The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  Recognizing the power of the resentments ignited by these events, the British took countermeasures. In 1858 Victoria proclaimed that the British crown was taking over all the rights of the East India Company; she became queen of India.47 She forced the missionaries to lay off, now more than ever realizing, again, what was at stake in interfering with Hinduism. Acknowledging that the sepoys in 1857-1858 had genuinely feared conversion to Christianity, Queen Victoria’s proclamation of 1858 not only curtailed missionary activity but reduced the public funding of mission schools and ordered British officials to abstain from interfering with Indian beliefs and rituals “on the pain of Our highest displeasure.”48 She also specifically disclaimed any “desire to impose Our convictions on any of Our subjects.” (Victoria herself has become the religion: She capitalizes “Our” as the missionaries capitalized “God.”)

  Many of the missionaries had been killed during the Rebellion, but the damage had already been done. While the new official attitude was superficially similar to the earlier hands-off policy toward Hinduism, the sentiments fueling it were very different; whereas the missionaries had attempted to convert the Hindus, now the British as a whole were totally dismissive of them as irredeemable heathens, with no hope of ever becoming human beings. After 1858 the government officials themselves had become more Christian in their scorn for Hindus, whom they avoided as much as possible. Now that they felt that they had a divine mission to rule India and were convinced of Christianity’s moral superiority, they lost their earlier toleration, let alone their support, of Indian religions.49 This third batch, in contrast with the conservatives and Orientalists, together with the evangelicals and opportunists, were Utilitarians and Anglicists, who believed in the superiority of reason and progress and pushed for Western education.

  HINDUS UNDER THE RAJ

  What made the sepoys so suspicious of those greased cartridges in the first place? Let us go back and reconsider the shifting winds of religious interactions in the century between 1756 and 1857.

  In the first wave (roughly between 1750 and 1813), despite the steadily darkening political scene, the British had respected both Islam and Hinduism and were, in general, blessedly free of religious zeal.50 In the late eighteenth century a Muslim visitor to India commented with surprise on the respect that the British paid to both Hindus and Muslims—at least to those of a certain respectability:

  They treat the white-beard elders and old-established families, both Muslim and Hindu, courteously and equably, respecting the religious customs of the country and as well the scholars, sayyids, sheikhs and dervishes they come across. . . . More remarkable still is the fact that they themselves take part in most of the festivals and ceremonies of both the Muslims and the Hindus, mixing with the people.51

  And there were conversations. The medieval Indian tradition of debate in the Mughal court, patronized by rulers and commonly held in the royal darbar (Akbar is the most famous but by no means the only example), was transformed, in the colonial period, first into Muslim-Christian debates, retaining much of the medieval structure and rhetoric,52 and then, through the end of the nineteenth century, into debates between Hindu court pandits and traveling controversialists. The social context of these debates was radically broadened, now accessible to a much wider literate audience. One missionary remarked that religious debate was a major source of entertainment in India, “and the people will enjoy the triumph as much when a Brahmun falls as when the Christian is foiled.”53 The crowd laughed at the Brahmins and then at the missionaries. This was a self-serving argument, implying that since Hinduism was already a space of debate and entertainment, the missionaries would do no harm,54 but there was some truth in it.

  The conversations, however, often turned into conversions. Religious tensions were greatly exacerbated during this period by what Hindus perceived as attempts to convert them to Islam or Christianity. As we have noted, traditional Hinduism was not a proselytizing religion, though particular renunciant and reform movements within it did increasingly seek converts. Therefore, when Hindus had ceased to be Hindus, often against their will and/or by accident, and wished to return to the fold, it was difficult for them to reconvert back to Hinduism. Indian sepoys lucky enough to survive the First Afghan War, in 1839 (there were enormous sepoy casualties), found when they returned to India that they were ostracized as Pariahs, for in Afghanistan some had been forced to convert to Islam, and in any case they lost caste by crossing the Indus, transgressing the geographical bounds of India, which was against caste law. (Earlier, Hindus had had the right to refuse foreign service on the grounds that they would be polluted if they crossed the sea.55) Sometimes they could reconvert by crossing the palms of various priests with silver; previously Hindus had been able to reconvert with the spoils of conquest, but since the sepoys had lost in Afghanistan, there were no spoils.56 There were also ritual prescriptions, dating back to the first or second century CE, by which an excommunicated man could be purified by performing a vow of restoration,57 and new reconversion ceremonies were developed out of these prescriptions as well as from prototypes originally designed for reconversion from Islam under the Mughals.

