06-16-2007, 07:22 PM
Book Review
<b>Representing Hinduism: The Construction of Religious and National Identity</b>
by Heidi Pauwels
Representing Hinduism: The Construction of Religious and National Identity. Edited by VASUDHA DALMIA and HEINRICH VON STIETENCRON. New Delhi: SAGE PUBLICATIONS, 1995. Pp. 467. $24.95 (paper).
Even if scholarship sometimes may happen in ivory towers, the walls are quite permeable to real-life events. Contemporary politics unavoidably influences scholarly exchanges, even if the setting is a place as remote from India's heat and dust as a hilltop castle in Tubingen, Germany. The <b>castle was the unlikely site of an interdisciplinary conference on modern Hindu self-perception in October 1990, during the build-up of political tension in India</b>. Between the time of the conference and the publication of the volume, the tension had led to the destruction of the so-called Babri Masjid, the mosque in Ayodhya, by self-proclaimed "liberators of the birthplace of Lord Rama" in December 1992. The ensuing communal rioting shocked many, including the editors, who envisage this volume as an answer to the violence. They hope it will contribute to "digging up the ground beneath the feet of the stereotypes being projected currently" (p. 32). The destruction of an edifice called for the deconstruction of a hegemonic discourse.
This is not to discredit the volume as tainted by <b>political motivation.</b> The articles, though of uneven quality, are scholarly and well supported. Even those who do not agree with the political perspective of the editors (shared by at least some of the authors) will have to admit that the volume is a major contribution to understanding Hinduism and other South Asian religions in all their diversity.
Taken together, the articles show how the current perception of many urban Hindus of their religion has come about historically through the interaction of many factors. In the past two centuries, the Christian critique, Orientalist perceptions, and the nationalist movement have led to privileging in Hinduism's self-definition the devotional (bhakti) and monistic (advaita) strands, and to stressing the issue of foreign origin in its demarcation against other religions.
At the very least, this rich volume will be thought-provoking. The very topic alluded to in the title, the representation of Hinduism, is one of considerable interest to contemporary academics, as witnessed by the recent special section devoted to it in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (68.4 [2000]: 705-835). It should be pointed out, however, that the volume under review does not directly address the issue of who should represent Hinduism, <b>but rather aims at undermining the authority of a (politically empowered) discourse that claims to represent Hinduism</b>.
It is impossible to do justice to all the arguments within the scope of this review. The volume is conceived as a collection of perspectives from different disciplines. What the articles have in common is that they set Out to challenge current stereotypes regarding Hinduism in its many aspects.
Two articles concentrate on legal issues. Dieter Conrad unmasks legal reforms in personal law, in particular with regard to the scheduled caste issue, as "legal Hindutva" (p. 335). Sudhir Chandra counters the notion that British legislation in India was progressive, especially on the issue of women's rights. He presents as a case study a late-nineteenth-century, much-publicized legal case known as Dadaji Bhakaji vs. Rukhmabai, which revolved around a husband's seeking legal resort to force his child-bride to be restored to him.
Two other articles tackle historical truisms. Partha Chatterjee shows that the notion that Indian nationalism is synonymous with Hindu nationalism is a modern, rationalist, and historicist idea. He does so by comparing the view of history as expressed in early and later colonial Bengali historical textbooks. More directly bearing on the Babri Masjid issue is Gyanendra Pandey's insightful analysis of Hindu histories of Ayodhya. He shows that these texts remove agency (and thus responsibility) from the Hindu "martyrs" and instead invest it in timeless agents.
Three articles by South Asian political scientists, Ram Bapat, Sudipta Kaviraj, and Suresh Sharma, deal with Hindu ways of coming to terms with Western modernity (and its claim of superiority) without losing one's traditional "self." They analyze nineteenth- and twentieth-century writings that grapple with this issue, but, within the political frame of the book, the arguments can be seen as challenging the apparently attractive solution of the issue presented by the Hindu Right and proposing alternative ways to assert one's Hindu identity in the face of modernity.
