PART 1
Swagato Ganguly is a reputed journalist on the editorial board of the Times of India; and a rare one with an engineering degree from IIT Kanpur and a doctorate of literature from the University of Pennsylvania! He is a prolific writer on a wide variety of subjects as noted from his blog articles. He has written this wonderful book- a must read, to understand the colonial discourses on idolatry, which finally justified their despotic rule in India.
IDOLATROUS NATIONS ARE UNFIT FOR SELF-RULE
Biblical conception of false gods designated idolatry as a flawed cognitive apparatus overdetermined by images. Enlightenment values enhanced the delusional mentality of Indian society and religion based on idolatry. This was a weakness of reason plaguing the subjects of colonial rule, thus justifying their civilizing mission of upholding Enlightenment values. Idolatry was the origin and causal explanation for irrationality in the Indian society.
Idolatry was like fetishism, a product of the cross-cultural interactions on the coast of West Africa, which the European Enlightenment intellectuals took up eagerly. Fetishism was a religious delusion of African religion and society- a strong reason for their perceived anomalies. Fetishism was perverse overvaluation of ‘things’ to which ‘a religious, aesthetic, sexual or social value’ can be attached. Africans’ attachment to false things allowed sensuality and promiscuity in their society. Africans became ‘things’ rather than ‘subjects’, and hence fit for slavery.
Fetishism and idolatry both stress the inappropriateness of material entities as a locus of spiritual and devotional activity; leading to superstitious cult practices; and finally latch to the idea of spiritual fraud by evil priests. This wonderful book studies the colonial mentalities surrounding these ideas.
It started with Plato where ‘idea’ was divorced from its ‘image’. The idea or form is pure; and the image (or the eidolon) is a corrupted, mutable, and a degradable copy, inferior to the world of ideas from which it emanates, says the author. The Judeo-Christian God is the immaterial and immutable Platonic form or truth; and the ‘idol’ comes to designate the false, fabricated, and material entity prone to decay and disintegration.
St Augustine carried this into Christianity as a hierarchical distinction between the ‘intelligible’ faith and the ‘sensible’ idolatry. Ironically, Enlightenment, which stood in opposition to religion, speaks in the same theological but secularised language. ‘Ideology’ of the Enlightenment was opposed to ‘idolatry’ of the superstitious past stressing the superiority of ‘ideas’ over ‘images’ as instruments of thought. In the world of western metaphysics, the split between the idea and the image transformed into the superior ‘signified’ and the inferior ‘signifier’. Western metaphysical reason bypasses the ‘signifier’ transcending all falsifications of image.
All discourses finally converge to the position of idolatry or fetishism as something false existing at a lower level. If idolatry stresses the ‘image/signifier’ without reference to the ultimate transcendental ‘signified’, it promotes a multiplicity of meanings rather than reducing them to the first causes. Thus, idolatry links to polytheism too. Like writing being a Platonian corrupted image of the speech, idolatrous speech and belief has greater affinity to narrative and myth than to metaphysics and philosophy.
An idol resembles a god, without being God, leading to metaphysical disappointment. It is related to artifice and through it, to art and literature. The colonial narrative said that the taste for allegory and penchant for outward appearances leads Indians and specially Hindus, to dwell on the outward forms of nature itself, instead of a radical separation between nature and God. Nature is multiple and corporeal; it is inimical to the notion of God-a unitary and a perfect being. Polytheism, like idolatry, also posits a multi-causal world which is antithetical to a monotheistic absolute God.
One British scholar said: ‘the religion of Kalee is pure, unmixed evil’. In colonial India, idolatry became a totalising figure for Indian society and its perceived strangeness, excesses, and anomalies. Hindu architectural design was idolatrous and the British shunned these completely in their building constructions. Idolatry was the overarching figure for Indian irrationality, aesthetic shortcomings, and moral flaws. The idolater’s deficiency of an autonomous subjectivity made him unable to control and govern himself, as he is liable to be in captivity by his powers of imagination, as the author says. This lack of self-control requires an external ‘civilizing’ power to govern him wisely.
Augustus Comte told about the three theological progressive states -fetishism, polytheism, and then finally monotheism. This further progresses into metaphysics and then finally science. Neat! Similarly, a prominent philosopher Hegel thought that the lack of reason to successfully mediate between an abstract ‘universal’ and a concrete ‘particular’ inhibited the growth of a free, autonomous subject in India. Not only that, Hegel placed the Indian society in a graded hierarchy of civilizations with obviously the Christian, European civilization at its apex.
