Postcolonial Theories and the Study of Modern Hinduism
Victor van Bijlert, Faculty of Theology, VU University Amsterdam
History Dept. Calcutta University, 20 August 2013
I would first like to thank this eminent institution and the head of the Dept. prof. Rachana Chakraborty for giving me the opportunity to speak before you. In this lecture I will discuss a few highlights of postcolonial theory and show how these theories are applied to the study of modern Hinduism. I am aware that all three namely: postcolonial theory, modernity and Hinduism,are hotly contested and fiercely debated issues with wide political ramifications. To bring these three together here is perhaps foolish, but let me forge ahead anyway.
Postcolonial theory, Edward Said
It is generally accepted that postcolonial theory was initiated by the Palestinian American professor of English literature, Edward Said (1935-2003). He had taken the Western academic world by storm with his bestseller Orientalism published in 1978. In this book Said argued that Western knowledge and scholarship on the Islamic culture of the Middle East was misleading and negatively biased. According to Said, Western scholars studying the East were driven by a hidden agenda to present Oriental culture as inferior to the West. Because of this perceived inferiority of the Islamic Middle East, it behoved the West to dominate and control it. Said argued that over the centuries most Western portrayals and scholarship regarding the Orient had served the sole purpose of showing the Orient in a negative light and furnishing reasons for dominating and colonizing it. Not only was the Orient inferior to the West, it was incurably so. From the days of the crusades in the middle ages to the present-day deliberations of the Pentagon and the White House, one single fact remains unchallenged: the Orient is dangerous, inferior and must be subjected to Western influence. Thus Said’s argument.
He tried to prove this point by adducing a wealth of quotations and references to Western cultural products that depict the Orient: whether in paintings, or in literary texts, in travelogues or in scholarly works, the underlying Western notion of the inferior Orient remains a constant factor. Hence Said termed this Western negative perception Orientalism.
To build his arguments Said makes use of two fashionable Western academic notions: postmodernism and the method of intellectual archaeology devised by the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984).
The postmodern element in his argument questions the universal validity of grand narratives that were supposed to explain the history of the whole worldwhile encouraging universal social emancipation. These grand narratives allegedly derived from the Western Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. They are presently known as Liberalism, Democracy, Marxism, Socialism, Secularism, etc. These are modern grand narratives. When their universality and global applicability are seriously questioned, we enter the intellectual realm of the postmodern, the sphere in which we must doubt universalism and rationalism. Said used this postmodern critique of grand narratives to show how Western scholars writing on the Orient were themselves inspired by the idea that their biased knowledge had universal applicability. In other words: what those scholars produced was not universal true knowledge but politically motivated propaganda posing as scientific knowledge of the Orient.
The second element in Said’s critique is the archaeological method of Foucault. Foucault also questioned received knowledge. In order to understand where present-day Western institutions of power and control originated from, Foucault read their history as it were chronologically backwards. Thus he could come up with some startling discoveries about modern control systems such as psychiatric institutions, the modern prison system and what he called the ‘technologies of the self’. The latter has to do with the ways in which we have become what we are nowadays,by disciplining ourselves and others. Again the main issue is control and what Foucault called ‘governmentality’. Said applied this archaeological method to Western scholarship on the Orient and discovered the often hidden intentions of control and domination underlying the scientific knowledge-production regarding the Orient.
Postcolonial theory after Said
Said’s influence reached far and wide. His postcolonial critique not only fundamentally altered the way we look at literature and cultural history. It also significantly changed the way many conduct research in fields like history, sociology, anthropology and lately also the academic study of religions. Said’s critique mainly addressed scholarship on the Islamic Middle East. Others applied his method to the study of Indian culture and history. After all, India had also been colonized by the West and Western Orientalist scholarship was not limited to the Arabic world. It included the study of Hinduism and Buddhism and the related languages such as Sanskrit, Pali, Prakrit and the modern Indian vernaculars.An important segment of Orientalist scholarship had started in the late eighteenth century right here in Calcutta with scholars like sir William Jones, and a host of others. The main object of this Orientalism was India.
It was the Chicago-based Indologist Ronald Inden who first applied Said’s critique to Western orientalist scholarship on India.Imagining India published in 1990 contains Inden’s assessment of orientalism regarding India. Inden’s postcolonial critique, interestingly, more or less coincided with the rise to prominence of the Subaltern Studies method invented by Ranajit Guha and further developed by his followers such as Partha Chatterjee and Dipesh Chakrabarty.
