constitutive and characteristic elements. The
essential, like its cousin, the definition, plays a critical role in the life
of any historical analysis or social theory-not necessarily, however, because
it is truly of a thing's essence, but precisely because of its imposture. As
hypothesis, preliminary proposal, guiding idea, or provisional conclusion, the
naming of a set of qualities, characteristics, or principles that constitute or
identify a thing is always part of the historian's and theorist's art, as is
the meticulous critique of prevailing historiography and theory. Essentialism
and the deconstruction of imputed essences is the heart and soul of social and
historical inquiry, the means by which it attains
greater clarity and further insight.
It might be useful
here to make a distinction between two variants of essentializing,
representations. There is the kind of "hard essentialism" that
determines asocial formation, such as a religion or culture, to be the passive
product of an inherent principle that generates that formation's beliefs,
practices, and identities. Inden's analysis of
western ideas about Hinduism as a tangled jungle or as the product of
imagination unbridled by reason finds fault with just this sort of
representational strategy. Hard essentialism posits timeless core essences that
travel through history taking on and shedding accretions such that their
external forms are ultimately identical and impervious to substantial
transformation or innovation. This is a fundamentally antihistorical method,
and one that the study of religion has largely outgrown, a fact that its most
vocal detractors steadfastly ignore. Such a hard essentialism may be polemical,
as we see in many evangelical representations of Hinduism, that Hinduism is fundamentally
centered on the logic of idol worship. In other instances, hard essentialism
may evince nostalgic or romantic themes, as in some Christian appropriations of
eastern spirituality and New Age syncretisms. The
harshest critics of the study of religion paint the
discipline with the broad brush of hard essentialism, imagining it a
uniform, monophonic discourse still deeply invested in the homogenizing methods
of the mid-twentieth century for which Mircea Eliade has become the most
prominent effigy.27
There is a less
egregious form of essentialism, a kinder and gentler version, what we might
think of as "soft essentialism," which makes the simple claim that a
social formation-religion as such, a religion, a
gender, and so forth-possesses key identifying properties and characteristics.
I have in mind here the colloquial use of the term "essential," as in
the phrase, "Essentially, what I am saying is x." In this sense,
"essentially" means only "more or less,"
"basically," "in sum," or "chiefly." A soft essentialism
is provisional and fully amenable to critique and revision, and we ought not
confuse it with the ossifying, hegemonic uses of hard essentialism. Neither,
moreover, should scholars in religious studies departments quietly accept the
gross distortions of our discipline that suggest it is solely in the business
of reifying and essentializing dynamic, variable, and multiform personal and
social experiences.
There is no serious
doubt about the proposition that colonial and proto-nationalist discourses in
India functioned, and functioned effectively, by means of the articulation of a
cohesive Hinduism oriented around some historical, textual, or social core essence. From the very moment of their pronouncement,
however, such core essences have been challenged. Indeed, however dominant the
early nineteenth-century discourses that identified Hinduism as a social and
religious system generated from a text (e.g., the Vedas or the Gita), a ritual
logic (that of sacrifice or idol worship), a mythical imagination (the fecund
"spirit of polytheism"), or a system of social ordering (caste as
defined by brahmanical or merchant elites), such
essentialist claims have quickly met with two critical responses. On the one
side, there have always arisen the competing claims that Hinduism coheres in
one or another of these essences. On the other, there have sounded the frustrated
British protestations that there was no one thing that distinguished Hindu
practice or identity; namely, that there was no Hinduism at all. Given the daims about the ubiquity of western essentialism, it is
important to note that this second response has always been present in western
representations of Hinduism and in intercultural dialogue throughout the
history of European and Indian contact. It is, in fact, a mark of careful and
fruitful scholarship that one attempts both to identify the essence of some
perceived social reality and also carefully to articulate
how and why such an essentialism may be misleading in the messy world of actual
human institutions and relations. We must both theorize and question theory;
demonstrate its critical relevance to organic and shifting constellations,
and remind ourselves of its always provisional and homogenizing
character. Theories, concepts, and constructions simultaneously falsify and
clarify; that is their nature and the nature of all language. The work of the
historian of religion lies precisely along the borderland between that
falsification and clarification, the territory where our grander and more
ambitious proposals shed light on observable human experience and are, at the
same time, humbled by its ineffability.
The question of the
nature and appropriateness of "Hinduism" is also an aspect of the
larger question about the genealogy of the concept of religion. Many hold it to
possess a strictly modern and western lineage and regard its application to traditions
that do not emphasize text, faith, and belief, that is, religious formations
that are not Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, to represent an arrogant and wholly
misleading imposition of a nonindigenous category on Indian social reality.
Given what he takes to be the narrow range of its signification and the
suggestions of an exclusive identity the word religion conveys in the West, S.
N. Balagangadhara, for one, insists that "there
simply could be no `religion' in India."28
Two distinct claims
are heard among those who argue against the use of the category. The first
asserts that "religion" as a concept that describes a set of
universal or near-universal human institutions centered on distinctive beliefs
and practices that might invite a cross-cultural comparison of one set to
another is a historical latecomer, dating only from the European
Enlightenment.29 A broader application beyond the post-Enlightenment West,
therefore, would normalize modern, western, and especially Christian
experience. To classify other traditions as religions distorts them and renders
them deviant from an ideal type, because they would fall short in some key
respects. The second asserts that to employ
"religion" as a term of social analysis lends credence to the
unverifiable claims and untenable categories of religious practitioners
themselves by reproducing the grammar and vocabulary of religious belief.
Religions turn on an acceptance of a supersensible reality that the scientific
method must exclude. The end of studying religion,
this line of reasoning goes, should be to explain why
people express and embody such beliefs at all and what they achieve socially by
doing so, rather than to reinscribe religious ideas and social formations in
the academy as if they demanded no interrogation themselves.
Religion as a Strictly Modern and Christian Concept
On the first score,
it seems easily demonstrable, however, that a category encompassing a variety
of cross-cultural beliefs and practices has been a part of western discourses
for centuries longer than many believe, and if they only came to be called religions
later, the belief that humans possessed distinct, mutually exclusive traditions
of belief and rite has remained fairly consistent.
