(Routledge South Asian Religion Series, 4) Esther Bloch_ Marianne Keppens_ Rajaram Hegde-Rethinking...

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RETHINKING RELIGION IN INDIA

This book critically assesses recent debates about the colonial constructionof Hinduism. Increasingly scholars have come to realise that the dominantunderstanding of Indian culture and its traditions is unsatisfactory. Accord-ing to the classical paradigm, Hindu traditions are conceptualized as featuresof a religion with distinct beliefs, doctrines, sacred laws and holy texts.Today, however, many academics consider this conception to be a colonialconstruction. This book focuses on the dierent versions, arguments andcounter-arguments of the thesis that the Hindu religion is a construct ofcolonialism. Bringing together the dierent positions in the debate, it pro-vides necessary historical data, arguments and conceptual tools to examinethe argument.

Organized in two parts, the rst half of the book provides new analyses ofhistorical and empirical data; the second presents some of the theoreticalquestions that have emerged from the debate on the construction of Hinduism.Where some of the contributors argue that Hinduism was created as a resultof a western Christian notion of religion and the imperatives of British colo-nialism, others show that this religion already existed in pre-colonial India;and as an alternative to these standpoints, other writers argue that Hinduismonly exists in the European experience and does not correspond to any empir-ical reality in India. This volume oers new insights into the nature of theconstruction of religion in India and will be of interest to scholars of theHistory of Religion, Asian Religion, Postcolonial and South Asian Studies.

Esther Bloch and Marianne Keppens are Doctoral Researchers at theResearch Centre Vergelijkende Cultuurwetenschap, Ghent University,Belgium. Rajaram Hegde is Professor in History and Archaeology atKuvempu University, Karnataka, India. He is also the Director of the Centrefor the Study of Local Cultures a research collaboration between GhentUniversity and Kuvempu University.

ROUTLEDGE SOUTH ASIANRELIGION SERIES

1. HINDU SELVES IN A MODERN WORLDGuru faith in the Mata Amritanandamayi Mission

Maya Warrier

2. PARSIS IN INDIA AND THE DIASPORAEdited by John R. Hinnells and Alan Williams

3. SOUTH ASIAN RELIGIONS ON DISPLAYReligious processions in South Asia and in the Diaspora

Edited by Knut A. Jacobsen

4. RETHINKING RELIGION IN INDIAThe colonial construction of Hinduism

Edited by Esther Bloch, Marianne Keppens and Rajaram Hegde

RETHINKINGRELIGION IN INDIA

The colonial construction of Hinduism

Edited by Esther Bloch,Marianne Keppens and

Rajaram Hegde

First published 2010

by Routledge2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canadaby Routledge

270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, aninforma business

2010 Esther Bloch, Marianne Keppens and Rajaram Hegdefor selection and editorial matter; individual contributors

their contribution

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted orreproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter

invented, including photocopying and recording, or in anyinformation storage or retrieval system, without permission in

writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication DataRethinking religion in India : the colonial construction of Hinduism /

edited by Esther Bloch, Marianne Keppens, and Rajaram Hegde.p. cm. (Routledge South Asian religion series)Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. HinduismHistoriography. 2. HinduismHistory18th century.3. HinduismHistory19th century. 4. IndiaCivilization18thcentury. 5. IndiaCivilization19th century. I. Bloch, Esther.

II. Keppens, Marianne. III. Hegde, Rajaram.

BL1151.5.R48 2010294.509034dc22

2009025369

ISBN10: 041554890X (hbk)ISBN10: 0203862899 (ebk)

ISBN13: 9780415548908 (hbk)ISBN13: 9780203862896 (ebk)

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009.

To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledgescollection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.

ISBN 0-203-86289-9 Master e-book ISBN

The Trustees of the Bhagat Family Trust, which kindly sponsored a part ofthe rst conference Rethinking Religion in India, would like to acknowledgetheir parents and mentors, Harish and Suraj Bhagat and Manghan andSheela Manwani.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ixNotes on the contributors xiPreface xiii

Introduction: rethinking religion in India 1MARIANNE KEPPENS AND ESTHER BLOCH

PART IHistorical and empirical arguments 23

1 Hindus and others 25DAVID N. LORENZEN

2 Hindu religious identity with special reference tothe origin and signicance of the termHinduism, c. 17871947 41GEOFFREY A. ODDIE

3 Representing religion in colonial India 56JOHN ZAVOS

4 Colonialism and religion 69SHARADA SUGIRTHARAJAH

5 Women, the freedom movement, and Sanskrit:notes on religion and colonialism from theethnographic present 79LAURIE L. PATTON

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PART IITheoretical reections 93

6 Colonialism, Hinduism and the discourse of religion 95RICHARD KING

7 Who invented Hinduism? Rethinking religion in India 114TIMOTHY FITZGERALD

8 Orientalism, postcolonialism and the constructionof religion 135S.N. BALAGANGADHARA

9 The colonial construction of what? 164JAKOB DE ROOVER AND SARAH CLAERHOUT

Index 185

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The contributions in this volume were inspired by an intellectual gathering inNew Delhi in January 2008, at the inaugural conference of the ve-yearconference cluster Rethinking Religion in India. This meeting of mindswould not have been possible, if not for the generous support of the BhagatFamily Trust, and the municent help of Dr. Purushottama Bilimale, DineshShenoy and Gurudath Baliga.

The contributors to this volume sat together in Platform and Roundtablesessions for sustained discussions, sharing their dierent visions, at timesinvolved in passionate disagreements, at times enthusiastically agreeing.The fertile soil of the contributions together with the glasshouse eect ofthe heated discussions brought forth unforeseen and fruitful ideas, eventu-ally crystallizing into the chapters of this volume. Footage of the talksand discussions that took place during the conference can be watchedon www.youtube.com/cultuurwetenschap, a video project that would nothave been possible without the hard work of two people, Rana Ghose andRaf Gelders.

We would like to thank the contributors for their timely and insightfulcontributions. We are also deeply indebted to the unremitting support andhelp, and the constructive suggestions and comments of the Ghent group the members of the Research Centre Vergelijkende Cultuurwetenschap ofGhent University (Belgium) namely S.N. Balagangadhara, Sarah Claerhout,Nele De Gersem, Jakob De Roover, Raf Gelders, Alexander Naessens, andSarika Rao as well as of the Kuvempu team the members of the Centrefor the Study of Local Cultures of Kuvempu University (Karnataka, India) namely J.S. Sadananda, Shilpa Achari, Dunkin Jalki, Kavitha P.N.,Mahesh Kumar C.S., Santhosh Kumar P.K., Vani Palve, Praveen T.L., andShankarappa N.S. We would also like to thank Routledge for their assist-ance, and especially Dorothea Schaefter for her continued interest in andfollowing up on the research and projects of the latter groups.

The editors and the publisher would like to thank the following for permis-sion to reprint the following material in Rethinking Religion in India:

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Oxford University Press for permission to reprint excerpts in Chapter 5:Laurie L. Patton, Women, the Freedom Movement, and Sanskrit: Notes onReligion and Colonialism from the Ethnographic Present, from an articleoriginally published as Cat in the courtyard: the performance of Sanskritand the religious experience of women in T. Pintchman (ed.) Womens Lives,Womens Rituals in the Hindu Tradition, 2007, Oxford and New York: OxfordUniversity Press (parts of pp. 126129; 131; 135138), www.oup.co.uk.

Interventions for permission to reprint excerpts in Chapter 8: S.N. Balagan-gadhara, Orientalism, Postcolonialism and the Construction of Religionfrom an article previously published in Balagangadhara, S.N. and Keppens,M. (2009) Reconceptualizing the postcolonial project: beyond the strict-ures and structures of Orientalism, Interventions, 11: 5068, http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/routledge.