From the late 1990s onwards there seems to have occurred a sort of convergence of postcolonial theory and Subaltern Studies. The essence of this composite postcolonial approach consists in questioning the received academic knowledge about Indian culture. In most cases there is a lingering inspiration from Marxism, especially as an ideology of emancipation for the underclasses. The cultural political agenda of postcolonial theory also still retains rudiments of emancipatory intentions. This emancipatory motivation now demands the decolonisationof the academic mind and decolonising the academic knowledge-production on India. This decolonisation process involves a deep analysis of earlier Western academic knowledge production and the ways in which this was informed by a Western desire to control and dominate the East.
The study of Hinduism
This rather lengthy introduction enables us to appreciate better the highly contentious matter of modern Hinduism and its academic study. This contentiousness has obvious political causes into which I am not going. But even in the strictly academic domain there is fierce controversy over almost any term and concept used in connection with Hinduism. The term itself is heavily contested and often it is said that Hinduism is of recent origin. As we are dealing with modern Hinduism, this does not really matter for modern Hinduism is of course of recent origin. The other terms and concepts that are subjected to much debate are: ‘religion’, ‘modernity’ and the concept of ‘scripture’. I leave out discussions of concepts such as caste, class, untouchability, Brahmin, pollution, ritual, worship, etc. but I can assure you that they are also fiercely debated and deconstructed. Iwill limit myself to religion, and modern Hinduism. Note that in my view the latter represents a single concept. Moreover, I will treat modern Hinduism as an ideology of modernity, not as a set of local practices, rituals,and institutions.
S.N.Balagangadhara
What has postcolonial theory so far contributed to the academic study of modern Hinduism? Not the first but the most well-known postcolonial critic of the Western study of Hinduism to date is the Belgian-Indian social scientist S.N. Balagangadhara. In his study The Heathen in his Blindness published in 1994, Balagangadhara argues as follows. In contemporary scholarly and popular parlance we speak of Hinduism as a religion. But the concept of religion and the term itself derive from Christian theology. Thus religion is not a category of the social sciences but of theology. As religion is the ideal-typical self-designation of Christianity alone, the term cannot meaningfully describe phenomena that are not Christian.
According to Balagangadhara religion in its genuine Christian meaning constitutes an ‘explanatory intelligible account of both the cosmos and itself’ (Bloch 2010:144). Thus religion explains the cosmos meaningfully and explains its own role in the cosmos. And this is eminently Christian, for the explanatory account of the cosmos is found in the first book of the Bible and the essence of religion, namely that Christ has died for men’s sins and that Christ redeems humans through faith, forms an integral part of the self-explanation of the Christian religion.
Now, still according to Balagangadhara, this double notion of religion was inherited by European travellers and missionaries to India. They projected their inherited notion onto what they observed in India and thus came up with the idea that India had a religion as well, namely Hinduism. Of course it was a false religion, with false gods, cunning priests and false scriptures, but a religion nonetheless. Colonialism’s power from the late eighteenth century onwards solidified this projection, amounting to a Christian distortion of Hinduism.And this distortion lasts until today, because we still use the term Hinduism and religion. But, according to Balagangadhara, there is no religion called Hinduism. There are many Hindu traditions but they do not in truth resemble what Christians thought religion ought to be.Thus Balagangadhara’s postcolonial project consists in a thorough deconstruction of Western terms and concepts and in decolonising the mind from Christian influences.
Other postcolonial scholars on Hinduism
Among scholars working on Hinduism, Balagangadhara found many takers of his critique. Thus Richard King believes that colonialism still exerts a tremendous epistemological power over our academic concepts, and that most scholarship on Hinduism remains bound by Eurocentrism (cf Bloch 2010:95). King even speaks of the ‘cultural imperialism of Christianity’, which, he claims, operates largely invisibly (cf Bloch 2010:99-100). Like Balagangadhara King stresses that Hinduism understood as a single bounded religion is a Christian framing of the Hindu reality. A scholar on Hinduism like Timothy Fitzgerald even goes so far as to say that ‘religion is an act of the imagination which we are persuaded to believe in by the rhetoric of academics, politicians, media people, and by general discourse’ (Bloch 2010:115). The Indian theorist Sharada Sugirtharajah makes the point that because in the nineteenth century native pandits together with European orientalists produced many printed editions of Sanskrit texts, the notion came up that Hinduism was based on ancient Sanskrit texts, and that these were the Hindu scriptures. This is actually an adaptation from the Christian idea that Christianity is founded or ought to be founded on the scripture called the Bible.This brings me close to my own observations on modern Hinduism.
