08-17-2007, 09:54 AM
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<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Hindu-Christian encounter takes place all over the globe, but it is in India where contact between Hindus and Christians is most immediate, public, and of greatest historical duration."83 Here, religion and politics nowhere display or aspire to the separation they enjoy in the West.84 The character of Hindu-Christian relations shifts with the changing national and international conÂcerns prevailing in the times and places that give rise to encounter. It is critical, therefore, if we are to cast an eye toward the future of such relations, to remind ourselves that Hindu violence against Christians is of very recent historical provenance. It has stemmed largely from Hindu anger and litigation over the right of Christians to proselytize non-Christians in India.85 By virtue of Christianity's association with the United States and, to a lesser degree, Europe, Hindu-Christian conflict in India has invited the close scrutiny of the press both in India and elsewhere. The Indian press writes for a public informed by and sensitive to its colonial history and postcolonial struggles with that history, whereas the western media is encouraged by noble as well as base motives to cover "trouble spots," particularly those that affect western interests. Hindu nationalist organizations preaching the notion that India is historically and culturally a Hindu nation foster the conflict that attracts this attention. Those religions that did not originate in India-Christianity and Islam in particular they declare foreign transplants whose practitioners can find acceptance only by acknowledging their foreignness and thereby accepting a secondary status in the life of the nation. "Hindutva" organizations such as the Vishva Hindu Parishad convey this message in both public speech and public ritual spectacle, celebrating Christians and Muslims who identify themselves culturally and nationally as Hindus at the same time that they depict Islam and Christianity as foreign threats to Indian society and state .86 However, even when Christians explicitly identify themselves as Indian, there is often deep suspicion among Hindus of Christian duplicity. It is readily believed that Christian communities are footholds for foreign influences and also that Christians will adopt whatever disguise might suit their ultimate and governing end: conversion. The recent introduction of anti-conversion bills in state legislatures has been one expresÂsion of this suspicion. The now centuries-old Catholic movement to adopt Hindu symbols, concepts, and lifestyles and thus "Indianize" Catholicism, to take another example, has been intensely controversial, with many Hindus regarding "Catholic" ashrams as fraudulent conduits for foreign capital expended for conversion.87
It is important to point out that, for all its sites of conflict, India has also offered numerous models for cooperation and mutual appreciation between Hindus and Christians. No one concerned about the state of relations between these two increasingly global communities should forget the rich store of historical and contemporary resources for imagining peaceful and productive enÂgagement between them. Prior to the arrival of Europeans, Hindus and Christians in South India had developed indigenous strategies and patterns for living together. There is ample contemporary evidence, moreover, of day-to-day cooperation and coexistence of Hindus and Christians. Even in ritual settings, there can be much room for rapprochement. The most successful mutual religious undertakings seem to be those that spontaneously and organically evolve at the grassroots level, whereas contrived institutional settings such as Catholic ashrams often incite Hindu resentment.88 Even assertions of difference among Hindus and Christians in South India employ the common idioms and grammars of divinity that underscore their shared religious sensibilÂities and make for a kind of civil theology that publicly stages and debates religious claims.89 Living together certainly does not mean living without conflict or competition. An intricate web of relationships and attitudes binds Hindus and Christians in the state of Kerala but also pits one community against the other.90 In short, current circumstances in India give no clear signal about the future of Hindu-Christian relations, offering reason for optimism as well as anxiety.
