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 world while 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
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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 decolonisation of the academic mind and decolonising the academic knowledgeproduction 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. I will 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
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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
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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.
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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 nationstate. The ethos of modernity in the Weberian sense designates an ethic which induces people
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 itself is 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 needs serious 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).
The ethos of modernity is a set of moral beliefs that ‘gives a salient place to freedom
and self-control, places a high priority on avoiding suffering, and sees productive activity and
family life as central to our well-being’ (op.cit:14). Taylor, like the postcolonial theorist
Balagangadhara and his followers, claims that stress on human welfare in this ethos springs
‘from the New Testament and is one of the central themes of Christian spirituality’
(op.cit:13). But where Balagangadhara and King see this as Christian imperialism, Taylor
simply states what he believes to be fact.
Protestant beginnings of Western modernity
Long before Taylor, the German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920) had argued that the
ethos of modern capitalism derived from the work ethic and the inner asceticism preached by
seventeenth century Calvinist theologians. Calvinism in the sixteenth and seventeenth century
was the most radical form of Christian Protestantism. Calvinists promoted the Bible as the
sole source of Christianity and thus fundamentally rejected every aspect of Roman
Catholicism: dominance of the priesthood, the Pope, the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Incidentally,
Calvinists from the sixteenth century onwards also ferociously combatted absolute monarchy,
in France, the Netherlands, Germany, England and Scotland. One could contend that the
origins of Western modernity do not lie in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century only,
but have much deeper roots in the Protestant reformation, particularly in Calvinism.
Composite Hindu modernity
Against this backdrop we are better able to identify the different strands in Rammohun’s
Hindu modernity. First the Protestant Christian strand. Rammohun was keen on restoring to
Hindus what he regarded as the original scriptures of Hinduism, namely the Upanishads and
the Brahma Sutra. He translated some of the Upanishads into Bengali and English in an effort
to repeat the Protestant emphasis on scripture as the source of religion. As the Protestant
reformation had made use of the printing press to spread the new message of religious reform,
similarly Rammohun used the print media to spread the message of Vedantic Hinduism. The
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idea was to ensure that the general public would study the scriptures for themselves, interpret
the scriptures for themselves, and not be misled by cunning priests enforcing useless rituals.
Another important aspect in Rammohun’s modernity was the lessening and avoidance
of human suffering. This goal he tried to accomplish through his socio-religious reform
proposals. The most important of which was his struggle against widow-burning. It should be
noted that in this respect Rammohun need not have been influenced by Protestant Christianity
but rather by personal experience, as his sister-law-law was burned as a widow and he came
too late to prevent it. Yet Rammohun’s insistence on ancient classical texts like the
Upanishads to form the basis of a new form of Hinduism does seem inspired by Protestant
examples.
It is important to remember that both the 16th century Protestants in Europe and
Rammohun in India in the 19th century thought they were restoring an ancient original
revelation to its pristine glory. Protestants promoted the Bible alone as the only true source of
Christianity and rejected the medieval Catholic traditions as false accretions. Rammohun
adopted a similar stance when he rejected contemporary Hinduism with its Brahmins and its
worship of images of gods and goddesses, and advised his fellow Hindus to return to the pure
monotheism of the age-old Vedanta.
Why Vedanta texts?
We are left with one last important question. Why did Rammohun turn to the Vedanta, that is,
to the Brahma Sutra and the Upanishads? Later in the nineteenth century other Hindu
reformist thinkers added the Bhagavad Gita to this canon. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee for
instance believed that the Bhagavad Gita contained the noblest essence of true Hinduism.
Bankim’s preference for the Gita gained much following. Think of Swami Vivekananda, Sri
Aurobindo, or Mahatma Gandhi and the Hindu revolutionaries of the early twentieth century.
But how do we explain this preference for Upanishads and the Gita as prime Hindu
scriptures? Western readers of these texts expressed their admiration for their philosophical
content. This non-Indian admiration proved that the Vedantic texts could speak to audiences
outside the Hindu fold and inspire them as well. In other words, the Vedantic texts were as
universal as the Bible, perhaps even more so. The fact that the Bhagavad Gita had been
translated into English already in 1785 may have contributed to its fame outside India. But
this is not the only reason to explain the choice for Vedantic texts.
In the early nineteenth century European intellectuals had not read much else from the
Sanskrit literature besides the Gita, the Upanishads and Kalidasa’s Shakuntala. But
Rammohun who started modern Hinduism, knew the vast extent of Sanskrit literature; he was
familiar with the many dharmashastras, epics, tantras and puranas. And from among all these
he preferred only the Vedantic texts.
The reason for this choice lies in the content of the Upanishads and the Gita
themselves. The Upanishads and the Gita contain doctrines that are uncannily similar to the
ideas of Western modernity and even to some extent to Calvinist Protestantism. Where
traditional Christianity relied on church ritual and church hierarchy, reformed Christianity
regarded as the essence of true religion the study of the Bible and the inner prayer to God,
thus rejecting the need for rituals and priests. Every believer is his or her own priest.
Similarly, in the teachings of the Upanishads and more so in those of the Gita, we find that
rituals and the hierarchical social order do not play a role. Instead, the realisation of the Self
or of God results from devotion and personal meditation. For the spirituality of the Vedanta
on does not need anything but one’s own mental effort and desire to know God or the Self.
We saw that the modern ethos according to Taylor consists in universal respect for all
humans, respect for personal freedom and a feeling that one should regard all fellow humans
as equals. It is remarkable that a very similar ethos is expressed in the Upanishads and in the
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Bhagavad Gita. Universality is not a sin of Western Enlightenment or Protestant Christianity.
It is explicitly found throughout many Upanishadic passages and the Gita. Krishna for
instance calls himself the Self seated in the hearts of all living beings (Gita 10:20). The Isha
Upanishad enjoins us to see the divine Self in all living beings and all living beings as
contained in the divine Self and thus not feel aversion to anyone (Isha Up 6). Both statements
imply the fundamental and universal equality of all living beings, and certainly of all humans
as they are embodiments of the Divine. Here we have an ancient Hindu version of Taylor’s
description of modernity as universal respect for all humans. It is such teachings and their
deep implications which must have satisfied Rammohun and later Hindu modernisers that the
Vedantic scriptures could be and ought to be the foundation of a Hinduism that is both going
back to its most ancient roots and at the same time looks forward to a future of equality and
human respect. Postcolonial theory has made us fully aware of the global intellectual
dominance of Western culture. But our discussion of modern Hinduism has shown that even if
its form owes much to Protestantism and thus is of Western origin, its inner core is purely
Indian. The postmodern critique of grand narratives as provincial Western biases can be
severely qualified when we notice the universality and global applicability of Vedantic
teachings. Vedanta is not of Western origin and yet evinces a universalist tendency.
Postcolonial and postmodern theories regarding modern Hinduism stand in need of critique
themselves. Let us hope there are intellectuals ready for such a challenge.
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Bibliography
Balagangadhara, S.N. 1994. ‘The Heathen in his Blindness...’: Asia, The West and the
Dynamic of Religion. Leiden, New York, Köln: E.J.Brill.
Bloch, Esther; Marianne Keppens; Rajaram Hegde eds. 2010. Rethinking Religion in India:
The colonial construction of Hinduism. London & New York: Routledge.
Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge
Mass.: Harvard University Press.
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