BOOK
REVIEW The
evolution of Hinduism Was
Hinduism Invented? by Brian K
Pennington
Reviewed by Aruni Mukherjee
William Wilberforce, a British
parliamentarian who died in 1833, once spoke of
the "dark and bloody superstitions" that embody
the creed that came to be termed Hinduism.
Prior to that, the mind-boggling diversity
in sub-continental religious practices existed
without a common definition to bind them together,
and this "crystallization of the concept" is what
Brian K Pennington traces in his book Was
Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians and the
Colonial Construction of Religion.
Between 1789 and 1832, the Orientalist
fascination for the "cloud
of
fables" - according to William Jones, the 18th
century Indian historian - embodied in Vedic
literature was replaced by the East India
Company-backed intelligentsia who were preoccupied
with utilitarian criticisms of the "sinister
principles" of the same, depicted nowhere more
vividly than in the works of James Mill and Thomas
Macaulay.
Pennington argues that the
modern avatar of the somewhat homogenized ancient
religion that can be loosely termed Hinduism is a
direct reaction to such seething and degrading
criticism from the colonial academics, some of it
indeed valid (such as vilifying the sati
tradition - the traditional Hindu practice of a
widow immolating herself on her husband's funeral
pyre).
He argues that the elites within
Hindu society entered a "dialectical space" with
colonialism, thereby producing a defensive
self-determined version of their faith. While
celebrating colonial promotion of certain
scriptures, they vehemently opposed stereotyping,
as can be seen in the outcry among the Bengali
educated middle classes over the label of the
effeminate babu. This similar dialectic
process was behind the rise of Hindu nationalism
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as well
as behind the progress made by the Hindutva
movement of the late 1990s.
Nevertheless,
Pennington refuses to present the colonial state
with the credit of transforming "fragmented,
disparate, localized, particularistic and
ever-changing mini traditions" into a world
religion. Whereas "Indophoebia" and the "racist
science" of the 19th century did indeed contribute
substantially toward the development of a
defensive definition of Hinduism, crediting the
state with the invention of Hinduism as we know it
is ignoring the "mess of encounters" that can
better explain this development.
Whereas
literary critic Edward Said accused the West of
essentializing the East, the opposite argument is
also true. Pennington makes a distinction between
various classes of Hinduism’s "other", and argues
that class, nationality, outlook and background of
the actors on the ground made the encounters
between, say, a missionary and a peasant much
different from that between a colonial academic
and a local historian.
What follows from
the importance of the nature of the "other" is the
fundamental significance of religious values in
this discourse, discarded by many schools of
historians preferring to focus solely on
socio-economic trends. Pennington associates
himself with Partha Chatterjee who wrote in the
first volume of the Subaltern Studies about the
various ways in which the downtrodden communities
often express themselves in the form of their
religion. This is also seen in the works of David
Hardiman on Adivasis or indigenous people in
western India, as well as that of Saurabh Dube on
the Satnamis of central India.
Pennington
uses a relatively small number of first-hand
sources, but adheres closely to them. The archives
of the Church Missionary Society reveal the
attitudes of missionaries toward evangelizing the
natives, an attitude advocated by many including
Charles Grant, the Scottish politician, and
Wilberforce. On the other hand, the transformation
in colonial attitudes can be seen in the archives
of the Asiatick Researches, which gradually gets
taken over by colonial influences, sidelining the
Orientalists. He also dwells on the religious
newspaper Samacar Chandrika published by
Bhabanicaran Bandyopadhyaya, which took on the
task to refute much of the essentialism dished out
by colonial literature. However, all of this does
strengthen the author's point about the importance
of religion, explicit or implicit, in colonial
policy-making.
Two questions beg to be
answered by Pennington. First, he says nothing
about the crude distinction made by the colonial
state between "martial" and "non-martial" races in
the subcontinent, and the various categories of
castes it defined. Such essentialization went a
long way toward complicating the already
juxtaposed threads of Hinduism, and much of that
legacy exists to this day.
Moreover,
whereas the colonial state may not have explicitly
defined Hinduism, its criticisms of the same
nevertheless led to Hindu nationalism adopting a
very homogenous and essentially narrow view of
Hinduism. As Amartya Sen has argued in his recent
work The Argumentative Indian, Hinduism is
simply too diverse to speak of in one single
breath. Therefore, the prevalent definition of
Hinduism (as in the stereotype used in the public
domain today) may well have been invented during
the high noon of colonialism.
Second,
Pennington argues that there is increasingly a
"need of structuring the relationship of religion
and the nation state". This contemporary universal
"need" can be readily questioned if one looks at
secular Europe and India. Debates about race
relations in Britain and France, and that of
minority reservations in India are more to do with
social exclusion and opportunities rather than any
concerns about delineating the contours of state
and religion. A more relevant discussion is the
Middle East, where Islam and the nation state
remain problematically juxtaposed.
However, Pennington is in need of
recognizing the "essence" of Hindu philosophical
writings during times much before his book covers,
but which can indeed be a useful apparatus to
determine the role of the state vis-a-vis
religion. The image of the Brahmin holding the
sveta-chattra (white umbrella) over the
king was never involved in the analytical modus
operandi of the colonial state while defining
Hinduism.
On the larger question of
whether contemporary Hinduism was invented,
Pennington seems to adopt a persuasive argument.
Whether there exists an alternative and distinct
definition is a question that he leaves
unexplored.
Was Hinduism Invented?
Britons, Indians and the Colonial Construction of
Religion by Brian K Pennington. Oxford
University Press, April, 2005. ISBN 0195166558,
hardback. Price:$45, 260 pages.
Aruni Mukherjee is
based at the University of Warwick, England.
BOOK
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