S.N. Balagangadhara for permission to reprint excerpts from Balagangad-hara, S.N. (1994; 2nd edn 2005) The Heathen in his Blindness . . .: Asia,the West, and the dynamic of religion, New Delhi: Manohar, pp. 231247, 2005 S.N. Balagangadhara.

AC K N O W L E D G E M E N T S

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CONTRIBUTORS

S.N. Balagangadhara (a.k.a. Balu) is Professor in Comparative Science ofCultures and Director of the Research Centre Vergelijkende Cultuur-wetenschap, Ghent University, Belgium. In recent work, he analyses thedominant accounts of India as descriptions of the western culturalexperience.

Esther Bloch is Doctoral Researcher at the Research Centre VergelijkendeCultuurwetenschap, Ghent University, Belgium. Her research focuses onthe contemporary European experience and images of India.

Sarah Claerhout is Teaching and Research Assistant at the ResearchCentre Vergelijkende Cultuurwetenschap, Ghent University, Belgium. Herresearch concerns religious conversion and the conversion debates in India.

Jakob De Roover is Post-Doctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation (FWO)Flanders at the Research Centre Vergelijkende Cultuurwetenschap, GhentUniversity, Belgium. His research concerns the cultural history oftoleration and secularism in the West and the impact of western politicalthought on colonial and post-colonial India.

Timothy Fitzgerald is Reader in Religion at the School of Languages, Cul-tures and Religions, , Scotland. He has publishedimportant works that question the legitimacy of the category of religionand the use of other concepts like politics, the secular, the sacred andthe profane in the academic study of other cultures.

Marianne Keppens is Doctoral Researcher at the Research Centre Vergelij-kende Cultuurwetenschap, Ghent University, Belgium. Her researchfocuses on the European experience and images of India and moreparticularly in the debate on the Aryan Invasion theory.

Richard King is Professor of Religious Studies and Professor of Religion andCulture in the Divinity School, Vanderbilt University, USA. He works onHindu and Buddhist philosophical traditions, comparative mysticism,theory and method in the study of religion and postcolonial approaches to

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the study of South Asian traditions and has published a number ofimportant essays on the colonial construction of religion in India.

David N. Lorenzen is Professor at the Centre of Asian and AfricanStudies, El Colegio de Mexico, Mexico. He has published widely on theBhakti traditions of India and is well-known for his stance against theconstructionist argument in the contemporary study of Hinduism.

Georey A. Oddie, an Honorary Research Associate in History at the Uni-versity of Sydney, Australia, has published a series of important works onChristian missions, missionary perceptions of Hinduism, conversion andpopular religion in India during the colonial period.

Laurie L. Patton is Charles Howard Candler Professor and Professorof Early Indian Religions at the Department of Religion at Emory Uni-versity, Georgia, USA. Her interests are in the interpretation of earlyIndian ritual and narrative, Hinduism and gender, comparative mythology,and religion and literature.

Sharada Sugirtharajah is Senior Lecturer in Hindu Studies in the School ofPhilosophy, Theology and Religion at the University of Birmingham, UK.Her research interests include the representations of Hinduism in thecolonial and contemporary periods, women and spirituality, and inter-religious relations.

John Zavos is Lecturer in South Asian Studies in the School of Arts, Historiesand Cultures at the University of Manchester, UK. His areas of interestare religion, politics and identity formation in South Asia and the SouthAsian Diaspora.

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PREFACE

A major inspiration behind this book was the rst edition of the RethinkingReligion in India conference cluster, which took place in New Delhi in January2008. This ve-year cluster was organized by three partners: the ResearchCentre Vergelijkende Cultuurwetenschap, Ghent University, in Belgium, andthe Centre for the Study of Local Cultures, Kuvempu University, andthe Academy of Social Sciences and Humanities in India. RethinkingReligion in India aims at re-conceptualizing the study of the Indian cultureand its traditions and at developing an alternative approach to the dominantframework of religious studies. While the present volume is an independentcollection of essays, it shares the aim of making the reader aware of theimportance and urgency of the task of re-conceptualizing religion in India.

It is becoming increasingly clear today that the term religion and its cog-nates like worship, secularism or religious freedom fail to make senseto Indian minds. Naturally, we have centuries of scholarship talking aboutreligions like Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism. Both our schooltextbooks and scholarly treatises in history, politics and sociology insist onthe existence of such religions in India. To a large extent, the requiredvocabulary has been translated into Indian languages and is now available tothe average Indian. For example, religion is translated as dharma and weare taught in school about how Hindu dharma and Bauddha dharma exist inIndia along with Islam dharma and Christian dharma. Our educational andbureaucratic systems impress on Indian citizens that they belong to onereligion or the other. However, in spite of all such eorts, many Indians seemto be unable to understand this conceptual vocabulary.

Let me illustrate this point with an anecdote from my own experience asan Indian. Whenever I used to read in newspapers about religion, secular-ism, religious tolerance or the call for Hindu unity, I felt as thoughI understood the meaning of these terms. When I pursued higher studies andresearch in this eld, I thought that I had a perfect understanding of thedebates on secularism or the theories on Hinduism and the caste system,because the entire vocabulary was translated into sets of native terms famil-iar to me. In my everyday life, I had heard words like dharma, mata, jati

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and was familiar with the things these words referred to. Hence, I alsothought I had made proper sense of terms like Hindu dharma or Hinduismand the caste system. I considered them to be descriptions and explanationsat a meta-level, which we Indians are not aware of. During my research, I wasalso introduced to the unresolved debate on the inadequacy of such transla-tions of words and applications of concepts, especially after the postcolonialstudies started to percolate into the native languages. However, these argu-ments complicated my understanding and left a feeling of discontent in me.

At this juncture, I was exposed to S.N. Balagangadharas work in thiseld. I gradually started to realize that I could neither fully understand norparticipate in the debates and theory building on religion and secularism,because they were completely unrelated to my lived experience. I had neverseen a phenomenon like Hinduism, the religion to which I was supposed tobelong. No one in my family or the traditional society in which I grew uphad instructed me about any such thing called Hindu dharma and its char-acteristic features. It was only through my school education that I learnedabout this Hinduism, which is supposed to consist of religious scripturescalled the Vedas and the Bhagavad-Gita, beliefs about reincarnation, socialdivisions called the four varnas and things like ashramas.

Sharing my experience with friends, colleagues and acquaintances, I dis-covered that they too, without exception, had similar experiences. At theCentre for the Study of Local Cultures at Kuvempu University, we con-ducted a eld study, which conrmed that even the college-educated inKarnataka fail to gure out what this Hindu dharma is, once they forget theirtextbook lessons in the process of living in the actual Indian society. Thoughthey know the term dharma, they never use it in the sense of religion.Dharma is something like duty, good deeds and meritorious acts of humanbeings, to which gods are largely irrelevant. They nd the term Hindu verypeculiar. Those who happen to remember this term do not know its precisemeaning or implications. They say that they learned about things like Hindudharma, the four varnas, the four Vedas etc. in school. They still rememberthese terms, they add, because of seeing them repeated in newspapers andhearing them used by politicians and social activists.

Fascinatingly, these facts are not at all startling to social scientists broughtup in this society. Some of them even asked us what the point was of con-ducting eld research only to come to know such trivial and obvious facts.These social scientists gave us a variety of explanations for this state ofaairs. They said one cannot rely upon the answers of the ignorant to provethat Hindu dharma does not exist. They added that this only reected thepathetic status of Hinduism today and that this ignorance had been causedby the Brahmanical priesthood, who had kept lay people ignorant abouttheir own religion. How could a society ever exist without religion, theyasked, and what would explain Hindu fundamentalism, communal strifeand the attacks on churches and mosques in India, if it were not for Hindu

P R E FAC E

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religion? The fact that many of the supposed Hindus did not have a clue aboutthis Hindu religion was explained away, instead of being taken seriously asa fundamental aspect of Indian experience.