Idolatry not only justified their colonising mission, but also was dangerous to the colonial rulers. It was contagious and communicable with the capacity to corrupt the colonial rulers, according to some. Idolatry could hence breach European rationalities through the deployment of image, spectacle, and sensuality. This could lead to a sense of exaltation despite the danger of decay and death. Hence, if the European coloniser is behaving irrationally, blame it on his contact with idolatry in the Indian society.
THE DUPLICITY OF WILLIAM JONES
William Jones (1746–1794) was the first Orientalist popularising the study of India and its languages. A philologist and a judge in Bengal, he noted connections between the European languages and Sanskrit and proposed the Indo-European family of languages. In 1784, he founded the Asiatic Society in Calcutta and started a journal called Asiatick Researches. Of course, the membership was to only Britishers; and there is tremendous evidence today that his researches on Indian culture were coloured with Christian theological considerations.
The author says that his ‘A Hymn to Lacshmi’ clearly shows that the average Hindu is patient but slow on the uptake, held in thrall by the wily priests. The priests are rational manipulators because they are aware of the falsehoods they are perpetrating and hence are guilty of imposing a false consciousness on the society. The same hymn clarifies the meaning of idolatry as bowing down to ‘senseless nature’ instead of ‘God.’ And finally, the short hymn declares that the empire will liberate the Hindus from their priests using the ‘magic wand’ rather than a ‘rod.’ So much so for altruistic respect of other cultures and traditions. The persistence of idolatry, rather than a desire for profits, provides a rationale to the British in their colonial enterprise. Strangely, this short hymn is an invocation to Goddess Lakshmi to deliver the Hindus from the priests to the British empire.
The poem in short, inscribes the Orientalist view of the imperial civilising mission. Jones becomes a deliverer of the primitive populace held in the thrall of an originally pure scripture corrupted by later Hindus into an inferior brand. Indigenous laws would govern India, but the Englishmen would be the most effective arbiters and interpreters of these laws cleaning them of misuse by priests and idolaters.
The Christian doctrine of the 18th century talked of one people receiving a primeval revelation. These people dispersed to different parts of the world following the Tower of Babel. The Pagans lost the revelation, and idolatry originated among them. However, there were traces of monotheism in all cultures, including the Hindu traditions, and these were the recollections of a remote past. Jones immersed himself in searching for such a primeval text in Hindu scriptures which could link to the original Christian revelation. Unlike most of the Indologists, old and new, Jones learnt Sanskrit but the reasons were not very kind. He said, ‘the villainy of the Brahmen lawyers makes it necessary for me to learn Sanscrit, which is as difficult as Greek.’
The British scholars following him, confused with the heterogeneity of texts in the Indic traditions, conveniently connected the multiplicity to one of the root senses of idolatry- an endless proliferation of images and meanings, without reference to an ultimate ‘signified’. For Jones, idolatry implied fracture of subjectivity and truth. Textual corruption of the original pure scriptures also implied a moral corruption of the peoples.
Idolatry and its identification with textual and moral corruption also leads to forgery, and later, lying under oath in the courts. Jones was very harsh with his punishments for forgery and perjury, because to him that was the lowest a society can slide into. Thus, the author says, the meme of forgery, linked to the concept of idolatry as a spiritual fraud, emerges as a crucial site for the exercise of colonial power.
Jones managed to translate and interpret the gayatri mantra too as a nonidolatrous monotheistic form which he believed Hinduism originally was in act of epistemic violence, says the author. The sun is the sun itself and not as an idol or a symbol representing the divine. Adoration of the sun was a sign of pagan idolatry. One scholar Jenny Sharpe sharply describes Jones as finding a ‘secondary origin’ for Hinduism.
Jones identified poetry, fable, metaphors as an important source for idolatry. They represent a corrupted version of original metaphysics and deep study could uncover these underlying truths. Specifically, Hindu fables, if studied carefully, could confirm Mosaic accounts of Biblical history. Satyavrata’s story in Bhagvat-Purana seemed to be that of Noah disguised by Asiatick fiction according to him.
Jones was clear where Europe stood in comparison to India when he proclaimed: ‘reason and taste are the grand prerogatives of European minds, while the Asiaticks have soared to loftier heights in the sphere of imagination.’ Another place he says: ‘…. yet the Athenian poet seems perfectly in the right, when he represents Europe as a sovereign Princess and Asia as her Handmaid.’