In the late 1980âs, just as the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party was beginning to experience considerable electoral success and Christianity began to assume a prominent place in Hindu nationalist rhetoric, a collection of essays edited by Harold Coward tided Hindu-Christian Dialogue was published. It remains the only work of its kind, although the Society for Hindu-Christian Studies has grown significantly in recent years and publishes a journal annually, Hindu-Christian Studies Bulletin, which continues to foster dialogue and provide a forum for exchange between Hindus and Christians. Coward's book offered an assessment of the state of Hindu-Christian dialogue then, and its predictions for the future that may be instructive to our current state. In his essay for that volume, Richard W Taylor noted a general lack of interest in dialogue and identified a growing suspicion among Hindus that dialogue was a cover for proselytization, especially since such conversations were generally initiated and framed by westerners.91 As we have seen, these concerns persist. In a companion essay, Klaus Klostermaier also anticipated the continued rise of Hindu nationalism.92 He issued a call for the greater involvement of scholars of religion who could, he imagined, further Hindu-Christian understanding by helping to imagine new articulations of dialogic possibilities.93
On the role of scholars in these efforts, Hindu-Christian studies is all too familiar with the double-edged sword the academic study of religion can wield. The field can indeed promote mutual understanding by clarifying the history and nature of the traditions in question, especially by describing the great internal diversity that characterizes both Hinduism and Christianity. The canons of the discipline, however, often put scholars at odds with practitioners, Hindu and Christian alike, because many academics aim to render the historical and metaphysical claims of religious faith both as their partisans experience them and as mythologized reflections of merely human desires. It is exactly this "both" that triggers the offended sentiment. Although some might regard this "bothness" as a mark of careful and sensitive scholarship, one that attends to the norms of historiography, ethnography, and hermeneutics, it can strike the devout practitioner as a profound violation. The scholar's craft consists in carefully sketching the contours of a people's imaginings and institutions, thereby revealing, even if unintentionally, humanity in all its depravity and beauty, all its high-mindedness and pettiness, all its elegance and folly. No social institution captures these poles of a people's moral range more than religion; none, however, is more jealously guarded by those who inhabit it. As a consequence, the scrutiny of religious agents and experiences by the academic study of religion has routinely invited misunderstanding and offense.
Scholarship must find a new voice with which to speak about religion, forge a language and set of interpretive practices that remain faithful to the demands of rigorous analysis and historical accuracy by refusing to capitulate to religious sentiment as the ultimate jury for what may be said about it.
Our world simply cannot afford the disdain or disregard for religious belief and identity that marginalizes some religious subjectivities from the production of knowledge about them or the feverish resentment and violence such a marginalization invites.
1. Sharma, "Of Hindu, Hindustân, Hinduism and Hindutva."
2. I take the term from Lorenzen, "Who Invented Hinduism," 630Â
3. Heinrich von Stietencron, "Hinduism: On the Proper Use of a Deceptive
Term," in Hinduism Reconsidered, South Asian Studies 24, ed. Günther-Dietz Sontheimer and Hermann Kulke (New Delhi: Manohar, 1997), 36.
4. Frykenberg, "The Emergence of Modern 'Hinduism,'" 8z.
5. Frits Staal, Ritual and Mantras: Rules without Meaning (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1996), 397.
6. E.g., Heinrich von Stietencron, "Religious Configurations in Pre-Muslim InÂdia and the Modern Concept of Hinduism," in Representing Hinduism: The ConstrucÂtion of Religious Traditions and National Identity, ed. Vasudha Dalmia and Heinrich von Stietencron (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1995) 73-77.
7. On various ways the colonial state mined and catalogued Indian practices, see Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, 57-75; Bayly, "Knowing the Country"; Rosane Rocher, "British Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century: The Dialects of Knowledge and Government," in Orientalism and the Postcolonyal Predicament: PerspecÂtives on South Asia, South Asia Seminar Series, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 220-25.
8. See the recent formulations of this argument in, for example, Mary SearleÂChatterjee, "'World Religions' and `Ethnic Groups': Do These Paradigms Lend ThemÂselves to the Cause of Hindu Nationalism?," Ethnic and Racial Studies 23/3 (May 2000): 497-515, and John Zavos, "Defending Hindu Tradition: Sanatana Dharma as a Symbol of Orthodoxy in Colonial India," Religion 31 (2001): 109-23. See also Brian K. Smith's rejoinder that in fact it is a diffuse, not a unified, tradition that Hindu nationÂalists invoke, "Questioning Authority: Constructions and Deconstructions of HinduÂism," International Journal of Hindu Studies 2, 3 (Dec. 1998): 313-39Â
9. Romila Thapar, "Syndicated Hinduism," in Hinduism Reconsidered, South Asian Studies XXIV, ed. Günther-Dietz Sontheimer and Hermann Kulke (New Delhi: Manohar, 1997) 54-81.