This anecdote raises certain basic questions: If the common experienceof Indians does not know of any such thing as Hinduism, what are thesereligions that we have been trying to investigate for all these years? Why is itthat social science research brushes aside this experience, as though it iswithout value or importance? Why is it that these peculiar concepts andvocabulary are being forced upon us as truths about our society that we allhave to accept? What is the nature of this religion that we see and judge inthe name of secularism or Hindu nationalism? In other words, the situationcalls for a fundamental reformulation of the questions and reorientation ofthe research programme of religious studies, if this eld of study is to haveany future in India.

By bringing together several major contributors to the debate on the con-struction of Hinduism and some new theoretical and historical reections,this collection will introduce the reader to the basic problems of discussingreligion in contemporary India. Even though the book is but an initialstep towards rethinking religion in India, its purpose will be served if thereader begins to appreciate the true dimension of this task. With moreprojects such as this one, the study of religion and culture should take oat Indian universities in a much more serious fashion than has so far beenthe case.

Rajaram HegdeShankaraghatta, India, June 2009

P R E FAC E

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INTRODUCTION

Rethinking religion in India

Marianne Keppens and Esther Bloch

Rethinking religion in India: a larger project

Today, many scholars argue that the theoretical framework of religious stud-ies is inadequate for the Indian context. Some go as far as to argue that theuse of the concept religion only makes sense within a western, basicallyChristian, framework. This conceptual inadequacy is illustrated by the stateof religious studies in the Indian universities as well as by Indian academicdebates on religion. First, the academic study of religion has never reallytaken o in India. Very few departments and programmes on religion exist atIndian universities. The existing departments and programmes often focuson questions that are irrelevant to Indian society today. Second, the absenceof serious academic study of religion and tradition in India has produced avacuum, which has allowed a political and ideological struggle to dominatethe universities. Two opposing political positions, secularism and Hindutva,have hijacked reection on the nature of Indian culture. This makes itincreasingly dicult to hold an academic debate on these issues on cognitivegrounds. Textbooks are written to represent one of the two positions; socialscience research aims to conrm the views of one of the two camps; academ-ics are appointed as partisans. This shows that the need to rethink religion inIndia and to develop an alternative theoretical framework for the study ofreligion and traditions in India has become acute today.

Moreover, if the very characterization of Indian traditions as religionis problematic, we will need to rethink our current understanding of manyproblems in contemporary India that are generally related to religion.Amongst the most pressing of these problems are the clash over religiousconversion and the growing communal conicts in contemporary India(e.g. Balagangadhara and De Roover 2007; Claerhout and De Roover 2005).

The colonial construction of Hinduism

The issue of the colonial construction of Hinduism plays an important rolein this larger debate on the adequacy of the theoretical framework of

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religious studies. It raises fundamental questions such as: Is the concept ofreligion western? Do we need to develop an alternative concept of religionthat allows us to also include non-western traditions? Do Indian traditionslike Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism form a dierent kind of religion? Dosuch Indian religions exist at all? Did a new religion, namely Hinduism,come into being during the colonial era? How could this happen?

Before we can get a better understanding of issues like the controversyover conversion in India, HinduMuslim conicts or other problems relatedto religion, we rst need to acquire clarity on these questions. That is, unlesswe get a grip on the nature and problems of the current theoretical frame-work, we cannot even begin to develop an alternative framework to makesense of the pressing problems India is facing today.

Nevertheless, the number of books and articles that has appeared on theconstruction of Hinduism is not proportionate to the importance of theissue. Moreover, the discussion has not had much impact on the study ofIndia in general. Even though postcolonial thinkers argue that Hinduism is aconstruction, this has not been taken seriously by most Indologists andscholars of religion who continue to study Hinduism as the ancient religionof India. Neither has it become clear how, if Hinduism is a construction, weshould study problems in Indian society which are taken to be related toreligion. Thus, if we want to take further steps in the development of analternative theoretical framework for the study of religion and tradition inIndia, we need to clearly understand what it means to say that Hinduism is aconstruct and what the implications of this claim are.

This volume brings together some of the most important voices in thedebate on the construction of Hinduism. The main objective of the volumeis to provide the reader with the required historical data, arguments andconceptual tools to come to a well-grounded position on its central ques-tions. The volume also engages with new theoretical questions generated bythis debate. By providing answers to the question whether Hinduism is theancient religion of India, or whether it was constructed and if so what thismeans, the volume hopes to give new vantage points to look at Indian cultureand some of the problems that it confronts today.

Two threads: the concept of religion and orientalism

The account about the construction of Hinduism can be regarded as a child ofdevelopments in two dierent domains of study, which came together in thelast decennia of the previous century. On the one hand, there were discus-sions in the domain of religious studies about the adequacy of the conceptof religion in general and of its use in the study of Hinduism in particular.On the other hand, there was the emerging domain of postcolonial studies,where scholars studied how the colonial descriptions of India were taintedby European cultural assumptions and the needs of the colonial project.

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M A R I A N N E K E P P E N S A N D E S T H E R B L O C H

The concept of religion

In the eld of religious studies there is a longstanding problem of how torecognize Hinduism as a religion. The tremendous diversity of doctrines,texts, gods and practices in India has puzzled scholars, missionaries andothers who tried to get a grip on the Indian religion (Brockington 1981: 1;Flood 1996: 16; Klostermaier 1989: 15). As an answer to this problem manyscholars have stated, from an early period onwards, that Hinduism is notone religion, but should be seen as a collection of many separate religionsor faiths.1

Against this background, Wilfred Cantwell Smiths inuential workThe Meaning and End of Religion (1962 [1991]) argues that the concept ofHinduism is a construction of the West. Hinduism, he says, refers not to anentity, it is a name that the West has given to a prodigiously variegated seriesof facts. It is a notion in mens minds and a notion that cannot but beinadequate (1962 [1991]: 144). The name Hinduism, he argues, waswrongly given to the varied series of Indian religious facts as if these formedone system of doctrines. According to Smith, this misconception was theresult of the use of a Christian, and more specically, a Protestant concep-tion of religions as systems of doctrines.

Smiths main thesis is that the concept of religion is itself Christian andtherefore inadequate to study religious phenomena in general. To Smith, theterm Christianity does not capture the religious phenomena of Christiansany more than Hinduism does for those of Hindus. The alternative he sug-gests is to study religious phenomena not as systems of doctrines but ratheras faiths and cumulative traditions.

Orientalism

Predating Edward Saids seminal work Orientalism (1978 [1995]), scholarslike Raymond Schwab, David Kopf, Bernard Cohn and P.J. Marshall hadalready begun providing historical overviews of the orientalist and mission-ary descriptions of India, situating these within the European debates, needsand questions of their time. For instance, Marshall shows in The BritishDiscovery of Hinduism (1970) that orientalist writings on Hinduism werenot so much about India, but rather about issues and controversies withinChristian theology, such as the question of the truth of mosaic chronology,or whether Hinduism contained traces of the original true monotheism givenby the Biblical God. These European religious controversies, Marshall argues,circumscribed the limits of orientalist scholarship, which entailed that theydid not try to understand what Hinduism meant to millions of Indians(Marshall 1970: 44). Another emerging trend in the scholarship on oriental-ism was to look at the relation between the orientalist descriptions and theneeds of colonialism. A scholar who became very inuential in this regard

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I N T RO D U C T I O N

was Bernard Cohn. Since the 1960s, Cohn had been arguing that the colonialstudy of India had shaped a predictable India that could be classied andhence dominated and controlled (Cohn 1987 [1998], 1997).

In Saids Orientalism, both arguments were brought together in a compel-ling way. His work sparked o a whole new school of thought, viz. thepostcolonial studies. It is one of Orientalisms central theses that specicallywestern concepts and assumptions limited the orientalist descriptions of theEast (e.g. Said (1978 [1995]: 42). The other central point of Orientalism isthat the orientalist descriptions were intrinsically related to the colonial pro-ject and the process of acquiring power and dominance over the East. Bycapturing the Orientals in unchanging essences, by classifying and system-atizing them, Said argues, they could be controlled and dominated.

