4 Religious Studies and the Social Sciences, the Development of a Problematic Relationship-Some Comparison of Development in the West and in India

Maitree Devi

Introduction

In this module, we shall consider how the subject of religion has emerged as an independent field of study within the social sciences both in the West and in India. The purpose of this engagement is to bring out the radically different ways in which this field of study has been approached by social science scholarship in two very different contexts and under radically different historical circumstances. While it is an acknowledged fact today that a vast array of belief systems across regions and cultures are denoted under the category of religion, it is important to acknowledge at the very outset that the term religion both as a category of nomenclature as well as a characteristic of a faith system was for the first time used in the context of Christianity. It is in the context of the evolution of Christianity both in terms of its historical expansion as well as in its doctrinal legitimation, Christianity came to be recognised as a religion.According to the philologist Max Müller (1907) in the 19th century, the root of the English word “religion”, the Latin religio, was originally used to mean only “reverence for God or the gods, careful pondering of divine things, piety”. Such a consideration of the term religion made possible the use of this category to several other belief-systems in other regions and cultures of the world. It is not surprising then that by the time Max Weber (1993) was approaching the subject of religion there was already in existence the concept of world religions, meaning thereby entire communities across vast geographical regions who were bound up by this reverence for God or the Gods. Yet despite this attempt to universalize the category of religion Fitzgerald (2007) observes that the concept of a religion is a modern category emerging out of a specific set of historical condition from the second half of the 17th century. Religion emerged in conjunction with other categories like that of the secular. It is in the context of this relationship between the religion and the secular that one maps out the understanding of religion in the Western context. In non-Western societies, religion often gets subsumed under the category of culture or else is understood as the law provided by the Gods. In such an instance, the religion-secular relationship does not feature as a significant moment in the study of religion in non-Western societies. Further it would be noted that the expansion of colonialism was not only a project of expanding capitalist markets but also involved the enlightenment project through which religion became part of the imperial project to proselytise and dominate the colonial world (Chatterjee 1986, King 1999).

The development of religious studies in the West must be understood in the context of this separation between the religious and the secular. In constituting a separate field of enquiry identified as the domain of the sacred, religion came to be understood as a wholly separate field of enquiry different and in opposition to the world of the secular where the procedures and practices of science became the foundations on which to construct a knowledge of the secular world. Across Europe and America, department of religious studies focussed on the religions of the world paying great attention to the holy books, belief systems and ritual practices. Religion was conceived of as one of the sub-systems of society that could be investigated on much the same basis as some of the other major institutions of human society. The role of disciplines like philology, hermeneutics, proved immensely useful in developing knowledge of religious text that belong to the great religions of the world. In the Indian context, however, a separation between the religion and the secular, remained a deeply contested and problematic one. What were recognised as the Hindu religionwas often seen as an all-encompassing cultural world view of Indian society that provided for all Indians a way to live their life.1

This module is divided into three sections. Section one deals with the development of religious studies in West: its challenges and responses. Section two discusses the reasons of the religious studies not being developed or flourished in India. And lastly, section three discusses the historiographical relationship between religious studies and social sciences in the Indian context and the scope of religious studies in India as part of social science as viewed by the western and Indian scholars.

Section-I

Development of Religious Studies in the West

Ever since the sixteenth century, the ‘religious-secular dichotomy’ has played an ideological function in the colonial project. ‘Religion’ was separated from other domain such as ‘politics’, ‘social science’ and ‘economics’ and this divide between the religious and the secular/ secular thinking has assumed the status of a static binary. This promotes an essential distinction between domains such as ‘politics’, ‘human interference’ and ‘social science’ (as secular and non-religious) and ‘religion’ (as non-political). The implication was that religion is essentially non-political, and that politics is essentially non-religious (Fitzgerald, 2007). A common hesitationseen in scholarly discourses world-wide is that of assuming that ‘religion and politics’ as distinct, mutually exclusive categories in the ‘modern’ time.

For example, Adam Smith and David Hume contributed heavily to the idea of ‘secularization’, in other words the naturalization of the emerging ideological configuration of the ‘non-religious’secular (religion-secular dichotomy) which constructed non-religious political economy (development of hegemonic world economic system that makes capital markets their unavoidable natural occurrence) and generic religion.

