Balagandhara

INDIA AND EUROPE REVISITED: STUDYING THE WEST THROUGH ITS EXPERIENCE OF ASIA

Since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism, many have examined the European descriptions of India as reflections of the power/knowledge nexus in the colonial state. Few, however, have capitalized on Said's insight that whereas the Orientalist discourse appears to be a description of a place in the world (viz. the Orient) it actually is a description of how the West has experienced the Asian cultures. This panel will present a research program which studies the West and its cultural experience by approaching Orientalism as a description of that experience. Since Orientalism developed in continuous interaction with, and as a part of the growth of, the social sciences, both making claims about man and society, the latter cannot possibly be an alternative to Orientalism. Rather, the social sciences reflect the West's experience of itself. To understand the way the western culture has described both itself and others is to begin understanding this culture. The challenge of Orientalism, then, is a challenge to understand the western culture. 2. Taking this heuristic as a starting point, the papers in this panel will look into different aspects of the European understanding of India. Rather than accepting the post-colonial claim that ‘Hinduism', ‘the caste system' or ‘secularism' are colonial constructs in Indian society, they will look at these entities as patterns or structures in the European experience. These experiential structures came into being along with the historical development of Europe. That is, to explain the origin and nature of entities like ‘Hinduism', ‘the caste system' and ‘secularism', one has to examine the historical process which gave shape to the West as a cultural configuration. To do so, a hypothesis is required that not only conceptualizes the characteristic dynamics of this process, but also tells one how the western culture differs from other cultures, such as the Asian. Moreover, such a hypothesis should reveal the link between the dynamics of the western culture and its experience of the Asian cultures. 3. The panel will present one such hypothesis: S. N. Balagangadhara's proposal that the emergence of the western culture is constituted by an internal universalizing dynamic of the Christian religion. According to this hypothesis, the cultural history of Europe does not exhibit emancipation from religion, but rather an internal process of secularization. In this process, the Christian religion expands by discarding some of its doctrinal content while retaining its basic structures in a minimal and variable form. These basic structures constitute and shape the cultural experience of the West. The different papers will assess whether and how this internal dynamic of Christian secularization can account for certain aspects of the European attitude towards Indian culture and society. More specifically, they will look at the question of religious conversion, the debate on Hinduism, the caste system and Aryan invasion, and the history of secularism and religious toleration.

1. Colonial Toleration and the Transformation of the Indian Traditions

A striking feature of early British colonial rule in India was its policy of religious toleration. The practices of Indian society were examined in order to find out whether or not these were sanctioned by the ‘Hindu religion' and its scriptures. If certain practices were found to be "sanctioned by the Shaster," these ought to be tolerated by the colonial state. In the process, the colonials employed the pundits of local courts in order to codify the "Hindoo law." The prevalent explanations of this policy look to the power-knowledge nexus of colonial rule and its need for a precise legal apparatus to gain control of Indian society. These explanations fail on several counts. Firstly, they are ad hoc: they cannot explain as to why the British colonials required a codification of Hindu law, while the Islamic rulers had not. Secondly, they beg the question, since they do not account for the colonial obsession to interpret and endorse the scriptural injunctions of a ‘false and idolatrous' religion. Thirdly, they ignore the many normative justifications of the toleration/codification policy that drew on the religious background of the British. My paper will develop an alternative explanation, which revolves around the cultural framework of the colonial state. From the start, the Europeans had looked for the ancient law giver of the heathen religion of the Indians - the equivalent of Moses for the Jews and Mohammed for the Muslims. This law giver, they assumed, would give them the key to understanding Indian society. According to the Protestant religion, all human souls had access to God's law and lived on earth to obey this law. Nevertheless, the devil and his priests, who imposed their own fabrications as divinely revealed commandments on innocent believers, had corrupted this sense. In order to understand such people and go about with them, one first had to find out what they believed to be the will of God for humanity. Which specific set of laws did the Hindus mistake for God's revelation? The early colonials looked for the answer in the text of Manu, the supposed 'ancient law giver', and in the dharmashastra tradition more generally. Because of this theological background, the colonial policy of religious toleration identified a pattern in the Indian traditions, which was completely alien to the latter. They not only located a ‘Hindu sacred law' in the shastras, but also identified a particular group of scholars, the so-called pundits, as the interpreters of this law. Thus, certain texts and scholars, which had played a different and relatively minor role in the Indian traditions, were turned into the core of the Indian culture and society. Moreover, the toleration policy also compelled the spokesmen of the Indian traditions to adopt this characterization: if they wished to continue their cultural practices, they had to prove that such practices were sanctioned by the Hindu scriptures. As a result, the opposition to colonial rule also gradually accepted the European experience as a true description of the Indian traditions. Today's debates between secularism and Hindutva, my paper will argue, take place within the same framework

