Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Subject: History

Lesson: Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Course Developers

The advent of printing and its implications Reform and revival: Brahmo samj;prarthana samaj; Ramakrishna and Vivekananda; Arya Samaj Reform and revival: Deoband, Aligarh and Singh Sabha Movements Debates around gender Making of religious and linguistic identities Caste and colonialism: Sanskritising and anti-Bramanical treand

Dr. Charu Gupta Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Delhi

Language Editor: Swapna Liddle Formating Editor: Ashutos Kumar

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Table of contents

Chapter 6: Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements  6.1: The advent of printing and its implications  6.2: Reform and revival: Brahmo Samaj; Prarthana Samaj; Ramakrishna and Vivekananda; Arya Samaj  6.3: Reform and revival: Deoband, Aligarh and Singh Sabha movements  6.4: Debates around gender  6.5: Making of religious and linguistic identities  6.6: Caste and colonialism: Sanskritizing and anti-Brahmanical trends  Summary  Exercises  Glossary  Further readings

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

6.1: The advent of printing and its implications

Power of print

Print, language and literature have been viewed as significant means for contests over power, propagation of dominant ideas, a means of registering protest, and for the fashioning of national, regional and community identities in the modern world, including India. Changing perceptions of communications lie at the heart of transformations in culture. Further, as argues Stuart Blackburn, print should not be viewed just as an autonomous technology that brings with it its own logic and power, but as a practice mediated by the socio-cultural contexts of its production, enabling forging of new literary practices which accompany it (Blackburn 2003). In the colonial period, missionaries, pundits, literary scholars, socio-religious reformers, and nationalists extensively made use of print and press to disseminate their ideas among the wider public. These also became critical means for arousing, training, mobilising and consolidating nationalist public opinion.

A preliminary debate

There has been some debate among scholars about the impact of print on Indian society. Influenced by the seminal work of Benedict Anderson, some have argued that print and new literary sensibilities displaced the manuscript, as well as the oral and popular culture. However, others have effectively shown that despite the unabated growth, and later dominance, of the print form across India in the 19th and 20th centuries, there appears to be a strong continuity between the age of manuscript and that of print, as they ran parallel to, and lived off, each other. Not only did print capitalism not do away with pre-print capitalism forms of exchange, in many important ways, through the interplay between them, they reinforced and appropriated each other. Moreover, printed texts could be transmitted in varied idioms - educational, oral and performed; read and staged - each offering different meanings. The hearing public and reading public intermingled. Print also stimulated new expressions of vernacular literature, and gave them a wider diffusion. Thus colonial India offered an arena where printed, oral and visual media criss-crossed, leaving their imprint on each other.

In the debate around print in colonial India there has been a tendency to make a sharp distinction between big, ‘elite’ presses, books printed from there and their subject matter and the small, ‘popular’ presses. The former is seen as dealing with ‘serious’ issues and ‘high’ literature, centring around social reforms, nationalism and religious identities, while the latter published ‘low’ literature like novellas, farces, plays, social tracts, almanacs, soft pornography and drawings. Simultaneously, it is argued that as the national movement grew, there was a dominance of the former over the latter. These claims have been questioned by the work of scholars like Anindita Ghosh (Ghosh 2006) and Charu Gupta (Gupta 2001). Through their work on popular literature published in Bengal and United Provinces (present day Uttar Pradesh) respectively, they argue that while the educated middle classes attempted to standardize writing and publishing, reading practices and the market often led them to incorporate some popular elements into their work. The efforts to cleanse language and writing from the ‘speech contamination’ of the lower classes and women produced dissent from within the

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

educated milieu. Similarly, popular publishing and literature selectively appropriated certain values of elite literature. Also, there appears to have been a diversified readership and tremendous popularity of cheap illustrated booklets and sensational stories churned out by the popular presses. No simplistic distinctions between elite and popular taste, male and female, upper class and lower class, wealthy and poor, would satisfactorily explain the growth and dissemination of print in colonial India.

Beginnings of printing in India

The history of Indian press and printing began with the coming of the Europeans. The first presses, two of them, arrived in India in 1550, though nothing was published till 1557 when a Catechism, reputedly by St Francis Xavier, was printed and circulated. The Portuguese first brought a printing press to Goa in the sixteenth century, and then the English East India Company set up a printing press in Bombay in 1684. However, for about a century no newspapers were published in the Company’s territories, as they wished to withhold news of their malpractices.

The firstnewspapers in India were started by those Europeans who had grievances against the Company and resigned from its service to express them. The first newspaper was published in 1780 by James Augustus Hicky, called The Bengal Gazette. However, like the Company itself, the press in this period worked in a no-man’s land. The circulation of the newspapers during the early period never exceeded a few hundreds.

Value addition: interesting details Hickey and The Bengal Gazette When Hickey started The Bengal Gazette, he stated: ‘I have no particular passion for printing of newspapers; I have no propensity; I was not bred to a slavish life of hard work, yet I take pleasure in enslaving my body in order to purchase freedom for my mind and soul.’It was a weekly that described itself as ‘a commercial paper open to all, but influenced by none’. His paper specialised in the exposure of the private lives of servants of the Company including the Governor-General Warren Hastings. Enraged by this, Hastings persecuted Hickey. But he continued his career of courageous but scurrilous journalism till he was reduced to poverty and distress. Source: Rau, M. Chalapathi. 1974. The Press. Delhi: National Book Trust, 10-11.

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Figure 6.1.1:Hicky’s Bengal Gazette Source: http://www.bl.uk/images/content/hicky2.jpg

Missionaries were among the first to extensively use print in various parts of India to spread Christianity. They published not only in English but also in the vernacular. In some ways, they transformed the Indian languages in a number of respects. Missionaries created the first interlingual dictionaries and grammars and began to make translations of texts from one language to another. Scripts were rationalized and systematized to allow for printing and easier reading.

Indians and printing

Soon however the Indians too realized the power of print. The Indian publishing now turned from European and Christian enterprise to a newliterary culture where Indians produced and printed texts for Indian audiences. This was aided by certain developments from the 19th century, especially after 1857. There was a rapid expansion of improved means of organization and communication, along with market production, coinciding with the development of public institutions, English education, libraries, growing publishing houses, presses, newspapers, books and print culture.

The dynamic print public sphere

Indians’ encounter with Europeans led to a fundamental shift in the way they viewed their language: no longer only aspatrimony, but as a thing to be measured, known and used. Print greatly aided the growth of vernacular languages. Various languages like Bengali, Marathi and Tamil used print extensively for new kinds of knowledge production, social organisation and political mobilization. Simultaneously, there was the emergence of a dynamic new middle class. Many pundits, munshis, lawyers and social reformers became publishers in their own right, leading to the emergence of new kinds of literature. Not coincidentally, such printers provided the means for the publication and propagation of an anti-missionary campaign in the early 19th century, involving perhaps the first public gatherings and protests.

However, the world of print did not just reflect the simplistic duality of colonizer- colonized, but also indicated a wider and more complex set of conflicts within colonised society itself. Printing became a critical means also for establishing one’s caste, class and gender identities. In the 19th century, language and its written literature was more than anything else, object of immense debate, scrutiny, and surveillance among the Indians

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

and the colonial administration. Amidst struggle and conflict, various indigenous upper and intermediate caste groups, educated middle classes, and religious groups articulated their ideas and thoughts. Through the print-language and literature, these groups attempted to assert their power and representation, impacting on the resultant identity formations. The print form became an important medium though which religious differences were debated, for example, between Sanatan Dharma and Arya samaj, Christianity and Hinduism, orthodox Islam and Sufism, and Islam and Hinduism. Not only did it become a means of propounding and contesting each others’ views, it became an instrument through which reputations were made and demolished. Print languages and literature were also vital instruments for crafting social identities, and in a competitive environment like colonial India, they offered substantial opportunities to indigenous groups to consolidate power along multiple axes of class, gender, and community.

Printing was also used extensively by the social reformers for the spread of their ideas. Various issues like sati, widow remarriage, women’s education, age of consent, Hindu superstitious practices etc were discussed widely in press and print, and through these the reformers operated in a public domain, attempting to reform both the ‘private’ and the ‘public’. Those who countered the arguments of reformers too extensively used the print. Print thus opened vast avenues to carry out debates in public.

Printing created an appetite for new kinds of writing. The novel acquired distinctively Indian forms and styles. Other literary forms like lyrics, short stories, and essays too entered the world of reading. In the 1870s, new modes of historical writing began to trace the contours of the nation; in addition to historiography and historical novels in Indian languages (primarily Marathi and Bengali), scholars also began to write the first literary histories of Indian languages. In Hindi, there emerged in the 19th century Bharatendu Harischandra, often called the Father of Modern Hindi, who was a playwright, journalist, polemicist and publicist. He expressed and shaped views on a wide variety of issues, including literary, linguistic and religious, which were inextricably bound up with questions of political and national identity. In the world of novels, O. Chandu Menon wrote Indulekha, a Malayalam novel published in 1889, which though a love story, dealt with larger concerns of society as well. And we cannot talk of the novel without referring to Premchand’s Godan, published in 1936, which was an epic of the Indian peasantry.

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Value addition: did you know? Bharatendu Harischandra’s address at Ballia

Figure 6.1.2: Bharatendu Harischandra Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bharatendu_Harishchandra

In November 1884, Harischandra was invited to address a gathering in Ballia. His address was entitled ‘How Can India Make Progress?’, which was later published as well. This address has attracted critical attention. It laid forth his concern with the political and social issues of the times, with the creation of informed public opinion and the constituents of Hindu/Indian national identity. The burning issue of the day was the establishment and maintenance of an indigenous cultural identity, whether in matters of food, clothing or language. Source: Dalmia, Vasudha. 1996. The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bharatendu Harischandra and Nineteenth-century Banaras. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 21-27.

Figure 6.1.3:Bharatendu Harischandra Source:http://www.anubhuti-hindi.org/dohe/images/bhartendu2.jpg

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Figure 6.1.4: Premchand Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premchand

From the late nineteenth century even middle class women began to participate and become visible in the public realm of print culture. The spread of education had increased the number of women who could read in middle-class homes. Many journals began carrying writings by women. Many articulated the need to educate women, though conservatives had a deep fear of women reading and writing. Rashsundari Debi, a young married girl in a very orthodox household in Bengal, wrote her autobiography Amar Jiban (My Life), which was published in 1876. In the 1880s, women like Tarabai Shinde and Pandita Ramabai used print to passionately express their anger against the miserable lives of upper-caste Hindu women, especially widows.

The poor, the factory workers and the ‘low castes’ too came to rely onprint in certain ways, even though many of them were overworked and lacked education. Very cheap books were brought to markets in 19th century Madras towns and sold at crossroads, allowing poor people travelling to markets to buy them. In the 20th century, B. R. Ambedkar in Maharashtra and Periyar in Madras wrote powerfully on caste, and their writings were read widely. Various caste associations in different parts of India were publishing their own journals and tracts, to articulate their specific demands and forge their identities. In Kanpur, a millworker Kashibaba wrote Chhote aur Bade ka Sawal in 1938, showing the links between caste and class exploitation.

Value addition: interesting details Print, Hindi language and Hindu identity in the United Provinces In the 19th century in the United Provinces, the languages of Urdu and Hindi became, both among the Muslim gentry and the Hindu upper castes, a means and symbol of community-creation. By late 19th century, Hindi appeared to have emerged with an upper hand in this conflict. The power of print was used effectively by the upper caste Hindu literati to establish a standardized

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Khari Boli Hindi. This helped them to assert a distinct community identity and to prepare themselves for a culturally hegemonic role in the new nation. In this region, Saraswati, a Hindi magazine was started from Allahabad in 1900. The magazine and its editor Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi became extremely influential over the next 20 years, and adopted the role of educators of the Hindi literati. Literacy acquired new meanings, as it was linked more and more to employment in offices, schools and print media. Various other magazines, journals and newspapers like Chand and Abhyudaya became means of journalistic, literary and linguistic expression for assertions of self- identity by a confident Hindu middle class, and for a growing Hindi public sphere in the early 20th century. Text creation became a wider activity and the impact of the printed word extended beyond the literate level. Source: Gupta, Charu. 2001. Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims and the Hindu Public in Colonial India. Delhi: Permanent Black, 39-40.