Ram Bapat tries to make sense of the controversial Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922), a highly educated high-caste Hindu who was interested in Hindu reform, married a low-caste man, and finally converted to Christianity. However, after her conversion, she had her fights with Church authorities, and when she eventually set up a missionary school for widows, she led it in an idiosyncratic way. In representing Pandita's words: "there is no such thing as Christianity, there are Christian religions" (p. 249), Bapat turns upside-down the whole enterprise of deconstructing Hinduism as many Hinduisms. Sudipta Kaviraj goes further in his essay on how the "forgotten" Bengali author Bhudev Mukhopadhyah (1827-94) "talks back" to the empire by means of his "reverse anthropology." One of the questions Mukhopadhyah raises is at the very heart of the volume's critique of neo-Hindu chauvinism, namely what constitutes the "we" of the nationalists. Suresh Sharma discusses the most famous of all those who "talked back," namely Gandhi, and analyzes the meta-position underlying his seminal text Hind Swaraj (first published in 1909). He incisively distinguishes Gandhi's sense of the past as a living tradition from "various modernist attempts to appropriate tradition as a past no longer alive" (p. 286).
Three articles come from the perspective of the performing arts. They deal with what happens to religious texts when performed in non-traditional ways. Roma Chatterji problematizes concepts of authenticity and tradition in her analysis of the complex interrelating discourses surrounding the rediscovered "tribal" dance called Chho from Purulia in Bengal. Anuradha Kapur analyzes Parsi theatre, in particular the mythological drama of the early twentieth-century Hindutva defender Radhesyam Kathavacak. She argues that the introduction of realism as a narrative model led on the one hand to a "domestication" of the gods, who are forced within a logic of cause and effect, and, on the other, to the introduction of "miracles" made possible by stage technology. She repeatedly draws out the relevance of her conclusions for the modern television versions of the epics. Angelika Malinar makes the Bhagavadgita episodes on the Mahabharata television serial the object of her research, arguing that the intelligentsia's belittli ng of the series as a "soap" has preempted serious analysis. Malinar alerts the reader to the serial's dangerous reduction of the complexity of the Gita's message to a "martial" solution for contemporary Indian society's problems.
Two articles deal with the construction of non-Hindu South Asian religious identities, one Sikh, one Muslim. In both cases, the parallels with Hindu militant discourse are tantalizing. Veena Das reveals how militant Sikh discourse combines a discourse of Sikh history with a modern one of state, minorities, and cultural rights. Novelty is subsumed within repetition, and present and past are intrinsically interrelated. Javeed Alam presents a case study of the Ittehadul Muslimeen in Hyderabad, arguing that the recent avatar of this movement has occupied a vacuum created by the perceived withdrawal of the state as a protective institution (with the disposal of the Nizam, compounded by the land reforms that impacted Muslims negatively). He finds that the Ittehad's rhetoric of past Muslim glories was instrumental only in gaining the confidence of the Muslim community, but that it has receded in favor of cultural and linguistic identity building.
Several other articles seek to place different ingredients of currently mainstream political Hinduism in historical perspective. Jurgen Lutt argues that the Ram lahar (Rama-wave) in middle-class Hinduism is a continuation of a British puritan rejection of Krishna. He traces the history of Rama's rise to prominence to the Maharaja Libel Case of 1861, and the ensuing reactions of Hindu reform groups, in particular those led by Dayanand Saraswati and Gandhi. The late Wilhelm Halb-fass discusses one of the influential strands of modern Hinduism, practical Vedanta, with regard to the ethical and social applicability of Vedantic metaphysics of nondualism. He revisits Hacker's argument that Svami Vivekananda's so-called tattvamasi ethics were inspired by Schopenhauer through his student Paul Deussen. Vasudha Dalmia unravels masterfully the complicated fabric of nineteenth-century "traditionalist" (sanatana) reconstructions of Hinduism. She argues convincingly that these were as deeply impacted by missionary and Orie ntalist perspectives as the so-called reform movements, by analyzing the complex works of the influential Hariscandra of Banaras. Monika Horstmann focuses on the influential, much-used but little-studied Hindi journal Kalyan and the Gita Press.
