Europeans did not just study Hinduism as a means of extending their power over Hindu subjects. As Edward Said pointed out, early Orientalists were often searching for solutions to their own theological problems.19 Ever since the Renaissance, theologians had been obsessed with the origins of mankind and civilisation, and ancient Hinduism now presented a raft of possible answers. Although Holwell’s belief that humans were animated by the souls of the fallen angels seemed bizarre to many, he felt that it solved a number of inconsistencies in Christianity, such as the ‘horrid incestuous union’ of Adam and Eve’s children.
The extent to which Holwell’s research into Hinduism was motivated by a sincere desire to resolve unsettled questions in Western religious debate is illustrated by his interest in the Christian Reincarnationists.20 Holwell engaged with this long tradition of unorthodox theologians and considered that they were all groping towards the original truth which he had finally uncovered in Hinduism.
Holwell had read the works of the printer Jacob Ilive (1705–63), famously imprisoned in the 1750s for writing ‘a most blasphemous book’, who had argued that human souls (not those of animals) were the spirits of the rebel angels which were condemned to reincarnate on earth until they had worked off their sins and rose to a heavenly planet.21 Holwell was also inspired by the highly unorthodox Anglican cleric, Capel Berrow (1715–82), who had extended Ilive’s logic to include animals by fusing Hinduism with the beliefs of Henry More, Joseph Glanvill, the seventeenth-century Origenists and kabbalists, the Turkish Spy and ‘the very sensible and acute Dr Cheyne’. Berrow had explained that since God would not let ‘either sentient, or intelligent beings, suffer, merely for suffering sake’, all souls on earth must be the spirits who rebelled with the apostate angels and were now reincarnating from the level of microbes up to humans on their long journey back to heaven. Though not an advocate of vegetarianism, Berrow was appalled by unnecessary cruelty to animals: ‘What exquisite, what affecting tortures do many of these animals endure,’ he lamented, ‘from some merciless, callous-hearted monster of a master!’22
Holwell also learned a great deal from Cheyne’s friend, the Chevalier Andrew Michael Ramsay,23 who had argued that the Greeks, Persians and Chaldaeans all derived their philosophies from the Brahmins and that the souls of the rebellious angels were imprisoned in animals on earth.24 Ramsay dismissed reincarnation as a pagan corruption of the true doctrine of pre-existence,25 but his recognition that it existed in an astonishing number of ancient religions nevertheless provided Holwell with an excuse for arguing that it was a true doctrine that Christianity alone had forgotten.
More recently, the Jesuit Father Guillaume Hyacinthe Bougeant had been imprisoned for jocularly suggesting that animals (not humans) were animated by the souls of the fallen angels which meant that even though they deserved their suffering, animal souls were ‘more perfect than ours’. He also added provocatively that, though illegal, it was reasonable to believe that they reincarnated according to the Pythagorean and Indian system. (As Voltaire later said, Bougeant had inadvertently uncovered ‘an article of the faith of the most ancient oriental priests’.) The rector of Wath in Yorkshire, John Hildrop, had modified Bougeant’s theories by arguing that animal souls had only been condemned to suffer because of the Fall of man, and therefore ought to be ‘the unhappy Objects of our Care and Compassion’.26
Holwell was keen on all these writers – especially the Turkish Spy – but with recourse to genuine Hindu doctrines he showed how their theodicies (contrary to most of their own conclusions) meant that it was a sin to kill animals. Holwell thus used the venerable antiquity of Hinduism to resolve a long-standing Christian debate, and simultaneously showed how easy it was to reconcile the two religions.