1The Supreme Court’s “Hindutva judgment” delivered by Justice J.S.Verma on December 11, 1995

Berger (1999) strongly assertsthat religion has not died on the contrary it has not only survived but flourished across the world. The resurgence of religion hasan impact on the political life of all the countries across the world. From the early 1990’s, the so called ‘global resurgence of religion’ has inspired scholars to re-examine the relation between the religious and the secular in the modern world. A new methodology based on a historical and ethnographic deconstruction of the categories of ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’ and the divide between them, aims to expose how in the modern and colonial era, these categories have been imposed on non-western cultures and how, in the course of this process, they gradually assumed the form they have today. In other words, the category and the dichotomy have a specific history and function in the western culture. The history is related to the Christian religion and the function to the shaping of the modern and colonial worlds. These scholars apparently questioned critically the ideological functions of the religious-secular distinction and the exact analysis of historically changing usages of ‘religious’ in the emergence of modern category. This also included critically questing how religious studies and associated disciplines such as anthropology, philosophy and sociology of religion are framed and taught in the academy and the schools.2

Timothy Fitzgerald presents his critical deconstruction of religion as a powerful discourse and its binary relation to ‘secular’ categories like politics and economics. He says that the assumption of an essential difference between the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’ is embedded in the writing of perhaps the majority of scholars in religious studies and even more widely. Religion is not a stand-alone category, he argues; ‘religions’ are modern inventions which are made to appear ubiquitous and, by being removed to a marginal, privatised domain, serve to mystify the supposed natural rationality of the secular state and capital (Timothy Fitzgerald, 2000).The theoretical claim he makes is that ‘religion’ cannot be treated as a category in isolation, but must be analysed in its historical emergence as part of a network of categories (private and public, inner and outer etc.).He furthers this point by saying that there are many beliefs and

2Among such scholars, W.C. Smith (1962), John Bossy (1982; 1985), Jonathan Z.Smith (1982; 1998), Peter Biller (1985), Louis

Dumont (1986), Michael Taussig (1987), Fritz Staal (1989), Peer Harrison (1990), Michel Despland And Gérard Vallée (1992), Talal Asad (1993; 2003), S. N. Balagangadhara (1994), David Chidester (1996), Russ McCutcheon (1997), Daniel Dubuisson (1998), Gavin Flood (1999), Richard King (1999), Danièle Hervieu-Léger (2000), Timothy Fitzgerald (2000), Derek Peterson and Darren Walhof (2002), Kim Knott (2005), Tomoko Masuzawa (2005) etc. are significant to be mentioned.

practices in western cultures normally categorised as ‘secular’ but which can equally belabelled ‘religious’. He has given the example of ‘Nationalism’, which is according to him, a kind of worship of a transcendental imaginary entity that undercuts the supposed distinctions between religion and the secular state (Timothy Fitzgerald, 2000).

According to him, the historical role of the category ‘religion’ in developing the dominant ideology of the modern west, has been used in a way that has not only added nothing to, but has actually obscured, the subject matter it was supposed to illuminate, and this term has typically been more of a hindrance than a help in the study of culture/tradition of a society. That the term religion carries an ideological baggage is what truly renders its use as a scholarly tool untenable.He stresses that the methodological problem in the historiography of religious studies is thatwhile treating ‘religion’ as a category of its own right, one the one hand, the legitimisation and construction in particular the idea of ‘non-religious’ is overlooked, and on the other, the importance of the ideological configuration of what ‘religion is doing’ is also missed.

The merit of this approach lies in its genuine attempt to take seriously non-western cultures and their experience of social reality, which challenge the common-sense view that the modern west is the embodiment of a universal and secular way of being as opposed to the many religious ways that limit the non-western societies. This approach also instigates two central issues which are, (a) how the categories of religion and the secular were shaped by these colonial encounters, and (b) how this impacted upon the self-understanding of non-western cultures.

The history of the term ‘religion’ and of the field of religious studies, is inextricably bound up with the development of a liberal ecumenical theology which required to seek historically to free itself from distinctively Christian terminologies and symbolisms, contrasting/binary relations with ‘the secular’, and the field of religious studies as an ostensibly scientific and tradition-neutral exploration of this phenomenon of ‘religion’.

Contemporary religious studies and histories,meanwhile, started looking at the ‘categories’ without which we could not think of religion on the modern sense at all such as‘the secular’ as the ‘non-religious’ in various constructions like the secular nation state, secular politics and law, economics and markets, scientific naturalism and materialism, and so on. As TalalAsad argues, the secular cannot be viewed as a successor to religion, or be seen as on the side of the rational. It is a category with a multi-layered history, related to major premises of modernity, democracy, and the concept of human rights (Talal Asad, 2003). The ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’ are mutually delimiting and defining concepts, the distinction between them continually shifting depending on the context of a particular society. According to him, in creating its characteristic division between secular public space and religious private space, European secularism sought to shuffle ritual and discipline into the private realm. In doing so, however, it loses touch with the ways in which embodied practices of conduct help to constitute culture, including European culture. Hence, secularism should not merely be the division between public and private realms, which prevents harshly the allowance of religious diversity to flourish in the public arena (Talal Asad, 2003).

