The Hindu Rate of Survival

IN JUNE 1889, a man called WH Findlay produced a crisp defence of missionary activity in India. Writing in the Harvest Field, he challenged the increasingly prevalent view that evangelical work, in education particularly, was a failure. After all, through the nineteenth century, far from converting in large quantities, brown men were subverting Western formulas of thinking for ‘attempts to revive Hinduism’. What we might now call evidence of ‘native’ agency triggered laments in Findlay’s colleagues. But he himself proposed a different view; movements to reform Hinduism were, in his mind, proof of Christianity’s success in the land. Yes, as ‘Hindus begin to awaken’, it was ‘natural, and indeed proper, that they should first resort to the religion of their fathers’; that the initial ‘result of the operation of the spirit of Christianity’ must ‘almost necessarily be a revival of Hinduism’. But this defensive instinct would, Findlay believed, run aground. And when Hindus, following childish attempts to build with borrowed tools what Christianity alone could guarantee, realized this, they would ‘accept what we offer’. The modern rebranding of Hinduism, in other words, was not an event in its own right but merely a step to ‘the complete and general triumph of Christianity’. It was a temporary case of ‘Christian wine in Hindu bottles’; in the next stage, those ‘bottles [would] burst’. Indeed, the very fact that through ‘our schools and colleges’ missionaries had stirred Hindus to re-envision their religion was a victory. Or as the man explained:

The task the revivers of Hinduism have set themselves is to make it satisfy new ideals which they have accepted from Christianity. They are not supporting Hinduism as their fathers believed it… they are trying to imagine it to be, or to frame out of it, a worthy rival of Christianity… So ignorant have Hindus, in general, been in the past, of what their conglomerate religion is, that they can easily persuade themselves that what they now call Hinduism is the old genuine belief of their fathers, which in our descriptions we grossly malign. But this error of theirs is of very secondary importance. Our triumph is that the Hindus who have, at last, begun to value religion, have a high, a Christian ideal of what a religion should be.

Its blind wishfulness aside, there is some truth to Findlay’s assertion. Historically, dialogue with missionaries that began in the sixteenth century first provoked puzzled amusement and some petty irritation on the Hindu side. But the advent of European power in the land rendered Christianity a concern. Even if the number of converts was never alarmingly high, the joining of the Bible with white political authority represented a challenge to ‘native’ ways of thinking, organizing society, and defining faith and divinity. All along, Western ideas that presented religion as a fixed, consistent affair—with a book, core principles, a mania for monotheism—played on colonized minds. And so, in adapting to survive, Hindu intellectuals reframed their beliefs. Figures like Ram Mohan Roy represent this impulse: a desire to synthesize a dominant idea of what ‘religion’ ought to look like, with matching bits in the Hindu tradition. This meant that some elements of the Hindu past were espoused, others branded adulteration; some ideas of god exaggerated but a plurality of living traditions denied. After all, as Ashis Nandy observes, ‘[T]he ultimate violence which colonialism does to its victims’ is that ‘it creates a culture in which the ruled are constantly tempted to fight their rulers within the psychological limits set by the latter.’ And Findlay had a point when he noted that Christianity’s triumph lay in determining exactly these psychological terms for colonized Hindus.

And yet, this triumph was hardly total or unqualified, for Indians never ceased to resist. Even in a politically enervated state, even with the terms of engagement set by another, the colonized mind found strategies to assert itself; to try and shape matters to its own advantage. At an intellectual level, after all, Roy, while he accepted a new structure for Hinduism, used the same process to critique Christianity as well. As the scholar Eric Sharpe wrote, one characteristic of modernity is that ‘sacred scriptures, whatever their origin’ could be ‘read by those for whom they were initially not intended’. Holy texts, in alien hands, could be examined ‘not in the light of [their] ‘original’ religious, liturgical, philosophical or social setting’ but against ‘entirely different presuppositions’. The Vedas and Puranas were subjected to this process first, and Europeans ‘discovered’ in them whatever they desired: from undefiled monotheism, to the ‘shameful’ gods and polytheism that so agitated missionar­ies. Different Western interests made use of these ‘discoveries’ to bolster their views and positions; they utilised Hinduism and India to develop their sense of self and their identities vis-à-vis others. ‘Native’ thinkers like Roy, however, reversed the gaze. And they too drew from the West what they felt essential to reconstructing and defending their positions under colonialism, while rejecting all that did not fit this need. It was a case of selec­tive appropriation to meet contingencies of the age. And what brown men seized, it can be argued, was not Christian wine for Hindu bottles, but Christian bottles for Hindu wine.