In Bengal, Bengali rose to prominence as a vernacular language from the late eighteenth century onwards, marginalising the importance of Persian and Sanskrit among the educated groups in Bengal. The reformist agenda of the Bengali elite during this period, and their desire to purge Bengali literature of ‘obscene’ and ‘lowly’ language contributed to a new prose style, highly accentuated by long sonorous Sanskrit words and approximating the form of English prose.

Value addition: interesting details Power of print Remarks historian C. A Bayly, ‘Print capitalism… gave many existing communities of knowledge the capacity to operate on a wider scale. It was a midwife of intellectual change, not in itself the essence of that change’. Source: Bayly, C. A. 1999. Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 374.

The growth of commercial printing

The print market and commercial press developed slowly but steadily, and grew extensively in many parts of India in the second half of the 19th century, coinciding with the rise of printed vernacular languages. It became a means of disseminating and mediating literature, independently of the official channels, sites and practices sanctioned by universities, government publications and elite literary circles.

By the end of the 19th century, a new visual culture was taking shape. Painters like Raja Ravi Varma produced Figure 6.s for mass circulation. Poor wood engravers who made woodblocks set up shop near the letterpresses, and were employed by print shops. Cheap prints and calendars, easily available in the bazaar, could be bought even by the poor to decorate the walls of their homes or places of work. Cartoons and caricatures were being published in journals and newspapers.

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Figure 6.1.5: Painting by Raja Ravi Varma Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Raja_Ravi_Varma,_The_Maharashtrian_Lady.jpg

To see the growth of commercial printing, let us take the example of the United Provinces, where the number of presses rose from 177 in 1878-79 to 568 in 1901-02 and 743 in 1925-26. The concentration in UP had initially been on the publication of vernacular newspapers. Thus, 591 such papers were published in 1878-79 in UP. However, soon the production of vernacular books surpassed this. In 1925-26, 2,777 such books were published in UP. The use of lithography was quite common. Most of the publishers of these books were also booksellers. In the 1860s and 1870s, the largest number of presses in UP was found at Agra, followed by Bareilly, Kanpur, Banaras, Shahjahanpur, Roorkee and Meerut. However, Lucknow saw the growth of one of the oldest and most reputed press, the Nawal Kishore Press. By the early 20th century, Allahabad had taken over as the centre of publishing activity. Most of the presses were small, and survived by regularly churning out almanacs, religious and mythological literature, poetry, sensational novels and romances. They published accessible but badly printed pamphlets and ephemeral literature on topical themes, available cheaply, and written in a colloquial language.

Value addition: common misconceptions Bengal and popular commercial printing It is often assumed that print led to increasing standardization of language and also that it often displaced popular traditions. But this does not appear to be the case always. Thus for example, in Bengal there flourished a brisk trade in popular, commercial print. By 1857 there were at least 46 presses operating in close proximity in the neighbourhoods of Garanhata, Ahiritola, Chitpore and Barabazar. By the late 19th century the nucleus of the publishing industry in Calcutta had squarely moved into the northern, native part of the city, and Battala dominated commercial sales. Here one could buy cheap editions of religious tracts and scriptures, as well as literature that was considered obscene

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

and scandalous. Source: Ghosh, Anindita. 2006. Power in Print: Popular Publishing and the Politics of Language and Culture in a Colonial Society, 1778-1905. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Struggle over press freedom

However, the biggest impact of print was felt in the publishing of Indian newspapers and magazines that helped in the propagation of nationalist ideas.

Value addition: did you know? Newspapers and early nationalism In the initial years of the Indian National Congress, between 1885 and 1918, when it had still not resorted to mass agitations, press became an important means for politicization, political propaganda, education and propagation of nationalist ideologies. Interestingly, nearly one-third of the founding fathers of the Congress in 1885 were journalists. Powerful newspapers emerged during these years under distinguished and fearless journalists. These included the Hindu under G. Subramaniya Iyer, Kesari and Mahratta under B. G. Tilak, Bengalee under Surendranath Banerjee and Amrita Bazar Patrika under Sisir Kumar Ghosh. Source: Chandra, Bipin et.al. 1989. India’s Struggle for Independence. Delhi: Penguin Books, 102-3.

Figure 6.1.6: Mahratta Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maratha_Editorial.jpg

Impact of print on nationalism

The impact of print and press extended far beyond its literate subscribers. Nor was it confined to cities and towns. Often newspapers and magazines reached remote villages and were then read in the public sphere by a reader amidst tens of others. Gradually library movements sprung up all over the country. A local ‘library’ would be organized around a single newspaper. A table, a bench or two would constitute the capital equipment. Every piece of news or editorial comment would be read or heard and

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

thoroughly discussed. The newspaper became not only the political educator; reading or discussing it became a form of political participation.

Most of the newspapers were not in those days business enterprises, nor were the editors and journalists professionals. Newspapers were published as a national or public service. They were often framed as objects of philanthropy. To be a journalist was often to be a political worker and an agitator at considerable self-sacrifice. Many of the major social and political controversies of the day were conducted through print and press. It also played the institutional role of opposition to the government. After 1857, the vernacular press became even more vocal in its criticism against British policies. Regarding the role of the nationalist press, Lord Dufferin, the Viceroy, wrote as early as March 1886, ‘Day after day, hundreds of sharp-witted babus pour forth their indignation against their English oppressors in very pungent and effective diatribe.’

The British government, on its part, enacted stringent laws to curb press freedom. From 1870, Section 12A of the Indian Penal Code stated that whoever attempted to excite feelings of disaffection to the Government established by law in British India was to be punished with transportation for life or for any terms or with imprisonment up to three years. To escape this Section, many of the early nationalist writers prefaced their vitriolic writing with effusive sentiments of loyalty to the Government and the Queen. Some writers, like Harischandra, took recourse to irony, sarcasm and banter.

Many of the Indian newspapers became highly critical of the imperialist acts of Lord Lytton. The terrible famine of 1876-77, which took a toll of over six million people, combined with the vulgar and lavish expenditure by Lytton at the same time on the Imperial Darbar at Delhi aroused the press. In retaliation, the government imposed the Vernacular Press Act of 1878, directed only against Indian language newspapers. The Act was designed to empower the Government with more effective means of punishing and repressing seditious writings. It provided for the confiscation of the printing press, paper and other materials of a newspaper if the Government believed that it was publishing such material. No appeal could be made to a court of law against it. It came to be nicknamed as the Gagging Act. Under the Act, proceedings were instituted against newspapers like Som Prakash, The Bharat Mihir and The Samachar. There was a huge furore by the Indian nationalists against the Act, with many public meetings. As a result, it was repealed in 1881 by Lord Ripon.

The man who is most frequently associated with the struggle for the freedom of the Press during the nationalist movement is Bal Gangadhar Tilak. In 1881, along with G. G. Agarkar, he founded the newspaper Kesari (in Marathi) and Mahratta (in English). In 1888, he took over the two papers and used their columns to spread discontent against British rule and to preach national resistance to it. Tilak was a fiery and courageous journalist whose style was simple and direct and yet highly readable. He effectively used the traditional religious Ganpati festival and the Shivaji festival to stimulate nationalism. Tilak’s writings reflected his aggressive journalism. He opposed various bills and acts, enacted to curb press freedom. When Punjab revolutionaries were deported in 1907, Tilak wrote with great sympathy, which led to his imprisonment in 1908, provoking in turn widespread protests all over India.

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

The British government continued at various times with attempts to suppress the press. Thus after the Partition of Bengal, when the policies of Lord Curzon created a huge unrest, the Government passed the Newspaper Act, 1908, under which it launched prosecutions against nine newspapers and confiscated seven presses. It again sought to strengthen its hands with the Indian Press Act of 1910, which empowered the local government to demand at the time of registration security of not less than Rs. 500 and not more than Rs. 2,000 from the keeper of a printing press or publisher of a newspaper and to forfeit the security and annul the declaration of registration of an offending newspaper.

Despite repressive measures, nationalist newspapers grew in numbers in all parts of India. The Gandhian era saw nationalism taking on new colours, and with that the power of print too acquired new meanings. Gandhi himself was probably the greatest journalist of all time, and he ran and edited remarkable weeklies like Young India and Harijan. The final phase of the freedom movement during the war years, especially after the Quit India movement of 1942, was a savage policy of repression towards nationalist newspapers, under the Press Emergency Powers Act and war-time ordinances. However, in spite of persistent persecution, the power of print and press played a remarkable role in India’s freedom struggle.

Figure 6.1.7:Young India Source: Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_India

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

6.2: Reform and revival: Brahmo Samaj; Prarthana Samaj; Ramakrishna and Vivekananda; Arya Samaj

Background

The socio-religious reform movements emerged largely in the 19th century in colonial India. They started in Bengal, but soon spread to other areas. These movements are important in the study of Indian nationalism, because they contributed greatly to the imagining of the Indian nation. These movements were confined, by and large, to one region or another and to particular religions. They also emerged at different points of time in different parts of the country. Yet they had certain similarities in their aims and perspectives. All of them demanded changes in society through social and educational reforms, ranging from the relatively limited approach of defensive and self-consciously orthodox groups to radicals who articulated a sweeping condemnation of the status-quo (Jones 1989:2). Their key arenas of focus in the social realm were emancipation of women (which included problems like sati, infanticide and widow remarriage), questioning of casteism and untouchability, and spread of education. In the religious sphere, they mainly raised concerns around idolatry, polytheism, religious superstitions and exploitation by priests. In this lesson, we are broadly going to talk of Hindu social reform movements. They attempted to reorder society, its norms and behaviour and questioned established religious authorities. These reforms rested on a charismatic leadership, largely male, upper caste and middle class.

Reasons for growth

Some questions arise regarding the emergence of reform movements. Were these reforms a result of the impact of the West? Were they a response to challenges posed by colonialism? What were their ‘indigenous’ roots? There are no simple answers to this, as there were multiple reasons for the growth of these movements in this specific period. Dissemination of English education among the high castes, development of vernacular languages, improved communications, and expansion of print culture helped in their spread. Fears of conversions to Christianity due to the spread of polemical tracts and preaching by professional missionaries strengthened the urge for reforms from within. Christian missionaries were entering the sphere of service like education, hospitals, orphanages and schools in a significant way, creating further anxieties among Hindus. Simultaneously, there was a need felt by Hindu social reformers to seek changes in Hindu customs and British policies. They further wished to eliminate social evils and certain ‘unreasonable’ and ‘wrong’ religious beliefs from within, leading to an age of definition and redefinition of religion. There reforms represented a contest for moral authority and were a response of Hindu men and women to foreign presence.

Indigenous vs Colonial, Modernist vs Revivalist

The early policy of the East India Company was of non-intervention in Indian social matters. At the same time, Orientalist scholars were deeply interested in learning about Indian culture. Gradually however, there was a move towards cautious intervention in

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Indian social institutions, influenced by ideologies of Evangelicalism, Utilitarianism and free trade thinking.

There were broadly two kinds of movements which emerged, one that Kenneth Jones has described as ‘transitional’ and the other ‘acculturative’. The former had their origins, according to him, in the pre-colonial world and arose from indigenous forms of socio- religious dissent, with little or no influence from the colonial milieu. At the same time for the Indians of various religions, the period of British rule was one of intense reassessment of religion and society, mostly in response to the challenge of the West, especially Protestant Christianity and Enlightenment thought. The ‘acculturative’ movements originated within the colonial milieu and were led by individuals who were products of cultural interaction. In other words, these movements were led mostly by people who had received a western education or who had had much contact with Europeans. These people could not reject the impact of Western Enlightenment thinking, but they wanted to rediscover reason and science in their own civilization, and to produce a modernization project within a cultural space defined by Indian tradition. Further, the Orientalist project of the West systematized the study of India’s past with chronologies and value judgements. For Indians, particularly Hindus, this new knowledge of their ancient past had important consequences once they began to encounter it in the new, western-style colleges.