The Christian and kabbalist Reincarnationists no doubt coloured his interpretation of Hindu doctrines, but Holwell was most unusual in the extent to which he gave priority to Hinduism. His eighty-eight reincarnations obviously came from Hinduism, as did the idea that cow killing was punished by being pushed back to the beginning of the cycle. His idea that envy and jealousy precipitated Moisasoor’s original fall accords with Christianity, but Holwell may equally have derived this from Hindu scriptures which blame it on pride and anger. Even Holwell’s conflation of the three types of being – devas, asuras and humans – is justified by a Hindu myth in which all three fall from heaven together. In Hinduism, too, the demons gradually regain their former influence, just as Holwell’s Debtah do. Holwell’s notion of the world being overburdened by sinners – unable to escape from samsara (the cycle of reincarnations) because of the predominance of vice – also has an equivalent in classical Hinduism. The Hindu and Christian myths really are so similar that – as the Indologist Wendy Doniger has shown – some Indians who heard about the Christian version fused it with their own beliefs about the Fall. Holwell’s idea that infections were spread by microscopic organisms inhabited by the worst of the fallen spirits – first hinted at in his medical Account of the Small Pox (1767) – also seems to be derived from the classical Jaina belief that souls that have committed extreme crimes in previous lives are incarnated into airborne microscopic nigoda, which parasitically colonise other beings. Just as Holwell said, certain foods are abstained from because they contain high concentrations of nigoda. Even Holwell’s point that wine induces men to commit violence without hesitation occurs in Sanskrit texts.27
The similarities between Western and Indian traditions – on any explanation of which scholars still disagree – made Holwell conclude that Hinduism must have been based on a true revelation from God. His recognition that modern Hinduism had been altered since the original writing of the scriptures also meant that he felt able to determine better than Hindus themselves what the original revelation to Bramah contained. Holwell made a brilliant and in many respects unique fusion of Christianity and Hinduism; cracks and seams of instability were cemented over by his imagination and commitment to systematising a workable eschatology, and with the help of his affable character, colourful rhetoric and integral humanity, he pushed his new system into the consciousness of Europe.
Holwell’s early writings on the Hindu scriptures – before he plainly announced that he was a vegetarian proselyte – received more attention than any previous Indological work. Magazines and pamphlets ran extracts and reviews and his work was immediately translated into German and French.28 The Gentleman’s Magazine reproduced long excerpts from his ‘translation’ of the Shastah, and considered that it ‘abounds with curious particulars, and is well worthy the attention of learning and curiosity’.29 In 1770, when Denis Diderot and the anti-clerical Abbé Guillaume-Thomas Raynal (1713–96) published their six-volume critique of European imperialism – which went through more than thirty editions before 1789, despite being banned – they copied out Holwell’s account and agreed that the Hindus’ ‘sublime morality, deep philosophy, and refined policy’ had been successful in inducing sobriety and strict laws against ‘the effusion of blood’.30 Johann Rudolph Sinner, who wrote one of the most serious studies of metempsychosis in the eighteenth century, applauded Holwell for having ‘vindicated the Brahmans of the charge of idolatry, of polytheism, and of the absurd doctrines which have been imputed to them up to today’. As late as 1826 the Professor of History at the University of Heidelberg, Friedrich Schlosser (1776–1861), affirmed that ‘The best essay on the religion of Brahma is to be found in Holwell’s work.’ Holwell had succeeded in making Hinduism a legitimate – even essential – study for Christian intellectuals.31
To those less keen on acrediting pagan Indians with a philosophy comparable to any in Europe, Holwell’s enthusiastic vindication appeared preposterous. William Julius Mickle, a careful student of Indian culture, saw in Holwell’s endorsement of Hinduism a hurdle in the way of British imperialism, and took the view that India was desperately in need of illumination by the rational and democratic forces of European culture. Hindu vegetarianism, with its stupid Pythagorean philosophy, was, he though
t, the ultimate demonstration of benighted Indian ignorance. If it was damnable to eat animals, as Holwell had claimed, then even the most assiduous Brahmin would end up in hell for accidentally killing ‘innumerable living creatures’ while drinking a glass of water or eating a salad.32
The Conservative Critical Review, meanwhile, accused Holwell of being a renegade, rebuffed his critique of colonialism and slandered his personal character – and that was only after he published the first two parts of Interesting Historical Events, which only hinted at his enthusiasm for Hinduism. Instead of doubting the authenticity of Holwell’s ‘Shaster’, they argued that it confirmed that Hinduism was a recent ‘compound of Manicheism, vitiated Christianity, pagan idolatry, superstitious rites, and unintelligible jargon’.33
When Holwell finally unveiled, in his third volume, the extent of his conversion to Hinduism, he was met with an embarrassed silence. Here was a man who had been governor of the country’s most prestigious colonial outpost. He was a respected public figure, a magistrate in Wales, and even after his death officially remembered as one ‘in whom brilliancy of talents, benignity of spirit, social vivacity, and suavity of manners were so united as to render him the most amiable of men’. His portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds, in full British uniform, hung in the Company’s halls. And now, to the dismay of all conservative Christians, he had thrown the fundamentals of his religion to the wind, and clung to the monstrously sensual pillars of pagan India. Indians were supposed to be subordinate – raw material waiting to be utilised – not the inheritors of the pristine word of God. Vegetarianism, in particular, was a direct blow to the British constitution. In the character of John Bull, beef-eating had become the insignia of British national pride – by the time of the Napoleonic Wars the French nickname for British forces had become ‘rosbifs’ – and here was Holwell calling the cow a sacred animal, the killing of which carried a cosmic punishment!