The hyperactive Asian imagination can be a source of idolatry according to Jones. But when confronted with criticism of Christianity showing tendencies of polytheism or idolatry within Christianity itself, or Gospels returning as a corrupted form of Islam, he too showed an amazing hyperactive imagination in rhetoric and circular arguments.
THE FRAUD OF EZOURVEDAM
Ezourvedam was a fake work of French Jesuit missionaries who wanted to convert people using this as a tool. This work was ‘the lost Veda’ and made strong arguments against idolatry obscuring an originally pure monotheism derived from Christianity, of course. However, another important interpretation was Hinduism being chronologically more ancient than Christianity and this was precisely the reading of Voltaire of this text! Voltaire used it as evidence that Christian concepts pre-existed the birth of Christ writing, ‘our holy Christian religion is solely based on the holy religion of Brahma.’ However, he too believed that the golden age of Hindu fell to the present where idolatry is dominant.
There are significant crossovers and overlaps between the Asiatic project founded by Jones and Ezourvedam. Jones truly believed in the myth of a past golden age ‘splendid in arts and arms, happy in government, wise in legislation, and eminent in various knowledge.’ Idolatry was the source of a degenerate present. Jones’ conceit considers the decline from a Satya-Yuga to a Kali-Yuga of Indian traditions to the idolatry represented by Kali, the ferocious. Of course, colonial ideas of Indian decay fitted well into the context of European progress. This provides a rationale for colonial rule as a degenerated and decayed civilization is incapable of self-rule.
JAMES MILL AND HIS INFLUENTIAL POLEMICS AGAINST INDIA
Mill wrote ‘The History of British India’, which was a necessary manual for British officers coming to India. It was more of a polemic against India and surprisingly, James Mill thought it unnecessary to set foot on Indian soil before writing its history! He wrote: ‘Whatever is worth seeing or hearing in India, can be expressed in writing. As soon as everything of importance is expressed in writing, a man who is duly qualified may obtain more knowledge of India in one year, in his closet in England, then he could obtain during the course of the longest life, by the use of his eyes and ears in India.’
‘Western metaphysics’ ran through his history giving more privilege to philosophizing than observing; to ideas more than images; to the intelligible over the sensible. The difference between myth and philosophy is the difference between India and Europe finally. Mill claimed his ‘History’ offering a ‘knowledge of India, approaching to completeness.’ He wrote a ‘judging history’ because he thought his absence from the scene of action qualified him better to speak his history from the position of a philosopher/judge. But what was he judging?
It was India on an evolutionary scale of civilizations based on ‘utilitarian’ normative standards. A nation is civilised in proportion to its pursuit of Utility; and a nation wasting on ‘contemptible or mischievous’ objects is barbaric. Hence, India, no wonder, ranked low among civilisations. Not only that, in India, liberty would be incompatible with the maximisation of utility, hence foreign rule gets its justification.
For Mill, the preponderance of idolatry and the imaginative Hindu faculty explained their inability to form a nation-state. The subjectivities that harbour polymorphous myths and legends fall outside both monotheism and philosophy. Mill goes on to say: ‘It is the want of this power of combination (of different states into a nation) which has rendered India so easy a conquest to all invaders; and enables us to retain, so easily, that dominion over it which we have acquired.’
Mill was clear that Hindu polytheism makes Hindus responsible for their own subjugation and clears the way for a colonial state. Mill transformed the earlier theological view of Hindu gods as demons into figures of frightful irrationality and social pathology, which guaranteed a misguided and miscreating society unless reformed through external invasion and conquest. James Mill three volumes on Indian History played a huge role in the imperial British rule and in moulding their officers to get a very degraded view of the ruled subjects. His polemical attack on the history, character, religion, literature, arts, laws of India, and Indian climate certainly helped in deconstructing India.
‘Of the Hindus’, comprising ten chapters – is the single most important source of British Indophobia and hostility to Orientalism, according to scholars. Mill’s description of Hindus was with generous nouns, verbs, adverbs, and adjectives like: ‘deceit, perfidy, insincerity, mendacity, perfidy, indifference, prostitution, venality, penurious, eunuch like, slave like, dissembling, treacherous, uncultivated, prone to excessive exaggeration, cowardly, unfeeling, conceited, contemptuous, and disgustingly physically unclean.’ Wow! No wonder the colonials thought poorly of Indians and Hindus.