When Augustine wrote On True Religion (De Vera Religion), he was contrasting
the superstitious rites of Roman pagans with the spiritualized piety of
Christians; both qualified as species of the generic category “religion” in his
mind, but one was illumined by reason and revelation, the other pocked with
vulgar error. Had his opening remarks appeared in the Missionary Papers, they
would not have sounded the least incongruous:
The way of the good
and blessed life is to be found entirely in the true religion wherein one God
is worshiped and acknowledged with purest piety to be the beginning of all
existing things, originating, perfecting and containing the universe. Thus it becomes easy to detect the error of the peoples who
have preferred to worship many gods rather than the true God and Lord of all
things.30
When Augustine used
the term “religion,” he meant the one, true religion, Catholic Christianity,
not chiefly as an institution but as a standard of piety. He nevertheless
posited the ubiquity of two general elements of human culture: belief and
rite. He remarked that pagans differed passionately on matters of belief but
participated in common rites at common temples .31 By contrast, Christians
excluded from their rites those who made competing metaphysical claims, however
similar in nature those claims were.32
Here, in Augustine’s
early work, we find several components of(what we commonly take religion to be
today: I) a very widespread, if not universal, form of human expression of
supernatural reality, 2) a plurality of competing such systems, and 3) their amenability
to mutual comparison .33 To leap ahead some centuries to illustrate further,34
the French reformer John Calvin acknowledged the core of genuine pious insight
that lay at the heart of other faiths when he made the natural world a primary
resource for knowledge about God and declared that Christianity held some
characteristic habits in common with pagans. He insisted that “from the
beginning of the world there has been no region, no city, in short, no
household that could do without religion.”35 For Calvin, all human knowledge
had suffered the corruption of sin, but what distinguished Christian faith and
piety from pagan belief and practice was the former’s possession of a revealed
truth superseding natural knowledge, available through the scriptural text only
to those pre-elected to salvation.36
In short, the case
holding that the concept of religion, in terms of a (nearly) universal human
artifact subsisting in mutually exclusive systems of belief and practice,
possesses a strictly modern genealogy has been overstated. It is clear that the
Christian West has always regarded its traditions as one subset among others of
the generic concept “religion” and seen religion as a cross-cultural element of
human thought and behavior .37 And it is certainly true that, in this respect,
the early church was altering the received meaning of the term somewhat from
an older Roman conception of religion as the unassailable traditions of one’s
ancestors and manipulating the idea to its own purposes in order to contrast
“true” belief to paganism and heresy.38 That is to say, the modern concept of
religion indeed has its roots in Christian, specifically Latin Christian,
triumphalism.
It is equally true,
however, that just as the term evolved with changed usage to indicate closed
systems of competing and mutually exclusive beliefs, it has, since the
initiation of colonial contact, continued to evolve beyond its narrow Christian
range of meaning.39 Current debate over the term marks one more moment in that
evolution. With the Enlightenment and the broadening of European contact with
other civilizations, it became possible to speak of religion outside this
restricted context-not, to be sure, without a significant distortion that we
continue to try to temper. Discourses we call “naturalistic,” “rationalistic,”
“humanistic,” “academic,” “religious studies,” and more began their slow
evolution and institutionalization in the university.’° With these developments
has come an expanded self-consciousness about the comparative project and the
terms by which comparison is conducted and entities compared. The academic
usage of “religion” has changed substantially, and under continuing scrutiny, it
remains elastic. Its semantic range continues to evolve and expand as scholars
critique and examine their own categories and as they apply new data from
non-western traditions to the category. Religious studies departments are not,
by and large, simply factories for the maintenance of Christian hegemony but
do, in very many instances, work assiduously to overcome their own histories
and discover truly meaningful and instructive ways to characterize human
difference as well as a shared humanity across cultures.
This last point
brings me to a second important aspect of the argument that “religion” is a
misleading term for describing systems of belief outside the Abrahamic faiths,
one distinctly postcolonial in its concerns and intent. There is a great deal
of hand-wringing in the field of religious studies and
among scholars who study religion from positions in departments of history and
sociology not only over the term’s hegemonic potential, but also for religious
studies’ sloppy demarcation of what counts as its data. A glance at one recent
program of the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion might bear
some of these charges out. It suggests that such disparate phenomena as
transgender activism, the television serial The Sopranos, the sarin gas attacks
on Tokyo’s subways in 1995, the Harry Potter phenomenon, zazen, family
planning, Kierkegaard’s ethical thought, the Ku Klux Klan, the camp meeting,
and, I cannot resist including him, Hanako the toilet ghost all have a share in
some nebulous undertaking named “religion.” The alleged ubiquity and centrality
of this imagined entity to human societies serves to justify the existence of
this professional association and provides its raison d’etre.41 Whereas one
might maintain that its ability to theorize such divergent human expressions
and experiences is precisely the strongest argument for the relevance and
institutional legitimacy of religious studies ‘42 others might perceive an
ill-defined object of study. The more serious corollary to this charge, however,
is that the study of religion as such is tantamount to an uncritical
acceptance, even promotion, of discourses that invoke beings whose presence and
existence are not at all in evidence. To take the statements of religious
practitioners at face value and to seek to interpret their meaning for those
practitioners is-the argument goes-merely to describe what the insider believes
and experiences and not to engage in any second-order, explanatory method.
These objections to
the practice of religious studies, namely, that its founding concept is
simultaneously empty and hegemonic, and that the discipline gives voice to and
advances insider approaches to religion (i.e., mythological, theological) over
outsider accounts of religious behavior (i.e., social scientific, biological,
etc.), implicitly raise questions about the historical processes by which
Hinduism came to be understood as one species in a genus of universal human
behaviors and hence comparable to others. S. N. Balagangadhara
and Richard King have both cast suspicion on the application of the concept
religion to Hindu traditions in India, especially because, in each of their
views, “religion” refracts its content through a prism of Christian categories.
It thereby suggests orderly social realities or dosed systems of thought about
the origins of the cosmos that are easily distinguishable from their political
and social surroundings-things not characteristic of Indian traditions.” In
response, Will Sweetman notes that religion was not an ossified, static concept
into which Hinduism was forced in the eighteenth century but rather an elastic
category that continued to stretch and develop as a result of
the encounter with Indian religions.” I argue that religion is not and has not
been the monothetic concept awkwardly applied to Hindu and other data that so
many critics would claim. It has proven, in fact, a very useful, if
constructed, category for framing colonial contact and highlighting certain
features of intercultural encounter. This book has
pursued a religious studies approach to the encounter between Hindus and their
(largely Christian) British rulers in the early nineteenth century by
demonstrating the indispensability of understanding and foregrounding religious
categories, rituals, communities, and beliefs in these interactions. It has
shown that to reduce religion to mere social practice or political power would
be to fundamentally misrepresent and misunderstand the relations between
Britons and Indians. More to the point, it has drawn attention to ways in which
Hindus and Christians compared themselves to one another and invoked their
mutually shared concepts. These groups themselves articulated their similarities and differences, both in terms of specific
beliefs and in their more general nature as socially located entities.