In contrast to the chorus of reviews that greeted his early scholarly works, reviewers now looked the other way: the sooner this was hushed up the better. Even his obituarist in the Gentleman’s Magazine, who dug up his most obscure paper on a new species of oak tree, quietly passed over Interesting Historical Events part three, and politely excused his unfortunate belief in reincarnation by mourning that ‘Mr H. being then 77, was advancing fast into dotage, or the second childhood.’ Apart from getting Holwell’s age wrong by two years, this deliberately omitted the fact that by the time of his death Holwell had been propounding the same doctrines for at least twenty-seven years, since the age of sixty.34 This pointed silence was replicated by subsequent biographical notices. The nineteenth-century nostalgic historian of British India, H. E. Busteed, who communicated with Holwell’s grandson and inheritor of his lost papers, cut his account of Holwell short, avoiding the later developments. Until the most recent edition, the Dictionary of National Biography recounted uncritically Holwell’s version of the Black Hole saga but said nothing about his conversion to Hindu vegetarianism.35
It took the Monthly Review in 1771 to state what the whole of decent society must have been thinking: that Holwell’s latest work was akin to the mystic visions of the Behmenists.36 This evident disapproval, however, did not stop Holwell reissuing his work in more editions. Nor did it stop him writing two more books which, if anything, were more outlandish than before. The hitherto unattributed Primitive Religion Elucidated, and Restored … By a Divine, of No Church (1776) was supposedly penned by a member of the public who approved of Holwell’s doctrines, but was certainly by Holwell himself, and although he laconically confessed his authorship later on, no one blew his cover. Primitive Religion propounded Hindu doctrines, but under the cover of palatably unaffiliated deism. Holwell’s final book, the Dissertation on the Origin, Nature, and Pursuits of Intelligent Beings (1786), used the same trick. By this time, Holwell no longer believed in active divine Providence, and he argued that it was blasphemous to think that atrocities such as imperialist massacres happened with God’s direct consent. Instead, he reverted to the ancient idea of a ‘kind of sympathetic movement’ – espoused by Henry More, Thomas Tryon and the Turkish Spy – which automatically forced each spirit to enter the appropriate species of animal according to its deserts.37 ‘Extravagant as the foregoing doctrine may appear to some,’ concluded Holwell at the twilight of his public life,
Forty years meditation, study and reasoning, have brought me a full conviction, that there is no other hypothesis which can, consistent with piety, reason or philosophy, reconcile the creation of that miserable being Man, with the wisdom, justice, or benign attributes of God; or afford any probable cause, why? and to what end or purpose, the material universe was created and constructed.38
By now, Holwell’s incessant ranting had become impossible to ignore. The assiduous anti-Indophile William Julius Mickle quickly identified Holwell as the author of this last work, and immediately denounced the sly attempt to disguise as rational deductions the ‘transmigration of souls, and the other principles of the Gentoo religion’. The public had borne with Holwell’s absurdities long enough; it was time to drop the hushed respect and tell Holwell that his work was ‘risible entertainment’:
When an author narrates the religious madness and absurdities of a country in which he has travelled, it is proper and fair. But when he becomes a zealous convert to, and enthusiast in such inconsistent and unphilosophical doctrines as Mr H. ascribes to his favourite Gentoos, we are lost in surprize at the weakness of human nature; and cannot refrain the wish, that our eastern travellers would employ themselves better than in obtruding on their native country, as the most sacred and sublime truths, the wild dreams and incoherent crudities of Indian superstition and contemptible folly.39
Mickle was no doubt as concerned by the likes of Alexander Dow, who had slowly lost his grip on Christian orthodoxy as he delved into the ‘Platonic’ splendour of Hinduism;40 or Colonel Antoine Polier who had gone native in 1758, married Indian women, and ended up promising a raja that he would never bind his copy of the Vedas in animal skins;41 or even Anquetil Duperron who went to India in 1754 and became a disciple of ‘the sages of Asia’ when he found that the Upanishads expressed the same universal religion as Christianity and on his return to France joined the vegetarian community of Antoine Gleïzes.42 But Mickle’s desperate backlash would not stem the tide. Later there would be Major General Charles ‘Hindoo’ Stuart (1757–1828), a Bengal officer who offered puja to idols and was, in the words of one shocked onlooker, ‘an Englishman, born and educated in a Christian land, who was become the wretched and degraded partaker in this heathen worship’. William Fraser, assistant to the Resident in Delhi (1806–11) who wore Indian clothes, had Indian mistresses and lived on the vegetarian food of his hosts. And Thomas Medwin (1788–1869), whose literary representation of a nabob seemed more than a little autobiographical, as ‘a person neither English nor Indian, Christian nor Hindu. In diet he was a rigid disciple of Brama’ and looked ‘upon the slaughter of a cow as only next to the murder of a human being.’43 Over the coming years more and more Christians came back from their travels with an enthusiasm for Hinduism which they unleashed on the European public.