THE ORIENTALISM OF FRIEDRICH MAX MÜLLER- LOVE FOR INDIA OR FOR CHRISTIANITY?
Max Müller was a German-born philologist and an Orientalist, who lived and studied in Britain for most of his life. He was one of the founders of the western academic field of Indian studies and the discipline of Study of religions. The ‘Sacred Books of the East’, a 50-volume set of English translations, was his major output. He is largely responsible for popularisation of the Aryan theory. Certainly controversial, but his ideas carry a lot of weight even today.
Scholars have argued for the surrogate role of English literature in the creation of colonial subjects given the failure of proselytization efforts to convert. Muller’s scholarly output does that surrogate function for issuing ‘authentic’ versions of Hindu scriptures stripped of their idolatry. His study and translation of Hindu texts and Vedas did this colonial work, but the author shows how fractured, inconsistent, and contradictory these efforts were.
Müller is difficult to understand. Sometimes he could be effusive in the praise of India; but was clearly disapproving of Home rule in India. There are still people swearing by him (Swami Vivekananda spoke in glowing terms about his encounter with him) even as Prodosh Aich calls him a total fraud. What is evident is his theological bias in translating the Vedas and Indian scriptures. His work had a definite agenda of showing the supremacy of Christianity; and he was on the payrolls of the East India Company.
He believed in an original pure and sensible Hinduism peaking at the time of Upanishads. But after that, the people were living in a time of a ‘dying or a dead’ religion. Müllers Veda is one which is devoid of the idolatry and fetishism, like the version of Hinduism in Ezourvedam. His gift to India was a rediscovered Veda! Hence, he was attempting a reform of the religion. He was enthusiastic in his support of Brahmo Samaj to clean Hinduism out of its idolatrous elements and elevate it to a pristine and monotheistic Hinduism. Muller’s biographer, Nirad C. Chaudhary, says that towards the end of his life he tried to persuade the adherents of the Brahmo Samaj to declare themselves Christian.
Müller finds the Vedas to be ‘full of childish, silly, and monstrous conceptions’, but he could also discover in the Vedic period ‘the original, simple, and intelligible religion of India.’ His Orientalism separated the ‘metaphysical’ India from the ‘physical’ one- the superior past from the degraded present. So much so that Müller thought fit to censor sexual material from Eastern religious texts because he found them to signify the animalistic character of the ancient peoples. Previously Saint Augustine and Mill spoke of the sexual as a sign of gross and animalistic character of religions, and Müller only continued this theological line of reasoning in his work.
Hegel thought China and India exhibit ‘a dull, half conscious brooding of the Spirit, immobile and unhistorical. If China is nothing else but a state, Hindu political existence presents us with a people, but no state.’ Müller accepts this but revalorizes it, says the author Ganguly, to make India the home of a transcendental spirituality outside of its history and empirical experience. This has paradoxical effects of on the one hand implying that political rule is best left to the British; but on the other, it enabled a nationalism, premised on the fulfilment of a transcendental spirituality as India’s unique world-historical destiny. Müller concludes about contemporary Hinduism: ‘The religion is still professed by at least 110,000,000 of human souls… and yet I do not shrink from saying that their religion is dying or dead.’ A remarkable statement from a man who never set his foot on the Indian soil! Unfortunately, his influence still has a great presence in the great Indian debates on the Aryan-Dravidian issue. Müller’s soul would be enjoying the great divisions in our country based on his noxious theories of religion, caste, race, and idolatry.
PART 2
The first part saw the wonderful book dealing with how Christian and Enlightenment values at the roots of the missionary and Orientalist/Indologist efforts in India converged to a similar theme. Idolatry was the first cause of the moral and intellectual degeneration of the Indian society. It represented everything wrong with the Indian society; and not only that, made the natives incapable of self-rule. They needed the rule of outsiders, preferably monotheistic in belief, to hold the polymorphous, heterogenous and ignorant masses together; and help them on their onward march to an enlightened reason.
Here we will see how colonial writers and art critics strengthened the narrative on idolatry with their influential writings, sinking it further into public conscience. There was also an effort by Indian reformers to answer western criticisms of Hindu religion and idolatry by people like Raja Rammohan Roy and Bankimchandra Chatterjee, but they were ambivalent to some extent. Rammohan Roy put western European lenses in his efforts to reform; and Bankim’s Indian lenses were a bit tinted with European colours.
