In the spring of 1878, Madame Blavatsky wrote to a follower of Swami Dayananda Sarasvati leader of the reform group the Arya Samaj:

“Is our friend a Sikh? If so, the fact he should be, as you say, 'very much pleased to learn the object of our Society' is not at all strange.-You will understand, without any explanation from me, how important it is for us to establish relations with some Sikhs, whose ancestors before them have been for centuries teaching the great 'Brotherhood of Humanity‘- precisely the doctrine we teach.”

At the time, the dialogic construction Sikh identity were shared visions of the nature of 'popular Hinduism' and religious reform like for example the newly systematized Tat Khalsa identity. The Tat Khalsa identity in fact was very much the result of the interplay between the distinct, but often complementary, agendas and cultural values of both Tat Khalsa and British elites. Most importantly, but like also with the above examples it reflected understandings of 'religion' that both colonizer and colonized accepted.

Debates over the Sikh identity also reveal the importance of multipoint comparisons in the construction of identity. -'Indian' identities were not simply constructed through a generalized opposition between Indianness and Britishness. A complex web of ideas about the nature of religion, Europe's religious history and the nature of Indian religions informed the British belief that Sikhism was perhaps the purest of all the Indian religious traditions. (2)

Sikhism was initially defined in relationship to Christian history: it was seen as the product of an 'Indian Reformation' and strong parallels were drawn between Guru Nanak and Luther and Calvin.

And both British scholar-administrators and Sikh reformers defined the Tat Khalsa, or 'pure Sikh', identity against those Sikhs they believed to be merging back into the amorphous mass of popular Hinduism. The notion of 'popular Hinduism' was a powerful tool for both Indian reformers attempting to redefine the boundaries of their own communities and for Europeans searching for a key to unlock the complexities of Indian history and society. The next chapter will trace the transplantation of this concept to Maori studies from the 1850s on, when Pakeha scholars suddenly 'discovered' Maori religion and came to believe that this religious tradition was a transplanted form of Hinduism.

Comparative religion historicized Protestantism, recognizing that it was part of the universal 'evolution' of religious sensibilities, but the structures and values of the Protestant tradition continued to mould discussions of non-Christian religion in profound ways. Until the 1850s British and Pakeha scholars imagined Maori culture as fundamentally irreligious: Maori had no notion of the divine and lacked any religious organization. Nineteenth-century depictions of popular Hinduism were also marked by strong 'othering'. While the Maori were seen as 'other' because they lacked religion, India was depicted as 'other' because it was perceived as so fundamentally religious that religion saturated every aspect of life and moulded Indian society into distinct religious communities. But alongside, and often competing with, these 'othering' discourses, British commentators forwarded other views of nonChristian religions. Late eighteenth-century Orientalists, imbued by cosmopolitanism and convinced of the unity of humanity, found many affinities between Hindu and Christian belief. On the other hand Evangelicals, despite their conviction that both Hinduism and Maori culture were largely corrupted, insisted that indigenous peoples were not entirely 'other': all humans were created by God and were capable of salvation. Any study of British encounters with non-Christian communities must recover these deep-seated conflicts and variant agendas within the colonizing culture.

However, British interpretations of non-European religions cannot be explained through reference to the power and longevity of Protestantism alone. The northern wars of the 1840s and the growth of a market economy underpinned the textualization of tradition in the late 1840s and early 1850s. This important shift in colonial knowledge, together with the rising intellectual authority of comparative religion, prompted a reassessment of mythology and religion. The older discourse of negation was undermined as the Maori were increasingly conceived of as a religious people. 

Like J.T. Thomson created the ‘Barata’ race, M.A. Macauliffe worked within the analytical framework established within nineteenth-century Indology, manipulated stock Orientalist images to emphasize the strength and significance of Sikhism.

Nanak and his followers were thus represented as a group animated by a newly discovered religious enthusiasm that allowed them to break out of the spiritual solemnitude of medieval Hinduism. The weight of Hindu tradition was again conceived as the enemy of spiritual progress and Macauliffe drew on a well established Orientalist tradition of representing India as a slothful and timeless land.

These stock devices could be used to construct oppositions within Indian culture, in this case between Hinduism and Sikhism, as well as between India and Europe. The effect of these metaphors was heightened by Macauliffe's assumption of personal authority, as he reminded his audience that only 'those who know India by actual experience' could appreciate the full achievements of the Sikh Gurus. Elsewhere Macauliffe announced that 'I bring from the East what is practically an unknown religion. Maori themselves had limited interest in any Indian connection.'

The notion of an Aryan people was foreign and too irrelevant to be of any significance in nineteenth-century Maori thought. But the idea of the Israelites was also foreign and irrelevant in the period of earliest contact as well. However, with the spread of Christianity and literacy and the increasing marginalization of Maori in the colonial economy, the belief that Maori were a chosen people destined to overthrow their oppressors held an obvious appeal.