Reform movements among Hindus can further be divided into two broad categories: modernizing or reformist on the one hand, and revivalist on the other. Modernizing and reformist movements adopted basically Western models for political and social change in India while the latter looked to the ancient roots of Hindu religion and civilization and often invoked and upheld a myth of a Hindu ‘golden age’ in the past. This tended to sometimes impart a conservative and retrogressive character to these movements. Within both groups the ideological sphere was wide. Revivalism, for example, included those who wanted to preserve the traditional social order as well as those who wanted to do away with that traditional social order and replace it with an imagined purer and more ancient Hindu model of society. Also, they lamented the spectacle of division in Hindu society, either sectarian or caste-based, and one of their main goals was to strengthen Hindu solidarity. However the divisions between the revivalists and reformists were often blurred as both came to impinge upon and influence each other.

Besides advocating reforms from within Hindu society, many of them also sought change with social work and through legislative interventions by the British state. Let us examine these movements in some detail.

Brahmo Samaj

The first major landmark of these movements began in Bengal with Raja Rammohun Roy (1772-1833), who founded the Brahmo Samaj in 1828. He was the central figure of the early socio-religious reforms, and has been referred to as the ‘Father of Modern India’ because of the social, educational, and political reforms he advocated. He defended Hinduism from missionary attack, stating that Christianity too was laced with superstition and error. He was against polytheism, idol worship, Brahman priests and their rituals and women’s subordination. He carried on a successful campaign for the abolition of Sati (self-immolation of widows on the funeral pyres of their dead husbands).

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Value addition: life stories Raja Rammohun Roy Rammohun Roy represented a synthesis of the thought of East and West. As a young man he had studied Sanskrit literature and Hindu philosophy at Varanasi and the Koran and Persian and Arabic literature at Patna. He supported himself by money-lending, managing his small estates, and speculating in British East India Company bonds. In 1805 he was employed by John Digby, a lower company official and through him he was introduced to Western culture and literature. For the next 10 years Roy drifted in and out of the British East India Company’s service. He continued his religious studies throughout this period. In 1803 he composed a Persian tract denouncing India's religious divisions and superstitions. As a remedy for these ills, he advocated a monotheistic Hinduism in which reason guides the adherent. He sought a philosophical basis for his religious beliefs in the Upanishads and Vedas, translating these ancient Sanskrit treatises into Bengali, Hindi, and English and writing summaries on them. The central theme of these texts, for Roy, was the worship of the Supreme God, beyond human knowledge, who supports the universe. He substituted scriptures for priests as the sources of proper knowledge. His most dramatic act however was his consistent campaign against sati, citing scriptural sources to justify his contention that sati was not required by Hindu law and was instead an example of degenerate Hinduism. Finally in 1829, after much hesitation, the British-Indian government outlawed sati. Source: Original

Figure 6.2.1: Raja Rammohun Roy Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ram_Mohan_Roy

Roy’s first organization, Atmiya Sabha, founded in Calcutta in 1815, eventually took the shape of Brahmo Samaj in 1828. It emerged as a major religious movement of the

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

middle-class educated Bengalis, based on the essential principle of monotheism. At this time there was no formal organization, no membership, no creed, though it had weekly recitations from the Vedas and Upanishads.

Value addition: common misconceptions Rammohun Roy a unitarian? An assumption has long been that Rammohun Roy was secretly a Unitarian, and that his socio-religious reform ideas were derived from a Western discourse coming out of the Enlightenment and also an apologia to Western missionary critiques of Hinduism. But a dissenting opinion by Bruce Robertson argues that Roy’s political vision of a self-determining, modern, pluralistic society was founded on his reading of the ancient Upanishads, and that he was a profound vedantic thinker, and was following in a tradition coming down from Shankaracharya (the 8th century advaita vedantic philosopher). This view places Roy within an indigenous tradition, without much reference to the West. However, we also cannot ignore that Roy was stimulated to go into these ancient Indian texts and find the basis for a society that looked modern due to the challenge that the West presented. Source: Robertson, Bruce Carlisle. 1995. Raja Rammohan Ray, The Father of Modern India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

After Roy’s death in 1833, the organization almost faded, but was revived by Debendranath Tagore. He emphasized the superiority of Hinduism, and though he was a Brahmo, he would not break with Hindu caste rules. The Brahmo Samaj split at various times in the course of the 19th century. There were increasing conflicts within the Samaj between the conservatives or cultural nationalists on the one hand and the ‘liberals’ or modernizers on the other, who split into two camps by 1866. The former included those who believed in one God and discarded the worship of Figure 6.s, but did not want to sever all connections with Hindu society, while the latter comprised those who regarded popular Hinduism as too narrow and chafed at the Sanskrit texts and the social practices which symbolized the religion. The conservatives were led by Debendranath Tagore. On the other hand was Keshub Chandra Sen who had much more progressive ideas. He was against the caste system and supported inter-caste marriages. He took the movement out of the limited elite circles of Calcutta literati into the district towns of east Bengal.

Under the leadership of Sen, the newly started Brahmo Samaj of India had a triumphant career. The inclusion of women as members and the adoption of a moderate programme of social reform formed a new feature of the rejuvenated society. It was chiefly due to its efforts that the government passed the Brahmo Marriage Act of 1872, which abolished early marriage of girls and polygamy, and sanctioned widow remarriages and inter-caste marriages for those who did not profess any recognized faith such as Hinduism and Islam. With the passing of the Act, which effectively declared that Brahmos were not Hindus, and hence not subject to Hindu law, Keshab Chandra Sen’s Brahmo Samaj of India underwent a split between radicals and moderates, especially over the status of women. Sen, leading the moderate faction, turned away from social change, and instead embraced the study and reform of religion. Successive ideological rifts weakened the movement, confining it to a small elite group.

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Prarthana Samaj

Keshub Chandra Sen visited Bombay in 1864 and again in 1867 and this generated great enthusiasm among the English educated elite of Maharashtra. As a direct consequence of this, the Prarthana Samaj was founded in Bombay in 1867. The main spirit behind it was Mahadev Gobind Ranade. All the leading lights of this organisation were English educated Chitpavan and Saraswat Brahmans. Like the Brahmo movement, the Prarthana Samaj too preached monotheism, denounced idolatry, priestly domination, caste restrictions, and supported widow remarriage and women’s education. It showed a syncretistic acceptance of all religions. It’s members drew upon Christian and Buddhist texts as well as different Hindu scriptures when compiling their weekly services and the movement also connected itself later to the Maharashtrian bhakti tradition.

In spite of the assistance and aspiration provided continuously to the Prarthana Samaj by the Bengali Brahmos, it maintained its distinction from it. The most notable difference was in its cautious programme in contrast to the relatively more confrontational attitudes of the Bengali Brahmos. The reforms it sought were to come gradually, not cataclysmically, and this made it relatively more acceptable to the larger society. For example, while supporting widow remarriage, it did not lead in this campaign. The Samaj opened branches in Poona, Surat, Ahmedabad, Karachi, Kirkee, Kolhapur and Satara. Its activities also reached south India and by early 20th century, eighteen of its branches existed in the Madras Presidency.

There was a rupture in the Samaj in 1875, when Dayanand Saraswati with his Arya samaj visited Gujarat. A section of the Prarthana Samaj leaders, lead by S. P. Kelkar, were attracted towards Aryan ideology and broke away from the Samaj. Although they later returned to the Prarthana Samaj, it marked the beginning of a different kind of religious politics in western India. The Samaj however was successful in creating various institutions like free reading rooms, libraries, schools, orphanages and programmes for ‘untouchable’ uplift, though it never directly attacked Hindu orthodoxy or Brahmanical power.

Ramakrishna and Vivekananda

The weakening of the Brahmo Samaj in Bengal in the 1870s was followed by the emergence of Ramakrishna-Vivekananda movement in the 1880s. Ramakrishna Paramahansa was a holy man, who claimed to have had visions of the divine mother. Untouched by Western rationalist education, his Hinduism was simple, and appealed to the emotions of educated Bengalis.

Value addition: new leads Ramakrishna and his times: Kaliyuga, Chakri and Bhakti 19th century Bengal witnessed a strange fascination of the Calcutta bhadralok for Ramakrishna Paramahansa, a rustic Brahman and an obscure Dakshineshwar temple priest. He barely knew any English, received little formal schooling, held rationalistic argument in contempt, was disdainful of book knowledge, preached a timeless message of bhakti, and asserted the futility of organized social reform. The phenomenon of the Ramakrishna cult reflected a two-way crossing of social

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

frontiers. Firstly, a rustic Brahman became the guru of the city bhadralok. Secondly, the bhadralok fell under the spell of an idiom, values and personality different from their own.

The Western educated Bengali babus were tormented by their subjection to the drudgery of petty clerical jobs in government offices. Ramakrishna’s teachings offered the possibility of an escape into an inner world of bhakti, despite the bondage and discipline of alien jobs. Though his teachings hardly referred to colonial rule directly, they offered a rejection of the values imposed by Western education and the routine life of a clock-bound, ill-paid job or chakri. This was correlated to the evils of Kaliyuga, a world of calamity, denoted by loss of manliness, assertive lower castes and disorderly women. Through Ramakrisha, the city bhadralok imagined themselves to be reaching back to lost traditional moorings in the countryside and simple faith, and total surrender to the Shakta mother goddess, while at the same time preserving rural hierarchies. Source: Sarkar, Sumit. 1997. Writing Social History. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 282-357.

Figure 6.2.2: Vivekananda Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swami_Vivekananda

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902) has been regarded as Ramakrishna’s most important disciple, who nonetheless modified his teachings in significant ways. Vivekananda founded the Ramakrishna Mission, in the name of his guru. He was a brilliant student, a rationalist and an intellectual. He shifted the emphasis from bhakti towards a high Hindu spiritual quest through Vedantic knowledge and karma, redefined as social service rather than ritual. He induced a missionary zeal in the Mission as it dedicated itself to social uplift and spiritual education. While taking its inspiration from the ancient culture of India, the Mission recognised the value and utility of later developments in natural sciences and technology.

Vivekananda combined patriotic and spiritual impulses, and wanted to uplift the manhood of Indians, with a view to restoring the country to its proper place among the nations of the world. He believed that the present warring world can be saved by spiritual teachings which India alone can impart, but before it can do this it must enjoy the respect of other nations by raising its own status. Instead of the apologetic tone and the sense of inferiority which marked the Indian attitude towards European culture and civilization, a boldness and consciousness of inherent strength marked the utterances of Vivekananda.

A significant thing that he did for the Hindus’ self-esteem was that he attended the world parliament of religions in Chicago in 1894, and impressed the western world with his presentation of Hinduism, which was considered to be a major national achievement. He also planned a programme for the regeneration of his people. They must be taught to rebel, he argued, against malpractices, social and religious customs which weakened individuals as well as society. His ideal of nationalism rested on four rocks: the awakening of the masses; development of physical and moral strength; unity based on common spiritual ideas; and a consciousness and pride in the ancient glory and greatness of India. The issue of becoming physically strong and restoring their masculinity was important particularly for the Bengalis, as the British had caricatured them as effeminate and weaklings.

Vivekananda passionately triedto project a utopian figure of Bharatvarsha rooted in an ideal Hinduism but this was contradicted repeatedly by the harsh realities of contemporary Hindu society. He made systematic philanthropy and serving the ‘daridranarayan’ (God embodied in the poor folk) the central thrust of the Mission. Vivekananda was to become a ‘patriot prophet’ for a whole generation of Swadeshi supporters, revolutionary terrorists and nationalists. To see him as a mere revivalist would be to ignore the ‘universalistic’ aspect of his teachings. But the Bharat of Vivekananda’s dreams essentially remained Hindu. He drew inspiration from Vedantic tradition, followed some of the orthodox Hindu rituals and had a deep faith in the glories of Hindu civilization. This made it possible for the revivalists to appropriate him, who conveniently forgot his trenchant criticism of the evils of Hinduism. Thus in certain ways he was also one of the founders of 20th century Hindutva, a unified, muscular and aggressive Hinduism.

Arya samaj

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

The Arya samaj was founded in 1875 by Dayananda Saraswati (1824-1883) in Bombay, but its most visible and significant impact was felt in Punjab and the United Provinces. Dayananda’s motto was ‘Back to the Vedas’, the most ancient of Hindu texts. He claimed that any scientific theory or invention which was thought to be of modern origin actually derived from the Vedas. He not only disregarded the authority of the later scriptures like the Puranas but also had no hesitation in declaring them to be the writings of selfish, ignorant men. It appears that Dayananda was trying to project Hinduism too as a ‘religion of the book’, like Christianity and Islam.