10. Timothy Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies (New York: Oxford UniÂversity Press, 2000), 10-15 and chapter 7, "Hinduism," 134-55.
11. Lorenzen, "Who Invented Hinduism?," 630-59; Will Sweetman, "Unity and Plurality: Hinduism Ind the Religions of India in Early European Scholarship," ReliÂgion 31 (2001): 209-24.
12. Doniger, "Hinduism by Any Other Name," 41Â
13. Doniger, "Hinduism by Any Other Name," 36.
14. Gabriella Eichinger Ferro-Luzzi, "The Polythetic-Prototype Approach to HinÂduism," in Hinduism Reconsidered, ed. Sontheimer and Kulke, 294-304.
15. Robert Frykenberg, citing Peter Schmitlhenwer "Constructions of Hinduism at the Nexus of History and Religion," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23/3 (Winter 1993): 535, note II.
16. Frykenberg, "Constructions of Hinduism," 534.
17. Zavos, "Defending Hindu Tradition."
18. This claim corresponds roughly to Thomas Trautmann's own view, Aryans and British India, 67-68.
19. Paul Brass, quoted in Lorenzen, "Who Invented Hinduism," 646.
20. Rocher, "British Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century," 243.
21. As Heinrich von Stietencron comes very close to alleging, "Religious Configurations in Pre-Muslim India," 73.
22. See Eugene F. Irschick, Dialogue and History: Constructing South India, i795Â1895 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
23. Inden, Imagining India, 2.
24. Inden, Imagining India, 2.
25. Inden, Imagining India, e.g., 17-18.
26. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and IsÂlam (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 18.
27. E.g. King, Orientalism and Religion, 68-70, Russell T. McCutcheon, ManufacÂturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), and Timothy Fitzgerald, whose polemical diaÂtribe against the field of comparative religious studies is informed only by entirely outdated and outmoded scholarship, Ideology of Religious Studies, 33-53.
28. S. N. Balagangadhara, "The Heathen in his Blindness.. .":Asia, the West and the Dynamic of Religion, Studies in the History of Religions LXIV (Leiden, the NetherÂlands: E. J. Brill, 1994) 394.
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<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Hindu-Christian encounter takes place all over the globe, but it is in India where contact between Hindus and Christians is most immediate, public, and of greatest historical duration."83 Here, religion and politics nowhere display or aspire to the separation they enjoy in the West.84 The character of Hindu-Christian relations shifts with the changing national and international conÂcerns prevailing in the times and places that give rise to encounter. It is critical, therefore, if we are to cast an eye toward the future of such relations, to remind ourselves that Hindu violence against Christians is of very recent historical provenance. It has stemmed largely from Hindu anger and litigation over the right of Christians to proselytize non-Christians in India.85 By virtue of Christianity's association with the United States and, to a lesser degree, Europe, Hindu-Christian conflict in India has invited the close scrutiny of the press both in India and elsewhere. The Indian press writes for a public informed by and sensitive to its colonial history and postcolonial struggles with that history, whereas the western media is encouraged by noble as well as base motives to cover "trouble spots," particularly those that affect western interests. Hindu nationalist organizations preaching the notion that India is historically and culturally a Hindu nation foster the conflict that attracts this attention. Those religions that did not originate in India-Christianity and Islam in particular they declare foreign transplants whose practitioners can find acceptance only by acknowledging their foreignness and thereby accepting a secondary status in the life of the nation. "Hindutva" organizations such as the Vishva Hindu Parishad convey this message in both public speech and public ritual spectacle, celebrating Christians and Muslims who identify themselves culturally and nationally as Hindus at the same time that they depict Islam and Christianity as foreign threats to Indian society and state .86 However, even when Christians explicitly identify themselves as Indian, there is often deep suspicion among Hindus of Christian duplicity. It is readily believed that Christian communities are footholds for foreign influences and also that Christians will adopt whatever disguise might suit their ultimate and governing end: conversion. The recent introduction of anti-conversion bills in state legislatures has been one expresÂsion of this suspicion. The now centuries-old Catholic movement to adopt Hindu symbols, concepts, and lifestyles and thus "Indianize" Catholicism, to take another example, has been intensely controversial, with many Hindus regarding "Catholic" ashrams as fraudulent conduits for foreign capital expended for conversion.87