The postcolonial studies have picked up mainly one thread of Saids thesis.They have focused more on how orientalist descriptions were used to domin-ate and to essentialize other cultures and on the motives behind the colonialconstructions and less on Saids question of how the conceptual limitations oforientalism reect a European cultural experience of the Orient. As a result,the emphasis of postcolonial studies has come to lie on attempting to developa non-colonial and non-essentialist way of studying dierent cultures.

Hinduism as a construction

The critiques of the concept of religion and that of orientalism have some-thing in common. Both point to certain distorting aspects of the conceptualframework that the West has used to study other cultures. Moreover, bothplead for the development of alternative concepts that do justice to the real-ity they are meant to describe.

Together, these two threads form one of the central theses in the accountabout the construction of Hinduism. According to this thesis, the colonizerrepresented the variegated Indian reality in an essentialist manner in orderto classify and control the colonized. Thus, the postulation of one religion,Hinduism, unied the diversity of doctrines, texts, practices and gods thatexisted on the subcontinent. Along with the colonial needs of domination, awestern Christian concept of religion is said to have inspired the descriptionof Indian religions in terms of a pan-Indian Hinduism with a specic set ofcore characteristics or essences. In other words, the constructionist thesistells us that orientalist descriptions made certain features of Indian reality,such as the Sanskrit texts or Brahmanism, into the essence of Indian reli-gion, thereby distorting Indian realities (by taking a part for the whole).

A third thread: Hindu nationalism and native agency

A third thread in the account of the construction of Hinduism becameimportant because of challenges posed by developments within India itself.

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At a time when scholars started to point out that the descriptions ofHinduism were problematic and did not correspond to any existing religionin India, Indians themselves began to claim that the same descriptionswere true.

This problem became prominent due to a series of events in India. Afterindependence there had been a rise of Hindu nationalism and an upsurgeof violence between Hindus and Muslims. Events such as the destruction ofthe Babri Mosque at Ayodhya increasingly began to occupy scholars andbecame the focus of several conferences and books (see Dalmia and vonStietencron 1995; Sontheimer and Kulke 1989 [2001] and the special volumeof the Wilson Quarterly 1991). After 200 years of the scholarly study ofHinduism and its failure to nd a common core of doctrines, sacred texts,belief in one God etc., Indians themselves began now to claim that a religionwith those characteristics existed in India after all. Not only did the Indianssay this. This claim also united Hindus of dierent traditions into nationalistmovements and incited some to undertake violent acts against Muslims andChristians. The latter seemed to prove that this religion was a reality (for atleast some sections of Indian society).

This posed a challenge for those scholars who claimed that the use of theconcept Hinduism distorted the Indian reality. One had to explain eitherhow a religion that had not existed before had now come into being, or howand why Indians could have adopted such a false notion of Hinduism.The main approach to account for these questions has been to argue that theconstruction of Hinduism could not have been a product of Europeancolonials and orientalists alone.

In this context, one of the arguments directed Saids arrows back at hisown work and that of his followers. Many came to question whether authorssuch as Inden (1986, 1990) and Cohn (1987 [1998], 1997) were not actingas neo-orientalists, ending up essentializing the Indians once again thistime as passive receivers of false notions and even of a new SanskritizedHinduism (see B.K. Smith 1996; Viswanathan 2003). Nevertheless, in orderto keep the thesis about the colonial construction of Hinduism intact twoconclusions were drawn:

1 The Europeans could not have brought a religion into being that hadnot existed before without the help of the Indians. Hinduism couldnot have been constructed out of thin air by the colonizer and sub-sequently imposed upon a passive Indian population. Instead, it isargued, Hinduism was the result of a dialectical collaborative enterprise,with the colonials and Indians mutually contributing to the constructionof this edice (see Frykenberg 1993: 53435; Haan 2005; King 1999a;Lorenzen 1999, 2006; Pauwels 2002: 151; Pennington 2005; van der Veer1993: 23). Ignoring the colonized would be to erase the colonial subjectfrom history and perpetuate the myth of the passive Oriental (King

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1999a: 146). Interesting to note is that it is almost exclusively the brah-mans who are held responsible for the Indian contribution.

2 If Indians had accepted the orientalist descriptions so easily, there musthave been more truth to them than was thought by their postcolonialcritics. Indeed, many scholars have pointed at traces of a pre-colonialHindu religious identity and to the existence of phenomena similar to theChristian religion in India prior to the colonial period (see Dalmia 1995,2007; Frykenberg 1989 [2001], 1993; King 1999b; Lorenzen 1999, 2006;Oddie 2003, 2006, this volume; Thapar 1989; Viswanathan 2003). Again,it is worthwhile noting that it is the brahmans who are thought to haveplayed a central role. One of the central assumptions in the construction-ist thesis is that at least Brahmanism can be characterized in terms of theproperties of the western notion of religion.

Both elements are necessary to make the dierent versions of the con-structionist thesis coherent. As King (2006: 709) has already pointed out,none of the constructionists have left out the contribution of the Indians inthe construction of Hinduism, even though some have emphasized it morethan others. On the contrary, most of the discussions in the debate about theconstruction of Hinduism have revolved around the question which of thetwo has contributed the most. Those who see Hinduism as a constructedconcept focus more on the European and colonial agency; others for whomHinduism is a reality see the construction of Hinduism more as a historicalevolution of elements that were already present in India.

Why was Hinduism constructed?

Apart from nding out who was responsible, the other central question in thedebate is what caused this collaborative construction. Here, scholars havemainly looked for explanations in the motives and purposes of the Britishcolonials on the one hand and those of the Indians (or native collaborators)on the other.

British imperialism and the western concept of religion

In the account of the European and colonial contribution to the construc-tion of Hinduism many have provided a genealogy of the term Hinduismand of the notion of a pan-Indian religion. Even critics of the construction-ist thesis agree that the word Hinduism is relatively young and not native toIndia. The term Hindu is traced back to the ancient Greek and PersianSindhu, which referred to anything native to the region beyond the riverIndus. This is also, many authors argue, how the Muslim administrationlater used it: not to denote a people united by religious identity but tobring together various communities within the political structure of imperial

6


Muslim rule. Thus, the term Hindu did not ascribe religious unity to thesecommunities and was inclusive of Indian Muslims and Christians. Europeansonly adopted the term Hinduism as a name for the religion of Indiatowards the end of the eighteenth century. Before that, European travellersand missionaries had regarded the Indian traditions as instances of heathen-dom. Heathendom or paganism, according to medieval Christianity, was oneof the four religions of the world, next to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.The Indian form of paganism later acquired the name of gentooism, fol-lowed by the religion of the Hindus to be nally replaced by Hindooism,and then Hinduism by the end of the eighteenth century (see King 1999a:16266 and 1999b; Oddie 2003: 15659 and 2006; B.K. Smith 1987: 3435;von Stietencron 1989 [2001]: 3335 and 1995: 7077).

The constructionist thesis has it that, in this process, dierent religiousphenomena wrongly came to be seen as parts of one religion of all Hindus.The form attributed to this religion was based on a Christian understandingof what religion is. Europeans, so the argument goes, focused only on thoseaspects which they considered to be properties of religion, viz. sacred texts,doctrines and priests, while neglecting the myriad of other aspects of Indianreligion. As a result they mistook Brahmanism with its texts and priests for the religion of all Hindus (see Hardy 1995: 48; Hawley 1991; King 1999b:103; Oddie 2006: 100). This idea of a unied and clear-cut Hindu religionwas then used by the British to rule India (Hawley 1991; King 1999a: 15960,172; Pandey 1990 [1999]; Sugirtharajah 2003). Several colonial administra-tive measures, based on the idea of one Hindu religion, helped in creatingthis religion: the census and legislation of aspects related to religion (Dalmia2007: 1415; Frykenberg 1989 [2001], 1993; Haan 2005; Ludden 1996 [2005]:910; Oddie 2003, 2006; Zavos 2000, 2001). To summarize, three elements areidentied as central to the role played by the Europeans in the constructionof Hinduism: a western Christian concept of religion, the idea that theIndian religions formed one pan-Indian religion and the needs of the colonialenterprise.

