5 Indological and Orientalist constructions of Religion in India.

Janaki Somaiya

Introduction:

In this module we shall understand the ways in which religion and the episteme of ‘tradition’ in India got construed within Sociology through Indological and Orientalist perspectives. We begin by understanding the historical context in which religion in India came to be described. In the subsequent sections we shall understand what these perspectives mean and their relevance in the study of religion in India, followed by a critical analysis which tries to deconstruct the image of religion in India as ‘the mystic East’ and the politics involved in such stereotyping. It is important to note that public opinion in the West, about India and its culture is still largely shaped by such images.

In the history of Western scholarship, the textual disciplines were bound by the study of classical texts of ancient Greece and Rome. This trend however was encouraged by the affinity discovered by Sir William Jones in the resemblance between Sanskrit and European languages. The initial encouragement in studying other cultures and societies streamed from a curiosity in the treasures of the East, which could have been the source of Western religions and philosophies. A number of historical accounts such as travelogues written by ancient and medieval writers were embellished and mostly exaggerated descriptions of India. As the explorations increased by the Portuguese, the French, the English, this image slowly began to fade away as India then became merely a source of luxurious items for trading purposes.

The nineteenth century was a period when British officials, travelers and missionaries collected a considerable quantity of basic information on the character and resources of the country they had conquered, its people, ecology, agriculture, land revenue and much more.

The various studies that had already been taken up by various scholars, historians, from different parts of the world, described and re-described India through their own cultural lens. From being projected as the “land of desires”, India soon became a part of the “white man’s burden”, which then became a part of colonial project. It was in this context that Milton Singer explained that India was not out there waiting to be understood. It had already been discovered and rediscovered many times in other people’s terms. India has been struggling to free herself from these foreign terms since independence. (Singer, 1957)

A rigorous study of India’s cultures and belief systems began with the Ethnographic Survey of India, established at the beginning of the nineteenth century, which also led to the compilation of the district gazetteers, the Imperial Gazetteer of India, and the many volumes on the tribes. Professional anthropologists were the last to join the band of data-collectors who contributed to the description of India and her traditions. We shall understand in the following sections that there is a striking contrast between the early descriptions of India by the early Greek and Roman writers as compared to these later descriptions during the colonial period.

The Indological approach:

The need for administrative purposes of a knowledge of the structure of Indian society led to a systematic study of the nature of Indian society through different perspectives. By 1818, and the final defeat of the Marathas, the British became acutely aware of the baffling variety of cultures and people in India. The company then directly supported surveys to collect more systematic information about the land and its people. This ‘official’ view of Indian society was also reflected in the anthropological theories of the period 1870-1910.

The documentation of the community social behaviour, customs and mores became a major project for the British. Indologists built an extensive collection of knowledge on Vedic and post-Vedic scriptures and translated ancient Indian texts from Sanskrit into European languages. The Indologists believed that scriptures and texts are a major source of information about the history and character of the different schools and sects, as well as about their social life generally.

British officials relied on ‘native informants’, generally Brahmins, to codify practices and classify castes. The Brahmins had already elaborated the varna four-fold classification theory, but manipulated it to capitalize on new opportunities presented by the British. The Indologists were convinced that the religious texts were indeed accurate guides to the culture and society of the Hindus. Several of them with the help of local Brahmins translated these texts, projecting a Brahminical view of Indian society. Indian society was viewed as a set of religious beliefs that the upper-caste Hindus followed. Once the British has defined something as an Indian custom or traditional dress, or the proper form of salutation, any deviation from it was defined as a rebellion or an act to be punished. India was redefined by the British to be a place of rules and order; once the British had defined to their own satisfaction what they constructed as Indian rules and customs then the Indians had to conform to these constructions. (Cohn, 1987)

One may look at the work of Louis Dumont (1980) and his Indological characterization of Indian society. What Dumont saw was a timeless ideology of caste hierarchy replicated at every level of Indian society and culture. This view was itself a result of certain practices of classification and enumeration within the colonial perspective which portrayed Brahminical texts as representing the social reality of India. This Indological approach seemed to be a de-contextualized depiction of Indian society as being a Hindu society unaffected by a thousand years of Islamic and five hundred years of European history, which interpenetrated it. It achieved its image of ‘holistic’ Hindu ideology.