It is important to point out that, for all its sites of conflict, India has also offered numerous models for cooperation and mutual appreciation between Hindus and Christians. No one concerned about the state of relations between these two increasingly global communities should forget the rich store of historical and contemporary resources for imagining peaceful and productive enÂgagement between them. Prior to the arrival of Europeans, Hindus and Christians in South India had developed indigenous strategies and patterns for living together. There is ample contemporary evidence, moreover, of day-to-day cooperation and coexistence of Hindus and Christians. Even in ritual settings, there can be much room for rapprochement. The most successful mutual religious undertakings seem to be those that spontaneously and organically evolve at the grassroots level, whereas contrived institutional settings such as Catholic ashrams often incite Hindu resentment.88 Even assertions of difference among Hindus and Christians in South India employ the common idioms and grammars of divinity that underscore their shared religious sensibilÂities and make for a kind of civil theology that publicly stages and debates religious claims.89 Living together certainly does not mean living without conflict or competition. An intricate web of relationships and attitudes binds Hindus and Christians in the state of Kerala but also pits one community against the other.90 In short, current circumstances in India give no clear signal about the future of Hindu-Christian relations, offering reason for optimism as well as anxiety.
In the late 1980âs, just as the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party was beginning to experience considerable electoral success and Christianity began to assume a prominent place in Hindu nationalist rhetoric, a collection of essays edited by Harold Coward tided Hindu-Christian Dialogue was published. It remains the only work of its kind, although the Society for Hindu-Christian Studies has grown significantly in recent years and publishes a journal annually, Hindu-Christian Studies Bulletin, which continues to foster dialogue and provide a forum for exchange between Hindus and Christians. Coward's book offered an assessment of the state of Hindu-Christian dialogue then, and its predictions for the future that may be instructive to our current state. In his essay for that volume, Richard W Taylor noted a general lack of interest in dialogue and identified a growing suspicion among Hindus that dialogue was a cover for proselytization, especially since such conversations were generally initiated and framed by westerners.91 As we have seen, these concerns persist. In a companion essay, Klaus Klostermaier also anticipated the continued rise of Hindu nationalism.92 He issued a call for the greater involvement of scholars of religion who could, he imagined, further Hindu-Christian understanding by helping to imagine new articulations of dialogic possibilities.93
On the role of scholars in these efforts, Hindu-Christian studies is all too familiar with the double-edged sword the academic study of religion can wield. The field can indeed promote mutual understanding by clarifying the history and nature of the traditions in question, especially by describing the great internal diversity that characterizes both Hinduism and Christianity. The canons of the discipline, however, often put scholars at odds with practitioners, Hindu and Christian alike, because many academics aim to render the historical and metaphysical claims of religious faith both as their partisans experience them and as mythologized reflections of merely human desires. It is exactly this "both" that triggers the offended sentiment. Although some might regard this "bothness" as a mark of careful and sensitive scholarship, one that attends to the norms of historiography, ethnography, and hermeneutics, it can strike the devout practitioner as a profound violation. The scholar's craft consists in carefully sketching the contours of a people's imaginings and institutions, thereby revealing, even if unintentionally, humanity in all its depravity and beauty, all its high-mindedness and pettiness, all its elegance and folly. No social institution captures these poles of a people's moral range more than religion; none, however, is more jealously guarded by those who inhabit it. As a consequence, the scrutiny of religious agents and experiences by the academic study of religion has routinely invited misunderstanding and offense.
Scholarship must find a new voice with which to speak about religion, forge a language and set of interpretive practices that remain faithful to the demands of rigorous analysis and historical accuracy by refusing to capitulate to religious sentiment as the ultimate jury for what may be said about it.
Our world simply cannot afford the disdain or disregard for religious belief and identity that marginalizes some religious subjectivities from the production of knowledge about them or the feverish resentment and violence such a marginalization invites.