The Indian contribution: Brahmanism, nationalism and thereform movements

The literature characterizes the role of the Indians in the construction ofHinduism as follows: Indians adopted some of the orientalist and colonialideas, combined these with elements from their own (pre-colonial) cultureand used this combination for their own purposes. Two elements are generallyidentied as the pre-colonial foundations of Hinduism, namely Brahmanismor the Vedantic religion of the brahmans, and a pre-colonial Hindu self-awareness. On the one hand, Brahmanism is regarded as the Indian religionthat has properties similar to those of the Christian religion, namely Sanskritsacred texts, doctrines, priesthood etc. The brahmans are thought to have

7


formed the priestly elite of Indias textual religion, which they represented tothe British as if it were the religion of the whole of India (see Frykenberg1989 [2001], 1993; King 1999b: 103; Oddie 2006: 99, 26567; Thapar 1989:213; van der Veer 1993: 2627). On the other hand, some authors argue, theawareness of a common Hindu identity, opposed to the Muslims, alsoexisted in pre-colonial India (see Bayly 1985; Dalmia 1995, 2007; Lorenzen1999, 2006; Oddie 2003, this volume; Talbot 1995; Viswanathan 2003).2 Theconstructionists argue that Indian elites combined the orientalist assump-tions about Hinduism and the colonial policies with these pre-colonial foun-dations in order to create a Hinduism that served their purposes and motives,viz. to gain prominence and power over other groups in India, to form anation, to resist colonialism etc.

In this regard, a lot of work has been done on the role of the HinduReform Movements. It is argued that, in response to missionary criticisms oftheir religion, Indians tried to give a positive portrayal by presenting it as areligion that had the same properties as Christianity (Laine 1983: 165; King1999a: 173; Oddie 2003: 15859, 181 and this volume; Pennington 2005;Thapar 1985: 18 and 1989: 218; Viswanathan 2003: 27, 3536). The reform-ers are said to have tried to rid religion of the features most attacked byChristian missionaries, [and] driven by a similar will to monotheism in theirattempts to make the Hindu religion correspond more rigorously to theJudeo-Christian conceptions of a single, all-powerful deity (Viswanathan2003: 27). Other authors describe the native complicity more as an attemptto form a unitary group or organized religion, so that the Hindus could forma religious majority in India and stand strong against Muslim and Christianproselytism and missionary and colonial attacks on their traditions (King1999a; Oddie 2003: 16673; Pennington 2001, 2005; Zavos 2000, 2001).These reform movements consisting mostly of elites, intellectuals andbrahmans are thought to have played an important role in transforming theIndian traditions into a unied and textualized religion mainly based on theVedantic religion of the brahmans. They are also held to be the precursors ofthe Hindutva movement of today (see Frykenberg 1993: 548; Thapar 1989:218; White 2000: 105).

Some authors emphasize that Indians used the idea of religious unity inorder to form a Hindu nation or for political mobilization (see Dalmia 2007:1519; Dalmia and von Stietencron 1995: 19; Duara 1991; Frykenberg 1993:526, 53839; Hardy 1995: 47; Hawley 1991; King 1999a: 151, 160, 17677;Pennington 2005: 169; Thapar 1989: 210, 22830; van der Veer 1992: 96 and1993: 3943; von Stietencron 1995: 71, 79); others say that it was a means toget access to state resources distributed according to religion (see Frykenberg1989 [2001], 1993). Some also see it as part of an agenda of the brahmansto promote their own religion, the Sanskritic Brahmanism as a world religion(see King 1999a: 17071). It is said that because Europeans relied almostentirely on brahmans as their informants, the latter could make use of this

8


to present their religion as that of all Indians, to the detriment of other localor smaller religions. Additionally, the religion of the brahmans alsoresembled what Europeans were looking for: a religion with doctrines andsacred texts. Thus, Brahmin collaboration and Hindu nationalist and ReformMovements are said to have led to the Sanskritization, textualization, uni-cation, and essentialization of Hindu traditions (see Doniger 2009; Hardy1995: 3537; King 1999a, 1999b; B.K. Smith 1996: 368; van der Veer 1999:430; Viswanathan 2003).

Contra construction

Most criticism of the constructionist thesis has been directed against theclaim that it is not legitimate to speak of Hinduism as one homogeneousreligion and the idea that before colonialism there was no Hindu identitybased on this religion. Instead, these critics argue, a Hindu identity did existin India prior to colonialism. For David Lorenzen (1999, 2006; see also hischapter in this volume), for instance, the fact that poets like Kabir andGorakh had spoken about Hindus and Muslims shows that a notion ofHindu religion must have already existed in pre-colonial India. WendyDoniger (1991) argues that Hindus have always had a sense of a commonidentity based on markers such as being native to India, having a sharedsocial structure, etc. These critics of the constructionist thesis, however,focus more on showing that non-Muslim Indians already shared a com-mon identity, than on explaining what exactly makes this identity into areligious one (see also Mahmood 1993; Oddie 2003: 15961, this volume;Talbot 1995).

Moreover, critics say, the constructionist thesis once again denies agencyto the natives, and it is Eurocentric to assume that when we [westerners]made the name we made the game (Doniger 1991: 36). Even if the con-structionist historiographies did restore agency to elite native informants,they again leave other Indians lower-caste, women, illiterates etc. withoutagency or without a voice in Indias history. Therefore, many scholars takethis debate as an occasion to advocate recognition of the agency of minorreligions, folk religions, oral traditions, the lower castes, women etc. by givingthem a place in their historiographies (see Chakravarti 2006; Doniger 1991,2009: 13; Mahmood 1993).

Some critics say that the constructionists fail to recognize the existence ofHinduism or of a common Hindu identity, because the latter are themselvesguilty of using a western (or Judeo-Christian) concept of religion (Sweetman2003; Viswanathan 2003). These critics suggest that Hinduism is a dierentkind of religion. It is not a religious system with a core of common charac-teristics, but one with separate instances that share family resemblances.Hinduism is polythetic in nature and should be studied accordingly. As such,to capture the nature of Hinduism we need something like a Venn diagram

9


or an enumeration of family resemblances (see Doniger 1991; Ferro-Luzzi1989 [2001]; Hiltebeitel 1991; Larson 1995; Lipner 1994; Mahmood 1993;Olson 2007).

A dierent story

Two authors have been left out of the story so far: Frits Staal and S.N.Balagangadhara. Even though both have often been located among the con-structionists, their claims dier from the latter in signicant ways. Bothspeak about the creation of Hinduism, but only in the sense of the creationof a concept. To them, Hinduism is a conceptual unit, which exists only inwestern universities and minds. Neither today nor in the past did the conceptof Hinduism correspond to any reality in India. These two authors do notclaim, as the postcolonials do, that Hinduism is in fact a collection of dier-ent religions, nor that one aspect of Indian religions has been presented asthe religion of all Hindus. Instead they argue the following: if Christianity,Islam and Judaism are religions, then Hindu, Buddhist and other traditionscannot be religion. Moreover, Brahmanism, with its sacred texts andBrahmin priesthood, as well as the many local religions, are as much cti-tious entities as Hinduism is.3 Thus, they deny the validity of two centralelements of the constructionist thesis namely that Brahmanism came torepresent the religion for all Indians, and the existence of a multitude of localreligions that were thus dominated and ignored.