Research, A M Shah (1974), who has done a critical review of historical sociology, has argued that G.S. Ghurye brought his background of Indology and rigorous training in Sanskrit to bear on his important writings on family and Kin in the Indo-European culture, the Indian ‘sadhus’, gods and men, and ‘Pravara’ and ‘Charana’.

In an essay on the scholarship of L.K.A Iyer, Kalpana Ram puts forward an essential argument thus stated, Iyer’s essay on Religion in the Mysore volumes effortlessly absorbs an evolutionist schema in which Brahmanic religion retains its place on the top of the civilization ladder. But in his version, Brahmanism is distinguished in a new way from the religion of ‘lower castes’ and ‘tribes’ which henceforth become the province of ‘totemism’, ‘magic’, ‘sorcery’, and ‘animism’. The religion of the upper castes consists of named, organized bodies of thought. It includes the hymns and sacrifices of the Rig Veda, the philosophy of the Upanishads, doctrines of karma. Magic and sorcery on the other hand are considered the province of non-elites. (Uberoi, et al., 2000)

In Indian sociology and social anthropology, apart from Ghurye, several other scholars had contributed to the Indological studies by using textual sources for interpretation and reconstruction of religion. Notable among them are Ketkar (1909), Altekar (1927), Karandikar (1929), K M Kapadia (1945), and Iravati Karve (1953, 1961). More specifically, Karve (1953; 1961) had systematically used anthropometry and ethnographic data on family, various castes, tribes and clans, also linguistic data on kinship terminologies, religions and cultural regions of Maharashtra. Her work on caste is mostly embodied in Hindu Society: An Interpretation (1961) in which she questioned Ghurye’s contention that the system of caste and varna was a product of the Indo-Aryan culture and that it diffused to parts of the Indian subcontinent. Although Karve titled her chapter on caste as “a historical survey”, most of the references cited in this chapter are from such textual sources as Vedas, Upanishadas, Manusmriti, Bhagvadgita, Ramayana, Mahabharata and so on. Hence, like Ghurye’s work, Karve’s work also suffered from the limitations of Indological approach if it is to be understood as use of history in “reconstruction of caste as a form of living hierarchical system of discrimination” (Sundar, 2005). Her references to the present day caste system and its functioning are only token, not supported by any historical data, textual sources or even by contemporary field data.

Karve’s other well known work, Yugant (1991) is essentially an insightful re-interpretation of the epic of Mahabharat, in which she has challenged the commonly held norms of a Hindu family – particularly those ideas associated with ideal womanhood. The question is whether we are to distinguish between myth and history or not. It hardly needs to be over-emphasized that texts may at times be necessary, but certainly not sufficient, for historical reconstruction, analysis, reasoning and interpretation.

A kind of transposition is at work here, where some of the terms through which the British distinguished Europe from India become reworked in order to distinguish elite from non-elite Indians. Classical texts often change hands and go through several interpolations by the time they are handed down to us. Hence, the question as to whether or not an analysis based on textual interpretation, however meticulously attempted, could be accepted as a viable substitute for rigorous use of historical method, still remains open. It needs to be emphasized that in studying Indian society it is quite legitimate to examine classical texts as sources of cultural practices, behavior patterns, norms and values, and as legitimating institutions that regulate day-to-day life of people.

Against this practice of textual analysis of scriptures within religious studies, M.N Srinivas presented another practice, that of field work. The absence of a unity within Hinduism due to the absence of a single church organization did not prevent scholars from defining Hinduism as one single religion. It did not in any way extend any justice to the diversity of rituals within each caste, village, town, city or state. Srinivas distinguished these variations within Hinduism according to the degree of geographical spread. Srinivas called this as the process of “Sanskritization” which he concludes, occurred in two ways: “by the extension of Sanskritik deities and ritual forms to an outlaying group, as well as by the greater Sanskritization of the rituals and beliefs of groups inside Hinduism”. Through this process the lower castes and various tribal groups were brought under the Hindu fold. (Srinivas, 1956) But according to him, what affected the conceptualization of Hinduism within scholarly content was the constant dependence on Sanskritik texts and the ritual practices of the Brahmins.