The nationalist and anti-Muslim millionaire Marvari founders started a project to universalize dharma and streamline diverse Hindu groupings under one umbrella with the ultimate aim of bypassing those groupings, including Hindu sampradayas, as well as Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. The late Gunther Sonntheimer points Out that the embarrassed discarding of folk religion by middle-class Hindus comes in the wake of Christian missionary critiques. He argues this has an erosive effect, which can be compared with the ecological one of deforestation.
Several contributors suggest and demonstrate useful angles for further research. <b>Friedhelm Hardy argues in favor of stressing centrifugal de-Sanskritizing features and investigating Tamil sources in particular</b>. Gita Dharmapal-Frick makes a start at looking at the central notion of "caste" from the outside, via early Western understandings of it, utilizing little-known German sources. The late Richard Burghart provides an oft-forgotten perspective on Hinduism from that "other Hindu nation," Nepal.
The daring sweep of some authors' conclusions has already led to criticism. <b>This is the case with von Stietencron's ambitious study relating his findings about religious configurations in pre-Muslim India to the modern concept of Hinduism. His position seems to favor the notion that the category "Hinduism" was invented by Orientalist discourse.</b> For this, he has been sharply criticized, for instance, by David Lorenzen ("Who Invented Hinduism?" Comparative Studies in Society and History of Ideas 41.4 [1999]) and by Brian K. Smith ("Questioning Authority," International Journal of Hindu Studies 2.3 [1998]). Both critics overlook how von Stietencron's generalizations are balanced by the carefully researched first part of his article which, significantly, reveals that Saivas in pre-Muslim South India saw themselves as fundamentally different from other Hindu traditions.
What von Stietencron and Dalmia seek to accomplish in this volume is not so much to deconstruct the academic construct "Hinduism," but rather to discredit communalists who claim to speak for Hinduism (and Sikhism and Islam). They seek to highlight that different groups within Hinduism did not always understand themselves as first and foremost in opposition to Islam or other "foreign" religions, and that such an understanding comes about in conjunction with an increasing self-understanding as part of a monolithic religion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in response to Western critiques (Dalmia in effect addresses the issue on p. 177 n. 3). Their project is a profoundly political one, in that they express the hope that the awareness of these two major issues may deflate the political tension in India. <b>It remains to be seen whether the scholarly findings of this volume will change Hindu self-awareness and influence political events. </b>One of the editors envisages that "(t)he pressure of an imagined domin ating and uniform Hindu majority would cease to drive 'non-Hindu' communities into harsh reactions" (p. 80). Though one may disagree with the editors' position and with that of individual authors on several points, it should be stressed that all contributors are aware of the complexities involved in trying to make their individual research results relevant for the study at hand. The danger of generalizations is precisely what the whole volume sets out to counter.
In my view, the main shortcoming of the volume is the imbalance between articles researching the pre-colonial period and those about nineteenth- and twentieth-century perceptions of Hinduism. The editors are aware of this and express their hope of redressing the imbalance in a later volume (p. 32). In general, this imbalance is symptomatic of the current research climate, where an overreaction against the hegemony of "classical" Indology has led to an overemphasis on the importance of the colonial encounter. It is hoped that the pendulum will swing back, and that a better balance may be reached. The volume under review documents a wealth of detailed analyses of cases of "modem Hinduism" in the making. While that is an excellent project, it also needs to be complemented by studies of the "pre-modern" period. For such studies to be feasible what is desperately needed is that more of the countless "indigenous" sources that are untranslated, or even unpublished, should be made available. <b>If what has been said abo ut pre-colonial Hinduism is flawed and based too exclusively on Sanskritic and Brahmanical sources, the first priority should obviously be to overcome the bias by making available the other sources. </b>
<b>Representing Hinduism: The Construction of Religious and National Identity</b>
by Heidi Pauwels
Representing Hinduism: The Construction of Religious and National Identity. Edited by VASUDHA DALMIA and HEINRICH VON STIETENCRON. New Delhi: SAGE PUBLICATIONS, 1995. Pp. 467. $24.95 (paper).