Voltaire – or François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778) – was not so daunted by Holwell’s Indophilia. When Holwell’s translation of the Shastah came out, Voltaire had already fled from Paris, Prussia and Geneva to avoid persecution for his aggressive promotion of religious tolerance and deism, and had taken refuge on his private estate which straddled the French and Swiss border in order to escape the police of both countries. Holwell’s dating of the Shastah before the Bible provided fuel to the fire of Voltaire’s crusade against Christianity, and vegetarianism was a particularly powerful perspective from which he could critique the cruelty innate in European culture.
Voltaire had already presented the ancient Brahmins in his Essai sur les Moeurs (1756) as exemplars of religious tolerance and he highlighted the pure monotheism that underlay their polytheistic customs.
Like Montesquieu, Voltaire argued that the doctrine of metempsychosis made the Hindus ‘lovers and arbiters of peace’ and thus had been the only successful means of suppressing viciousness and instilling instead ‘a horror at shedding blood, constant charity towards human beings and animals’. With his irrepressible irony he added that ‘Their religion and the temperature of their climate made these peoples entirely resemble those peaceful animals whom we bring up in our sheep pens and our dove cotes for the purpose of cutting their throats.’44 Their harmlessness accentuated the savageness of European culture: ‘The Indian books announce only peace and gentleness; they forbid the killing of animals: the Hebrew books speak only of killing, of the massacre of men and beasts; everything is slaughtered in the name of the Lord; it is quite another order of things.’
In his entry under ‘Viande’ in the famous Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764), Voltaire had extolled the Brahmins – so excessively it is difficult to imagine that he was being entirely sincere – alongside the ancient Greek philosophers, the monks of La Trappe and the medical vegetarian Philippe Hecquet. These enlightened advocates, he announced, had shown that vegetarians were ‘notoriously the most free from disease and most long-lived of their countrymen’. In his entry on ‘Animals’ he launched into a sharp anti-Cartesian tirade:
There are barbarians who seize this dog, who so prodigiously surpasses man in friendship, and nail him down to a table, and dissect him alive to show you the mezaraic veins. You discover in him all the same organs of feeling which are in you. Answer me, mechanist; has Nature arranged all these springs of feeling in this animal, so that it does not feel? Has it nerves in order to be insensible? Do not even imply this impertinent contradiction in nature.
In subsequent publications Voltaire showed how the Hindu doctrines endorsed his own enlightened view of animals.45 Holwell’s Hindu Shastah exonerated everything he had said, and thus Voltaire hailed Holwell as a new Pythagoras and ‘the only European who has understood the beliefs of the Brahmins’.46 Despite his doubts that everything in the Shastah was authentic, Voltaire championed Holwell in a mass of essays on a range of different subjects and rewrote whole chunks of his own works to incorporate Holwell’s new information. In later editions of the Essai sur les Moeurs he thanked Holwell for his thirty-year-long selfless quest for knowledge (this compliment, too, was probably tongue-in-cheek), and portrayed the original Brahmins as the ideal king-priests presiding over a pure deistic religion. The fact that the modern Brahmins also held preposterous superstitions showed how religions corrupted over time and that Christianity too was just as full of fictions as any other. With stunning audacity, Voltaire argued that the whole of Christianity was based on the Brahmins’ doctrine of the fall of the angels. ‘Our religion was hidden deep in India,’ he asserted, and it ‘incontestably comes to us from the Brahmans’. In ironic contrast to Holwell, of course, Voltaire did not think the similarities corroborated each other; both were mythologies invented by avaricious priests to maintain their power over the people. Joseph Priestley developed this argument in his extremely provocative assault on Christian orthodoxy. Even though Holwell was an enthusiastic devotee of Hinduism himself, his comparative approach to demonstrating that the Bible was ahistoric helped to create the Enlightened, liberal secular outlook in modern society.
The Bloodless Revolution Page 36