The Orientalist approach:

The Indian reformers tried to initiate an Indian renaissance while being exposed to the criticisms of Christian missionaries, as well as British liberalism of the nineteenth century. Thus the knowledge that got constituted within India, about its culture, belief systems, philosophy et all cannot be seen, keeping out the context of colonial rule within which it was formed. Early studies by European scholars were often tinted with their own cultural prejudices. These prejudices also shaped the views of the Indian intelligentsia.

It is also important to note that there were several studies conducted by the missionaries that arrived in India. Amongst the missionaries, there was an attempt to condemn Hindu society for its many evils. In the view of Charles Grant, one of the early evangelicals, the only hope for the improvement being the conversion of Indian population to Christianity. One could here talk about the American writer, a woman named Katherine Mayo who wrote the classic epitome of the “white man’s burden” in a book titled, ‘Mother India” published in 1927 in the United States. She collected and noted in this work horrors of Indian society to haunt anyone- child marriage, subordination of wives to husbands, low status of widows, unsanitary and unskilled midwives, purdah, devdasi, sickness, Indian medicine, untouchables, shameless begging, the educated unemployed, and much more. She passed judgments of total inferiority on the Indian civilization, while the Greeks and the Romans in her works become objects of awe and curiosity. (Singer, 1972, pp. 20-21)

This perspective then merged with the discourse of reform that was deeply threaded in the language of late-nineteenth century Indian sociology. Their problem being to reconstitute Indian society to make it both ‘modern’, by recognizing universal rights, but at the same time ‘Indian’, by preserving Hindu traditions and law.

This tendency to move seamlessly from liberalism and rationalism to a conservative religious understanding of Indian society is found in works of major scholars like G.S Ghurye. Ghurye’s sociology drew heavily on the traditions of British and German Orientalism that had emerged out of eighteenth –century European debates on the nature and origin of ‘civilization’ and the West’s fascination with what were thought to be the earliest civilizations- Greece and Egypt. According to Upadhyay (2007), the Aryan invasion theory, together with the Orientalist construction of Hindu society, formed the discursive basis of the various social and religious reform, revivalist, and nationalist movements that proliferated in the second half of the nineteenth century.

This theory also underwrote Ghurye’s main thesis that Indian civilisation was formed through the slow assimilation of non-Aryan groups to Aryan or Vedic culture. In Aborigines he criticizes the view of anthropologist Verrier Elwin and several British administrators that the Indian tribes are culturally distinct from caste Hindus and that their way of life should be preserved through state-enforced isolation from Hindu society. Unlike most anthropologists, Ghurye also critiqued the tribe/caste distinction itself and regarded tribals as ‘imperfectly integrated classes of Hindu society’ or ‘Backward Hindus’. (Ghurye, 1959)

With Ghurye’s emphasis on the study of ‘tradition’, studying institutions of family, kinship, caste and religion, (specifically Hindu in content), sociology of reform got resonated in the works of mainstream sociologists. Ghurye was able to pass on his orientalist approach to his students.

Another scholar who influenced the study of religion in India was Vivekananda (1863–1902), the founder of the Ramakrishna Mission, an organization devoted to the promotion of a contemporary form of Advaita Vedanta (non-dualism). He placed particular emphasis upon the spirituality of Indian culture as a curative for the nihilism and materialism of modern Western culture. In Vivekananda’s hands, Orientalist notions of India as ‘other worldly’ and ‘mystical’ were embraced and praised as India’s special gift to humankind. Thus the very discourse that succeeded in alienating, subordinating and controlling India was used by Vivekananda as a religious clarion call for the Indian people to unite under the banner of a universalistic and all-embracing Hinduism. (King, 1999)