More particularly, Frits Staal questions the applicability of the westernconcept of religion to non-western traditions. This concept, he says, isincoherent and has either to be abandoned or conned to the western tradi-tions (Staal 1989: 415). Staal shows that the Indian traditions do not haveany of the characteristics that make Christianity, Islam and Judaism intoreligions. Thus, the construction of Hinduism, according to Staal, is not thatof a homogenization of the dierent religions into one religion, but rather aconceptual creation of something that does not exist in India. According tohim, dierent unconnected elements were taken together and transformedinto a religion. Moreover, contrary to most of the participants in the con-structionist debate, the focus of Staal is not on showing who constructedHinduism and why (see above), but on developing a new understandingof the Indian traditions and on showing in what way they dier from thereligions of the West. To put it in Staals own words:

The inapplicability of Western notions of religion to the traditionsof Asia has not only led to piecemeal errors of labeling, identica-tion and classication, to conceptual confusion and to some name-calling. It is also responsible for something more extraordinary: thecreation of so-called religions . . . The reasons lie in the nature ofWestern religion, which is pervaded by the notion of exclusive truth

10


and claims a monopoly on truth. . . . In most parts of Asia, suchreligions do not exist, but scholars, laymen and western convertspersist in searching for them. If they cannot nd them, they seizeupon labels used for indigenous categories, rent them from theiroriginal context and use them for subsequent identication of whatis now called a religious tradition. Thus there arises a host of reli-gions: Vedic, Brahmanical, Hindu, Buddhist, . . . In Asia, suchgroupings are not only uninteresting and uninformative, but tingedwith the unreal. What counts instead are ancestors and teachers . . .concepts with ritual rather than truth-functional overtones.

(Staal 1989: 393, emphasis in original)

Balagangadhara (1994 [2005]; see also this volume) makes this point evenmore strongly. He not only argues that Hinduism is neither a religion, nora collection of religions, but also explains why Europeans were compelledto look for and see religion in India, regardless of their motives or attitudestowards India. Dierent elements from the Indian culture, he points out, havebeen taken together and presented as a religion. Hinduism (also Buddhism,Sikhism, Jainism etc.), then, is an entity that exists only in the westernexperience of India and in the writings of scholars.4

In this way, one could say, Balagangadhara picks up a thread of Said thathas been largely ignored by the postcolonials, namely that the orientalistdescriptions tell us more about the West than about the Orient. He showsthat Europeans have seen religion in India, not because they used a westernconcept of religion, but because Christian theology compelled them to lookfor and recognize religion in some aspects of the Indian culture. As such, theconceptual construction of Hinduism has little to do with the exigencies ordemands of colonialism or with the goals and motives of Indians.5

Even though he argues that it is wrong to look at the Indian traditionsas though they were religions, Balagangadhara diers with critics of theconcept of religion (e.g. Fitzgerald this volume; King 1999b, this volume;McCutcheon 1997). He does not claim that the concept of religion is inade-quate to study human phenomena. On the contrary, developing a theory ofreligion allows him to distinguish between what constitutes religion amongthe human phenomena and what does not. This distinction allows him toshow that India does not have, and never had, indigenous religions, and tostart conceptualizing the Indian traditions dierently.6 Moreover, he alsoclaims that the construction of the experiential entity Hinduism is notcaused by using a western concept of religion. Instead, it has to do with thenature of Christianity as a religion that has compelled Europeans to seereligion in India.

Balagangadharas thesis generates important questions: if it was not reli-gion, what did the Europeans see which they mistook for religion? What kindof traditions exist in India, if the texts and practices do not form religions?

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Why have generations of Indian intellectuals spoken as though they possessedtheir own religion of Hinduism? How should we make sense of so-calledHinduMuslim conicts? Some of these questions have been analyzed inearlier writings (Balagangadhara 1994 [2005]; Balagangadhara and Claerhout2008; Balagangadhara and De Roover 2007; Balagangadhara et al. 2008),and are also addressed in this volume.

Raising questions

The importance of the constructionist arguments lies in the fact that theypoint to a mismatch between the descriptions of Hinduism and the realitiesof Indian culture. However, the dierent positions in the debate are stilldeeply contested. We would like to introduce a number of questions that needto be answered, in order to take the debate on the construction of Hinduismfurther and to allow for the development of an alternative conceptual frame-work for the study of Indian traditions.

1. The constructionist theses are characterized by an ambiguity about thenature of the process of construction. It is unclear what is constructed: aconcept, an idea or an object in the world. Did the Europeans and theirinformants invent a new concept to describe and classify the religious andsocial phenomena of India? If so, what are the implications of using such anew term (concept)? Or did they actually produce a new religion, which isnow a real entity in Indian society? Or did they do both? Or does Hinduismmerely describe a pattern in the western cultural experience of India? Eventhough most authors try to defend one of these positions, they continue tostruggle with these very dierent and incompatible options (see the chapterby De Roover and Claerhout in this volume).

2. While they disagree as to whether Hinduism is really one religion orcovers multiple religions, both the constructionists and their critics sharethe assumption that the phenomena described as Hinduism are manifest-ations of religion. Some say that Hinduism is a religion of a dierent kindthan Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Others say that we need to look forthe common elements or family resemblances that characterize this collec-tion of religious phenomena. However, such suggestions do not suce.One needs to show what makes this collection of phenomena into religion(dierentiating it from, say, social, ethnic, political, etc. phenomena). Thesame problem applies to the claims that a Hindu identity already existedin pre-colonial India. One needs to demonstrate what makes this identityinto a religious identity and not a geographical, ethnic, social or otheridentity.

3. Another problem in the constructionist account is that it is not clearwhat is problematic about the fact that Europeans used a western-Christianconcept of religion. Merely saying that this concept is inuenced by Christiantheology does not reveal any fundamental problem. To draw an analogy,

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Newtons physics was deeply inuenced by his Christian theological pers-pective, which told him that the world embodied Gods will. However, thisinuence did not have any impact on the truth value of his theory. There isalso an additional problem: it is commonly argued that the properties attrib-uted to religion by this western-Christian concept were never present in theHindu traditions. If that is the case, then the use of this concept of religionshould have prevented the Europeans from seeing religion in India. Thus, anyattempt at characterizing the construction of Hinduism would need toexplain as to why Europeans, in spite of their concept of religion, saw religionin India.

4. Some authors say that the European descriptions were not that wrongafter all. In fact, they argue, a religion that corresponded to the westernconcept of religion did exist in India, viz. in the textual and doctrinalreligious system of the Brahmin priests. However, until today no one hasbeen able to show that such a Brahmanism really exists or existed in India.Scholars have not found a common core in the so-called sacred texts anddoctrines of the brahmans either: these texts and stories are varied and oftencontradictory; it is unclear whether any and which of the texts could becanonical; the so-called Hindu priests often do not even know the contentof these texts etc. (see Gelders and Derde 2003; Hegde 2008; Lipner 1994;Quigley 1993). Moreover, if Brahmanism had really become the core of thereligion of all Hindus under the name of Hinduism, it becomes very dicultto explain why scholars have been unable for more than 200 years to clearlyidentify this religion. Even contemporary scholars of Hinduism start theintroduction of their work by saying that it is impossible to dene Hinduismor to nd its core.

5. If we accept the constructionist account that Brahmanism was one reli-gion among many in pre-colonial India, later to be imposed as the pan-Indianreligion, some other problems arise. First, this presupposes the existence ofa unied priesthood and power centre today, which dominates the religionof all Hindus and decides about Hindu orthodoxy or orthopraxy. Manyauthors have thrown doubt on this idea: not all Brahmins are priests and notall priests are Brahmins, nor has anyone been able to identify such a pan-Indian clerical authority (see Gelders and Derde 2003; Hegde 2008; Lipner1994; Quigley 1993). Second, if there were indeed dierent religions in pre-colonial India, why had non-Brahmins come to accept Brahmanism as theirreligion, or at least as its core? Neither the need for a common nationalidentity nor a wish to stand strong against the Christians and Muslims areable to explain this.