It is this acquisition of a new shape, with its tendency to mimic the Christian pattern, that often sparks the argument that modern Hinduism is ‘invented’; that in squeezing a diver­sity of beliefs and sects uncomfortably into Christian frames, what was manufactured was synthetic yarn. While there is no doubt that colonialism and exposure to the West dramatically altered Hinduism—indeed, even gave it its current name—the suggestion that this is ‘invention’, and by extension lacks legitimacy, is somewhat simplistic. It assumes, for one, that Hinduism could never reincarnate itself; that it could only have one appearance—fluid, loose, amorphous—that defies attempts to place it within solid brackets, like water on a sieve. However, we know that long before Europeans arrived on the scene, Hindu intellectuals had already started to delineate a separate identity as Hindus. One impetus came from Islamic rule. Or as the historian Muzaffar Alam notes, ‘By the four­teenth century the term Hindu had significantly begun to denote a religious culture to encompass all such cults and traditions as originated and developed within the geographical limits’ of India. Muslim accounts bunched together many types of traditions, ranging from the Brahminical to those antithetical to it, under the label ‘Hindu’. By this yardstick, Hinduism’s ‘invention’ began not in the colonial era but several centuries before, in the reign of sultans. European rule, it would appear, only ripened what already existed in a foetal shape, its conception the product of a different set of encounters.

Viewed against the long arc of history, though, ‘invention’ still grants too much power to those on the outside, while deny­ing those supposedly being ‘invented’ any autonomy. In pre-Islamic India, sects and groups we now lump as Hindu—Saivas, Vaishnavas, Saktas, each representing a spectrum—had something in com­mon when contrasted with Jains and Buddhists. Already, that is, seeds of unity existed, alongside that Brahminical drive for it. However, assertion of such unity became necessary only when the context presented itself. After all, Hinduism was never shaped by a book as much as by the currents of history. And faced with Islamic rule, motivations grew to fasten these religious ideas under a shared canopy. To supply an analogy, five brown persons in a room—each a shade different from the other—might not view themselves as a single organism. Indeed, they might violently disagree with one another. But the entry of a white person shifts something; the brown grow cognizant of their common features. If the new entrant is also threatening in some respect, that shared brownness becomes a means to mount joint action. Inner contradictions might remain—not to speak of the fact that white and brown could cheerfully consort too—but a new dynamic is born. With Islamic power, even if it was Mus­lim commentators who initially lumped diverse non-Muslims into the ‘Hindu’ category, the latter appropriated the tag, owning it for themselves—because they recognized value here. Hindus, that is, asserted Hinduness as an overarch­ing principle precisely because they confronted an identity separate—and occasionally hostile—to theirs.

This consciousness of a Hinduness grew with time, though it was neither linear nor the same everywhere, always. And it certainly wasn’t as categorically defined or total as figures like Savarkar would suggest. Yet something was under­way. It is often noted, for example, that in seventeenth-century Mughal miniatures, Muslim nobility appear with their upper coat tied on the right side. Non-Muslims, however, tie the jama to the left. The latter came from a variety of distinct castes: Rajputs, Brahmin, Kayasthas. Some were vegetarian, others were not; some offered hereditary scribal service, others were wedded to the sword. None of these would intermarry or even dine together. And yet court convention viewed them as a group. Aided by the fact that they shared gods and religious practices—that they had enough in common to transcend caste differences—Hinduness is implicit. This is not to say that Hindus and Muslims were monoliths; on the Islamic side, for instance, a whole empire in the Deccan imploded due to ethnic conflict between Persian immigrants and local Muslims. There was, that is, no want of dissension. But in specific contexts, religious identity allowed for networks of solidarity, and for political and social mobilization. Nor was this just an elite af­fair. The poet-saint Kabir—a weaver—in his fifteenth-century writings actively identifies Muslims and Hindus as separate types. Which suggests there was a recognizable Hinduness long in the air; colonial pressures only roused this into fortify­ing itself a certain way.