Section-II

Religious studies and the Social Sciences in India

In India, religious studies has yet to develop in the same way as is counterpart in the West. It is to be found in a fragmentary manner in the departments of Philosophy, Ancient Indian History and Culture, Sanskrit etc. Why is there such indifference in Independent India towards the study of the various religions of India and the world? Why has religious study or theology not been brought within the social sciences? Further, why is itunrealistic/impracticalto differentiate between ‘religion’ and ‘secular’ in the Indian context?The following discussion would throw some insight into these issues.

Edward Said (1978) launched his critique of the West by planting the idea that, western notions of the east and the ways in which ‘orientalist discourse’ was disseminated legitimized colonial aggression and political supremacy of the western world.Sheldon Pollock (1993) and Richard King (1999) have furthered thisargument by saying that the authoritative power of orientalist discourse is always associated with an imperial agenda to create a powerful ‘internal narrative’, which suggests that indigenous people of theEast have also used, manipulated and constructed their own positive responses to colonialism using orientalist conceptions. Orientalist presuppositions about the ‘spirituality’ of India etc. were used by the reformers such as Rammohan Roy, DayanandaSaraswati, Swami Vivekananda and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in the development of an anti-colonial Hindu ‘nationalism’. In short, Hindu intelligentsia were themselves influenced by the stereotypical portrayal of ‘the orient’ carried out by the West_.

The Europeanization of the ‘Orient’ which claimed culturally and politically neutralgoals and underlying values, however their methods, presupposed the supremacy of the European cultural project, which slides almost imperceptibly into the Utilitarian, Victorian enterprise of ‘improving’ the natives to give them their ‘own’ laws, to purify the Indian culture and speak on its behalf. This eventually formed a class of potential interpreters between the ‘colonisers’ and the millions of ‘colonised’; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect (Tejaswini Niranjana, 1990).

The Western terminologies and logic in social sciences, anthropology as a science, were habituated in treating the non-European races as ‘primitive’ and inferior. This attitude has marred most western approaches to the anthropology of religions. Some of the Chicago school thinkers like David Kopf (1980), in overstressing the anthropological and the magical elements in the study of religions of non-western, non-European regions, showed tendencies to treat religions of ‘savages’ as inferior.3

In India, British colonial ideology, through the various media of communication, education and institutional control has made a substantial contribution to the construction of modern religious and nationalist identities and self-awareness amongst contemporary Indians. The modernist concept of distinguishing ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ within Indian culture and history prevail and contemporary Indian identities remain subject to the influence of a westernising and neo-colonial orientalism or utilitarianism.

Alongside with Rajeev Bhargava (1998), T. N. Madan (1998) and Ashis Nandy (1998) viewed this political secularism carrying inevitably the heavy baggage of a larger, comprehensive, hyper-substantive, secular world view. According to them, secularism in

3Kindly see David Kopf, “Hermeneutics versus History”, in Journal of Asian Studies, XXXIX, No. 3, May,

1980.

India is part of a larger modernist project4. Secularism, according to them, constitutes an entire world-view that establishes a hierarchical relation between the secular and the religious, which in its political form expels religion from public life. In a multi-religious society like India, secularism may not be restricted to rationalism that it is compatible with faith; and that rationalism, as understood in the Victorian and post-enlightenment faith in the progressive nature of history is not the sole motive force of a concept of a modern state.

India and the subcontinents have different religious sects instead of one uniform ‘religion’ per se. All religions in turn, including Hinduism, have different sects. Hindu philosophers in India are associated with various religious groups/sects such as Sankaraites, Ramanujaites, Vaisnavaites, Saivaites etc. In Buddhism there are sects like Mahayana, Hinayana, Vajrayana, or the Diamond Vehicle, the Theravada School. In Islam, sects such as Ahmadia, Ismail, Salafi, Shia, Sufi, Sunni, NizariIsma’ilis, Wahhabism, etc. also exist.

In India religious belief as ‘faith’ was a ‘way of life’/philosophy, a tradition which is definitionally non-monolithic and operationally plural; and religious conviction as ‘ideology’ is a sub-national, national or cross-national identifier of populations contesting for or protecting ‘non-religious’, usually political or socio-economic interest (Ashis Nandy, 1998). Modernisation process in India made easy to recognise other communities on the basis of religion, such as Muslims and Christians; also produced political consequences of the construction of a common/consolidated Hindu identity, produced religion-as-ideology (in Gramsci’s terms, the class/community which wishes to become hegemonic has to nationalize itself and in the process create a nationalist middle class) (Romila Thapar, 1989)and then generated secularism to meet its challenge to the ‘ideology of modern statecraft’ (scientific management of state institutions). In contrast, in India,religiosity/religiousness being of ‘immense importance’, public-private distinctions failed to hold, and religiousness inevitably entered public life through communalisation of politics.