CRITICS AND LITTERATEURS ON THE IDOLATROUS GROTESQUE OF INDIA- EXAMINING THE WORKS OF JOHN RUSKIN, ALICE PERRIN, E.M. FORSTER
A few words on the writers themselves as sourced from the mother called ‘Wikipedia.’ John Ruskin (1819 –1900) was a leading English art critic of the Victorian era, amongst other things. He wrote on a wide variety of subjects like architecture, myth, literature, education, botany, and political economy. He emphasised the connections between nature, art, and society. He was hugely influential in the latter half of the 19th century and up to the First World War. His ideas and concerns were roots of environmentalism and sustainability.
Perrin (1867-1934) was born in Mussoorie. Her father was a senior officer in the Bengal Cavalry and her great grandfather had been a director of the East India Company. She married an engineer named Charles Perrin in 1886 in Dehradun. She took to writing to relieve herself of the boredom of an Englishwoman in India. She went on to publish seventeen novels. ‘Idolatry’ was one important novel which the author examines. She finally moved to Europe in 1925.
Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970) was an English novelist. Many of his novels examined class differences and hypocrisy, including his most famous novel, ‘A Passage to India’ in 1924. This was set against the backdrop of the British Raj and the Indian independence movement in the 1920s. The Modern Library called it as one of the hundred great works of twentieth century English literature. The novel is based on Forster’s experiences in India; and highlights the common racial tensions and prejudices between Indians and the British.
Ganguly writes that for Ruskin, idols are phantoms of imagination, conjured up in dream states and subsequently carved out of rock by the sculptor, bringing in a reign of image and appearance. Dawning of the knowledge of the true God exorcises these reigns. In his poem ‘Salsette and Elephanta’, Ruskin makes his contempt for idolatry quite clear. Without setting his foot on Indian soil, believing the travel reports of missionaries and soldiers, he describes the architecture of the cave temples of Salsette and Elephanta associated with idolatry, evil, and oppression! The diabolical and the grotesque of Indian architecture gets its stereotyping in Ruskin.
Of course, there is the ‘noble grotesque’ required for a truly art form; in contrast, an ‘ignoble or barbarous grotesque’ is the work of the ‘Hindoo and other Indian nations.’ Gothic art and architecture are a ‘noble grotesque’ for Ruskin, even though many have noted similarities between Gothic and Indian arts, says Ganguly. The arguments to differentiate between the two forms of grotesque are circular, but Ruskin in the end falls back on ‘instinct’. Similarly, in criticism of colour in art, Indian art was ‘colour without form.’ At a higher level was Greek school of art which was ‘light without colour.’ At the highest end of the spectrum was undoubtedly European art which brought the best of all-colour with light/form.
For Ruskin, idolatry is ‘not the mere bowing down before sculptures, but the serving or becoming the slave of images or imaginations which stand between us and God.’ Ironically, his own acts while studying the stones, buildings, and architecture of Venice was equally idolatrous as these animated with real presence for Ruskin, invoking love and faith.
Alice Perrin looked at idolatry as a contagion deeply affecting the rational to slide into the irrational. It contaminates English characters who encounter India. James Mill’s fears about India as an immoral corrupting force find truth in her novel. Idolatry seems to reassert more forcefully, more the attempt to exorcise. These popular fictional narratives of a communicable and contagious aspect of idolatry affecting the cool rational sensibilities of the Englishman became hugely influential in moulding public opinion.
The author sees Forster’s ‘Passage to India’ as a classic text containing tropes and generalisations familiarised and deployed by Orientalism. Indians are emotional and impulsive; Englishmen show controlled, phlegmatic, rational, and calculating behaviours, in conformity with the stereotypes. The lapses in rationality of the Indian mind could be due to the climate too, as one character in the book would claim. Forster’s notion of idolatry mediates the association between caves and evil. As opposed to the ‘high’ ideals of light and spirit, very little light penetrates down the entrance tunnel into the caves. The caves are also associated with carnality.
In another short story, ‘The Life to Come’, Forster describes idolatry as a sign of the perverse and essentially evil, contaminating and corrupting its opponents even in defeat. This story, dealing with erotic subtexts underlying the Christian-pagan encounter in a colonial situation, is a dark and mordant allegory of colonialism as the story, says the author. The idol has a sexual dimension and is related particularly to forms of sexual perversion like homosexuality. Forster himself struggled with his personal homosexual encounters in the court of the Maharaja of Dewas, under whose employment he was.