  But converts to Christianity, though relatively few in number, posed different theological and political threats. It was primarily the Protestants rather than the Catholics who messed with Hinduism. Catholics, who had been in India for many centuries, recognized and appreciated many of their own traits in Hindus: the many gods corresponding to many saints; the pageantry, color, and occasional brutality of the imagery; the animal sacrifice that could be assimilated to the Paschal Lamb (or, as the case may be, the Paschal goat, still sacrificed in many Indian Catholic communities at Easter). The Protestants admired little in Hinduism but its texts and philosophy. The rest was a lot too much like Catholicism to suit their tastes.

  On the eve of the second wave, when the company’s charter was about to be renewed, in 1813, Major General Sir Thomas Munro (who served in India from 1789 to 1827, chiefly in Madras) warned the directors of the East India Company about their attitude to the people of India. He spoke like a true man of the first wave, which indeed he was: He had learned Hindi and Persian and was noted for his generous rapport with both humans and horses (an extraordinary equestrian statue of him in Chennai depicts him mounted without saddle or stirrups, which I take to be symbolic of his relaxed attitude to dominationkb). On this occasion he granted that other conquerors had treated Indians with greater violence and cruelty, “but none has treated them with so much scorn as we, none has stigmatised the whole people as unworthy of trust, as incapable of honesty, and as fit to be employed only where we cannot do without them.”58

  His words fell on deaf ears. The British applied their scorn both to the people and to their religion. In 1810, Robert Southey (poet laureate of England), who had never been to India, declared, “The religion of the Hindoos . . . of all false religions is the most monstrous in its fables, and the most fatal in its effects.”59 In 1813 (the year that the missionaries were let in), William Wilberforce, an abolitionist and member of an evangelical sect, argued in the House of Commons that the need for such missions in India was more important than the abolition of slavery, because “our religion is sublime, pure and beneficent [while] theirs is mean, licentious and cruel”; because Hindu deities are “absolute monsters of lust, injustice, wickedness and cruelty,” Hinduism is “the most enormous and tormenting superstition that ever harassed and degraded any portion of mankind,” and Hindus therefore “the most enslaved portion of the human race.” Hindu science and cosmography came under fire too. In 1835 Thomas Babington Macaulay (the son of an eminent evangelical leader) issued his notorious tirade against “medical doctrines which would disgrace an English farrier, astronomy which would move laughter in girls at an English boarding school, history abounding with kings thirty feet high and reigns thirty thousand years long, and geography made up of seaskc of treacle and seas of butter.”60 And that was before the Rebellion.

 
After that, in the third wave, things went from bad to worse. Even the Bhagavad Gita, generally so dear to the hearts of European observers of Hinduism, came under fire in the English imaginary. In Forster’s A Passage to India, the bigoted policeman McBryde, discussing what he regards as the criminal psychology of Indian natives, remarks, “Read any of the Mutiny records; which, rather than the Bhagavad Gita, should be your Bible in this country. Though I’m not sure that the one and the other are not closely connected.”61 This reflected a widespread nineteenth-century canard: The members of one Bengal secret society were alleged to take an oath of allegiance before an image of the goddess Kali, with the Bhagavad Gita in one hand and a revolver in the other.62 A secret police report submitted in 1909 to the chief secretary to the government of Bengal stated that students were initiated into the secret society by taking their oath lying flat on a human skeleton with a revolver in one hand and a Gita in the other.63 This whole scene is suspiciously close to one imagined by the Bengali author Bankimcandra Chatterji in his highly influential 1882 novel Anandamath (“The Mission House”). Though Chatterji may have influenced the British, it is more likely that they both were reflecting the mythology of the period rather than any real practice. The most infamous players in that mythology were the Thugs, worshipers of the goddess Kali, to whom they were now said to offer British victims; they were probably just dacoits who happened to worship in Kali temples.64 The Rambles and Recollections (1844) of Lieutenant Colonel Sir William Henry (“Thuggee”) Sleeman of the Bengal army and the Indian Political Service is the proof text of that mythology.