4T. N. Madan, ‘Secularism in Its Place’, in Rajeev Bhargava, (ed.) Secularism and Its Critics, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1998.

Nevertheless, secularism without religiousness is culturally proves virtually inconsistent in India because the established hierarchy in Indian culture encompasses the secular within the religious, and because it is too much of a public matter to be privatised. The demand for the removal of religiosity from public life in India is predicated within the secular framework upon the mainstream ‘enlightenment view’ of religion(enlightenment view of Christianity culminated a new way of looking towards the religion; absolute claim for only one truth which held the defeat of belief/philosophy and metaphysics were the harbingers of secular modernity).This view of secularism proved an inappropriate ground for meeting the challenge of Hindu majoritarianism in India. Secularism in the sense of a strict separation between the modern state and traditional religion proves sometimes unsuitable in the Indian context for the defence of minorities because the majority religion sometimes used the separation in manoeuvring the vast machinery of the state to discriminate against minorities. On the flipside, strict neutrality and non-preferentialism, in the historical reality of the Indian situation has sometimes slipped from being practised. The Indian state had intervened selectively in the personal laws of majoritarian religious communities and has not been, strictly, ‘secular’in this sense (Partha Chatterjee, 1999).

As well in the context of ‘caste system’ in India, the separation between religion and politics became unmanageable which intricatethe separation between ‘religion and ‘social science’ as unreasonable. The understanding of caste as a religious system as intrinsically connected to Hinduism came into being only as late as the 1820s. Will Sweetman (2007) shows in his study that the British classification of caste as a ‘religious’ rather than a ‘political’ institution was an instrument of colonial policy designed to strengthen the Brahmin castes eventually.Caste is now believed to be extremely rigid, determined by birth and characterised by ‘untouchability’ where‘purity’, ‘impurity’ and ‘pollution’ play a crucial role (M. N. Srinivas, 1996).However, caste in India is no more a static phenomenon and is characterised by mobility. In India the caste system is too intrigue and complicated becausethe backward communities constitute the most heterogeneous category. In the non-Hindu religions, caste system do exist in varying degrees in India, which isn’t taken into account widely. Caste, occupation and social backwardness is intertwined in Indian society, and hence makes it a very difficultphenomenon to make a binary relation between religious and secular and religion and social science.

European colonial influence upon Indian religion and culture has profoundly altered its nature in the modern era. Western colonization has contributed to the modern construction of ‘Hinduism’ by locating the core of Indian religiosity through the textualization of cultures (in certain Sanskrit texts as sacred) and also by a tendency to define Indian religious convictions(which includes Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs as Hindu) in terms of a normative definition of religion based upon contemporary Western understanding of the Judaeo-Christian traditions. Thus the oral and ‘popular’ aspects of Indian religious tradition were either ignored or decried as evidence of the degradation of contemporary religions into superstitious practices on the grounds that they bear little or no resemblance to their own texts (Richard King, 1999). The project of translating (codification of Hindu and Muslim personal laws) of the Dharmashastras was a development of ‘textual imperialism’and a fixed and absolute body of knowledge based on the Vedic and Sanskrit scriptures. The translation of law of Hindus was a representation of the native Brahman pandits. The problem with taking the Dharamshastras as pan-Indian in application was that the texts themselves were representative of a Brahminical forms of Hinduism and not of unified Hindu community (J. Duncan M. Derrett, 1968).The whole process established a centralized legal system prevailed across the country and different sources were not consulted with widely varying regularity and results.

Section-III

Scope of studies on Religion associated with the Social Sciencesin India

The arbitrariness involved in the homogenization of Indian religious belief/philosophy under the rubric of ‘Hinduism’ and the same a priori assumption of religious unity of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Von Stietencron (1991) argues that these religious sects or denominations of a single religiositydespite having a common geographical origin in the Near East; a common ancestry (Abrahamic tradition); a common monotheism; prophetism; accepting a linear and eschatological conception of history; similar religious ethics;and similar theological framework (single God, devil, paradise creationand the status of mankind of history), there is no common founder of the three movements, no uniformed religious ritual, ecclesiastical/clergy organisation and no common doctrine which is valid for all adherents.