Figure 6.2.3: Dayananda Saraswati Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dayananda_Saraswati

Dayananda was radical in his social reformism. Like other reformers, he too attacked idolatry, polytheism and ritualistic religion dominated by the Brahman priests. While running down other religions and asserting Hinduism’s superiority to them, the Hinduism which Dayananda defended discarded much that everyone understood as Hinduism, including orthodox Hindus. In fact, Dayananda rejected the term ‘Hindu’ itself, and opted instead for ‘Arya’ (noble). He advocated the practise of havan and singing of bhajans. He made caste, or varna, contingent on behaviour and knowledge, not birth. At the same time, in his practise, he often upheld the fourfold varna division, thus retaining the core of the Indian social organization. He encouraged female education, condemned child marriage, and argued for permitting widow remarriage within certain limits. While upholding Vedas as the true bearers of knowledge, the Arya samaj could not escape the rationalism of the present age, and it appropriated the Western intellectual discourse of reason and science. This was clearly reflected in the field of education, where one school supported a more traditional system, while another section recognised the value of English education and was inclined to a more liberal programme. The social and educational work done by the Arya samaj has had a wide impact. The reach of Dayananda and the Arya samaj was much wider than other movements, and they

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

proved to be a dynamic force in Hindu society. The Arya samaj drew many leaders, militant Hindus and nationalists, including Lala Hansraj, Pandit Guru Dutt, Lala Lajpat Rai and Swami Shraddhananda.

The Arya samaj was an aggressively proselytizing movement, and contributed greatly to the rise of a militant Hindu consciousness in the 19th and 20th centuries. The moderate group within the Samaj, who had chosen to focus on education and community work were gradually marginalized by 1893, and the militant voices became more dominant and aggressive. The Hindu service communities, particularly Kayasthas and Khattris, were strong in the Arya samaj. Its membership often included shopkeepers, traders, lawyers and teachers. The Samaj used an effective network of updeshaksand pracharaksfor the spread of its ideas. These people inserted themselves into the public domain of north India as the voice of Hindus and used print extensively and powerfully. Prominent members of the Arya samaj controlled many of the important publishing houses and newspapers being published in north India.

As part of their community and nation making rhetoric, the Arya samaj launched the programmes of sangathanand shuddhi. The latter was a proselytization movement that involved the reconversion of those who were lost to the religions of Christianity, Sikhism and Islam. The Arya samaj also became intensely involved in the cow protection movements and the advocacy of standardized Hindi in preference to Urdu in the late 19th century, moving decisively from reformism to revivalism. The Arya Samaj’s stridency against Christianity and Islam and their belief in the superiority of ancient Hinduism was often reflected in their writings. This to an extent was the genesis of what later came to be known as Hindutva, a Hindu nationalism based on identification with Hindu culture.

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Figure 6.2.4: Sangathan Source: Vyanga Chitravali. 1925. Kanpur: Prakash Pustakalya, 2.

An assessment and critique of social reforms

These reform movements made a significant contribution to the evolution of modern India. It cannot be denied that they launched a significant attack on a number of social and religious evils. They advocated abolition of the caste system and stressed the need to improve the condition of women. However, within these movements also lay certain inherent contradictions limitations.

These reforms largely came from above. There was never any attempt in them to develop a modern social consciousness from below. Reformers never tried to take the reforms to the people, and their language mostly remained incomprehensible to the uneducated peasants and artisans. Most of the reform movements remained confined to a narrow social space, as the reformist spirit appealed only to a small elite group, who were primarily the economic and cultural beneficiaries of colonial rule. Most of them were upper caste Hindus.

While attacking caste rigidities, many of them simultaneously upheld caste hierarchies. It is not insignificant for example that many of the leading members of the Arya samaj

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

were also active members of various caste associations. Many of these movements thus revealed caste tensions, as they were uncomfortable with certain questions. In practice, the lower castes were not entitled to wear the sacred thread, to learn the Vedas and to inter-dine. Similarly on the women’s question, most initiatives were taken largely by men, and they mainly addressed problems of upper caste, middle class Hindu women only. Further, they hardly ever took women’s own voices into account.

Lacking a broad social base, most of the reform movements exhibited an intrinsic faith in the benevolent nature of colonial rule and relied more on legislation for imposing reform from above. Equally important is the colonial character of the reforms, as the Indian reformers’ positions in a significant way mirrored the colonial mind and therefore the ambivalence of the colonial policy planners.

A sharp tradition/modernization dichotomy is not intellectually conducive to an understanding of the process of reform in 19th century India. The ambivalences in the position of reformers were an outcome of a colonial context. Christophe Jaffrelot states that they ‘undertook to reform their society and its religious practices in order to adapt them to Western modernity while preserving the core of Hindu tradition.’ More importantly, many of the Hindu reform movements drew implicit links between Hindus and the nation, leaving themselves open to more conservative and revivalist appropriations.

6.3: Reform and revival: Deoband, Aligarh and Singh Sabha movements

The spirit of reform did not leave other communities untouched. Muslims, Sikhs and other religious communities too made efforts from the 19th century to bring about reforms from within. In this section, we will discuss some such movements.

Context of reform amongst Muslims

The colonial context was significant for the growth of reform movements amongst the Muslims. British rule brutally removed much of the financial and institutional support for Islamic society. There was elimination of a Muslim judiciary, and higher administrative posts came to be reserved for Europeans. In the wake of such a loss of power, many Muslims of the gentry class came to bemoan their misfortune. There was a general anxiety about how a Muslim society might be sustained without political power. Many Muslim reformers felt that the new social reality could only be interpreted in the light of Islam. A major concern of theirs was therefore to review the Islamic knowledge handed down to them from the past, and to see how it could be used to enable them to operate effectively in the present.

Also, colonial designs and exigencies, including the deployment of new forms of classification like the census, gave further impetus to the Muslims to redefine themselves. In response, there emerged broadly two trends amongst the Muslim intellectuals. They can be divided into two categories - revivalist, represented best by the Deoband movement and the reformist, which was reflected in the Aligarh movement.

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

In the late 19th century, in north India particularly, there emerged many Muslim intellectuals like Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Maulana Azad, Altaf Hussain Hali and Shibli Naumani, who came to exercise a great influence over the Muslim imagination. In addition, institutions like Deoband, Firangi Mahal and the Mohammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh exercised a powerful influence over the hearts and minds of Muslims not just in northern India, but all across the Indian sub-continent, and beyond. Indisputably, these individuals, institutions and trends helped in defining a certain Muslim identity. At the same time, one cannot conceive of a singular Muslim identity, as Muslims, like Hindus, were a fractured community. There was no single entity united by religion called ‘a Muslim’ and markers of identity within Islam and amongst Muslims were numerous and varied in the 19th century. Muslim publicists defined themselves and each other as Sunnis, Shias, Wahabis, Deobandis, Barelvis, Nechris, Ahle-Hadith, Ahle-Qur’an and Ahmadiyya, and often called all those belonging to a sect other than their own, as kafirs. Only they themselves were claimed as righteous, true and the chosen ones. There were thus attempts by both revivalist and reformers to carve out a more homogenous Muslim identity.

Value addition: did you know? Islamic movements and print Like other reform movements, print was an important weapon of Muslim reform too. During the 19th century, religious titles formed the largest category of Urdu books. The town of Deoband was renowned for the number of its bookshops. The reforming ulama were amongst the very first to use the printing press; rightly, they saw it as the means to fashion and to consolidate their constituency outside the bounds of colonial rule. The Qur’an and a large number of other important Islamic texts were also translated into the regional languages of India. Muslim publicists used print not only to spread their ideas on religious reform but also to carry on public debates with Christian missionaries, with members of other Indian religions and with members of their own faith. Source: Original

One of the earliest manifestations of socio-religious reform movement by the Muslims was the Wahabi movement. In the eighteenth century itself, Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al- Wahab founded a puritanical movement aimed at removing all erroneous innovations within Islam, including the worship of saints, the use of a rosary, and the veneration of shrines. Though suppressed by the Ottoman Empire, the Wahabi movement survived and continued to be influential in the Islamic world (Jones 1989: 8). In India, for example, various newspapers labelled all kinds of adversaries as Wahabis in the 1860s and 1870s. The Ahmadiya movement, which took a definite shape in the 1890 due to the inspiration of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad of Qadian, opposed jihad, advocated fraternal relations among the people and championed Western liberal education.We now turn to some of the more powerful and sustaining Islamic reformist movements in 19th century India.

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Deoband school

The emergence of British power threatened the power of the ulama(teachers and interpreters of Islamic religious law), who had once received land grants and jobs in government. They now turned to society at large to sustain them in their role, and came to believe that their class interests rested with the fortunes of the Islamic community rather than the state. The majority of the ulamathus searched for a new world of purified Islam, reflecting the voice of Islamic revivalists. This view was best exemplified by the Deoband school, which was at the heart of Islamic revivalist movements in north India.

Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi (1833-77) and Rashid Ahmad Gangohi (1829-1925) were the leading lights of the Deoband school. They both came from the ulamaclass and the intellectual life of Delhi had a profound impact on them. The two settled in the Doab in 1867. Their major concern was to spread knowledge of their reforming message as widely as possible. They felt the best way to do so was through educational institutions, especially the madrasas. They thus founded the first Deoband madrasain 1867 at Chattah Masjid in the Doab. The Deoband school replaced the casual and personal teaching style, used for centuries, by a permanent teaching staff. Further, it shifted the emphasis in its madrasacurriculum from theology and philosophy, and the triumphs of medieval Persian scholarship, to the Qur’an and hadith and those subjects that made these central messages of Islam socially useful. In the past, schools had been supported by the institution of waqf(an endowment of land for charitable purposes). The Deoband madrasa, by contrast, was supported by public subscriptions and donations alone, which were usually in the form of annual pledges. This model became the most accepted and respectable one for the establishment of a school. This education system spread and by 1880, over a dozen Deoband schools had been established throughout the Upper Doab and Rohilkhand. The Deoband seminary was the centre of the system. By 1900, Deobandi ideology had spread far and wide in the north from Peshawar to Chittagong, and in the south-east to Madras. From such institutions came the teachers and scholars who provided the knowledge and the guidance to enable Muslim society not just to survive but also to entrench itself further.

There was an emerging puritanism among the Deobandis. While accepting Sufism in part, they attacked many of its customs in practice. Thus they opposed many of its ceremonies and the authority of the pirs. PilgrFigure 6.s to tombs of saints, and annual fairs held around them were declared as debased Islamic practices. By the same token, there were assaults on indigenous customs that had come to be incorporated into Islamic practice, for instance, following the Hindu custom of not marrying widows.

Value addition: interesting details Ashraf ‘Ali Thanwi and Bihishti Zewar The Deoband school expressed its views on how to be a Muslim. It made it clear that there was no intercession for man with God. Muslims were personally responsible for the way in which they put His guidance to them into practice on earth. Thus, the leading Deobandi reformer, Ashraf ‘Ali Thanwi, in his guide for women (but also men) in the tradition, Bihishti Zewar (The Jewels of Paradise), which is said to be the most widely published Muslim publication on the subcontinent after the Qur’an, painted a horrific

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

picture of the Day ofJudgement and the fate that would befall on those who had not striven hard enough to follow God’s guidance. To help believers avoid this fate he instructed them in regular self-examination, morning and evening, to ensure purity of intentions and to avoid wrongdoing. Thus, those in the Deobandi way were made powerfully conscious that they must act to sustain Islamic society on earth, if they were to be saved. Source: Original

Figure 6.3.1: Bihishti Zevar Source: http://www.786books.com/images/desc/bahishti-txt-ashraf-ali.gif

The Deoband school was designed to prepare students for their role as members of the ulama. It greatly attracted students from the ashrafclass, as they saw it as a way of upward mobility, by asserting a new status for themselves in the colonial state. There were repeated manifestations around ‘purification’ of ritual practices as part of the movement. The Deobandis made special appeals on the celebration of various Muslim festivals. They used print effectively to spread their ideas and also entered into public debates with other Muslims, Christians and Hindu critics of Islam, to defend and explain their ideology. With its new style of Islamic education, the impact of Deoband grew steadily. However the movement, while challenging existing social order and expressing the desire for upward mobility, also encouraged religious orthodoxy, articulated in a discourse of improvement.

Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the Aligarh movement

However, the Deoband school represented only one strand of Muslim reform. There also existed the voices of Islamic modernists, revealed most powerfully through the Anglicism of the Aligarhists. A section of Muslim political elites, immediately concerned with answering the challenges of the West, attempted to reshape Islamic knowledge and institutions in the light of western models, a process described as Islamic modernism and reformism. A part of Islamic reform both opened the way to modernity and then worked with it. It destroyed much of the authority of the past, making possible a more creative engagement with the present. It also helped set off a rationalization and reification of Islam, which, amongst other things, prepared Muslims to engage with a

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

broad-based political identity and conceive of their faith as an entity, even a system. The Aligarh movement was a powerful example of this.

The Aligarh Movement was led by modernist Muslim gentlemen. It was spearheaded by the dynamic personality of Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817-98). He was born in a prestigious family of Delhi. He was fluent in Arabic and Persian, and was equally taken in with western science, mathematics and astronomy. He worked as a jurist for the British East India Company and gradually earned a reputation as a distinguished scholar. He lived through the 1857 Rebellion, which had a deep impact on him, even though he remained loyal to the British, and was noted for his actions in saving European lives.

Figure 6.3.2: Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syed_Ahmed_Khan

Sir Sayyid wanted to restore a debilitated and defeated Muslim community, as he wished for its survival in British India. He argued that the future of Islam rested with the fortunes of Muslims, particularly those in north India. He found a variety of public forums to express his ideas. He supported British rule and highlighted the decadence of Muslim society in comparison to the British. He believed that the future of Muslims was threatened by the rigidity of their orthodox outlook. He urged that some of the characteristics of English society like discipline, order, efficiency, and especially high level of scientific education must be adopted by the Muslim community. He argued that Islam was not a threat to British interests. He also tackled the ulama, who dismissed the British as enemies of Islam. In 1866 Sir Sayyid created the British-Indian Association of

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

the North-Western Provinces as another expression of his desire for closer relations with the British.

Value addition: what the sources say Islam and education To prove that Islam was rational and not irrational, Sayyid Ahmad stated: ‘The Muslims have nothing to fear from the adoption of the new education if they simultaneously hold steadfast to their faith, because Islam is not irrational superstition, it is a rational religion which can march hand in hand with the growth of human knowledge’. Source: Original

Sir Sayyid called for a new theology and stressed the need for the emergence of new Muslim leaders. His profile and stature, combined with the fact that he was acceptable to the British as the face of an ashraf Muslim, accorded him the authority to ‘speak for the Muslim’. However, his ideas were opposed by the orthodox Muslims. His support for scientific knowledge and belief was seen as antithetical to many of the Islamic ideals and the Qur’an. Opposition to him grew along with his popularity. Sayyid Ahmad used the word qaum or nation for painting and defining the new Muslim society and community. He wished to unite the dispersed Muslims into a single qaum, a community no longer divided by sectarian strife, class tensions and linguistic pluralism. However, when Sir Sayyid talked of Muslim unity, he largely meant ‘the gentle-born north Indian Muslims’, the ashrafs, thus excluding others from consideration.

By the end of 19th century, Sayyid Ahmad Khan was confronted with the spectre of an aggressive and expanding Hindu elite in north India, who had become commercially prosperous. Publications of Hindu religious literature proliferated. This was also the time when the language movement, positing Hindi vs Urdu was emerging, along with cow protection movements. Aggressive Hindu leaders were demanding a ban on cow slaughter, especially during Eid. Ahmad recognized the threat that was posed to Urdu, and promoted its adoption as the lingua franca of all Indian Muslims. He came to regard Hindus and Muslims as two separate communities, though he compared them to two eyes of a pretty bride.

For Ahmad, the answer to the present dilemma of Muslims lay in education, particularly for the sons of respectable ashraf Muslims. He stated that elements of English knowledge needed to be taught within an Islamic context. This led him to establish the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College of Aligarh in 1875, which was renamed the Aligarh Muslim University in 1920. He attempted to model it on Cambridge University. Between 1882 and 1902 Aligarh had sent up 220 Muslim graduates. Sir Sayyid envisioned the college as serving the Muslim qaum. The college faced various problems and tensions. Due to rivalries with Sayyid Ahmad, some leading lights left the institution, but for Sir Sayyid it remained his most important cause. He was suspicious of the Indian independence movement, and denounced the Congress. He urged Muslims to avoid joining it.

Sir Sayyid was indeed one of the most prominent public men in 19th century northern India. He was a prolific writer and one of the greatest thinkers of the period. His

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

voluminous works include volumes on the interpretation of the Qur’an, on the history of the architecture of Delhi and a biography of Muhammad, on the causes of the 1857 Revolt and on Muslims who stayed loyal through it, as well as hundreds of articles written on education, culture and history. His work gave rise to a new generation of Muslim intellectuals and politicians who came together under the Aligarh movement to secure the political future of Muslims in India. The movement was a profoundly political enterprise, to construct and consolidate among the Muslim elite the mentality of belonging to a single qaum.

Muslim reformers, while undoubtedly responding to British colonial discourse, nevertheless inherited a similar discourse of moral decline and renewal from their own religious tradition. Muslims saw themselves as former rulers, who were displaced by the British. This gave them a more fraught relationship with Westernization than their Hindu counterparts. Because they had been in power, there was an impulse to use a reinterpreted and reformist Islam to make up for the relatively greater loss in status.

Muslim reforms and women’s rights

Let us now turn to a different aspect of Muslim social reform. Like the Hindu reformers, many of the Muslim reformers too were concerned with the women’s question, but they too revealed an ambiguity regarding it. For example, Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s educational enterprise was largely aimed at elite Muslim men. He stated that women should be mainly educated within their homes, observe purdah, and education for them should be aimed to make them better companions and mothers. Broadly, most of the Muslim reformers wanted women to be educated to protect the ‘purity’ of Islamic religion, to improve individual and familial piety and to purify household rituals.

However, in spite of various limits, the reforms did pave the way for some Muslim women towards greater education. We will discuss this through the example of the Muslim reformer Sayyid Mumtaz Ali. He was affiliated with the Deoband school and was also inspired by the Aligarh school. His intellectual heritage thus combined both the elements, which shows us that there can often not be a neat split between revivalism and reformism, tradition and modernity. He became a great supporter of women’s education, even if garbed in the form of religious education. Though he was careful to defend himself against accusations of ‘westernization’ and based his assertions squarely within the tradition of Muslim religious reformism, he constantly re-interpreted Qur’an to put forth his views.

Value addition: interesting details Mumtaz Ali and women’s rights In the late 1890s within the Muslim community, the dual challenge of British colonization and Christian proselytizing inspired the Muslim reformer Sayyid Mumtaz Ali to respond using the tools of his own cultural, political, and religious tradition: the interpretation of the Qur’an. Since both colonial justifications for political control over Indian society and Christian arguments for conversion focused heavily on the ‘backward’ status of women in Indian society, Mumtaz Ali decided to redeem Muslim culture and Islam on the same grounds. He played a pioneering role in Urdu journalism for women. In 1898, he published Huquq un-

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Niswan, or The Rights of Women. In it he returned to the Qur’an to find an interpretation not only compatible with, but supportive and expansive of the rights of women. He thus suggested a model for ‘progressive’ social development from within Muslim India, delegitimizing the ‘civilising mission’ Britain employed to justify their colonial rule. Source: Minault, Gail. 1990. Sayyid Mumtaz Ali and Huquq un-Niswan: An Advocate of Women’s Rights in Islam in the late Nineteenth Century. Modern Asian Studies,24: 147-72.

Mumtaz Ali’s interpretation of the Qur’an articulated a version of Islam quite apart from the dominant view among the conservative ulama, or Islamic scholars, of the day. In 1890 the interpretation of Qur’an had been co-opted by conservative, patriarchal forces within the all-male Indian Muslim elite. As a result, the dominant reading of the Qur’an saw women as agents of fitna, or ‘potential disorder’, whose behaviour and especially sexuality had to be controlled so that the fabric of Muslim society and the integrity of the Muslim family could be protected. Mumtaz Ali, on the other hand, argued that women were inherently equal to their male counterparts, systematically dismantling each of the common instances in which the Qur’an had been read to suggest the opposite.

Sayyid Mumtaz Ali and his vision for expanding rights within Islam thus arose to challenge the dominant reading of the Qur’an and opened up a new discussion of women’s position in society. In other words, Mumtaz Ali, though subject to all of the criticisms of the early reformist movement in India, exploited the social and economic instability of the second half of the 19th century and the deep ambiguity of authority over women and their rights, to force a new, progressive argument into an ossified and dominant discourse. He challenged established notions about women, which he maintained, were based on social customs that went against the true spirit of the Islamic message. He brought together a number of intellectual antecedents that included the Deoband school with its emphasis on studies of the Qur’an and hadith, Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s religious reformism, and the heated debates among spokesmen for different religions that Mumtaz Ali witnessed while a student. This example shows that social reforms amongst Muslims had a potential for multiple interpretations, even if based within Islamic traditions of controversy and internal reform.

Singh Sabha movement

The Singh Sabha movement first emerged in Amritsar, Punjab in the late 19th century, to articulate a distinct Sikh identity. The Arya samaj campaign in Punjab, especially its attacks on Guru Nanak, played a key role in its emergence. A larger context behind its rise was the emergence of a small Sikh elite in the 19th century who were indignant about the relative exclusion of the Sikhs from education and employment in Punjab. Christian missionary campaigns, growth of other reform movements and colonial stereotypes of Sikhs also contributed to the growth of the Singh Sabha movement. Its intentions were to restore Sikhism to its past purity, to publish historical religious books, magazines and journals, to propagate knowledge using Punjabi, to return Sikh apostates to their original faith, and to involve highly placed Englishmen in the educational programs of the Sikhs. Between 1880 and 1900, 115 Singh Sabhas were founded, mostly in Punjab.

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Some of the Singh Sabha reformers set up the Khalsa Tract Society in 1894 and published a large number of tracts, pamphlets and books in Gurmukhi. They were aimed at forging a Sikh identity but actually covered a wide range and revealed the peculiar mind-set of an emerging middle class, high caste society in Punjab, who had their own phobias and insecurities. They also revealed the experiments undertaken by the Singh Sabha reformers with the Punjabi language in order to standardize it, and evolve a puritan, modernist prose. The evolution of the Punjabi language was closely tied with the construction of the Sikh identity. There were attempts to not only standardize the language, but also to cleanse it of its ‘vulgarities’. This was part of a discourse on what should be the ideal behaviour of a Sikh person, including an attempt to structure the day of an average ideal Sikh person.

Interpreting reforms

The socio-religious reforms that emerged in colonial India in the 19th century had a rich and complex nature. The literary sphere, print and pamphlet wars were critical to the activities of various reformers. Like the reforms initiated by the Hindus, those by Muslims and Sikhs too have left us with a mixed legacy. Reform movements amongst Muslims and Sikhs too affected a small percentage of the population, up until the 1930s. Further, they too were male dominated. At the same time, even amidst various limitations, they opened up unexpected spaces for educated classes, including for some women. Among the Muslims, movements like Aligarh became the torch bearers of a rational and modern outlook. The Singh Sabha movement too brought a new dimension of the inner life of the Sikh community through various intellectual and cultural processes.

At the same time, with these reform movements, combined with other factors, to be a Hindu, Muslim or a Sikh took on new meanings with the clarification and definition of religious terms, creeds and rituals. In a multi-religious society, the drive to establish or re-establish a purified form of religion led inevitably to the rejection of behaviour and beliefs attributed to other religions. Consequently, the distance between religions grew and religious lines and identities hardened.

6.4: Debates around gender

Historiography: women and reforms

The social reform movements have had a contradictory and ambiguous relationship with the gender question, which we will discuss in some detail.

Most British colonial and missionary writings viewed the position of women in India before their advent as one of extreme degradation. In fact, the condition of women in India became one of the principle means for the Empire to justify its ‘civilizing mission’, and press for the ‘reform’ of the ‘depraved’ customs of India. James Mill argued that the status of women indicated a society’s rung on the ladder of civilization, and India featured way below on this front according to him. These writers broadly saw social reforms as a result of their endeavours, and which led to the liberation of Indian women.