Christians and Hindus were already doing, albeit in an unselfconscious way,
what all good comparativists do-they enumerated contrasts and likenesses, but
also examined to what extent the entities in question were comparable. The
degree to which one or another set of cultural expressions is a religion is
precisely a matter for comparative analysis, not an issue that the comparative
method precludes. To propose that Hinduism is not a religion because only
Christianity and related faiths are religions is to imply that Hindus and
Christians have nothing to say to one another qua Hindus and Christians and
that, in a conceptually clearheaded universe, they shouldn’t.
Of graver and more
immediate import, however, for early
twenty-first-century global politics, are the allegiances the vitiation of the
concept of religion subtly declares. The marginalization of religion as a
concept also entails the marginalization of religious communities and
identities from centers of power and knowledge production. The nullification of
religion aims to severely restrict access to the critical analysis of religion
at the very historical moment when peoples formerly only represented by religious
studies discourses are achieving a measure of self
representation in the academy and when “religion,” whatever the
concept’s genealogy, has, in fact, evolved as a category of cross-cultural
comparison invoked by insiders to non-Christian religious traditions. This
comparative undertaking now cuts a number of ways, in
the negative evaluation of Christian (and Jewish) conduct and intentions toward
others that might prompt some to terrorist violence, in the peaceful resistance
to western hegemonies on the basis of religious
convictions, and as the proud assertion of a distinctive history and identity
vis-à-vis the Christian West. Whatever their intent, the reification of
religion and the comparative study of religion are now rampant global
exercises, often undertaken by those who would contest a history
of western essentialism, alterization, and distortion
of colonized religious ideologies.
To narrow the focus
and put the matter somewhat bluntly for clarity’s sake, if religion is not a
real thing, then likewise it is not meaningful to speak of Hinduism or any
other “religious” faith as if it were a real thing. This claim in turn denies
and devalues the lived experience of, in this case, Hindus and hits at the very
heart of what many regard with the greatest reverence as the core of their
received identity. Moreover, this claim excludes their voices from the centers
of knowledge production about their defining experiences and emotions on that
very basis. The arguments that religion is a meaningless category and Hinduism
a bungled western construct best dispensed with effectively undercut the
geopolitical aims of some Hindus to be taken seriously after centuries of
stereotyping, misrepresentation, and demonization at the hands of the Christian
West. To seek to deny, moreover, entrance to a conversation about the social
and political character and effect of religion to those who espouse religious points
of view on the argument that such voices represent not the scholarship of
religion but data for scholars of religion, and to claim this at the same time
that one claims that religion is a misleading category for cross-cultural
comparison, signals an attempt to trump the self
representation card that some non-Christians might now play. It conceals
a basic contradiction in the critique of religious studies as nonempirical
doublespeak between faulting the discipline for a legacy of imperialism and
undermining the authority and agency clairred by
those whom imperialism has most directly and negatively affected.
Perhaps the most
vociferous recent attack the field that allegedly
takes religion as a sui generis, self-evident datum of
human cultural life is Timothy Fitzgerald’s The Ideology of Religious Studies.
Briefly, Fitzgerald’s major claims, as I read him, are as follows. First, he
contends that the category “religion” itself is empty, precisely for the fact
that academic and vernacular usage employs the term to identify an enormously
varied set of cross-cultural phenomena such that it comes to have no concrete
referent at all. Fitzgerald writes, “Religion cannot reasonably be taken to be
a valid analytical category since it does not pick out any distinctive
cross-cultural aspect of human life. “45 Second, Fitzgerald argues that all
usage of the term “religion” imports an implicitly theological framework into
what should remain a strictly anthropological or sociological undertaking.46 He
locates this theological core of religious studies in the work of the founding
members of the discipline who conceived religion as a variable but universal
and innate human response to universally felt experiences of transcendence. F.
Max Müller, Mircea Eliade, and Rudolph Otto are among the seminal comparativists and phenomenologists Fitzgerald accuses of
mystifying textual and ethnographic data to construct such an instinctive human
faculty. Their approaches presume the very thing they must, instead,
demonstrate, namely that there is something distinctive about a set of human
behaviors that could legitimately be grouped under the concept “religion.”
Finally, Fitzgerald identifies the form and character of the ideology of
religious studies as a “liberal ecumenical” theology guided by the acceptance
of the existence of “a transcendent intelligent Being who gives meaning and
purpose to human history. “47 The aim of this discourse is to foster fruitful
dialogue, peaceful coexistence, and perhaps even, Fitzgerald seems to fear, a
mutual recognition of the validity of distinct religious communities.
Others have taken
Fitzgerald to task for a series of shortcomings in his book.48 He has been
criticized for not tapping fields outside religious studies to see how others
address the problems of category formation and taxonomy,49 for recommending a
shift to the category “culture,” one at least as problematic as “religion,”50
for his reified concept of the West,” and for failing to appreciate the
complexity of the question of disciplinary boundaries .52 In addition, and most
relevant to this book’s major approach, however, is Fitzgerald’s stereotyped
and ill-informed representation of the field of religious studies, which he
depicts as a dinosaur lumbering among complex and subtle data, clumsily
addressing them with theories and ideas generations out of date and crippled by
theological commitments. He confidently makes such wide-ranging and damning
statements as this: “All the notable theorists of religious studies have placed
their usually outstanding scholarship firmly and explicitly in a theological
framework, heavily loaded with western Christian assumptions about God and
salvation, even if not Christian in an exact confessional sense.”53
In praising Louis
Dumont’s Homo Hierarchicus, a book that thoroughly
reifies caste, Fitzgerald says that “religious studies as religious studies has
nothing to offer” about questions of power and its mystification .54 When he
surveys the field of religious studies, Fitzgerald sees only the likes of
Frazer, Tylor, Müller, and Eliade. His selective vision produces a gross
misrepresentation of a discipline. Whether it is
attributable to genuine ignorance or simple mischief I cannot say. In the fifty
years since Wilfred Cantwell Smith first raised the question about the broad
application of the term in his The Meaning and End of Religion, religious
studies has been vibrantly self-critical and has
eagerly interrogated its own founding concept. Smith’s own charge that “the
term `religion’ is confusing, unnecessary, and distorting”55 and Johathan Z.
Smith’s judgment that religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study
have become virtual mantras in the field, regular reminders that, like
“culture” and “society,” the thing we study does not exist in nature but serves
descriptive ends. Fitzgerald, for all his frequent caveats to the effect that
there are many excellent scholars in religious studies departments, displays no
sense that religious studies or the study of religion could include any but I,
monotheistic, textually oriented phenomenologists. He locates those who actually critique the phenomenologist
tradition in religious studies outside the field, a move that allows him to
construct the very thing he attacks while he completely ignores significant
advances in the study of religion made in the last twenty-five years by, for
example, the contributions of feminism, post-modernism, and ethnography. 56
I find Russell T
McCutcheon’s body of theory and criticism altogether different from
Fitzgerald’s. Although both aim toward similar ends, namely
to challenge the assumptions and execution of religious studies, McCutcheon’s
work is far better informed about the field and his
critique is both less polemical and harder hitting than Fitzgerald’s. Although
I will proceed to disagree with many of his major claims, I believe the quality
of current debate among scholars who study something they or others identify as
“religion” would be much impoverished without McCutcheon’s carefully honed and
often pointedly satirical characterization of the field.