An art critic who never came to India; a lady intimately associated with India; and an author personally experiencing India; but for all of them, idolatry in India is an important conception to enable the rhetoric of colonial order and look at the ‘low other’ with a combination of disgust and desire. The author brilliantly illuminates the ambivalences in their works. They all start with the assumption that idolatry is an alternative cognitive mode unique to India or the East. Attempts to further define its character gradually leads to generalised questions of imaginative vision and artistic practice. And finally, idolatry becomes an elaboration of the grotesque in the works of all the three.
In the works of these English writers of the colonial period, the ideas of Christian Universalism and colonial contempt for the ruled becomes evident, says Ganguly. Missionaries had a problem with idolatry and called them false gods in their proselytising efforts. Enlightenment values posed a secular garb and called idolatry posited against ‘reason, sense, and logic.’ The arguments against idolatry remained the same but ‘Reason’ took the place of ‘God’. Colonial writers and critics, influential in their own way like the scholars, thus created powerful narratives popularising the conception against idolatry.
THE INDIAN RESPONSE FOR REFORMING HINDUISM- RAMMOHAN ROY, BANKIMCHANDRA CHATTERJEE- HEARTS IN THE RIGHT PLACE
In the colonial reading of Indian society, its social evils were a consequence of idolatrous practices rather than the asymmetries of power. The social remedying would be purging the religious practice of idolatry. Both Müller and Jones agreed to a golden age of pure Hinduism degenerating into the present abominable because of idolatrous practices. Their anxiety was in getting rid of the impure practices to bring it back to the shining past and elevating it to the monotheism of Christianity.
Raja Rammohan Roy and Bankimchandra Chatterjee were two Indian reformers who played an important part in these efforts to cleanse Hinduism and reinforce new ideals of nationalism.
Rammohan Roy (1772-1833) has the status of ‘father of modern India’ for fighting the social evils of that time and against idolatry. Rammohan Roy was a prosperous man with close contacts to the British officials. The utilitarian theories of the west deeply influenced his thinking. Rammohan continued the theme of Jones that the pure Vedic religion with an Upanishidic peak degenerated in present times. The purpose of all reforms would be to clean the religion off all the superstitious elements, so that the ‘pure spirit of it dictates.’
Unfortunately, there were severe problems with his understanding of Hinduism and Advaita in complete discordance with the traditional interpretations of Indian philosophy. He put on western European lenses and pulled down the absolute monism of Advaita to the monotheism of Christianity to confirm to utilitarian principles. He eliminated idolatry in this effort. He believed that this effort elevated Advaita to the Christian philosophy, but the fact was he degenerated Advaita to a different sphere altogether.
Advaita in its basic form accepts everything along the way in terms of space, time, cause, effect, matter, and energy; even idolatry; but they are a superimposition lying at a lower plane of knowledge. Nothing is true; yet everything exists. The higher knowledge is only ‘one Self’, and nothing else. This reading of Advaita is nothing new or contemporary: the traditional commentators, seers, and realized saints for centuries before Rammohan Roy stressed upon this. The need to confirm to western values made Rammohan Roy take a rather ambiguous project to purify Hinduism. However, the immense traditionally steeped land of India generally rejected the Brahmo Samaj; and this was hardly surprising.
He quoted the scriptures in support of his arguments on the one hand; but on the other, Roy rejected the claim of Brahmins that ’the quoting ancestors are positive authorities.’ He linked caprice to Indian idolatry sanctioned by custom and saw in idolatry a principle of social order. He linked debauchery, sensuality, falsehood, ingratitude, breach of trust, and treachery in the Indian society as an outcome of idolatry. This highly confirmed with the prevailing western view. No wonder the British loved and nurtured him. He perhaps had a very deep and genuine love for his nation; but the need to confirm to the ruler’s philosophy and his educational background made him take a stance which exposed his poor understanding of Indian traditions. He opposed the Chaitanya Bhakti movements based on the commentaries of Shankara, ignoring Shankara’s own compositions steeped in great Bhakti.
Rammohan’s enterprise thus has a remarkable resemblance to the Ezourvedam project, says the author. Both projects invent original texts for Hinduism, which propagate an enlightened philosophical monotheism supposedly obscured by later idolatry. He appeared to align with an evangelical Christian perspective, favouring the type of moral subject fostered by Christianity.