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Traditional history writing, reformist rhetoric, and indeed most nationalist writings too have analysed the Hindu social reform movements as a relatively straightforward affair. There has been an uncritical celebration of these movements in such writings. They claim that they led to the emancipation of women and to their social and cultural progress from the stagnating condition in which they had been rotting, particularly from the medieval period onwards, and well into the eighteenth century (Datta 1965). They however claim that the reforms were a result of indigenous efforts and not due to the British. In this adulation, the social reform movement emerges as a truly liberating force, leading to the abolition of sati, to the introduction of female education, widow remarriage, raising of the age of consent, eradication of purdah, and an end to ‘obscene’ representations of women in literature and art. To further glorify the enlightenment and liberating effect of Hindu reforms on and for women, it became imperative to paint the earlier period, particularly medieval times and the eighteenth century, as one of darkness and stagnation, and to vehemently critique it. Simultaneously, the ancient past was depicted as a ‘golden age’, where women were valued and occupied positions of high status. Thus for example, the discourse on purdah amongst the Hindu reformers highlighted it as a problem that was a result of Muslim rule and came into force largely due to two reasons. One was the unhealthy impact of Muslim customs, and the other was the need to use purdah as a defence to shield Hindu women from being attacked by ‘bestial’ Muslim males. Social reforms were depicted as bringing light after a long tunnel of darkness, to end all such evils.

Later historians however, pointed to various lacunae in the social reform movements. Thus they argued that all the earlier initiatives on the women’s question were taken largely by men; that the reformers belonged mostly to the upper castes and emerging elite classes; and that they mainly addressed problems of upper caste, middle class Hindu women (Sarkar S. 2007, Heimsath 1964, Jones 1989). Further, the reformers were primarily concerned with modifying relationships with their own families and sought only limited and controlled emancipation. It has also been argued that with the growth of the national movement, the women’s question was co-opted into a larger political project and put ‘on hold’ pending the achievement of other objectives (Chatterjee 1993).

Subaltern historians, particularly in their search for a non-elite perspective for understanding historical processes, have pointed to the coercive power of modernity itself. They argue that the central question regarding women in the 19th century was not what women want but rather how to modernize them, which came with its own coercive package. This has sometimes led to a an erring on the other side, where there is a celebration of tradition uncritically and it is argued that there was increasing conformity and marginalization of women’s space and culture due to renaissance, enlightenment and modernity.

Most importantly, feminist scholars have attempted to present an alternative account of colonial social reforms from a gender sensitive perspective (Sarkar T. 2001, Sangari 1989, Nair 1996). Even at the risk of appearing to condone the pernicious social practices and forms of violence against women that the reformers had endeavoured to eliminate, they have sought to produce a more complex and textured view of the processes of social reform. Thus it has been pointed out that the reforms tell us little about women’s desires and emotions, their health and work. As has been stated, the debates over social issues constructed women as victims or heroines, denying them

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

complex personalities and agency. Women in fact became the site on which tradition was debated and reformulated, with an exclusion of the voices of women themselves (Mani 1998). Even the efficacy of the law has been questioned, for it is shown to have effected no significant changes in the existing nexus of gender relations (Nair 1996).

Ambiguous implications of reforms for women

Through fragments and examples we will try and see how a close reading of some of the reformist debates reveals that things were not as they seemed, that supposedly philanthropic concerns for women were motivated by more than abstract principles of humanitarianism. Gender stereotypes continued to be evoked in various debates around women and reform. Moreover, many of the reforms expressly directed towards improving women’s lot often benefited men more than women.

Precarious purdah

Take the example of removal of purdah, in relation to which Hindu reformers moved on a pendulum. While opposing purdah in no unclear terms, they also supported it selectively as is clear from their celebration of lajja, or modesty,as the Hindu woman’s best adornment. With greater access of women to public places, selective appearance of purdahwas thought necessary at railway stations, public ghats and roads, in interactions with shopkeepers and other men. The arguments betrayed anxieties about women’s behaviour, movement and relationships outside the household. Particularly, women bathing semi-nude in public ghats was seen as reason for shame, of being uncivilized. This was an antithesis of purdah. The discourse on purdah thus revealed an ambiguity. It paralleled other attempts to control and isolate women, and at the same time to support reforms in order to appear civilized. Thus, a selective purdah was shown as being good for women themselves. Worries about modern developments, with markets, railways, pilgrFigure 6.s etc. increasingly becoming sites for the ‘exposure’ of respectable women, indicated the subversive potential of completely doing away with purdah. This led to simultaneous condemnation and endorsement (Gupta 2001).

Value addition: what the sources say Anxieties around women and purdah These days women have constructed completely opposite meanings of purdah. As soon as they enter their homes, they pull a yard-long veil, and when they go out to fairs, they have their face totally uncovered. Singing obscene songs, they walk on the streets at the time of marriages. In such situations can they be thought of as purdah-bearers just because their faces are covered?... Then again in the month of Kartik, they take bath in rivers, where thousands of people see them. Then they do not feel at all ashamed…. The true purdahis that which existed between Sita and Lakshman. Source: Gupta, Shakuntala Devi. 1923. Purdah. Stri Darpan, 29 (1): 346- 7.

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Figure 6.4.1: Bathing Ghats and Purdah Source: Vyanga Chitravali. 1930. Allahabad: Chand Press.

Contentious traditions and sati

The debates around satitoo revealed ambiguities, as tradition was reconstituted under colonial rule, where women and the Brahmanic scriptures became an interlocking ground for it. Women became emblematic of tradition, and reworking of tradition was largely conducted through debating the rights and status of women in society. The discourse around sati was specifically colonial, where there was a privileging of Brahmanic tradition. There was in fact marginality of women to a debate which was ostensibly about them. Those who were opposed to sati and those who were supporting it, officials and natives, both were tied in laying scriptures as the basis of the debate, and were not primarily concerned with its cruelty and barbarity (Mani 1998).

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Age of consent debates

Scholars have also studied the arguments around the age of consentcontroversy. In 1891, much of India’s political and social discourse was devoted to debating the Age of Consent Bill, by which the age of consent for having sex was proposed to be raised from 10 to 12. After centuries of emasculation by colonial rule, it appeared that Indian men were fixated on the debate over women’s bodies as an antidote for their own political powerlessness. None of the agents involved in the debate ever thought to consult the women they were talking about, and no women’s organizations yet existed to inject a female voice into the discourse. In excluding women’s voices, the debate became a staging ground for colonization-induced insecurities of men doing the debating. Those opposed to the bill stated that they did not want government restricting religious rituals such as garbhadhan. Shrugging off the impositions of colonial rule was just as central to the debate as retaining the right to cohabit with child brides. The Hindu woman’s body alone could signify past freedom and future autonomy. Those who supported the bill were no better in considering women as individuals whose lives would be determined by this legizlation. For these advocates, the bill was a chance to enact ‘civilizing’ reform from within to deny the necessity of colonial rule (Sarkar T. 2001).

Value addition: life stories Rukhmabai and the age of consent debate Behramji Malabari played a pioneering role in campaigning against early marriage. However, the case that really brought the campaign to the forefront was that of Rukhmabai, born in Bombay in 1864, and married off to Dadaji Bhikaji when she was eleven years old. She however did not live with him, remaining with her mother. In 1884 a long battle between Rukhmabai and Dadaji began when he attempted, in law, to assert his right for his wife to live with him. Rukhmabai carried on a legal crusade for freedom from the conjugal claims of a husband she disliked, stating that she could not be compelled to consummate the marriage against her wishes. Her case sparked off an intense social and political debate, as Rukhmabai questioned the authority, indeed the legality, of Indian marriage laws. After an initial victory a second hearing found in favour of her husband and she was ordered by the court to take up residence with her husband or face a prison sentence. However by then her case had been taken up not only by some reformers but also by some feminists in London. Funds were raised to bring Rukhmabai to London where she entered the London School of Medicine for Women and qualified as a doctor in 1894. She then returned to India where she continued to work as a doctor in Bombay, and carried on writing against the harmful effects on women ofpurdah and life in the zenana. She did not marry; although Dadaji had finally accepted financial compensation not to continue with his claims, her legal situation in Hindu law as neither married nor unmarried, was never clear. Sources: http://www.womenofbrighton.co.uk/Rukhmabai.htm; Chandra, Sudhir. 1998. Enslaved Daughters: Colonialism, Law and Women’s Rights. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Figure 6.4.2: Rukhmabai Source: www.womenofbrighton.co.uk/Rukh001.jpg

Contestations around obscenity

Contestations over obscenity and sexuality were at the heart of many reformist debates – over the representation of women in Figure 6.s and words, of licit and illicit relations, of ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ sexuality – and these were linked to the maintenance of social order and the enhancement of civilization, modernity and nationalism. Here again, there was an intensification in the management and policing of sexuality and a sexual ‘purity’ emerged. The Hindu social reforms were characterized by a defence of morality, both in literature and in popular cultural practices, with particular implications for women. Thus obscenity was redefined by many reformist literary writers, specifically to control certain sexual identities of women. In the new poetry, for example, Radha was transformed from being a figure of incomparable joy into an incomparable bore (Gupta 2001).

Uneasy Hindu widow remarriage

Remarriage of Hindu widows was hotly debated at this time, with most reformers advocating it selectively. Here too however, we see shifts in their arguments. Initially, widow remarriage was seen as a way to control women’s sexuality. There was also a sympathy among the reformers for the widow, especially child virgin widows. However, there was a perceptible shift in the arguments of reformers, especially in the stance of Arya samaj publicists on this issue, in the early 20th century. The debate on widow remarriage was now linked to a hardening of Hindu religious identity. It was advocated

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

because some Hindu widows were seen as eloping with Muslim males, converting to Islam and increasing their numbers. In such a scenario, it was imperative for the Hindu revivalists to support widow remarriage and thus control the Hindu widow’s reproductivity within the bounds of Hinduism. Hindu men were asked in this hour of crisis, as part of their religious duty, to marry Hindu widows. Widow remarriage came to be advocated, at least to some extent, by a community’s need for a better economy of potential childbearing wombs.

Value addition: what the sources say Fear of Hindu widows’ alliance with Muslim men Out of the 7.25 lakhs of child widows, there are thousands who lead a life of strict chastity, and it is perhaps due to their tapsya that the Hindu society still ekes out its existence. But an overwhelming majority consists of those who are compelled to leave their homes on account of the brutal tyranny and lustful attacks of their female and male relatives, and to seek shelter under Muhammadan roofs or to add to the numbers of the daughters of shame. In this way, while reducing the numbers of Hindus, they add to the numerical strength of beef-eating religious societies.... One reason of Hindu-Mohammadan riots and ill will between the communities is the problem of the Hindu child widow.... If the onrush of Hindu widows towards prostitution and Muhammadanism, on account of the brutal treatment of their relations, is not stopped by allowing them to remarry in their own community, the number of beef-eaters will increase and gauraksha will remain only a dream of unpractical sentimentalists. Source: Shraddhanand, Swami. 1926. Hindu Sangathan: Saviour of the Dying Race. n.p., 97, 100, 138.

Figure 6.4.3: Hindu Widows and Conversions Source: Kashyap, Narayan Dutt Sharma. 1929. Bhartiya Vidhwaon ki Karunapurna Kathayen arthat Hindu Vidhwaon par Atyachar, Part II. Agra: Vidhwa Sahayak

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Granthmala Karyalaya. Front and back cover.

From these fragmentary examples it appears that the rhetoric of Hindu social reform reworked and updated patriarchy in a different form and combined it with an assertion of a homogeneous Hindu cultural and political identity, whereby it became important to control Hindu women. The liberal premise and promise of the reformist discourse was considerably overturned, when within it, the woman came to be viewed as a means to rework and recover an imagined glorious Hindu past, and her place in the home was valorised as the space of uncontaminated purity.