At the same time, we see that a majority of Indians call themselves Hinduand dierentiate themselves from Muslims and Christians. However, thisdoes not imply that a pan-Indian Hindu identity exists and that it concerns areligious identity, or that all Hindus now follow the doctrines and practicesof Brahmanism (a similar point has been made by Chatterjee 1992: 14748).

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On the contrary, even today, we have many indications that Indians stillpractice their ancestral traditions rather than any common pan-IndianHinduism.7 Nevertheless, if this is true, we have to explain why generationsof Indians have spoken as though they possessed a religion Hinduism andwhy a Hindutva movement could come into being that appeals to Hinduismas one of the world religions.

6. Another problem in the constructionist writings is that most explan-ations take the form of identifying the motives and purposes of the dierentactors. That is, instead of giving explanations of how Hinduism could beconstructed, scholars dispute who was responsible for the construction andwhich reasons and motives inspired them to do so. However, there is nodirect relation between the motives one has for doing something and what isdone. Someones motives for opening the door, for instance, cannot be readfrom them opening the door; nor does their opening the door tell you any-thing about their motivations for doing so. In the case of the colonial con-struction of Hinduism, would it be possible to say that all colonials sharedthe same motives, namely to colonize, control, and rule? And even if this ispossible, why should this lead to the creation of a new religion? For instance,with the same motive of colonizing India, the British created Hinduism andthe Muslims did not. If colonial needs led the British to construct Hinduism,then why did the Muslims not do the same?

Moreover, long before colonialism with its particular needs and motiv-ations, Jesuit missionaries and European travellers had already described theexistence of a pan-Indian religion, even though they named the pattern dif-ferently (paganism, heathenism, idolatry) (Oddie 2006, Sweetman 2001). Infact, the British colonial descriptions of the Indian traditions were verymuch coloured by what their continental European predecessors wrote(Gelders 2009). Thus, the needs of the colonial government cannot becomethe explanation for the European descriptions of the phenomenon that waslater called Hinduism. Likewise, in the constructionist account, the know-ledge that allowed the British to colonize and control the Indians was alsothe knowledge that allowed the Indians to ght and resist colonialism. Thesemotives are diametrically opposed to dominate and to resist domination.In other words, there exists no clear relationship between the motives for theconstruction and the fact of the construction of Hinduism.

The structure of the book

In Part I: Historical and Empirical Arguments some of the key scholarsin the debate on the colonial construction of religion contribute chapterswith the main historical arguments for and against the thesis that Hinduismis a colonial construct. Other authors give original analyses of historicaland empirical data, which show the relevance of the debate on colonialconstruction.

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The volume opens with one of the most important challenges to the ideaof a British construction of Hinduism a challenge that has come fromDavid Lorenzen. In his Hindus and Others, Lorenzen argues that Hinduismexisted as a religion in India prior to the emergence of British colonialism.His historical evidence lies in the fact that the medieval Indian poetry ofKabir and Gorakh already referred to distinctions between Hindu andTurk or Hindu and Muslim. According to Lorenzen, this indicates a pre-colonial consciousness of Hindus as a religious group and Hinduism as areligious institution.

Georey Oddie puts forward one of the main historical arguments againstthe idea that Hinduism already existed prior to British colonization. In hisHindu Religious Identity with Special Reference to the Origin and Signicanceof the Term Hinduism, c. 17871947, Oddie discusses the gradual emergenceand spread of a sense of an all-India Hindu religious identity and exploresthe origin and signicance of the term Hinduism in further developing thisawareness. Oddie points out that the term, rst coined by the Europeans, wasreadily adopted in India, especially by western educated Hindus. He arguesthat it was used as a method of mobilization and self-defence for Indiansin the struggle against missionaries and colonials, especially during the laterstages of British rule. In conclusion, he relates these ndings to the ongoingdebates about the denition of Hinduism.

John Zavos, in his Representing Religion in Colonial India, puts the ques-tion of the construction of Hinduism in a broader context. He discusses theopportunities of rethinking religion in India with regard to the debates onthe colonial construction of Hinduism, the rise of the nationalist movementand the impact of colonialism on religious identity formation in India. Heargues that we need to think beyond traditional orientalist representationsand normative western models of religion. Yet, he adds, even though ideasof religion may be based on European structures of knowledge, these havebeen dynamically developed through the colonial encounter. Therefore, weshould not just recognize the pre-colonial genealogy of this concept, but alsoits continuing development in the context of colonialism, and more broadlyin the modern world.

Sharada Sugirtharajah is another voice, which argues that Hinduism is acolonial construction. In her Colonialism and Religion, she points out that,besides territorial expansion, colonialism also involved intellectual and cul-tural expansion. The colonized were thought to be lacking in maturity andcolonialism was seen as a civilizing activity. She explores how these motivesof intellectual and cultural expansion informed the orientalist and missionaryunderstanding of Hinduism and the Indian culture in general. Moreover,she emphasizes that colonialism did not begin or end in the colonial era butcuts across time and space and still determines our current understandingof Hinduism.

In her Women, the Freedom Movement, and Sanskrit: Notes on Religion

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and Colonialism from the Ethnographic Present, Laurie L. Patton brings in anempirical perspective on the issue, by showing the relevance of the historicalarguments about the construction of religion to the contemporary situationin India. She shares with the reader her empirical study of the changing roleof women in the study of Sanskrit in India. On the basis of eldwork amongtwo age groups, Patton concludes that older women who learned Sanskritdid not regard the language as religious in nature, but saw it as the vehicleof freedom. In contrast, the younger women of postcolonial India regardthe learning and teaching of Sanskrit entirely as Hindu and have thusembedded Sanskrit in the conception of Hinduism as a religion.

Part II: Theoretical Reections contains chapters that reect on the theor-etical future of the study of religion in India. They focus on the Christianframework of religious studies, the inadequacy of the concept of religion,the nature of orientalism and the process of colonial construction.

Richard King, in his Colonialism, Hinduism and the Discourse of Religion,challenges the notion of religion as a cross-cultural phenomenon that isclearly distinguishable from other phenomena in the world. Because ofcolonialism, King argues, European assumptions about religion have beenuniversalized and religion came to be seen as part of a universal history. Hepoints to the Eurocentric logic that frames the rest of the world as vari-ations on a western Christian theme and shows that the Indian traditions donot correspond to this logic of the discourse of religion. To describe theIndian traditions in terms of the concepts of religion and the secular thusentails a distortion. Instead, King proposes that we go back to the Indiantraditions themselves and excavate the conceptual framework these tradi-tions used to describe themselves.

Timothy Fitzgerald questions the usefulness of the category of religion assuch. In his Who Invented Hinduism? Rethinking Religion in India, he alsocalls into question the distinction between the religious and the non-religious (or the secular). This distinction, he argues, comes together with aset of binaries that have been taken for granted as existing binaries in themodern discourse, viz. religion/secular, natural/supernatural, church/stateetc. He points out that all these concepts originate within Christian theology.Many societies in the world do not even have terms to distinguish betweenthe religious and the non-religious. The conclusion of his chapter is thatreligion is a concept, just like society or state, which in fact does not exist as areal and distinct phenomenon in the world.

S.N. Balagangadhara, in Orientalism, Postcolonialism and the Constructionof Religion, attempts to show how religions, as concepts, were constructed inIndia. To him, Indian religions, with the exception of Judaism, Christianityand Islam in India, are ctional entities on par with Hogwarts, the magicalschool of Harry Potter, and entities like unicorns and satyrs. However, hedoes not advance such a claim on the basis of some general argument aboutthe nature of the category religion but on the basis of a hypothesis about

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religion. That hypothesis, which is briey elaborated in the volume, alsoexplains why religious studies of today rely so heavily on a generic Christianunderstanding of religion. In the course of the article, he also addresseshimself to some of the criticisms his work has met with.