McCutcheon’s work
presents a mixture of important insights, significant overstatements, and
rhetorically effective misrepresentations of the field of religious studies,
and many of its contributions and shortcomings I cannot address here. One
strand of his overall critique of religious studies, however, is especially
relevant to this book’s characterization of religion in nineteenth-century
British India. Some wider summary of McCutcheon’s larger project is necessary
to get me to that one point. In his first book, Manufacturing Religion: The
Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia, taking
Jonathan Z. Smith’s famous dictum that religion is solely the creation of the
scholar’s imagination as his point of departure, McCutcheon maintains that
there is no sui generis, self-evident phenomenon that corresponds to our word
“religion.” We have taken this term in the singular, specific sense to mean a
set of beliefs and practices that together constitute a people’s distinctive
way of constructing and communicating with some other realm that we religious
studies scholars, buying into the categories of religious practitioners, have
called “the sacred.” These constructs, McCutcheon urges, are convenient
fictions, and he warns that “rather than simply imagining [religion], we have
actively manufactured it.”, Academic representations, McCutcheon finds, reproduce
and authorize religious identities and categories and thereby are implicated in
the maintenance of larger geopolitical and sociopolitical realities. Perpetuation of discourse about sui generis religion is more
than an act of fancy for McCutcheon: it colludes in the sustenance of these
larger networks of political and social relations. He claims that to protect
themselves against this awareness, western scholars of religion have tended to
think of religion in terms of decontextualized phenomena, a flawed approach
that has favored the study of narrative and essentialist symbolism over concern
for local and historical backdrops, formalized ritual over ritual process, and
religion as a private and privileged discourse over religion as a nexus of many
other social discourses.58
In his most recent
book, Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion,
McCutcheon urges that we think of religion as simply “an all too ordinary
effect of events in the historical and social world,”59 a “thoroughly human
activity with no mysterious distillate left over”60 that must be explained by
theory and not simply described by means of the very vocabulary (“sacred,”
“holy,” “worship,” etc.) employed by practitioners. The scholar’s role as
scholar is-and McCutcheon is very prescriptive about this-solely to demystify
religious assertions and practices and expose them as one of a society’s means
for authorizing power .61 In no circumstance should the scholar give voice to
or regard religious claims and actions, or the people making them, including
theologians in the academy, as anything other than his or her data that unveils
the authorizing function of religion .62 Because religion is an everyday affair
firmly rooted in its particular linguistic, cultural, social, and political worlds,
interreligious understanding is an illusion and a quest best abandoned because
such an illusory goal is a part of the European tradition of scholarship not
shared by all other traditions and amounts to plundering another’s tradition to
serve “our” ends .63 McCutcheon rejects the notion of cross-cultural
understanding because, among other reasons, he doubts both that “our”
categories can be sufficiently mapped over onto those of “the other” and that
this other would be at all interested in attempting to understand us.64
There is a fatal
blindness in McCutcheon’s reasoning on this point, and one that displays either
his naiveté or his disregard for the political-a realm about which he claims to
care so much. McCutcheon imagines this “other” to be completely uninterested in
comprehending “our” ways, but he fails to take account of the contemporary
reality in the academy and among many religious communities, namely that what
these “others” want is not so much a clearer apprehension of European and
American cultural logic (in a globalized economy, this logic is almost
everywhere all-too-apparent), but to be understood, on their own terms,
according to their own categories, and by means of their own
self-representation. In the academic study of Hinduism, powerful and angry Hindu
voices have criticized the academic representation of Hinduism and exposed the
divergent aims and contexts that motivate religious practitioners and students
in the secular study. 65 I remain in complete agreement with Brian K. Smith’s
demand that scholarship not abrogate its responsibility to contradict false
historical, social, or political claims made by religious practitioners’66 but I maintain that responsible scholarship on religion
must seek productive engagement with practitioners that does not scoffingly
dismiss their faith. In discounting all religious claims and demanding that
only the theorist versed in sophisticated theory-theory forged almost
exclusively in academic institutions in or modeled on those in Europe and the
United States-be recognized McCutcheon and those similarly disposed reveal
their own neocolonialist and elitist agenda. To behave as if the concerns of
religious communities do not and should not matter to the scholar of religion,
a creature that McCutcheon has thoroughly documented as having great effect on
and influence over the practice and understanding of religion, seems arrogant,
misguided, and decidedly dangerous. To proceed in such a way, moreover, at this
highly charged historical moment when religion and religious identity are
invoked by actors in many regional and global dramas as motives for escalating
violence, severely undercuts McCutcheon’s claim to be fundamentally concerned
about the public role of the scholar of religion. To assume that role for
McCutcheon means only one thing: to call into question-using the power of the
classroom, the microphone, and western critical discourses-the most cherished
beliefs, values, and identities of those who may already resent the power of
western discourses to characterize them and shape their destinies. In the years
immediately following the period this book covers, as some Indian groups began
to master the technologies and institutionalizing strategies that would allow
them a measure of self representation, Thomas
Babbington Macaulay issued, as a statement of government policy, the famous
opinion that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole
native literature of India and Arabia.”67 McCutcheon’s casual dismissal of
religious identity and his exclusion of religious practitioners from the study
of religion is tantamount to the same condemnation.
Christians and Hindus
Both Hindus and
Christians, are a part of today's conflicts and recriminations in India today.
Both Christian and Hindu, our forebears or contemporaries,
have pursued policies and strategies to which I might vehemently object,
were themselves political agents plotting specific ends but also bearers of
social and historical processes beyond their control or cognizance.