Contrary to McKenzie's assertion that the Bible was 'alien' and 'irrelevant', it became the most important source for the recasting of Maori identity from the mid-1830s on. Thus in the New Zealand context, there were two parallel but largely independent discourses in racial origins. Maori identification with the Israelites coexisted with, and implicitly challenged, the common Pakeha belief that colonizer and colonized both belonged to the Aryan family. The Maori case clearly shows that there were profound limits to the 'colonization of consciousness'.

The negotiation of Hindu identity, was the product of a complex interaction between ancient tradition, nineteenth-century reform movements, and dominant interpretations of Indian history. The importance of history as a legitimating tool means that we must view the construction of Indian religious identities against the longue duree of the South Asian cultural tradition, the rise of Islam and European colonialism.

The Aryas remain a key touchstone in South Asian culture and politics. Over the last two decades, the Hindu right, eager to proclaim both the Aryas and Hinduism as the product of the national soil, has launched numerous attacks on British Orientalism and the 'Aryan Invasion Theory'. Such attempts to construct 'nativist' visions of the South Asian past not only deny the complex networks and exchanges that have shaped the region's past, but also repudiate history altogether. The editorial of the December 1994 issue of Hinduism Today, a leading monthly journal aimed both at a domestic Indian market and the communities of the Indian diaspora, proclaimed that 'History' was a 'Hoax' and suggested:

“The good news is that India and Hinduism live beyond history ... Other faiths, excluding some tribal and pagan paths, are rooted in events. They began on such and such a day, were born with the birth of a prophet or the pronouncements of a founder. Thus they are defined, circumscribed by history. Not Hinduism. She has no founder, no birthday to celebrate. Like Truth, she is eternal and unhistorical.”

Professional historians hesitate to give credence to such views, but Hinduism Today has a circulation of around 150, 000 readers, and a host of recent texts proclaiming the Aryas as the 'autochthon of India' have been greeted with enthusiasm.

Most importantly, such arguments are currently promulgated as the basis of Hindu identity and the Indian nation-state. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which dominates if not controls Indian politics, casts itself as the defender of Hinduism and equates Hinduism and India, effacing the reality of religious difference. In upholding the Vedas as the basis for its social programme and its advocacy of Sanskritizing projects, the BJP forwards a narrow vision of the nation, disempowering 'secularized' Hindus, Dalits, tribals, Christians and Muslims. This vision of Hindu nationalism is only possible by denying the power struggles and imperial exchanges that both moulded the emergence of Indian nationalism and repeatedly reinscribed the meaning of the 'Arya' category.

In the reimagining of colonial relationships and the crosfertilisation of politics and religion, also occultism had a function similar to what Robert Young describes as; “culture's role in imperializing Britain, which allowed for a cross-fertilization of language, history, and literature without the racial ‘degeneration’ caused by sexual contact.”

The location of cosmopolitan emigres at the nexus of professional and spiritualist interests, merged with the tendencies of Orientalism, which looked to the East as the fountainhead of spiritual knowledge yet did not necessarily privilege the people who were the conduits for that knowledge. Still, contact with "natives" was an essential part of the professional and spiritual lives of this new breed of Anglo-Indians, alienated from extreme forms of both British colonialism and Indian nationalism.

To some extent, their relationship with Indian spirituality as shown on the imagined Mahatmas of H.P. Blavatsky was parasitic.  Thus, the very word master acquired an ironic twist. In the colonial situation it was inevitably conjoined to hierarchical relationships. Yet in the practice of die occult the relations of domination and subordination were necessarily inverted, and masters were those who guided initiates into unseen phenomena.

 In a stunning inversion of die anti-Orientalist canard, derived from Marx's observation of the French peasantry that ,,they cannot represent themselves, they must be represented," we hear Anglo-Indian cosmopolitans speaking not in their own voices in these problematic texts of joint authorship but through the Indo-Tibetan masters whose occult knowledge becomes part of their expanding field of social interaction.

For example in The Mahatma Letters, Tibetan Masters are portrait as if they had a reality independent of their authors. And challenges its readers to imagine whose world is being imagined, whose perspective dominates the disenthralment of the modern world, whose viewpoint ultimately prevails in the reception of astral secrets, and, most of all, whose personae the masters assume.

The masters intended to function as agents of a new secularism is less present-minded and more open to genealogies beginning with primordial matter. This framework of “Mahatma Letters” seemed also designed to allow for a displacement of religious teleology by evolutionary history; which by the nineteenth century had begun to yield new units of scientific analysis such as race and ethnicity.

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