In The Colonial Construction of What?, Jakob De Roover and SarahClaerhout raise three fundamental questions to clear the conceptual groundrequired for theory formation on the construction of Hinduism. First, theyanalyze the question Is religion a construct? The claim that religion is onlya conceptual tool of the scholar, which does not refer to any empirical real-ity, they argue, fails to make sense in the absence of a theory of religion.However, this does not imply it is nonsensical to speak of the construction ofHinduism. Is Hinduism a construct? is answered in the positive, but quali-ed in a limited empirical sense. Subsequently, they raise the question as toWhat is constructed in the process of construction? On the one hand, onecould suggest that Hinduism has come into being as an object, a new religionthat materialized on the subcontinent. On the other hand, one could argue,as De Roover and Claerhout do, that Hinduism has been created as a con-ceptual unit in certain descriptions of India only. These descriptions havehad an impact upon Indian society, but this does not entail that Hindureligion exists in India today.

Notes

1 Even though this answer regained prominence in the twentieth-century academicstudy of religion, this claim was already widespread in the nineteenth centuryand before European colonialism. See for instance Monier-Williams [1875] 1974;Farquhar 1912; Bougl 1908; Wilson 1877; OMalley 1934: 6768; Ladd 1901. Thispoint has also been made by Oddie 2007 and Sweetman 2001.

2 This argument is often used as a critique on the colonial constructionist thesis,saying that the role of the colonials could at the most have been one of selection,not one of invention (see Lorenzen 1999, 2006).

3 This is of course not to say that none of the elements that went into the construc-tion of Hinduism exists in India. The claim is not that there are no distinct tradi-tions or texts in the Indian culture but that the way we understand them today asdierent religions with sacred texts, specic doctrines and practices, makes us blindfor many of their characteristics and at the same time makes us see phenomena thatare not there. For instance, research at Kuvempu University has shown that, eventhough generations of scholars have written about it, no single Brahmin casteexists that is universally accepted as superior, nor do many of the people not eventhe so-called priests know the contents of the so-called sacred texts that constitutethe religion (Hegde 2008).

4 This point is picked up and elaborated by his students (see De Roover andClaerhout, this volume).

5 This point has been elaborated by Raf Gelders (2009). Gelders shows that thesame structure of a Hindu religion was already present in pre-colonial Europeansources.

6 See Balagangadhara (2005) for a possible way of describing the Indian traditions ina dierent way.

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7 Fieldwork at Kuvempu University that has looked at the dierent jatis in villagesin Karnataka shows that each group has its own tradition (Hegde 2008).

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Part I

HISTORICAL ANDEMPIRICAL ARGUMENTS

1

HINDUS AND OTHERS

David N. Lorenzen

How can we best study religious movements? What makes a religious move-ment religious? How can religious institutions be distinguished from secularinstitutions? Is Hindu religion or Hinduism a coherent concept? Can Hindureligion be accommodated within the general category of the so-called worldreligions like Islam, Buddhism and Christianity? Is Hindu religion more away of life or a culture than a religion per se? How do Hindus themselvesdene and negotiate their Hindu identity? Any scholar who studies religiousmovements in India and their migration abroad inevitably has to adopt atleast implicit presuppositions and hypotheses about these questions.

A further set of questions relates to how a scholars own life experiencemay condition his or her views about specic religions and religious move-ments. Can a scholar who was raised outside of India and Indian culture havean authentic understanding of what it means to be a Hindu? Can a Christian,a Buddhist, a Muslim, or an atheist, even if raised in India, have such anunderstanding? What is the impact of colonialism and neocolonialism on thepoints of view of both Indian scholars and European and American scholarson these questions? Is it possible for scholars of dierent national and cul-tural backgrounds to establish a meaningful dialogue about these questions?Can they arrive at something resembling an international consensus aboutthe possible answers? If not, what is the point of attempting the dialogue inthe rst place?

Obviously, this chapter cannot attempt to seriously engage with all thesequestions. Much research is done without any explicit considerations ofthem at all. Nonetheless it is sometimes useful to try to make what isnormally implicit more explicit. Here I want to briey discuss three of theserelated foundational issues. First is a look at how religion is being studied inmodern universities, particularly in the United States, and the inuence ofMircea Eliade on this study. Second is a discussion of the historical construc-tion of the concept of Hindu religion or Hinduism. Third is an examinationof how three medieval Indian religious poets Gorakh, Kabir, and GuruArjan negotiated their own religious identities in a way at least partlyindependent of both Hindu religion and Islam.

25

Eliade and the study of religions

Most academic studies on the worlds major religions over the last fty yearsowe much to the ideas of the Romanian scholar Mircea Eliade. Although agood part of Eliades best work was done in Europe in the 1940s and early1950s, much of his inuence stems from his presence as a distinguished profes-sor in the University of Chicago where he arrived in 1956 to teach courses inthe eld he called The history of religions. This is particularly true of thestudies done in the religion departments of American universities, but theinuence of his ideas on studies of religions has, directly or indirectly, extendedto scholars in other departments and in other countries including India.

During the last fty years there has been an enormous increase in thenumber of scholars who teach and do research on most of the non-Christianreligions in the religion departments of American universities. Russell T.McCutcheons book, Manufacturing Religion (2003) argues convincinglythat a key idea that has justied and promoted this increase and its locationin religion departments is Eliades idea that religions are sui generis institu-tions, institutions that cannot be properly analysed using reductive strategiesthat discuss religions, particularly their origins, in terms of their economic,social, and political motives and consequences.

I myself was rst introduced to Eliades work when I was still an under-graduate. In about 1960, one of my professors, the psychoanalytic historianN.O. Brown, suggested that I read one of Eliades books, The Myth of theEternal Return (2005). I found it fascinating and proceeded to read all of hisbooks that were available in our university library. Eliades excellent study ofYoga, entitled Yoga: immortality and freedom (1970) was one of the readingswhich helped turn my own academic interests toward India and Hinduism.Today, looking back on all this, I think the thing that most attracted meto Eliade was the vision he oered of exotic new worlds of ideas: the worldof archaic man and the world of Hinduism. Ironically, much of the rest ofmy academic career has been dedicated to learning and showing that theseexotic worlds are not, after all, so exotic or dierent from the world in whichI grew up.

Eliade claims that all religions share a unique point of origin, a personalexperience of the sacred, the experience that Rudolf Otto (1970) earliercalled the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. It is this experience that allowedEliade and others associated with the history of religions to make the claimthat religion is sui generis and needs to be studied by its own methodologyand not reduced to secular history, sociology, anthropology, philosophy orpsychology. Although religion is necessarily manifested in historical timeas specic, organized religions each with its own history, churches, rituals,beliefs, customs, and social, economic and political programmes nonetheless,behind all this empirical prolixity lies the experience of the sacred, the phe-nomenon that makes religions religious.

DAV I D N. L O R E N Z E N

26

In terms of its consequences, the idea that Otto and Eliade promoted hasproved to be a powerful idea. By concentrating his research on the eectsof religious experience and not on its cause, Eliade oered a way to create anallegedly scientic mode of studying religion, and this possibility in turnhelped to legitimate the creation of new or expanded departments of religionin most American universities. Since Ottos and Eliades idea also positeda common origin for all religions, these same religious departments werealso now free to expand into studies not only of Christianity, Judaism andmaybe Islam, but also other so-called world religions: Buddhism, Hinduism,Confucianism, Shinto and the like.

The idea and study of world religions did, of course, exist in Europeand America well before Eliade and Otto. The eld known as compara-tive religion was a direct precursor. Tomoko Masuzawa (2005) has writtenan excellent account of the history of the idea of world religions amongEuropean and American scholars in the nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies. Most of the earlier discussions of these world religions arrangedthem in hierarchical subcategories such as universal and national, historicaland ahistorical, ethical and ritualistic, monotheistic and polytheistic. In thesearrangements Christianity always came out on top. These unequal evalu-ations were eventually dropped by most schola

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