  The British brokering of relations between Hindus and Muslims also did considerable damage. A report by Patrick Carnegy in 1870 insisted that Hindus and Muslims used to worship together in the Babri Mosque complex in the nineteenth century until the Hindu-Muslim clashes in the 1850s: “It is said that up to that time Hindus and Mohamedans alike used to worship in the mosque/temple. Since the British rule a railing has been put up to prevent dispute, within which, in the mosque the Mohamedans pray, while outside the fence the Hindus have raised a platform on which they make their offerings.”65 But the report was based on no evidence whatsoever that there had been such disputes or any need to separate the worshipers.66 And even by this report, the British had put up a railing where none had been, causing the disputes that they were allegedly preventing.

  A more positive, though more obviously mythical, story about a similarly dichotomized Hindu/Muslim shrine is told by Forster. The shrine was created when, according to legend, a Muslim saint was beheaded but, having left his head at the top of a hill, contrived somehow to continue to run (in order to accomplish his mother’s command) in the form of a headless torso, to the bottom of the hill, where his body finally collapsed. “Consequently there are two shrines to him to-day—that of the Head above and that of the Body below—and they are worshipped by the few Mohammedans who live near, and by Hindus also.”67 This image of the separation of head and body suggests but does not realize the recombinatory quality of Hindu mythologies of such head/body separations. The two shrines remain apart, but both Muslims and Hindus worship in both.

  Generally relations between Hindus and Muslims took several turns for the worse under the Raj, in some cases grotesquely twisting the genuine rapproachements that had taken place under the Mughals. In the nineteenth century, certain yogis claimed that Muhammad had been trained by a student of the great Hindu yogi Gorakhnath. They were scrupulous about fasting and ritual prayer when they were with Muslims, and about Hindu customs when with Hindus, eating pork according to the custom of Hindus and Christians, or beef according to the religion of Muslims and others.68 They argued that the striking resemblance between the Muslim minaret tower and prayer niche, on the one hand, and the Shaiva linga and yoni, on the other, explained both why the prayer niche and minaret were always found together and why Islam had spread so successfully. In this way, they relativized the sacred sources of Islam and subordinated them to Indian figures and categories.69 On the central Nath temple at Gorakhpur there is a small board explaining that Muhammad was a Nath yogi and that Mecca was a Shaiva center, known in some Puranas as Makheshvara (“Lord of the Sacrifice”).70 The arrogant insult in this wordplay of appropriation was the very opposite of the appreciative attitude that had inspired Hindus under the Delhi Sultanate to coin Sanskrit versions of Arabic titles such as Mohammad (Maha-muda) and Sultan (Sura-trana).

  DEEP ORIENTALISM71

  British attitudes to India, at first appreciative and tolerant (the first wave), then scornful (the second wave) and hostile (the third), were three facets of what we have been calling Orientalism. At the start, I defined “Orientalism” as the love-hate relationship that Europeans had with the Orient for both the right and the wrong reasons, making it in many ways the European inversion of what the Hindus called hate-love (dvesha-bhakti): loving India but with a skewed judgment and self-interest that amounted to hate, that distorted the Orientalists’ understanding and was often horrendously destructive to the object of their affection.

  The early Orientalists were reacting against an early version of what has recently been dubbed (in response to Edward Said’s term) Occidentalism, a stereotyped and dehumanized view of the West (more precisely, Europe and America, in contrast with all Asia).72 The two views share all the stereotypes, which always misrepresent both sides: the East = religion, spirit, nature, the exotic, adventure, danger, Romanticism (including Orientalism), myth, while the West = science, materialism, the city, boredom, comfort, safety, the Enlightenment, logos. The East is feminine, the West male; Eastern males are therefore feminine and impotent,kd but also oversexed, because the primitive Other is always oversexed.73 The only difference, and it is crucial, is the value placed on these stereotypes, Romanticism favoring the Eastern values, Enlightenment the Western ones.