Similarly, Benoy Kumar Sarkar’s scholarship has been essentially coloured with a nationalist fervour, shaped by his membership of the Dawn Society and by his participation in the Swadeshi movement. The influence of Shukraniti, a Sanskrit text seems to have influenced his thought. Sarkar’s work tried to describe the materialist history of India as a confrontation between ancient India and the India of his time. History then became a way of making the past a presence in the consciousness of colonial India, of establishing relations of commonality between institutions described in ancient texts and those in contemporary India. (Chatterji, 2007) Sarkar spoke of India as being exclusively Hindu, while at other times including Islam and the Muslim period as being part of the Indian civilizational process. Sarkar was introduced to these ideas through the Dawn society which, under the auspices of Satish Chandra Mukherjee, organized classes on subjects as diverse as the Bhagvat Gita, the Indian village tradition of Swaraj, the philosophy of Kant and Hegel, and so on.(Chatterji, 2007) Sarkar used sociology to oppose orientalist representations of India that were put forward by Indologists. But this glorification of one single religion (Hinduism) as constituting an entire civilization was an error committed by many sociologists of that period.

A critical analysis of the Orientalist and Indological study of religion in

India:

Colonial conquest and knowledge both enabled ways to rule and to construct was colonialism was all about. This form of classification proved beneficial for one indigenous group, the Brahmins, who were given a superior status. Anthropology then moved beyond classification that assessed racial stock through anthropometric studies was slowly replaced by the indological method.

When we look at the historical background in which these works were carried out, the period of national struggle, one cannot help but wonder if a perspective of ‘tradition’ that was assumed as being a significant character of Indian society, was used to constantly battle the notions of colonial superiority (modernity) and Eurocentricism. There are innumerable problems attached to such a view. It confined the discipline of sociology within its walls of tradition, at the same time producing knowledge that was deeply rooted in a Brahminical view of Indian society. It never detached itself from its colonial roots of Western education, in creating a class of intellectuals (in this case caste ‘Brahmins’), who interpreted Indian society for the colonial masters. It carefully adopted an evolutionary view of Indian society placing Brahmins at the top of the civilizational order, upholding it conservativism.

Cohn explains how the establishment of the Ethnographic Survey of India, as part of the census (1901), played a crucial role in defining the official view of caste. Indians increasingly started to identify themselves as part of endogamous groups owing to the constant need for government applications in indentifying citizens by caste. While caste distinctions among Hindus were rigorously recorded, similar distinctions among other religious groups did not receive equal attention.

Frantz Fanon has argued that the transfer of power from the colonists to what he calls the ‘national bourgeoisie’ maintains the colonial institutions intact.

Cohn(2001) argues how the view of Indian society was derived from the ‘textual’ analysis of Indian society. “A view of Indian society which was derived from the study of texts and cooperation with pundits had several consequences. It led to a consistent view that the Brahmins were the dominant group in the society. The acceptance of the textual view of the society by the orientalists also led to a picture of Indian society as being static, timeless and space-less.” Max Weber was also criticised for his flawed perception of Hinduism and Buddhism as being “other-worldly” and irrational in their “inner spirit” and hence were incapable of developing industrial capitalism. This perspective reconstructs the western bias towards Asian cultures as being incapable of social progress enmeshed with the prejudices of the Enlightenment thinkers.

As Dumont (1972: 70-103) has argued: understanding the values, belief system and ideology underlying caste system in India is vitally important and indis-pensable. Dumont’s assertion need not be disputed. Nonetheless, while bringing out the most fundamental distinction between “purity” and “pollution”, Dumont drew heavily on textual interpretations from P V Kane’s History of Dharmashastras. In this context, whatever has been presented by Dumont as historical evidence and data is essentially extracted from normative classical literature that tended to depict “ideal” rather than “real”. That “ideal” was a product of the dominant Brahmanical culture and regimented social order in which prescriptions and proscriptions of purity and pollution were coaxed in religious-ethical codes of the Dharmashastras and Grihyasutras – this has also been admitted by Dumont (ibid, pp 88-112).