In fact
two events of 1999 marked a crisis in global Hindu-Christian relations. They
cannot in any way be said to represent these relations as a
whole, but their wide dissemination through mass media in Europe,
Australia, the United States, and India have galvanized opposition of certain
segments of each group to one another and communicated to the world that
intractability is a hallmark of Hindu-Christian relations at the dawn of the
new millennium. That year opened with the horrific murder by right-wing Hindu
nationalists of the Australian medical missionary Graham Staines and his two
young boys while the family slept in their car outside a hospital Staines had
founded. Staines had worked with lepers in India for forty years. Many Indian
Christians responded with fear and retreat, and Christians outside India
expressed shock and alarm. The second event was the publication of the
International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention's pamphlet
highlighting the Hindu holiday Divali and urging
Christians to pray that Hindus would find the "true" light of Jesus
Christ.68
Fiercely evangelical
in tone and crafted to appeal to the lurid fascination with the erotic and
bizarre evident in CMS publications nearly two hundred years before, the
pamphlet provoked outrage from Hindus and non-Hindus across the globe by
rehearsing for its Christian audience the well-worn yarn that "more than
boo million people are lost in the hopeless darkness of Hinduism."69 In
both cases, members of the offended communities reacted with a polemic about
the other that projected a monolithic, unified enemy and suggested that Hindus
or Christians were uniformly in broad support of these acts. Hindus, especially
nationalists with access to microphones and Web sites, suggested that all
Christians were ardent evangelicals with no appreciation or understanding of
Hindu traditions, whereas Christians lamented the decline of the tolerance they
had once admired in Hinduism and the mobilization of popular opinion against
Christians in India.
I am not suggesting a
moral equivalence between them, but I mention these two incidents for several
reasons. The first is their obvious inheritance from the colonial events and
encounters narrated in this book. The ghosts of the colonial past have not seen
fit to lurk quietly in the shadows but have brought the force of the troubled
past to bear on the present. 70 Robert Frykenberg has called Hindu nationalism the
"twin" of British interventions in Hindu traditions," and I
would at least agree that the always-vehement and sometimes-violent opposition
of Hindu nationalists toward Christianity in India is but a late product of the
imperial manipulations of religions and the circumstances of aggressive
missionary interrogation of Hinduism beginning with the work of men like Abbé
Dubois, William Carey, Claudius Buchanan, and William Ward. Although horror at
such violence and despair at the current state of Hindu-Christian relations
seems an appropriate and natural response, it is difficult not to ascribe a very
significant measure of culpability for this state of affairs to the strategies
consciously adopted since the colonial era by Christians hoping for the
religious transformation of the subcontinent, strategies that have sown
resentment deeply in Indian public opinion. I must stress that this argument
speaks only to history and its ghosts-not to the motivations or intentions of
any contemporary actors. There can be no excusing or rationalizing senseless violence or grave insult. But if
relations between Hindus and Christians are to improve, history demands that
Christians, particularly non-Indian Christians, take the lead in healing the
breach by confessing their affront to the dignity and honor of Hinduism.
Among foreign
missionaries, Staines was, by all reliable accounts, a humanitarian of the most
compassionate and engaged stripes. He devoted his life to the alleviation of
suffering and seems never to have been involved in the demonization of Hinduism
or the arrogant propagation of Christianity that many Hindus, with
justification, find deeply offensive .72 The Staines murders were tragic in
themselves and also for their impact on
Hindu-Christian relations. The Staines' deaths and the attention the Indian and
foreign press gave them called yet again to Hindu minds the idea that
Christianity was itself largely a foreign force and presence in India. The
rightful fury over these crimes obscured the fact that the great measure of
suffering and persecution of Christians in India is of Indians themselves,
whose homes and churches were reduced to ashes in large numbers in a
frightening series of incidents in the late I990’s." Moreover, to
Christians the world over, Hinduism became associated with terror and mob
violence.
That the Baptist Divali pamphlet has become emblematic of Christian
attitudes toward Hindus is itself deeply troubling because it came to suggest
that all Christians alike regard Hinduism with disdain. The tract was
profoundly wounding to Hindu sensibilities rubbed raw by hundreds of years of
abuse at the hands of a very vocal minority of non-Indian Christians who have
possessed neither the courtesy nor the self-control to address alien ideas and
practices with honest inquiry. Both instances stand as enormous stains on the
reputations of two great faiths whose practitioners, by and large, deserve far
better representation.
These events point
first and perhaps most importantly to the need for an awareness of how poor the
state of information that most Hindus and Christians have about one another is
and how easily bad information can be mobilized for violence and insult.
Evangelical polemic about Hinduism at times seems to have progressed little
beyond the juvenile and lurid representations purveyed by the CMS Missionary
Papers.
If the Baptist Divali pamphlet serves to demonstrate this ignorance among
Christians, a 1999 Indian publication titled Christianity and Conversion in
India makes the case about Hindus clearly enough." Its pages are filled
with thirdhand rumormongering and simple confusion about the realities of
global Christianity, which it then marshals to contend that the failure of
Christianity in the West has forced its few remaining zealous practitioners to
turn to the developing world to compensate for the empty pews in Europe and the
Americas. It devotes almost an entire chapter to a speculative episode that is
of minor interest to even rabid western conspiracy theorists: the alleged
murder of Pope John Paul I in the Vatican a month after his election as pontiff
in 1978. The book names this murder, utterly unsubstantiated and seldom
discussed seriously in the West, a major crisis in the Christian world that has
so drastically eroded the faith of western Christians that evangelists now turn
to India to convert her masses to a dying faith .75 Most pervasive among the
book's flaws is the consistent representation of Christianity as a uniform
global system, which it often identifies with Roman Catholicism as when, for
example, it cites declining enrollment in Catholic seminaries and claims that
"without priests, Christianity cannot survive. "76 In this and other
places, the book displays complete ignorance about the vibrant and robust state
of many strands of Christianity in the West. It is of paramount importance that
both Christians and Hindus come to recoguze the
enormous diversity of communities who call themselves by those names.77
Clearly, there is a
role for the academic study of religion in stemming these streams of appalling
misinformation, but the question of what role is hardly a simple one. The
academic study of religion is itself an heir to western exoticization and
demonization of religion, and Hindus, in particular, are suspicious of the
motives and representations of scholars .78 This fact is painfully evident in
the successive waves of controversy over the academic study of Hinduism
initially set in motion by Jeffrey J. Kripal's Kali's Child, a book that many
scholars regard as a sensitive portrayal of the Hindu ascetic and teacher
Ramakrishna, but many Hindus see as a blasphemous denigration of one of their
most revered modern teachers .79 The origin of the ancient Aryans, the import
of archaeological remains at the disputed Babri Masjid, the character of past
Muslim rule over areas of the subcontinent, and the validity of psychoanalytic
interpretation all have erupted as sites of conflict between Hindus and
scholars of Hinduism. The fact that the study of religion is nearly absent from
post-Independence institutions of higher education in India and has, therefore,
very few Hindu voices representing the discipline to Hindus in India, further
contributes to the perception that the academic study of religion is a western
enterprise dismissive of Hindu traditions.80
Global capitalism,
the commodification of religion, and the voraciousness of the mass media are
each also responsible in some measure for irritating the sensibilities of
religious practitioners and provoking a defensiveness that can hinder progress
in interreligious understanding. This contemporary situation impacts all
religious groups, but two examples will suffice to make the point about Hindus
and Christians. A satirical Web site that actually aims to lampoon the
commodification of religion and feigns to sell toy "action figures"
of various gods and goddesses, armed with modern assault weaponry, has offended
Hindus and Christians alike by offering Jesus Christ (complete with
"ninja-messiah throwing nails") and Krishna ("cosmic warrior and
lover of many women") for sale .81 An episode of the popular cartoon Xena:
Warrior Princess offended Hindus when an episode featured Krishna and Hanuman
coming to the aid of its superhero protagonist.82 The invocation of religious
symbols for commercial or satirical purposes has contributed to an atmosphere
of mistrust and suspicion in which the offended quickly leap to a wounded
reclamation of their revered icons, especially in those from societies less
accustomed to a freedom of speech as permissive as that in North America and
Europe. Although secular market forces help erode traditional values and
symbols, they are encouraging a defensive vigilance that leaves religious
communities unwilling or unable to assume the posture of openness necessary for
fruitful dialogue.