Even if scholarship sometimes may happen in ivory towers, the walls are quite permeable to real-life events. Contemporary politics unavoidably influences scholarly exchanges, even if the setting is a place as remote from India's heat and dust as a hilltop castle in Tubingen, Germany. The <b>castle was the unlikely site of an interdisciplinary conference on modern Hindu self-perception in October 1990, during the build-up of political tension in India</b>. Between the time of the conference and the publication of the volume, the tension had led to the destruction of the so-called Babri Masjid, the mosque in Ayodhya, by self-proclaimed "liberators of the birthplace of Lord Rama" in December 1992. The ensuing communal rioting shocked many, including the editors, who envisage this volume as an answer to the violence. They hope it will contribute to "digging up the ground beneath the feet of the stereotypes being projected currently" (p. 32). The destruction of an edifice called for the deconstruction of a hegemonic discourse.
This is not to discredit the volume as tainted by <b>political motivation.</b> The articles, though of uneven quality, are scholarly and well supported. Even those who do not agree with the political perspective of the editors (shared by at least some of the authors) will have to admit that the volume is a major contribution to understanding Hinduism and other South Asian religions in all their diversity.
Taken together, the articles show how the current perception of many urban Hindus of their religion has come about historically through the interaction of many factors. In the past two centuries, the Christian critique, Orientalist perceptions, and the nationalist movement have led to privileging in Hinduism's self-definition the devotional (bhakti) and monistic (advaita) strands, and to stressing the issue of foreign origin in its demarcation against other religions.
At the very least, this rich volume will be thought-provoking. The very topic alluded to in the title, the representation of Hinduism, is one of considerable interest to contemporary academics, as witnessed by the recent special section devoted to it in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (68.4 [2000]: 705-835). It should be pointed out, however, that the volume under review does not directly address the issue of who should represent Hinduism, <b>but rather aims at undermining the authority of a (politically empowered) discourse that claims to represent Hinduism</b>.
It is impossible to do justice to all the arguments within the scope of this review. The volume is conceived as a collection of perspectives from different disciplines. What the articles have in common is that they set Out to challenge current stereotypes regarding Hinduism in its many aspects.
Two articles concentrate on legal issues. Dieter Conrad unmasks legal reforms in personal law, in particular with regard to the scheduled caste issue, as "legal Hindutva" (p. 335). Sudhir Chandra counters the notion that British legislation in India was progressive, especially on the issue of women's rights. He presents as a case study a late-nineteenth-century, much-publicized legal case known as Dadaji Bhakaji vs. Rukhmabai, which revolved around a husband's seeking legal resort to force his child-bride to be restored to him.
Two other articles tackle historical truisms. Partha Chatterjee shows that the notion that Indian nationalism is synonymous with Hindu nationalism is a modern, rationalist, and historicist idea. He does so by comparing the view of history as expressed in early and later colonial Bengali historical textbooks. More directly bearing on the Babri Masjid issue is Gyanendra Pandey's insightful analysis of Hindu histories of Ayodhya. He shows that these texts remove agency (and thus responsibility) from the Hindu "martyrs" and instead invest it in timeless agents.
Three articles by South Asian political scientists, Ram Bapat, Sudipta Kaviraj, and Suresh Sharma, deal with Hindu ways of coming to terms with Western modernity (and its claim of superiority) without losing one's traditional "self." They analyze nineteenth- and twentieth-century writings that grapple with this issue, but, within the political frame of the book, the arguments can be seen as challenging the apparently attractive solution of the issue presented by the Hindu Right and proposing alternative ways to assert one's Hindu identity in the face of modernity.