It is true that Ghurye and Dumont never confined themselves to the use of sacred texts only. Both have used primary data and secondary sources produced either by themselves or by other sociologists and anthropologists. However, Ghurye’s Indological probing and frequent excursions in anthropometry cannot be mistaken as systematic reconstruction of history or historical analysis of structure and change in Indian society.

The religious construction of knowledge by the British not only constructed the predominant Western image of India, but it also contributed to a sense of self-awareness that the Indians it went on to describe. The intelligentsia that arose in the colonies was a creature of imperialism. Wherever imperialism went, it particularly destroyed the old social organisation, and created a distorted society. It created new classes and new strata. It destroyed the balance of forces that contributed to the equilibrium of the old indigenous social order.

Conclusion:

It is important to note that classical texts or scriptures cannot be taken at their face value, as they go through a series of processes of editing throughout their historical journey. They are nonetheless a rich source of information for an anthropologist. Yet, textual interpretation must be conducted only in the context of the culture and society in which it is found.

Earlier anthropologists by confining their study to a tribe, avoided dealing with the central defining reality of the colonial political-economic framework.

Social anthropology was in itself was formed as a discourse rooted in a Eurocentric view of the world. The early theories of social evolutionary theorists like Taylor and Morgan are an evidence of this. One has to keep in mind, this view as a backdrop while understanding the study of religions in non-Western societies. The western educated intelligentsia was created to fulfil certain requirements of the colonial state. The most well known statement had been attributed to the liberal English statesman, Maculay (also the Governor General and President of the General Committee of Public Institutions), who stated, ”The aim of English education was to create ‘a class of persons, Indian in co lour and blood, but English in taste, opinions, in morals and in intellect’.” To Maculay, the political or military conquest was unimportant compared to the conquest over the minds. Even if India were to slip out of the British Empire, what mattered was that the Indian people continue to sing the glory of British institutions and values. The western-educated intelligentsia though a part of the conquered population, owed its social existence to imperialism. (Raman, 1982)

It is also of much importance to know the duality of subject-object, knower-known, insider-outsider while understanding the context within which the knowledge about cultures came to be constructed. Indian culture came to be generalized as a Hindu culture, which further was presupposed and romanticized as being mystical, as opposed to its rational Western counterpart. The characterizations of “this-worldly” religious world-views as opposed to “the other-worldly” world views of the East came to define the dualities of the West and the East. It was this conception of duality that was later challenged by most post modernist scholars. The idea of duality involved an inherent power relation of one dominating ‘the other’. In this case that ‘other’ is ‘the mystical east’ and the stereotypical conceptions such as being irrational, ascetic, subjective and mystical etc attached to the religions in the East. This kind of othering also involves an inherent form of subordination and exclusion.1

In conclusion, we understand that most Orientalist works functioned to portray Indian thoughts, institutions and practices as distortions of the normative ideal of Western thought. It transformed entire cultures into being subjugated by a superior form of knowledge, which was always controlled by the Western

1 Read Edward Said’s book ‘Orientalism’ for a better understanding of the term, along with it’s critical reviews. Also make a note of the references to Foucault’s knowledge/power debate within Said’s work.

Indological expert. All that was rational, logical became superior, while the object of their study, was deemed inferior. This idea was essentially a feature of the post-enlightenment thought that had a strong belief in scientific rationalism underpinned by the ideas of social Darwinism, the progressive evolution of society and a Eurocentric view of history. While sociology in the West evolved as an intellectual response to the perceived challenges of modern society, sociology in India, especially in the post-independent period was persistently for a long period of time trapped in the study of a glorified past. It almost seemed like a dogmatist attempt of the academia within Indian sociology to assert a distinctive quality to the understanding of Indian society, as if to exalt the ‘progressive’ character of Hindu traditions in response to its Western critique2. Both the disciplines of sociology and social anthropology mark a distinct phase in the intellectual orientation that characterized not only the colonial ruler’s engagement with traditional Indian society, but also the distinctive way in which modernity itself came to be accepted and represented by the various sections of Indian society.

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