But the ambivalences come across when he turned back on a Christian apologist questioning him about idolatry in Hinduism. Rammohan replied, ‘… if he (the Christian) dwell on the corrupt notions introduced into Hindooism in modern times, I shall also remind him of the corruptions introduced by various sects into Christianity… I appeal to History, and call upon the Christian to mention any religion on the face of the earth that has been the cause of so much war and bloodshed, cruelty, and oppression, for so many hundred years as this whose ‘sweet influence’ he celebrates.’ Rammohan’s heart was certainly in the right place, only the lenses were wrong. His rationalist, utilitarian position had fractures and was contradictory- a testimony to the difficulties of the formation of a native colonial subject, the author says.
Bankimchandra Chatterjee (1838-1894) was one of the first graduates of the English education system which wanted to dismantle Indian idolatry in 30 years. He was also the pioneers of the modern Bengali prose, and wrote on a wide variety of topics concerning the society. The author examines deeply his two important works Anandamath and Debi Chaudurani. He championed writing in vernacular Bengali to deanglicise the masses, but could write very well in English when the occasion demanded.
One such occasion was a reply to William Hastie, a missionary and the principal of General Assembly’s institution, who wrote a series of polemical articles for The Statesman attacking ‘Hindu idolatry.’ Hastie wrote that idolatry was the commission of intellectual and moral error; the Hindu variant infinitely worse than the West’s ‘pagan’ traditions. The Hindu thought and idolatry relied on a complete dissociation between reason and the senses, and went on to say that the ‘whole of Brahminic theology never really solved a single problem of human life and thought.’
Bankim gives him a strong reply asserting first the superiority of insider knowledge in understanding the Hindu scriptures and philosophy. He questions Orientalism’s intellectual prerogatives and places an outsider’s view in a less privileged position. He counsels Hastie to approach the Sanskrit scriptures in the original with the help of a Hindu and not rely on translations and commentaries of European scholars. Bankim completely denied the validity of existing European knowledges of India.
Disagreeing with Hastie’s arguments of ‘Krishna stories being the apotheosis of sensual desire and the idolatry of a mere finite life (thus becoming a benchmark of idolatry)’, Bankimchandra posits Hindu ideal as one of art rather than philosophy, where the ideal mediates through a material image. ‘The religious worship of idols is as justifiable as the intellectual worship of Hamlet or Prometheus,’ said Bankim. He relates idolatry to art; the ideal acquires a material embodiment through both art and idolatry, and to deny the legitimacy of idolatry is to deny the legitimacy of representation and projection of artistic images.
Bankim also severely criticised Müller for introducing a lot of ‘isms’ into Hindu religion like ‘Henotheism or Kakenotheism’ when none of them fit at all. He mocked at Müller for not able to comprehend the Hindu principle of immanence of divinity in the material world; and rued, ‘such knowledge is perused, studied, esteemed, and translated in this country is a matter of no small regret.’
It is also interesting to note that Bankimchandra did not believe in the primacy of the Vedas and believed that the whole of Hindu religious philosophy was probably post-Vedic. The Puranas, replete with idolatrous legends, in fact, are a realisation of the Hindu religion with its roots firmly in the Vedas. The Vedas and the Puranas represent the ancient and the modern religions of India respectively.
Interestingly Bankim also claimed that Hindu religion does not exist as such, and it exists only as an Orientalist construction, a position which many contemporary scholars also take up now. Hinduism arose because the foreigners could not different traditions existing in Indian society. Bankim also demonstrated that from a point of view of a Hindu observer in a European country, Christianity would seem idolatrous, polytheistic, and fetishistic too. Similarly, Bankim thought that the association of Hinduism with moral corruption and cruelty was reversible too when he gave examples of the Inquisition and the civil disabilities of Roman Catholics and Jews. They were no different of civil disabilities of the sudras under a Brahmanic regime.
His biggest contribution in the promotion of his arguments is undoubtedly the characterisation of India as a mother Goddess in his novel Anandamath. Bande Mataram, became a clarion call for nationalism and this evoked strongly the image of the country in the form of a mother, fit for worship.