Mixed legacies of reforms

While endorsing all that we have stated above, is it enough to stop here? Are we still not presenting only one side of the picture? After all, the period of Hindu reforms was also a period when caste hierarchies and Hindu patriarchies were qualified. Reforms did signal new opportunities for women, however limited they proved to be. Sexuality, love and pleasure came to be expressed in diverse ways. Reforms, often unintentionally, also paved the way for a rich variety of experiences and practices, indifferent to and sometimes even subverting the stated aims of the reforms. For example, the spread of education among women, new ideals of companionate and monogamous marriages, and the increase in the number of households, which was also seen as undermining the joint family, created a sense of disquiet and increased patriarchal insecurities. There was growing awareness of women’s roles and rights. The customary demarcation of gendered spaces was becoming untenable.

We need to thus also explore how disorder crept into the moral order of social reforms. The prescriptions of Hindu reformers and revivalists were often fragile, resulting in unintended consequences and contradictory and ambiguous situations. Once set in motion, the very same vocabulary and processes that were first employed by the reformers to control women acquired their own dynamic in education, literature and popular culture.

Reform movements often have a limited impact, andthey are not identical with domination. The need for constant reiteration of how women ‘ought to behave’, implied the potential or actual ‘recalcitrance’ of women. Further, while reforms may have worked to an extent for the upper caste women, confining them more in the home, the story is perhaps different for lower caste women. For many, there was a lack of genuine conviction or interest in reforms. Economic compulsions, more freedom of movement, and lesser importance of civilizational discourses may have led the lower caste leaders to posit similar reformist questions and ideas at the level of rhetoric and values, but often not implemented at the level of action. Many low caste women were full and active economic contributors in the household, and their loss could not be afforded. Thus, some accorded more social room, though not necessarily equality, to women. Because of the much more layered levels of oppression, the views, movements and linkages of different members of lower castes represented mixed voices, supporting contradictory readings.

Through the specific example of women’s education, we are going to discuss in some detail the contradictory nature of reforms and their impact on women.

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Education for women: aims and consequences

In pre-colonial India, educating women was largely frowned upon. Some education in the form of zenanaeducation, i.e., informal education at home, was given to a few women, but it was often limited to ‘useful’ domestic virtues. Overall, women’s literacy rates were very low. To quote Rashsundari Devi, ‘The Hindu social customs of our country in those days were evil, everything was denied to women; the hapless creatures led lives of animals’.

The British, particularly the missionaries, began efforts to change this, especially from the early 19th century. Their motives were however questionable. Some historians believe them to be genuinely philanthropic whereas others think them to be part of an effort to heighten submissiveness to British rule, and some others see them as attempts to gain conversions to Christianity. The effects were in any event concrete. The first schools for girls were opened in India through funding by the Church Missionary Society. William Adam, a Baptist missionary who worked under the Bengal governor, published a Report on the State of Education in Bengal in 1935. Adam stated that the Indians thought that ‘a girl taught to read and write will soon after marriage become a widow’. The report drew the attention of the British government and helped spur the first wave of reform regarding female education. Government schools geared towards women began to take fruition in increasing numbers. Secular schools, such as J.E. Drinkwater Bethune’s Hindu Balika Vidyalaya, were established towards mid-century. These schools, however, tended to enrol women of lower castes much more easily than their higher- caste compatriots, as the latter were still unable to break the barriers of tradition.

It was only in the late 19th century, in part thanks to British pressures, that the higher castes began to grudgingly support women’s education. Slowly, reformist groups like the Brahmo Samaj, Prarthanda Samaj, Arya samaj and Theosophical Society adopted the campaign,assigning a native air of credibility to the cause. By 1854 there were approximately 626 female schools in India. Compared to the population, this affected relatively few girls, but the climate of education for women was markedly different.

However, while education of women gradually emerged high on the agenda of reformist thinkers, and various schools did bring literacy to thousands of Indian women, it is important to see the language in which it was camouflaged. In the 19th century, even as education became available to women, it was highly controlled by the male perspective. This was reflected particularly in the primary goal of many schools of thought on women’s education: to create an environment which trained better domestic women, and produced better wives and mothers.

Value addition: common misconceptions Domesticity and education We often assume that education can bring about equality amongst women and men. However, if we look at the pattern of women’s education in 19th century India, it is clear that equality was not a concern of those running the system. One of the first journals marketed as reading material to women was Stribodh in 1857. Along with other women’s reading material of its time, Stribodh specialized in providing tips on ‘wifely behaviour’. It had twelve main suggestions for women,

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

which included ‘good wifely care’, ‘dress in nice clothes, especially to receive him when he returns in the evening’ and ‘do not ever nag him’. The motive for this school of thought was to teach submissiveness under the guise of ‘education’, to selectively teach literacy in order to convince women to stay content with their position in society. Source: Walsh, Judith E. 2004. Domesticity in Colonial India: What Women Learned when Men Gave them Advice. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

The disastrous effects of western education on women were stressed by many reformers. Education for women was a moral imperative and a national investment, designed to domesticate the woman and assign her a more enlightened and companionable role for greater compatibility in marriage. Religious and moral education was the most important pursuit for women. This was to be combined with scientific education of a specific kind. Women were to be trained in domestic sciences, including sanitary laws, home nursing, value of food-stuffs, household management, keeping of basic accounts, hygiene, cooking and sewing. Even women reformers could not escape such views completely. With the significant exception of Pandita Ramabai, 19th-century reformers such as Mataji Tapaswini advocated schools which still trained women in domesticity and submissiveness rather than equal education. Intellectual rigor in women’s education was therefore scant. It was not intended to be conducive to employment but rather envisaged as an instrument of self-improvement. Nowhere was education given such a moral fervour, a pure character and a virtuous flavour, as in the case of women’s education.

Value addition: what the sources say Fear of educating women We wish our women to be educated. But if education means letting them loose to mix with whom they please; if it means that as they rise in learning, they shall deteriorate in morals; if it means the loss of our honour and the invasion of the privacy of our homes; -- we prefer our honour to the education of our women, even though we may be called obstinate, and prejudiced, and wrong headed. Source: Aligarh Institute Gazette. 8 July 1870. Native Newspaper Reports of United Provinces. 1870, 271.

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Figure 6.4.4: Education and women Source: Vyanga Chitravali. 1930. Allahabad: Chand Press.

However, it is not enough to emphasize only the limits of the educational avenues of women and the function of education in the subordination of women. A study of education for women would be incomplete without drawing attention to levels other than that of the formal script. For example some upper caste widows used education to reject stereotypes of widows and to manipulate the ascetic model to carve out a space for themselves. As education blossomed, many middle-class women used it to participate and become visible in the public realm, such as publishing in magazines/journals and singing songs at literary and political functions. Even when cast in a reformist mould and accepting some of the structures of male reformers, women’s journal’s created endless opportunities for women to argue for a voice of their own in family and educational life.

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Even the reading habits of women in this period point to different directions. While one could limit and frame syllabi and order prescriptive texts, once women were educated, it was difficult to control what they read, and the uses to which they put their knowledge.

In spite of various limitations, there emerged a number of dynamic women like Rashsundari Debi, Pandita Ramabai, Mataji Tapaswini, Begum Rokeya, and Sister Subbalakshmi, who benefited from the spread of women’s education in the period. They flowered as editors and educators. These women were deciding for themselves what they wanted. Though they differed in numerous aspects, such as in the degree of change they desired, they had significant effects upon educational opportunities available for Indian women, providing viable alternatives to zenana education.

Thus while education may have been intended to reinforce the power of the male over the female, it also empowered its female beneficiaries in ways unanticipated by the reforming patriarchs. It created unpredictable, but undeniable opportunities for some women. Education for women was not plain literacy, but an awakening to self-respect and self-awareness.

Value addition: life stories Rashsundari Debi and Amar Jiban Rashsundari Debi was born in 1809 in an upper-caste Bengal family. Her life was relatively unremarkable until she put her life story to paper at the age of 67 in 1876, chronicling for the first time the life of a Hindu housewife. She wrote the first recorded autobiography printed in the Bengali language by an Indian woman, called Amar Jiban. In spite of the upper-caste prejudice toward learning, Rashsundari taught herself to read in the greatest secrecy. When she first began to teach herself the art of letters, Rashsundari was terrified of rebuke. She stated, ‘I was a woman, and on top of that, a married one. They are not meant to read and write. The authorities have decreed that this is a cardinal sin for women.’

Unlike the texts that expressly discussed the issue of womanhood or advocate a particular view of woman’s rights, Rashsundari makes no formal argument in her autobiography. Instead, she pours her life story onto paper, poignantly illustrating the role of the upper-caste woman in India. It is not a treatise on woman’s rights, instead Rashsundari’s is a woman’s story, and through it we understand the holistic experience of the upper-caste Hindu woman.

Some quotes from her book are as follows: (On getting married) ‘I went straight into my mother’s arms,’ crying, ‘Mother, why did you give me away to a stranger?’ (After marriage) ‘My day would begin at dawn and I worked till two at night… I was fourteen years old… I longed to read books, But I was unlucky, those days women were not allowed to read.’

Rashsundari Debi was a unique woman in her time. She could be called the first modern woman, yet she was rooted in the engrained tradition of the Indian household, rather than an imported view of modernity.

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Source: Sarkar, Tanika. 1999. Words to Win: The Making of Amar Jiban: A Modern Autobiography. New Delhi: Kali for Women.

Value addition: life stories Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922) Pandita Ramabai of Maharashtra, a Brahman by birth, first created a stir in 1880 by marrying out of caste a Bengali sudra. She became a widow at an early age and was shunned by her community. Shortly afterwards, she converted to Christianity. She was determined to learn English and medicine, and travelled to England to do so. She wrote the book The High Caste Hindu Woman as part of an effort to raise funds. The book, geared toward sympathetic Westerners, gives an inside view of the wretched condition and second-class status given to high-caste Hindu women. It was an angry account of the evils of upper-caste Hindu society. She blamed Manu, the Hindu progenitor of man, for the current societal wrongs against women. She wrote, ‘Manu is one of those hundreds who have done their best to make woman a hateful being in the world’s eye. To employ her in housekeeping and kindred occupations is thought to be the only means of keeping her out of mischief.’

Ramabai was one of the most radical 19th century figures. She was a pioneer in women’s education and a rebel champion of women’s rights. She was awarded the title ‘Pandita’ in recognition of her learning. In 1889 she founded a higher-education institution, Sharada Sadan, and later on her well-known Christianity-based Mukti Mission to help meet her three goals, i.e. self- reliance, education and native female teachers for high-caste women. Sharada Sadan, used as a centre for child widows, quickly garnered unfavorable reviews from the public due primarily to Ramabai’s Christianity. Upper-class elites became angered in part due to her anti-caste teachings. It was not until she received American funding for her Mukti Mission in 1897 that she was able to put her groundbreaking curriculum into practice. Her efforts inspired other reformers, male and female, to join the quest for women’s education. Source: Original

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Figure 6.4.5: Ramabai Source:http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_vGfiUKsBT1s/Sbf9ExGSc- I/AAAAAAAABDg/bF2yFt8QyM8/s400/094.jpg

With the example of education, we can thus see that despite being severely monitored, the domain of reforms remained imbued with unpredictable potential, offering tantalizing possibilities for women. Reforms did not result in an either or situation. The model of reforms was far less convincing as an explanation for women’s actual occupation and experiences. The identity of woman was not fixed, but was diverse and open to constant negotiation. Reforms also created certain fluid spaces, in which there were subversions through a recasting of certain idioms.

6.5: Making of religious and linguistic identities

Religious identities in pre-colonial India

In India, religious identities have been a deeply contentious issue. In pre-colonial India, while Hindu and Muslim religious identities existed, they were not fixed over time, or all- embracing ‘communities’. Historians like Richard Eaton have argued that in the earlier period, there was considerable daily social intercourse between Hindus and Muslims and a relative malleability and fuzziness of religious and cultural boundaries. Scholars like Sudipto Kaviraj, Romila Thapar and Gyanendra Pandey argue that most pre-modern Indians lacked the notion of a uniform, religious community, readily identified and enumerable, as Hindu. Further, pre-colonial society was too fragmented by sub-caste and local loyalties to allow larger religious allegiances to predominate, or be sharply articulated.

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

What happened with colonialism?