Ram Bapat tries to make sense of the controversial Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922), a highly educated high-caste Hindu who was interested in Hindu reform, married a low-caste man, and finally converted to Christianity. However, after her conversion, she had her fights with Church authorities, and when she eventually set up a missionary school for widows, she led it in an idiosyncratic way. In representing Pandita's words: "there is no such thing as Christianity, there are Christian religions" (p. 249), Bapat turns upside-down the whole enterprise of deconstructing Hinduism as many Hinduisms. Sudipta Kaviraj goes further in his essay on how the "forgotten" Bengali author Bhudev Mukhopadhyah (1827-94) "talks back" to the empire by means of his "reverse anthropology." One of the questions Mukhopadhyah raises is at the very heart of the volume's critique of neo-Hindu chauvinism, namely what constitutes the "we" of the nationalists. Suresh Sharma discusses the most famous of all those who "talked back," namely Gandhi, and analyzes the meta-position underlying his seminal text Hind Swaraj (first published in 1909). He incisively distinguishes Gandhi's sense of the past as a living tradition from "various modernist attempts to appropriate tradition as a past no longer alive" (p. 286).
Three articles come from the perspective of the performing arts. They deal with what happens to religious texts when performed in non-traditional ways. Roma Chatterji problematizes concepts of authenticity and tradition in her analysis of the complex interrelating discourses surrounding the rediscovered "tribal" dance called Chho from Purulia in Bengal. Anuradha Kapur analyzes Parsi theatre, in particular the mythological drama of the early twentieth-century Hindutva defender Radhesyam Kathavacak. She argues that the introduction of realism as a narrative model led on the one hand to a "domestication" of the gods, who are forced within a logic of cause and effect, and, on the other, to the introduction of "miracles" made possible by stage technology. She repeatedly draws out the relevance of her conclusions for the modern television versions of the epics. Angelika Malinar makes the Bhagavadgita episodes on the Mahabharata television serial the object of her research, arguing that the intelligentsia's belittli ng of the series as a "soap" has preempted serious analysis. Malinar alerts the reader to the serial's dangerous reduction of the complexity of the Gita's message to a "martial" solution for contemporary Indian society's problems.
Two articles deal with the construction of non-Hindu South Asian religious identities, one Sikh, one Muslim. In both cases, the parallels with Hindu militant discourse are tantalizing. Veena Das reveals how militant Sikh discourse combines a discourse of Sikh history with a modern one of state, minorities, and cultural rights. Novelty is subsumed within repetition, and present and past are intrinsically interrelated. Javeed Alam presents a case study of the Ittehadul Muslimeen in Hyderabad, arguing that the recent avatar of this movement has occupied a vacuum created by the perceived withdrawal of the state as a protective institution (with the disposal of the Nizam, compounded by the land reforms that impacted Muslims negatively). He finds that the Ittehad's rhetoric of past Muslim glories was instrumental only in gaining the confidence of the Muslim community, but that it has receded in favor of cultural and linguistic identity building.
Several other articles seek to place different ingredients of currently mainstream political Hinduism in historical perspective. Jurgen Lutt argues that the Ram lahar (Rama-wave) in middle-class Hinduism is a continuation of a British puritan rejection of Krishna. He traces the history of Rama's rise to prominence to the Maharaja Libel Case of 1861, and the ensuing reactions of Hindu reform groups, in particular those led by Dayanand Saraswati and Gandhi. The late Wilhelm Halb-fass discusses one of the influential strands of modern Hinduism, practical Vedanta, with regard to the ethical and social applicability of Vedantic metaphysics of nondualism. He revisits Hacker's argument that Svami Vivekananda's so-called tattvamasi ethics were inspired by Schopenhauer through his student Paul Deussen. Vasudha Dalmia unravels masterfully the complicated fabric of nineteenth-century "traditionalist" (sanatana) reconstructions of Hinduism. She argues convincingly that these were as deeply impacted by missionary and Orie ntalist perspectives as the so-called reform movements, by analyzing the complex works of the influential Hariscandra of Banaras. Monika Horstmann focuses on the influential, much-used but little-studied Hindi journal Kalyan and the Gita Press.