Bankimchandra however had his own contradictions. He did not sustain the position of debunking European intellectual superiority consistently in his writings. Swagato Ganguly shows how Bankimchandra was ambivalent with his ideas of a teleological version of history, involving the explanation of phenomena in terms of the purpose they serve rather than of the cause by which they arise. Hence, for Bankim, the colonial government is a necessary outcome of the march of Reason itself. His novels indicated Bankim’s deep ambivalence towards the British and their supposed historical mission in India, and are testimony to radical self-divisions in the constitution of the colonial subject, says the author.
FINAL THOUGHTS OF THE AUTHOR
The colonials looked at idolatry by an Indian belief in ‘things’ and ‘images’, sometimes extended to a material ‘rituals, ceremonies, and practices’ done in a repetitive manner. This was exactly how early Christianity looked at the Roman pagan rituals in its attempts to subsume or destroy. A hierarchy between ‘idea’ and ‘image’, ‘belief’ and ‘practice’, ‘signified’ and ‘signifier’, ‘ideology’ and ‘idolatry’ could administer a despotic state in India in the name of ‘reason’.
Idolatry was of course a fabrication of the wily Brahmins trying to hold the illiterate masses. This was like the fetishism of Africa. These represent the false objective values of a culture; and thus, naming someone as an idolater is to name an ‘Other’, a worshipper of false gods. Finally, colonial constructions of the fetishism and idolatry were justifications of their slave trades and brutal rules respectively. European accounts of idolatry attempted to set up the Indian society as a scene of the ‘Otherness’ and difference. Bankim shared this sense of difference in the argument that concept of religion was not applicable to Indian society, because paradoxically it was pervading all the society.
From a post-Reformation point of view, idolatrous societies did not confirm to the standards of a proper historical progress towards reason and purity. They were instead subject to the decay and destruction like the lot of the material idol itself. Rammohan Roy fought with European lenses; Bankimchandra with Indian lenses though tinted with European colours. Bankim set up the nation-state as an idol, but in an affirmative manner; but contradictorily, believed in the notion of a European historical progress towards ‘Reason’ for any civilization. The colonials have left, but the author rues that intellectuals with a heavy colonial hangover of ‘reason’ are still legion in independent India.
CONCLUSIONS
This is a highly recommended book; one of the most wonderful in recent times. The book is of immense interest to all students of history as well as to the laypeople. It certainly helps to understand the distortive colonial discourses in negating and rejecting us intellectually and morally, hitting at the very roots of our civilizational existence, even as the economic plunder went full steam.
The efforts of the colonial writers were ambiguous and discursive. It was a case of selective argumentation based on prejudices and cherry-picking of facts to show everything bad about idolatry and India. The missionaries used ‘faith, belief in a true God, and ideas of the false’ in condemning idolatry. The later Orientalists and Indologists used ‘reason’ to posit against idolatry, but the language and vocabulary remained clearly theological. Enlightenment, with clear theological vocabulary, used the same kind of arguments to create religions and the ‘caste system’ in India. This has been shown elegantly by Dr SN Balagangadhara and others in the two books, ‘The Heathen in His Blindness’ and ‘Western Foundations of the Caste System.’
In a lighter vein, I am always wary of card-holding liberals as the author claims himself to be. He is in the editorial staff of Times of India, a paper I agreed with in the past, and only because of RK Laxman’s cartoons. Liberals are lovely guys, but very slippery; and so long as they are using post-colonialism to bash up the English, we can hug them dearly. But one should know when to leave the hug because suddenly they may turn around and use ‘post-modernism’, ‘critical theory’, or some such thing to hit hard and say, ‘Hinduism is good, Hindutva is bad.’ My life’s experience has been to be careful with them and not to hold their hands too long. I do not know Mr. Swagato Ganguly personally, but I am sure he is as brilliant a man as the book he has written, a thorough must for all Indians. The book could have carried some of the traditional arguments against the colonial discourses on idolatry. Maybe, the thoughts of Swami Vivekananda or Sri Ramakrishna Paramhansa may not have been too off in this book as they lived in those times. The traditional experts and scholars rarely spoke in the language of the colonials and hence could never mount a response to their deadly distortions. Perhaps, most remained unbothered, but the effects of the English language are such that modern India takes up only the colonial discourses attacking our scriptures and our customs. This, when we should be talking in the language of the traditional commentators and be outright rejecting the noxious discourses. Sigh! A dream for now.
FIRST PUBLISHED IN INDIAFACTS
RANDOM MUSINGS 