Hindu-Christian
encounter takes place all over the globe, but it is in India where contact
between Hindus and Christians is most immediate, public, and of greatest
historical duration."83 Here, religion and politics nowhere display or
aspire to the separation they enjoy in the West.84 The character of
Hindu-Christian relations shifts with the changing national and international
concerns prevailing in the times and places that give rise to encounter. It is
critical, therefore, if we are to cast an eye toward the future of such
relations, to remind ourselves that Hindu violence against Christians is of
very recent historical provenance. It has stemmed largely from Hindu anger and
litigation over the right of Christians to proselytize non-Christians in India.85
By virtue of Christianity's association with the United States and, to a lesser
degree, Europe, Hindu-Christian conflict in India has invited the close scrutiny of the press both in India and elsewhere. The
Indian press writes for a public informed by and sensitive to its colonial
history and postcolonial struggles with that history, whereas the western media
is encouraged by noble as well as base motives to cover "trouble
spots," particularly those that affect western interests. Hindu nationalist
organizations preaching the notion that India is historically and culturally a
Hindu nation foster the conflict that attracts this attention. Those religions
that did not originate in India-Christianity and Islam in
particular they declare foreign transplants whose practitioners can find
acceptance only by acknowledging their foreignness and thereby accepting a
secondary status in the life of the nation. "Hindutva" organizations
such as the Vishva Hindu Parishad convey this message in both public speech and
public ritual spectacle, celebrating Christians and Muslims who identify
themselves culturally and nationally as Hindus at the same time that they
depict Islam and Christianity as foreign threats to Indian society and state
.86 However, even when Christians explicitly identify themselves as Indian,
there is often deep suspicion among Hindus of Christian duplicity. It is
readily believed that Christian communities are footholds for foreign
influences and also that Christians will adopt
whatever disguise might suit their ultimate and governing end: conversion. The
recent introduction of anti-conversion bills in state legislatures
has been one expression of this suspicion. The now centuries-old Catholic
movement to adopt Hindu symbols, concepts, and lifestyles and thus
"Indianize" Catholicism, to take another example, has been intensely
controversial, with many Hindus regarding "Catholic" ashrams as
fraudulent conduits for foreign capital expended for conversion.87
It is important to
point out that, for all its sites of conflict, India has also offered numerous
models for cooperation and mutual appreciation between Hindus and Christians.
No one concerned about the state of relations between these two increasingly global
communities should forget the rich store of historical and contemporary
resources for imagining peaceful and productive engagement between them. Prior
to the arrival of Europeans, Hindus and Christians in South India had developed
indigenous strategies and patterns for living together. There is ample
contemporary evidence, moreover, of day-to-day cooperation and coexistence of
Hindus and Christians. Even in ritual settings, there can be much room for
rapprochement. The most successful mutual religious undertakings seem to be
those that spontaneously and organically evolve at the grassroots level,
whereas contrived institutional settings such as Catholic ashrams often incite
Hindu resentment.88 Even assertions of difference among Hindus and Christians
in South India employ the common idioms and grammars of divinity that
underscore their shared religious sensibilities and make for a kind of civil
theology that publicly stages and debates religious claims.89 Living together
certainly does not mean living without conflict or competition. An intricate
web of relationships and attitudes binds Hindus and Christians in the state of
Kerala but also pits one community against the other.90 In short, current
circumstances in India give no clear signal about the future of Hindu-Christian
relations, offering reason for optimism as well as anxiety.
In the late 1980’s,
just as the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party was
beginning to experience considerable electoral success and Christianity began
to assume a prominent place in Hindu nationalist rhetoric, a collection of
essays edited by Harold Coward tided Hindu-Christian Dialogue was published. It
remains the only work of its kind, although the Society for Hindu-Christian
Studies has grown significantly in recent years and publishes a journal
annually, Hindu-Christian Studies Bulletin, which continues to foster dialogue
and provide a forum for exchange between Hindus and Christians. Coward's book
offered an assessment of the state of Hindu-Christian dialogue then, and its
predictions for the future that may be instructive to our current state. In his
essay for that volume, Richard W Taylor noted a general lack of interest in
dialogue and identified a growing suspicion among Hindus that dialogue was a
cover for proselytization, especially since such conversations were generally
initiated and framed by westerners.91 As we have seen, these concerns persist.
In a companion essay, Klaus Klostermaier also
anticipated the continued rise of Hindu nationalism.92 He issued a call for the
greater involvement of scholars of religion who could, he imagined, further
Hindu-Christian understanding by helping to imagine new articulations of
dialogic possibilities.93
On the role of
scholars in these efforts, Hindu-Christian studies is
all too familiar with the double-edged sword the academic study of religion can
wield. The field can indeed promote mutual understanding by clarifying the
history and nature of the traditions in question, especially by describing the
great internal diversity that characterizes both Hinduism and Christianity. The
canons of the discipline, however, often put scholars at odds with
practitioners, Hindu and Christian alike, because many academics aim to render
the historical and metaphysical claims of religious faith both as their
partisans experience them and as mythologized reflections of merely human
desires. It is exactly this "both" that triggers the offended
sentiment. Although some might regard this "bothness"
as a mark of careful and sensitive scholarship, one that attends to the norms
of historiography, ethnography, and hermeneutics, it can strike the devout
practitioner as a profound violation. The scholar's craft consists in carefully
sketching the contours of a people's imaginings and
institutions, thereby revealing, even if unintentionally, humanity in all its
depravity and beauty, all its high-mindedness and pettiness, all its elegance
and folly. No social institution captures these poles of a people's moral range
more than religion; none, however, is more jealously guarded by those who
inhabit it. As a consequence, the scrutiny of
religious agents and experiences by the academic study of religion has
routinely invited misunderstanding and offense.