In this, borrowing a structure or certain strategies from the West was a critical innovation, but it was not ‘invention’. Instead, it was an instrument of re-invention. Dayananda Saraswati, for instance, had been long on the path of reform, with little expo­sure to Western thought. A visit to Calcutta opened his eyes to new strategies and tools, but the desire to reform appeared from within. Communities in general are not concrete blocs; they are ‘social formations continuously engaged in self-recreation’. Identities shift and transform; all of Hinduism’s history, we know, is marked by adaptation. Indeed, there had once been several versions of Christianity as well. Eventually, some readings gained precedence, and internal coherence was constructed. As with Hindus, there were ‘large bodies of Christians who did not believe all the same things and who had relatively little to do with each other’. Yet, just as Rajputs and Brahmins possessed caste identities but also shared a Hinduness, different varieties of Chris­tians also could claim a shared Christian­ity. And this could be selectively drawn on, in times of nervousness especially. Thomas Roe, Britain’s envoy to the Mughals, for example, met at Emperor Jahangir’s court an Italian Jesuit. The latter requested that despite a ‘vast differ­ence’ in their view of religion—Catholic and Protestant—they must avoid displaying this. For it would hinder conversion. In this setting, that is, unity was urged; in Europe, on the other hand, sectarian prejudices looked incompatible. Indeed, among India’s Hindus and Muslims, ‘Europeans came to feel more like members of a [more singular] Christian community than they would have felt’ at home.

In other words, the white figure entering that room full of brown people was reminded also of his own whiteness in that moment. And just as the latter evolved their sense of self and its strategies of self-preservation to address the new environ­ment, so did he. To cite an example, Roberto de Nobili, a Jesuit who worked in Madurai, was a committed Catholic. Yet, the indigenised Catholicism he administered among Tamils looked little like its main fount in Rome: the acquisition of the Brahmin’s sacred thread for his converts, the embrace of Hindu customs and caste, rebranding the Bible as a Veda—these gen­erated controversy in Europe. But de Nobili was a white man in a country where brown men still prevailed; so, he adapted his religion to their terms. At that time, it was he who repackaged his wine, transferring Christianity to Hindu bottles. As the tables turned, however, and foreigners mastered the land, graft­ing onto it their own ideas, it was Hindus who were pressed to reinvent themselves. New institutions and novel concep­tions of the world came into play, and they responded—as all societies do. Where religion is concerned, Europe pictured it as a specific type of box with specific contents. ‘Native’ minds hitherto experienced religion as a network of beliefs, yes; but living under colonial pressures now, many endorsed the box, populating it with chosen strands from their traditions. And if de Nobili’s Christianity, despite innovations—tolerating even the odd goat sacrifice—was still Christianity, Hinduism’s latest avatar is also Hinduism, in a fresh garb.

Indeed, where Hindus are concerned, the acquisition of new clothes for older bodies—even if they were of foreign design— appears in other contexts too, making this a familiar shift. The Travancore rajahs, for example, defined themselves as not sovereigns but vassals of the deity, Sri Padmanabhaswamy (Vishnu). Their kingdom ‘belonged’ to him, and they were only his custodians—a very Vaishnava, Hindu and Brahmini­cal definition of their political selves. Yet, even as they served this role, they also operated in a world organized around other principles. In the eighteenth century, with the aura of the Mu­ghals still alive, the same rajahs, thus, found value in Persianate culture. In their ‘original’ form, they were exclusively a deity’s vassals; now they sought titles from a Muslim emperor. In temple processions, the rajahs appeared bare-chested in line with Hindu ritual tradition; in court, they wore the jama as in Islamic durbars. While diplomatic correspondence was con­ducted in Persian, with the ascent of the British, these Malay­alam speakers began to learn English, also acquiring the white man’s clothes by the mid-nineteenth century. The rajahs were still Hindu, but in each of these contexts, altered their appear­ance. Hinduism’s draping of new clothes too—its refashioning from Hinduness to a modern ism—is a product of such change. And, while looks convey much, they must not be overstated. To see the body, one must look past the cloth. Hinduism, we might conclude, then, is only ‘invented’ insofar as all religious categories are invented—and reinvented.

(This is a curated excerpt from Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity by Manu S Pillai)

adversityChristian missionariesChristianityConversionsDayananda SaraswatiGeneral OutramHinduismJahangirSir Thomas Roe