If we then consider the diversity of religious movements generally subsumed under the label of ‘Hinduism’ we will find that Hinduism is in effect a pan-Indian category that subsumes under its folds a vast diversity of sects and religious traditions. These religious traditions not only display a hierarchy of high-low Gods but also differentiation in terms of major and minortraditions within the different regions where these traditions hold sway Marriott (1955). It is true that Sanskritic Brahmanism sought to hegemonize and dominate through appropriation and control the non-Brahmanical forms of religious worship in the Indian context. This however, has remained an incomplete project with majoritarian Hinduism running into deep conflict and contradiction with its constituent parts. The growth of the reform movement in 19th century colonial India is clearly indicative of these divergent trends. This approach remains profoundly anti-historical in its postulation of an ahistorical essence to all forms of ‘Hinduism’ are related. Not surprising then any attempt to establish a universalistic homogenising discourse of religion in India has continued to remain a problematic and incomplete project.

Edward Said (1978) has suggested that such an abstract and synchronic approach which Orientalist discourses fundamentally distinguished the passive and ahistorical orient from the Active and historically changing Occident. This new Hinduism (syndicated Hinduism), furnished with a Brahminical base, merged with elements of upper caste belief and ritual with one eye on the Christian and Islamic models, which was thoroughly infused with a political and nationalistic emphasis, to search for national identity, consciousness and national union (Romila Thapar, 1985). The failure to transcend a model of religion premised on the monotheistic exclusivism of Western Christianity resulted in the imaginative construction of a single religion called ‘Hinduism’.

The perceived shortcomings of contemporary ‘Hinduism’ in utilitarian concept created the belief that Hindu religious conviction had stagnated over the centuries and was therefore in need of reformation. In result, the rise of ‘Hindu Reform movements’ in 19th century filled with the Brahmo Samaj, the Arya Samaj and the Ramakrishna Mission. Almost all the academic textbooks describe these groups as ‘reform movements’ which falls into the trap of seeing the pre-colonial religious convictions through colonial spectacles. The highly questionable periodization of ancient Indian history by the utilitarian school gave the impression that Hinduism is a single religion with its origins in the Vedas and from ‘medieval’ period onwards (10th century onwards) Hinduism stagnated and lost its potential for renewal/enlargement; hence with the arrival of the West, Hindus became inspired to reform their decadent religion to its former glory. Thus Hinduism in the 20th century is allowed to enter the privileged arena of the ‘world religions’, the criteria of membership established by West (Richard King, 1999).

The religious studies in India being a part of social science would make it possible to question/rethink/historically reconstruct/rewrite the historiography of the construction of modern nation state, which was a product of European socio-political and economic developments from the 16th century onwards, and the introduction of the nationalist model into Asia as a further legacy of European imperialism in this area.

Positing the existence of qualities of natures (mystical) which differentiate ‘Indian’ culture from the west, the ‘essentialism’ inherent in most orientalist discourses of Indian context should be comprehensively refuted. To attack such essentialism, rooted as it is in the enlightenment belief in a unified human nature, not just because it misrepresents the heterogeneity of the subject-matter, but also because of the way in which such essentialism results in the construction of a cultural stereotype which may then be used to subordinate, classify and dominate the non-western world (Ronald Inden, 1986).

The profound scope of religious studies in the social science in India would abandon the essentialism, rather than facilitating vagueness and disorder, opens up the possibility of new directions in the study of South Asian religion and culture. Through this a proper acknowledgement of the heterogeneity of Indian religiosity would critique the homogenising and hegemonic discourse provided by postcolonial world; also would allow for the possibility of subaltern responses in disagreement to dominant ideological constructs and the cultural, political elitism.

Conclusion

The above discussion informs us that the use of the word ‘religion’ in studies of non-western value system and cultures, easily portray how a western concept is continually foisted on non-western societies even though its applications areso obviously problematic. The study of ‘religion’ further makes clear the relation between institutionalised values of the specific societies and the legitimation of power.

Therefore in the Indian context, a historical analysis/development of western culture and its understanding of its own culture will make a discourse and categories significant in the religious studies. The term ‘religion’ requires introducing the category of ‘religion’ into the context of non-western and indigenous societies. Such studies are needed to clarify why a shift in the meaning of ‘religious’ or ‘secular’ is of crucial importance, which would identify a lacuna in contemporary research in the social sciences and religious studies. The convergence of religious studies with cultural studies and anthropology into the field of humanities/social science/ethnographical studies will encompass the field of ‘religion’ to useful analytic categories such as soteriology, ritual, politics, culture/tradition, social organisation, customary practice (caste system in India) etc., while simultaneously paving the way towards a genuine decolonisation of the study of religions in India.

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