Scholarship must find a new voice with which to speak about
religion, forge a language and set of interpretive practices that remain
faithful to the demands of rigorous analysis and historical accuracy by
refusing to capitulate to religious sentiment as the ultimate jury for what may
be said about it.
Our world simply
cannot afford the disdain or disregard for religious belief and identity that
marginalizes some religious subjectivities from the production of knowledge
about them or the feverish resentment and violence such a marginalization
invites.
1. Sharma, "Of
Hindu, Hindustân, Hinduism and Hindutva."
2. I take the term
from Lorenzen, "Who Invented Hinduism," 630
3. Heinrich von Stietencron, "Hinduism: On the Proper Use of a
Deceptive
Term," in
Hinduism Reconsidered, South Asian Studies 24, ed. Günther-Dietz
Sontheimer and Hermann Kulke (New Delhi: Manohar,
1997), 36.
4. Frykenberg, "The Emergence of Modern 'Hinduism,'" 8z.
5. Frits Staal,
Ritual and Mantras: Rules without Meaning (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass,
1996), 397.
6. E.g., Heinrich von
Stietencron, "Religious Configurations in
Pre-Muslim India and the Modern Concept of Hinduism," in Representing
Hinduism: The Construction of Religious Traditions and National Identity, ed.
Vasudha Dalmia and Heinrich von Stietencron (New
Delhi: Sage Publications, 1995) 73-77.
7. On various ways
the colonial state mined and catalogued Indian practices, see Cohn, Colonialism
and Its Forms of Knowledge, 57-75; Bayly, "Knowing the Country";
Rosane Rocher, "British Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century: The
Dialects of Knowledge and Government," in Orientalism and the Postcolonyal Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia,
South Asia Seminar Series, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 220-25.
8. See the recent
formulations of this argument in, for example, Mary SearleChatterjee,
"'World Religions' and `Ethnic Groups': Do These Paradigms Lend Themselves
to the Cause of Hindu Nationalism?," Ethnic and Racial Studies 23/3 (May
2000): 497-515, and John Zavos, "Defending Hindu Tradition: Sanatana
Dharma as a Symbol of Orthodoxy in Colonial India," Religion 31 (2001):
109-23. See also Brian K. Smith's rejoinder that in fact it is a diffuse, not a
unified, tradition that Hindu nationalists invoke, "Questioning
Authority: Constructions and Deconstructions of Hinduism," International
Journal of Hindu Studies 2, 3 (Dec. 1998): 313-39
9. Romila Thapar,
"Syndicated Hinduism," in Hinduism Reconsidered, South Asian Studies
XXIV, ed. Günther-Dietz Sontheimer and Hermann Kulke (New Delhi: Manohar, 1997)
54-81.
10. Timothy
Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2000), 10-15 and chapter 7, "Hinduism," 134-55.
11. Lorenzen,
"Who Invented Hinduism?," 630-59; Will
Sweetman, "Unity and Plurality: Hinduism Ind the Religions of India in
Early European Scholarship," Religion 31 (2001): 209-24.
12. Doniger,
"Hinduism by Any Other Name," 41
13. Doniger,
"Hinduism by Any Other Name," 36.
14. Gabriella
Eichinger Ferro-Luzzi, "The Polythetic-Prototype Approach to Hinduism,"
in Hinduism Reconsidered, ed. Sontheimer and Kulke, 294-304.
15. Robert
Frykenberg, citing Peter Schmitlhenwer
"Constructions of Hinduism at the Nexus of History and Religion,"
Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23/3 (Winter 1993): 535, note II.
16. Frykenberg, "Constructions of Hinduism," 534.
17. Zavos,
"Defending Hindu Tradition."
18. This claim
corresponds roughly to Thomas Trautmann's own view, Aryans and British India,
67-68.
19. Paul Brass,
quoted in Lorenzen, "Who Invented Hinduism," 646.
20. Rocher,
"British Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century," 243.
21. As Heinrich von Stietencron comes very close to alleging, "Religious
Configurations in Pre-Muslim India," 73.
22. See Eugene F. Irschick, Dialogue and History: Constructing South India,
i7951895 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
23. Inden, Imagining India, 2.
24. Inden, Imagining India, 2.
25. Inden, Imagining India, e.g., 17-18.
26. Genealogies of
Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam
(Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 18.
27. E.g. King,
Orientalism and Religion, 68-70, Russell T. McCutcheon, Manufacturing
Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), and Timothy Fitzgerald, whose polemical diatribe against the field of comparative
religious studies is informed only by entirely outdated and outmoded
scholarship, Ideology of Religious Studies, 33-53.
28. S. N. Balagangadhara, "The Heathen in his Blindness..
.":Asia, the West and the Dynamic of Religion,
Studies in the History of Religions LXIV (Leiden, the Netherlands: E. J.
Brill, 1994) 394.
29. Peter Harrison,
"Religion" and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 199o), the direct claim is made on,;
also,
Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (San Francisco: Harper
and Row, 1978), 37-41.
30. Augustine, De
Vera Religion. In Augustine: Earlier Writings, Library of Christian Classics,
Ichthus Edition, trans. John H. S. Burleigh (Philadelphia: Westminster
Press, 1953), 218-83, 1.1.
31. Augustine, De
Vera Religione 5.8.
32. Augustine, De
Vera Religion 5-9
33. On this issue, I
am expressing some difference of opinion from Harrison, who argues that the
term "religion" emerged as a generic category including distinct,
identifiable systems, only after the Middle Ages, especially among reformers,
Christian Platonists, and Renaissance thinkers. See 'Religion' and the
Religions, esp. 5-18. W C. Smith also claimed that De Vera Religion did not
portray systems of "observances or beliefs," a reading I clearly do
not accept, The Meaning and End of Religion, 29.
34. W. C. Smith
believed the terms "religion" and "religious" were seldom
used in the Middle Ages except as designating monastic offices, but Peter
Biller has found the term regularly employed in senses
rather similar to our contemporary usage. Smith, The
Meaning and End of Religion, 31-32; Peter Biller, "Words and the Medieval
Notion of 'Religion,' "Journal of Ecclesiastical History 36/3 (July 1985):
351-69.
35. John Calvin,
Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T MacNeill, transl. Ford Lewis
Battles, Library of Christian Classics 20 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press,
1960), 1.3-1
36. Harrison,
'Religion' and the Religions, 8, 19-28. See Calvin, Institutes 1.6-7.
37. See also Biller,
"Words and the Medieval Notion of 'Religion."'
38. King, Orientalism
and Religion, 36-38.
39. Will Sweetman,
"'Hinduism' and the History of 'Religion': Protestant Presuppositions in
the Critique of the Concept of Hinduism," Method and Theory in the
Study of Religion
15/4 (2003): 341
40. J. Samuel Preus,
Explaining Religion: Criticism and Theory from Bodin to Freud (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987).