Answering Balagangadhara and others
Let me first discuss the arguments put forward by Balagangadhara, King, Fitzgerald and Sugirtharajah. Balagangadhara’s argument to the effect that our concept of religion is Christian in origin seems compelling. According to Balagangadhara’s own description,religion is an explanatory intelligible account of the cosmos and of itself. He refers to the Biblical creation story and the redemption of Christ to support this definition. Thus it should cover only Christianity and only be meaningful in regard to Christianity. The question arises: is there nothing similar in Hinduism? I do not need to refer to the many creation stories in the Vedas, Brahmanas, Upanishads or Puranas. We could simply point to the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu text of wide renown (even if it does not represent the Hindu counterpart to the Christian Bible). In the Bhagavad Gita the main speaker, Krishna, declares himself to be the father of the universe (Gita 7:4-14; 9:17; 10:33d). Furthermore, Krishna repeatedly stresses that the ultimate goal of religion is surrendering to him as the supreme Deity of the cosmos (Gita 6:47; 9:33cd-34; 12:2; 18:65-66). This alone should suffice to question Balagangadhara’s claim that his characterisation can only meaningfully describe Christianity and that Hinduism is not a religion. In the Gita we have something akin to religion as understood by Christians.
Balagangadhara’s claim that Europeans projected their Christian bias onto Hindu traditions and interpreted the latter as an imperfect or fake version of the Christian religion has perhaps more merit. It is an observable fact that many local forms of Hinduism can do very well without Sanskrit texts. It is also an observable fact that average Hindus seldom study scriptures. Thus the everyday practice of Hinduism seems to have little in common with Christianity. But the example of the Bhagavad Gita alone could show that there is at least a cult around the Supreme God Krishna that does resemble in many ways what European observers would be perfectly justified in calling a religion. The same is true regarding the cult around the great Goddess, whose main scripture is the Devimahatmya.
Balagangadhara’s argument of Christian projection could perhaps be taken together with Sugirtharajah’s proposition about turning Hinduism into a religion of the book. In the early nineteenth century this process did indeed take place. Both indigenous Sanskrit experts and European orientalists were engaged in this activity.For example the German Indologist Max Müller edited the Rig Veda in the belief that he was restoring to Hindus their original Bible. This tendency to regard such texts as the scriptural foundations of Hinduism owes a lot to the Christian assumption that a real religion worth the name needs a holy book and should be monotheistic.
Moreover, the introduction of the printing press in Bengal and the rest of India facilitated the reproduction of sacred Hindu texts.Growing literacy helped creating an ever expanding market for printed texts. One could point to Protestant Christianity in the 16th century whose spread was also facilitated by the printing press and increasing demand for printed books due to growing literacy.
In this way we have also answered Richard King’s argument that Christianity framed Hinduism. It did happen. Fitzgerald’s claim that we are persuaded by powerful media to believe in the existence of religion, can be answered as follows. How is it possible that Hindus can recognise Hinduism as a religion? Is this all due to Western colonial scheming and the power of mass media and Western Indological scholars? Without more evidence, which Fitzgerald does not provide, these opinions can be treated as mere hypotheses.
Rammohun Roy and Modern Hinduism
Modern Hinduism began to take shape in the early nineteenth. There is little doubt that Western orientalists working at Fort William College and the Asiatic Society expedited the rise of modern Hinduism when they began publishing texts in Indian languages. Yet Western orientalists did not consciously promote or create modern Hinduism. After all, what would be their interest in this?Most of them adhered to some form of Christianity, mostly Calvinist Protestantism. By all accounts it was the Raja Rammohun Roy who initiated modern Hinduism.He drew the outlines of what we could designate as Hindu modernity.He framed the ideology of Hindu modernity.
Ethos of modernity
In using the term ethos of modernity we should briefly indicate what this concept entails. Modernity here refers to a mental makeup.It does not refer to the physical infrastructures such as educational institutions, capitalist economy, and the political institutions of the nation-state.The ethos of modernity in the Weberian sense designates an ethicwhich inducespeople to wish to create such institutions.We should take modernity here in the sense of a global motivational ideology, a set of moral values that are supposed to be universally applicable.
As I mentioned before in the discussion of postmodernism, it is precisely this universality that postmodern and postcolonial theorists question. They claim that this questionable universality is the product of European late seventeenth and eighteenth century Enlightenment philosophy. Thus modernity itselfis not universal but provincially European. And it is imposed on the rest of the world by European-American colonial and neo-colonial intellectual influence.However, as we will see in the discussion on Rammohun Roy, the proposition that modernity is purely European or Eurocentric needsserious qualification.
What is supposedly the motivational ethic of modernity? The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor devoted a 600 page monograph to this question, entitled Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity(1989). Taylor associates modern identity with ‘universal, natural, human rights’, respect for human life and the notion of individual autonomy(cf Taylor 1989:12). Universal respect for all humans prompts action to reduce to a minimum human suffering or to make sure that human suffering can be avoided. This he calls a characteristic of ‘higher civilisations’(op.cit:12).