  Before Said’s book, in 1978, Indologists of my generation had admired the British scholars who had recorded dialects and folklore that otherwise would have been lost to posterity, established the study of Sanskrit in Europe, and made available throughout India as well as Europe many of the classical texts recorded in that language. We felt indebted to them for our own knowledge of and love of India. But the anti-Orientalist critique changed our way of thinking forever. It taught us that those British scholars too had been caught up in the colonial enterprise, sustained it, fueled it, facilitated it. It taught us about the collusion between academic knowledge and political power, arguing that we too are implicated in that power when we carry on the work of those disciplines. In Kipling’s novel Kim, spying often masqueraded as anthropology, another form of Orientalism; Kipling made his master spy, Colonel Creighton, an amateur ethnographer.

  At the heart of the anti-Oriental enterprise was the argument that scholars, then and now, affect and often harm the people they study. In a delightful satire on Orientalism avant la lettre, J. B. S. Haldane (1892-1964), a British geneticist who spent his final years in India and died in Bhubaneshwar in Orissa, stipulated in his will that after his death his body was to be sent to the nearest medical college, so that “some future Indian doctors will have the unusual experience of dissecting a European.”74 This would be a fitting revenge for all the Indians who had been dissected by European Orientalists.

  TRANSLATIONS, LOST IN COLONIZATION

  At the start the British hoped to govern India by its laws and, as we saw, treated the Indian ruling class, at least, with some respect. As Protestants they preferred texts to practices, and as Orientalists they preferred the glorious past to what they regarded as the sordid present. This was the result of their confrontation of a quandary: How could Europeans continue to revere the culture of the people who had the oldest language in the world, Sanskrit, and presumably the civilization that went with it (closely related to the Greek civilization that the British claimed as their own heritage), at the same time as they were justifying their rule over contemporary Indians on the ground that those Indians were benighted primitives? Th
e answer was a doublethink historical process: For many centuries, as science replaced superstition (the social variant of Darwinian evolution) and Europe was rising up, India was sinking down, as the Brahmins and the hot, wet climate ruined the pristine Vedas and produced the degradation of present-day Hindus (an inversion of the Darwinian hypothesis). The Orientalists needed some fancy footwork to keep these two rivers flowing up and down at the same time (like yogis simultaneously breathing out of one nostril and in through the other), but somehow they managed. The argument was that the Indians were once like us (language) but are no longer like us (intermarriage of Indo-Europeans with indigenous Indians), the resolution of antiquarianism and racism.75

  The British Orientalists of the first wave reached back into the past, to Sanskrit texts, and began to translate them. (By the third wave, after 1858, the government severed support for the study of Sanskrit and Persian, disparaging the culture even of ancient India.76) European translations began in the eighteenth century with a fittingly fraudulent document, the so-called Ezour Veda (presumably a corruption of Yajur Veda), a French text in the form of a dialogue between two Vedic sages, one monotheist and one polytheist, who find that the monotheism of “pristine Hinduism” points to Christian truth. The text was, for a while, believed to be the French translation of a document composed in Sanskrit by one Brahmin and translated by another Brahmin in Benares who knew both French and Sanskrit. The Chevalier de Maudave gave a copy to Voltaire in September 1760, claiming to have received it from the hand of the Brahmin translator; Voltaire was deeply impressed by it and cited it often.77 In 1822, Sir Alexander Johnston claimed to have found, at the French settlement of Pondicherry, in South India, the manuscript copy of the “Ezour Vedam” in French and Sanskrit. His colleague Francis Whyte Ellis then published an article in which he argued that the work was not the French translation of a Sanskrit original but a work entirely composed in 1621 by the Jesuit Roberto de Nobili, who was accused of having written it in order to deceive Brahmins and convert them to Catholicism. Its authorship remains unknown, but it is now certain that it was an original French composition that claimed to be a copy of a lost Sanskrit text.