41. The annual
meeting of the American Academy of Religion has over eight thousand scholars of
religion in attendance annually. These themes were culled from the program book
of the Nov. 17-20, 2001 meeting held in Denver,
Colorado.
42. Walter H. Capps,
Religious Studies: The Making of a Discipline (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress
Press, 1995.
43. King, Orientalism
and Religion, 35-61; Balagangadhara, The Heathen in
His Blindness, e.g., 384-45.
44. Sweetman,
"Unity and Plurality," 218-19.
45. Fitzgerald, The
Ideology of Religious Studies, 4.
46. Fitzgerald, as in
The Ideology of Religious Studies, 19-24
47. Fitzgerald, The
Ideology of Religious Studies, 7.
48. For a fuller
critique of Fitzgerald's book, see the series of reviews published together in
Religious Studies Review 27/4 (Apr. 2001). They include Benson Saler,
"Some Reflections on Fitzgerald's Thesis," 103-5; Gustavo Benavides,
"Religious Studies Between Science and Ideology," 105-8; and Frank
Korom, "(H)ideology: The Hidden Agenda of Religious Studies," ,o8-,o. Fitzgerald's reply
follows these as "A Response to Saler, Benavides, and Korom," 110-15.
49. Saler, "Some
Reflections," 104.
50. Saler, "Some
Reflections," 103-4.
51. Benavides,
"Religious Studies."
52. Korom,
"(H)ideology."
53. Fitzgerald, The
Ideology of Religious Studies, 33-34.
54. Fitzgerald, The
Ideology of Religious Studies, 52.
55. W C. Smith, The
Meaning and End of Religion, 50.
56. The data is
incompletely reported, but an indication of the increasingly interdisciplinary
approaches of many departments of religious studies may be found in the
preliminary report of the American Academy of Religion's 2001 survey of
religion and theology programs. "Religion and Theology Programs Census:
'The Study of Religion Counts,'" Religious Studies News 16/4 (Fall 2001): i-iii.
57. McCutcheon,
Manufacturing Religion, 26.
58. In the same vein,
George Alfred James has identified three characteristics of this trend in
academic thought about religion-that its practices are ahistorical, atheoretical,
and antireductive, Interpreting Religion: The
Phenomenological Approaches of Pierre Daniel de la aussaye,
W. Brede Kristensen, and Gerardus van der Leeuw (Washington, DC: Catho is University of America Press, 1995) 47-50.
59. Russell T
McCutcheon, Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion
(Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2001), 5.
6o. McCutcheon,
Critics Not Caretakers, xi.
61. E.g., McCutcheon,
Critics Not Caretakers, 138-89.
62. McCutcheon,
Critics Not Caretakers, xiv, 17.
63. McCutcheon,
Critics Not Caretakers, 81.
64. McCutcheon,
Critics Not Caretakers, 8o.
65. E.g.,
"Protest Letters for Kali's Child." Sword of Truth, June 3, 2001,
http://www.swordoftruth.com/swordoftruth/news/betweenthelines/Kalischildletters.html.
See also the exchange between Michael Witzel and David Frawley in the English,
language Indian daily The Hindu, 5 Mar., 25 June, 16 July, 6 Aug., 13 Aug., and
2o Aug., 2002, available online at
http://www.hinduonnet.com.
66. Brian K. Smith,
"Re-envisioning Hinduism."
67. Thomas Babbington
Macauley, "Mr. Lord Macaulay's Great Minute," in W.F.B. Laurie,
Sketches of Some Distinguished Anglo-Indians (London: W. H. Allen, 1888; repr. New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1999), 174.
68. "Divali: Festival of Lights. Prayer for Hindus," (n.p.: International Mission Board, Southern Baptist
Convention, 1999).
69. "Divali,"
70. See Brian K.
Pennington, "Renaissance or Retrenchment? Hindu-Christian Dialogue at a
Crossroads," Indian Journal of Theology 42/1 (2000): 74-87.
71. Robert Eric Frykenberg, "The Construction of Hinduism as a
`Public' Religion: Looking Again at the Religious Roots of Company Raj in
South India," in Religion and Public Culture: Encounters and Identities
in Modern South India, ed. Keith E. Yandell and John J. Paul (Richmond: Curzon
Press, 2000), 3-4.
72. Sumit Sarkar,
"Hindutva and the Question of Conversions," in The Concerned
Indian's Guide to Communalism, ed. K. N. Panikkar (New Delhi: Viking, 1999),
77.
73. Sarkar,
"Hindutva and Conversions," 72-75.
74. Indian
Bibliographic Centre (Research Wing), Christianity and Conversion in India
(Varanasi: Rishi Publications, 1999).
75. Indian
Bibliographic Centre, Christianity and Conversion, 54-59
76. Indian
Bibliographic Centre, Christianity and Conversion, 95.
77. A need that one
theologian, John Brockington, recognizes, Hinduism and Christianity (New York:
St. Martin's Press, 1992), ix-x. See also Brian K. Pennington,
"Reverend William Ward," 5-6.
78. See John Stratton
Hawley, "Who Speaks for Hinduism-And Who Against?" Journal of the
American Academy of Religion 68/4 (Dec. 2000): 711-20.
79. Jeffrey J.
Kripal, Kali's Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of
Ramakrishna (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); the response by Swami
Tyagananda of the Ramakrishna Mission, is
"Kali's Child Revisited or Didn't Anyone Check the Documentation?"
Evam: Forum on Indian Representations 1/1-2 (2002): 173-90, to which Kripal has
responded in turn in the same volume, "Textuality, Sexuality, and the
Future of the Past: A Response to Swami Tyagananda,"
191205.
8o. Hawley, "Who
Speaks for Hinduism," 714-15.
81. From the Jesus
Christ Superstore, http://www.Jesuschristsuperstore.net.
82. Rashmi Luthra,
"The Formation of Interpretive Communities in the Hindu Diaspora," in
Religion and Popular Culture: Studies on the Interaction of Worldviews, ed.
David A. Stout and Judith M. Buddenbaum (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 2001),
125-39.
83. For a summary of
some discrete sites of this contact between Hindus and Christians, see Sita Ram
Goel, History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (New Delhi: Voice of India, 1989).
84. E.g., William S.
Sax, "Conquering the Quarters: Religion and Politics in Hinduism,"
International Journal of Hindu Studies 4/1 (April,
2000): 39-6ô.
85. On the legal
status of the right to convert, see Ronald Neufeldt, "Conversion and the
Courts," Hindu-Christian Studies Bulletin 13 (2000): 12-18.
86. See, e.g., Lise
McKean, Divine Enterprise: Gurus and the Hindu Nationalist.
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