1. Sharma, "Of Hindu, Hindustân, Hinduism and Hindutva."
2. I take the term from Lorenzen, "Who Invented Hinduism," 630Â
3. Heinrich von Stietencron, "Hinduism: On the Proper Use of a Deceptive
Term," in Hinduism Reconsidered, South Asian Studies 24, ed. Günther-Dietz Sontheimer and Hermann Kulke (New Delhi: Manohar, 1997), 36.
4. Frykenberg, "The Emergence of Modern 'Hinduism,'" 8z.
5. Frits Staal, Ritual and Mantras: Rules without Meaning (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1996), 397.
6. E.g., Heinrich von Stietencron, "Religious Configurations in Pre-Muslim InÂdia and the Modern Concept of Hinduism," in Representing Hinduism: The ConstrucÂtion of Religious Traditions and National Identity, ed. Vasudha Dalmia and Heinrich von Stietencron (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1995) 73-77.
7. On various ways the colonial state mined and catalogued Indian practices, see Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, 57-75; Bayly, "Knowing the Country"; Rosane Rocher, "British Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century: The Dialects of Knowledge and Government," in Orientalism and the Postcolonyal Predicament: PerspecÂtives on South Asia, South Asia Seminar Series, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 220-25.
8. See the recent formulations of this argument in, for example, Mary SearleÂChatterjee, "'World Religions' and `Ethnic Groups': Do These Paradigms Lend ThemÂselves to the Cause of Hindu Nationalism?," Ethnic and Racial Studies 23/3 (May 2000): 497-515, and John Zavos, "Defending Hindu Tradition: Sanatana Dharma as a Symbol of Orthodoxy in Colonial India," Religion 31 (2001): 109-23. See also Brian K. Smith's rejoinder that in fact it is a diffuse, not a unified, tradition that Hindu nationÂalists invoke, "Questioning Authority: Constructions and Deconstructions of HinduÂism," International Journal of Hindu Studies 2, 3 (Dec. 1998): 313-39Â
9. Romila Thapar, "Syndicated Hinduism," in Hinduism Reconsidered, South Asian Studies XXIV, ed. Günther-Dietz Sontheimer and Hermann Kulke (New Delhi: Manohar, 1997) 54-81.
10. Timothy Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies (New York: Oxford UniÂversity Press, 2000), 10-15 and chapter 7, "Hinduism," 134-55.
11. Lorenzen, "Who Invented Hinduism?," 630-59; Will Sweetman, "Unity and Plurality: Hinduism Ind the Religions of India in Early European Scholarship," ReliÂgion 31 (2001): 209-24.
12. Doniger, "Hinduism by Any Other Name," 41Â
13. Doniger, "Hinduism by Any Other Name," 36.
14. Gabriella Eichinger Ferro-Luzzi, "The Polythetic-Prototype Approach to HinÂduism," in Hinduism Reconsidered, ed. Sontheimer and Kulke, 294-304.
15. Robert Frykenberg, citing Peter Schmitlhenwer "Constructions of Hinduism at the Nexus of History and Religion," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23/3 (Winter 1993): 535, note II.
16. Frykenberg, "Constructions of Hinduism," 534.
17. Zavos, "Defending Hindu Tradition."
18. This claim corresponds roughly to Thomas Trautmann's own view, Aryans and British India, 67-68.
19. Paul Brass, quoted in Lorenzen, "Who Invented Hinduism," 646.
20. Rocher, "British Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century," 243.
21. As Heinrich von Stietencron comes very close to alleging, "Religious Configurations in Pre-Muslim India," 73.
22. See Eugene F. Irschick, Dialogue and History: Constructing South India, i795Â1895 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
23. Inden, Imagining India, 2.
24. Inden, Imagining India, 2.
25. Inden, Imagining India, e.g., 17-18.
26. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and IsÂlam (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 18.
27. E.g. King, Orientalism and Religion, 68-70, Russell T. McCutcheon, ManufacÂturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), and Timothy Fitzgerald, whose polemical diaÂtribe against the field of comparative religious studies is informed only by entirely outdated and outmoded scholarship, Ideology of Religious Studies, 33-53.
28. S. N. Balagangadhara, "The Heathen in his Blindness.. .":Asia, the West and the Dynamic of Religion, Studies in the History of Religions LXIV (Leiden, the NetherÂlands: E. J. Brill, 1994) 394.
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