2. The Caste System and Aryan Invasion Theory

The controversy about the Aryan Invasion Theory has occupied scholars from several domains over the last few decades. The advocates of this theory claim that a Sanskrit-speaking Aryan people invaded or entered India around 1500 BC and brought along a language, religion and social structure, which they imposed on the indigenous population. The opponents claim that the Aryan people, their language and religion have always been present in India and hence that an invasion could never have happened. When we analyze the arguments from both sides, these sustain only one general conclusion: India has a long history of co-existence and cross-fertilization of different groups of people, cultural traditions, languages, etc. Given the trivial nature of this conclusion, the question becomes: why have so many scholars debated the Aryan Invasion Theory with such passion? To answer this question, my paper looks at how the Aryan Invasion Theory was developed in the nineteenth century. I argue that the theory itself did not emerge from empirical evidence or scientific theorizing about the Indian languages, archaeology or history. Instead this theory developed as an explanation of two entities central to the European experience of India: the caste system and Hinduism as a degeneration of Vedic religion. The Aryan Invasion Theory not only explained how the caste system came into being, it also accounted for the degeneration of the religion of the Vedas and allowed for the classification of its evolution into three main phases: Vedism, Brahmanism and Hinduism. The contemporary debate shows that it remains impossible to defend the occurrence of an Aryan invasion on the basis of the available linguistic, archaeological and other evidence. However, the significance of the Aryan invasion controversy becomes intelligible when one realizes that this theory did not emerge as a description of real historical events. Rather, it is a theory that explained entities which exist only in the European experience of India. As such, if we desire to understand how the ‘Aryan invasion' as well as the ‘caste system', ‘Brahmanism' and other related concepts came into being, we need to study the development of Western culture.

3. The Puzzle of the Indian Religion and its Caste System

A central idea of Indology is that Indian history has gone through a religious evolution during which the Vedic religion degenerated into Brahmanism, which later found its popular translation in what is now considered to be India's main religion, Hinduism. Closely linked to this is another supposedly central aspect of the Indian culture, namely the social structure of the caste system. Looking at the juncture between the descriptions of a degenerated religion and the conceptualization of the caste system in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, I will try to show that these descriptions are descriptions of the Western cultural experience of India rather than of the Indian culture itself. The consensus in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries took the following form: the Indian religion went through a movement of degeneration from Vedism over Brahmanism into Hinduism. The Brahmin priests are supposed to have corrupted the Vedic religion. Traditions such as Buddhism, Jainism, the Bhakti movement, etc., are regarded as catalysts in this development, because they are thought to have threatened the survival of Brahmanical religion. Furthermore, it is presumed that, because of the degeneration, Hinduism is characterised by the absence of a church authority and a common creed. Therefore, it also seems to lack any source of excommunication and means of conversion. This leads to a fundamental puzzle about the existence of the Hindu religion: Can a religion (any religion) exist and be transmitted, if these characteristics are lacking? The literature notices the difficulty, but translates the puzzle into the following question: ‘if the absence of these characteristics jeopardizes the existence, survival and propagation of the Hindu religion, what else made its stubborn persistence possible?' The textbook answer to this question revolves around the Brahman priests and their caste system: it is said that the Brahmans recognized this challenge to their priestly hegemony and to the survival of their religion and cunningly developed the caste system as a means to sustain their religious authority. In order to understand why the puzzle is not taken seriously and dissolves into another question, we need to understand the background of the culture that has produced these accounts. My paper will briefly show how the central ideas in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century accounts about idolatry and false religion, about different traditions as rival and competing religions, about the corrupting influence of the priesthood and its oppression of the masses, had their roots in the Christian theological debates of Europe. Finally, I will indicate how these theological views have spread in a de-Christianized form.

4. The Colonial Project in India: Creating the Conditions of Conversion

Except for a brief period between 1813 and 1857, colonial authorities in India generally opposed missionary activity. In 1858, the Queen ordered her representatives in India to "abstain from all interference with the religious belief, or worship, of any of our subjects on pain of our severest displeasure." Many lamented the paradox of a Christian nation supporting idolatry. Indeed, a peculiar situation emerged: genuine Protestants who were convinced that theirs was the true religion and that all should convert to God's Will nevertheless opposed evangelization. Moreover, the very same groups engaged in a civilizing mission which aimed to make India into the mirror image of the Christian West. Given this aim, why not simply evangelize India? How to make sense of this stance? 2. My paper will present this hypothesis: the educational project of the British sought gradually to create the conditions for conversion to the true religion. They desired a patient and silent transformation of Indian society: (a) the natives would become aware that their ‘idolatrous' traditions could not possibly represent God's Will and (b) they would recognize the call of the Holy Spirit. This intensifies the problem: How could these colonials be against active conversion in order to promote the conversion of Hindus? I will argue that we have to examine the internal Christian process of conversion to make sense of this puzzle. ‘Conversio' is originally an internal theological process which transforms the believer into a real member of the Christian community. It is a process with specific characteristics: it can never be fully realized in this human life; it is the only route to real happiness and towards becoming a moral human being; only God can complete the conversion of a human soul; etc. This Christian process underwent an important shift during the Reformation period: from a process restricted to the clergy it became the norm for all human beings. So, gradually, the internal theological process assumed another form-more accessible-as it became the standard for all humans. In this form, it became central to the western cultural experience. 3. Finally, my paper will show how the nature of this process of conversion can help us explain the educational project of British colonialism in India. The British Protestants saw conversion as the work of God, in which human beings can maximally guide unbelievers to the stage where they are able to respond to God's call. This, I will argue, expresses the dynamic through which the Christian religion spreads itself: it cannot do so through evangelization alone, because its message is unintelligible to non-Christians. Therefore, a dynamic of secularization emerges in which this religion gradually transforms a society by dispersing secularized Christian frameworks and thus creating a fertile soil for conversion. The colonial project in India embodied this dynamic.