The nationalist and anti-Muslim millionaire Marvari founders started a project to universalize dharma and streamline diverse Hindu groupings under one umbrella with the ultimate aim of bypassing those groupings, including Hindu sampradayas, as well as Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. The late Gunther Sonntheimer points Out that the embarrassed discarding of folk religion by middle-class Hindus comes in the wake of Christian missionary critiques. He argues this has an erosive effect, which can be compared with the ecological one of deforestation.
Several contributors suggest and demonstrate useful angles for further research. <b>Friedhelm Hardy argues in favor of stressing centrifugal de-Sanskritizing features and investigating Tamil sources in particular</b>. Gita Dharmapal-Frick makes a start at looking at the central notion of "caste" from the outside, via early Western understandings of it, utilizing little-known German sources. The late Richard Burghart provides an oft-forgotten perspective on Hinduism from that "other Hindu nation," Nepal.
The daring sweep of some authors' conclusions has already led to criticism. <b>This is the case with von Stietencron's ambitious study relating his findings about religious configurations in pre-Muslim India to the modern concept of Hinduism. His position seems to favor the notion that the category "Hinduism" was invented by Orientalist discourse.</b> For this, he has been sharply criticized, for instance, by David Lorenzen ("Who Invented Hinduism?" Comparative Studies in Society and History of Ideas 41.4 [1999]) and by Brian K. Smith ("Questioning Authority," International Journal of Hindu Studies 2.3 [1998]). Both critics overlook how von Stietencron's generalizations are balanced by the carefully researched first part of his article which, significantly, reveals that Saivas in pre-Muslim South India saw themselves as fundamentally different from other Hindu traditions.
What von Stietencron and Dalmia seek to accomplish in this volume is not so much to deconstruct the academic construct "Hinduism," but rather to discredit communalists who claim to speak for Hinduism (and Sikhism and Islam). They seek to highlight that different groups within Hinduism did not always understand themselves as first and foremost in opposition to Islam or other "foreign" religions, and that such an understanding comes about in conjunction with an increasing self-understanding as part of a monolithic religion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in response to Western critiques (Dalmia in effect addresses the issue on p. 177 n. 3). Their project is a profoundly political one, in that they express the hope that the awareness of these two major issues may deflate the political tension in India. <b>It remains to be seen whether the scholarly findings of this volume will change Hindu self-awareness and influence political events. </b>One of the editors envisages that "(t)he pressure of an imagined domin ating and uniform Hindu majority would cease to drive 'non-Hindu' communities into harsh reactions" (p. 80). Though one may disagree with the editors' position and with that of individual authors on several points, it should be stressed that all contributors are aware of the complexities involved in trying to make their individual research results relevant for the study at hand. The danger of generalizations is precisely what the whole volume sets out to counter.
In my view, the main shortcoming of the volume is the imbalance between articles researching the pre-colonial period and those about nineteenth- and twentieth-century perceptions of Hinduism. The editors are aware of this and express their hope of redressing the imbalance in a later volume (p. 32). In general, this imbalance is symptomatic of the current research climate, where an overreaction against the hegemony of "classical" Indology has led to an overemphasis on the importance of the colonial encounter. It is hoped that the pendulum will swing back, and that a better balance may be reached. The volume under review documents a wealth of detailed analyses of cases of "modem Hinduism" in the making. While that is an excellent project, it also needs to be complemented by studies of the "pre-modern" period. For such studies to be feasible what is desperately needed is that more of the countless "indigenous" sources that are untranslated, or even unpublished, should be made available. <b>If what has been said abo ut pre-colonial Hinduism is flawed and based too exclusively on Sanskritic and Brahmanical sources, the first priority should obviously be to overcome the bias by making available the other sources. </b>