There had been earlier religious differences between Hindus and Muslims, but growing fractures emerged in the colonial period, with a sharpening of religious identities. There arose categories that encompassed all ‘Hindus’ and ‘Muslims’ by definition. These changes found their expression in everyday life, as well as in organized politics and religion. Their roots can be traced well into the 19th century when due to factors like development of communications, printing, reformist and revivalist movements, and emergence of certain individuals and organizations, there was a consolidation of religious identities. The British aided these processes through colonial urban morphology, municipal laws, orientalizing perceptions, missionary activities and the decennial census. We will examine here the growth of Hindu religious identities in the period in some detail, but before that we will briefly touch on the growing friction between a section of Hindus and Muslims.

Increasing divide between Hindus and Muslims

While common traditions and reference points for Hindus existed in the past, they had not necessarily solidified into the consolidated mass which resurgent Hinduism in the late 19th century came to signify, and which had new socio-political dimensions. Despite the existence of various strands and contradictory tendencies, there were attempts to unify Hinduism as never before. Hindu socio-religious reformism and political nationalism in the late 19th century developed in tandem with the strengthening of Hindu religious identities, symbolized also by revivalist trends within the movements. A context for Hindu revival was the emergence of a vital Hindu mercantile culture in various towns of India in the early 19th century. Temples mushroomed, novel processions appeared on the streets and the cow attained a new prominence as a focus of the Hindu community. Vaishnava reforms took new contours and shapes in this period, stressing higher caste status for many lower castes, and evolving a more aggressive Hinduism. There was a proliferation of religious rituals and celebrations and the activities of the Arya samaj, the Bharat Dharma Mahamandal (the organized body of orthodox Hindus) and the Hindu Sabha expanded considerably. Many Sanatan Dharma Sabhas (based on traditional and conservative Hindu praxis and belief), gaushalas and schools were established. In Allahabad for example, Prayag Hindu Samaj and Madhya Hindu Samaj were formed in the 1880s. Various members of the ruling Hindu aristocracy, landowners, priests and heads of Hindu societies sustained such bodies. These organizations played a key role in the formulation of Hindu nationalism. They helped upper caste, middle class Hindus to organize and publish and to use legal and other remedies to defend a view of themselves and their religion, which was both ancient and modern.

Hindu assertions in this period were aided by the growth of Muslim revivalism, particularly in north India. In fact, there was a slow diffusion of revivalist streams of Hinduism and Islam in the period. Muslim revivalism was due to various reasons. Loss of state power by Muslim rulers and the divisive impact of colonialism and Hindu revivalism played a role. A substantial section of Muslim elites made efforts to preserve Islam, and to sustain and mobilize a Muslim community, leading to separatist Muslim identity politics. This resulted in the creation of what Gyanendra Pandey calls ‘new cohesion’ around existing foci of loyalty. Christophe Jaffrelot too contends that the establishment and later expansion of the militant Hindu movement was indeed a modern phenomenon.

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Hindu religious identities

There were certain important texts and personalities which were critical for the development of Hindu religious identities in this period. Most of the writers of 19th century cannot be defined as ‘communal’. Ambiguity, ambivalences and contradictions were their characteristic hallmarks. But even though well intentioned and not using an exclusivist language, they often implicitly equated India with Hindu when defining Indian culture. The more unselfconscious this mentality, the more powerful and persistent was its hold upon the writers. It allowed an easy and spontaneous switch over from Indian to Hindu and back, as if these were interchangeable terms. There was an equation here of ‘Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan’. Notions like Hindustan is ours because we are Hindus or that he who inhabits Hindustan is a Hindu became a part of common sense. This was reflected in attempts to define the Indian nation primarily in terms of Hindu religious symbols, myths and history. 19th century Hindu tradition formed itself in the very process of negotiating the relationship to past idioms and classical texts in the light of present needs and claims, in order to project itself as a coherent and homogeneous entity. In doing so, it attempted to bypass and denigrate the long stretch of Muslim rule, and took pride in the construction of a mythic golden Hindu past.

Bharatendu Harischandra played a significant role in the nationalization of Hindu traditions in north India and in consolidation of those traditions. He used the modern print media, combined with Vaishnava spirit, to articulate a homogenizing doctrinal core of Hindu nationalist identity. He countered the heterogeneity of Hinduism, which prevented the presentation of a united front and an effective ‘Hindu public opinion’. However, Bharatendu cannot be separated from the social, political and cultural movements in colonial India. Hindi writers like Pratapnarayan Misra and Badrinarayan Bhatt represented similar trends.

In eastern and western India, efforts of Vivekananda were supplemented by those of Bhudeb Mukherjee, Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Tilak and others, who prolifically used Hindu Figure 6.ry and iconography in their writings and speeches. There developed a tendency, for example in Bengal, to legitimize any defence of Hindu traditions as respectable and acceptable. For Bankimchandra, neither Hindu faith nor Hindu nationalism offered any resolution for his dilemmas. Yet he did evoke the mythical figure of Krishna as a modern politician and national builder. In his later years, he appeared closer to a Hindu revivalist-nationalist agenda. His celebrated novel Anandamath, published in 1882, invented an icon for the nation, the Mother Goddess, identified with the motherland. His song Bande Mataram (Hail Mother) became the anthem of the nationalist movement in India, and was particularly invoked by Hindu nationalists. A recurring theme in the writings of this period was an anxiety over supposed Hindu weakness. It was claimed that Hindu society had to be defended against external weakness, caused by conversions to ‘foreign’ religion, and against the ‘internal’ weakness, caused by differences and conflicts amongst Hindus.

In Maharashtra, Bal Gangadhar Tilak revived the Ganapati and Shivaji festivals in the 1890s, activating Hindu and Maratha pride in their culture and tradition. Ganapati, a syncretistic figure, combined elements of high Hinduism, asceticism and wisdom, with values of village Hinduism, devotion and pleasure. His appeal extended to Chitpavan Brahmans and the non-Brahman lower castes. The figure was effectively ‘politically

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

recruited’ by Tilak. While earlier, Ganesh puja was always a domestic or family affair, from the 1890s Ganapati religious festivals became the centre around which large public gatherings were constituted in Maharashtra. Simultaneously, Hindus were urged not to participate in Muharram festivals. In 1895 Tilak also introduced the Shivaji festival. The legend of Shivaji, deeply rooted in the Maharshtiran psyche, was invoked and glorified, and he became a public God and hero. Marathi pride was intermixed with Shivaji’s fight against the Muslims. There were public celebrations of Shivaji’s birthday, used to mobilize the masses for freedom struggle. While these Hindu religious and historical symbols were used for political mobilization, their extensive use inadvertently aided Hindu religious revivalism and Muslim alienation. They harped on a romantic, nostalgic and primordialist discourse.

In Madras too, in the 1820s emerged the Vihbuti Sangam (Sacred Ashes Society) which preached reconversion of the radicalized Shanar Christians. The 1840s saw the coming up of the Dharma Sabha, mainly patronized by the Brahmans and high caste Hindus. The two organizations stood for conservative resistance to change, rigid adherence to varnashramadharma and caste exclusiveness. With the establishment of the Theosophical Society in 1882, Hindu revivalism gained strength in Madras, as it stimulated the interest of the educated Indians in the history and culture of their country. It was further reinforced after the arrival of Annie Besant, who also formed the linkage with nationalism and Congress politics (Bandyopadhyay 2004: 245).

Religious conflicts in the 1880s and 1890s

In the 1880s and 1890s, there were increasing tensions between Hindus and Muslims. Various issues provided occasion for riots in this period, for example when a mosque or a temple was defiled, when there were coincidences of major Muslim and Hindu festivals, over cow-slaughter, over music before mosques etc. Riots occurred over processions in public spaces and access to them. They signified struggle over power and status, as there was a contest over boundaries of ritual space. We will briefly discuss some of these issues.

Earlier too, there had been some tensions. For example, at Ayodhya in 1855, there was a contention over a site where a mosque stood adjacent to an older Hindu temple. In Bareli riots occurred in 1837 and 1871 when public religious processions of the two communities coincided. Such conflicts were as much over matters of religious and ritual practice, as over economically and socially exploitative relations. They were exacerbated by the colonial regime’s new drive to catalogue Indian practice – public and personal, sacred and secular – and to establish ‘customary’ practices. Procession routes, timing, musical accompaniment etc. all generated new kinds of competition for domination of public space. In the 1880s, such conflicts received an impetus with the emergence of cow protection movements.

Cow protection movements

The cow was to emerge as an enormously potent and sacred symbol of the Hindu nation particularly in late 19th century north India. The question of ritual slaughter of cows, with Hindus demanding a complete ban on it, led to many violent agitations and riots in the period. It was not so much because Muslims loved to sacrifice cows, as because

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

militant Hindus made it an issue. In response to the Hindu challenge, what used to be a quiet, often private ritual, became an ostentatious public celebration.

The cow-protection movement arose in north India between 1880 and 1920. A significant feature of the movement was that it led to an ententebetween the publicists of the Arya samaj, orthodox Sanatan Dharma Sabhas and other Hindu bodies. In Punjab and UP, and later in central India, various gaurakshini sabhas(cow protection societies)and gaushalassprang up in the late 19th century, giving the movement a much more systematic form. These became particularly strong in Bihar, Banaras, Awadh, Allahabad, and later on in Bengal, Bombay, Madras, Sind, Rajputana and Central Provinces. Its leaders were mostly Brahman officials,honorary magistrates, schoolmasters and pleaders. Its main adherents in 1893-94 were the urban-based Hindu publicists, merchants, landed elite and trading and banking classes. More than thirty riots occurred in six months in Bihar and UP, the first being in 1893 in Mau in Azamgarh district. It has been noted that there were two distinct phases in the agitation, an earlier urban phase and a later rural campaign. Further, it involved a struggle not only over a ‘sacred symbol’ but also, locally, over ‘sacred spaces’, and over occasions that were used to highlight the issue.

Value addition: interesting details Cow protection movements and print To boost the cow protection movement’s organization and ideology, its preachers and emissaries used various platforms like municipalities, legislatures, political meetings, press and print extensively. They published mass posters, distributed handbills, printed poems, sang bhajans, gave extensive lectures and enacted plays in praise of the ‘mother’ cow. A newspaper entitled Gausewak was regularly published at Banaras from the 1890s, and another called Gaudharma Prakash was issued monthly at Farrukhabad. A drama in Hindi called Bharat-dimdima Natak, published at Lucknow with copies sold at railway book-stalls, highlighted the grievous condition of India at the present time owing to cow-slaughter. ‘Snowball letters’ or patias, using a gendered Figure 6.ry, became a significant feature of the propaganda. Addressed to men, the sin of incest was constantly evoked in many of them. Locally produced mass visual Figure 6.s and pictures of the cow were circulated and exhibited at many meetings. For example, one depicted a cow in the act of being slaughtered by three Muslim butchers, and was headed ‘The present state’. Another exhibited a cow, in every part of whose body groups of Hindu deities and holy persons were shown. In such Figure 6.s, the body of the cow itself was invested with the divine and she herself became a proto-nation. This new space of the cow-nation embodied a Hindu cosmology, with the sacred inscribed onto her body. Since all the gods dwelt in the cow, to kill a cow was an insult to every Hindu, it was argued. Sources: Sanyasi, Swami Alaram. 1892. Bhajan Gauraksha Updesh Manjari. Prayag; Narayan, Badri. 1917. Bhajan Gauraksha Gopal Darpan. Lucknow; Sharma, Rameshwar. 1919. Gauraksha Prachar Natak. Moradabad; Pinney, Christopher. 1997. The Nation (Un)Pictured? Chromolithography and ‘Popular’ Politics in India, 1878-1995. Critical Inquiry, 23: 841-47; Pandey, Gyanendra. Construction of Communalism, 185.

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

The movement had a strong upper caste bias and its leadership largely remained in the hands of the elite. Other groups participated with various other motives. Thus zamindars tried to assert their social power that had been slipping away from their hands because of various changes instituted by colonial rule. The peasant communities and intermediate castes like Ahirs and Yadavs ‘used’ the movement to fulfill their own caste dynamics and needs and to legitimize their social mobility and new status. The movement had exclusivist overtones too, as it urged upper caste Hindus not to sell cows to Chamas, Nats or Banjaras, as they too, along with Muslims, were seen as cow-killers. This was an indicator of the movement’s artificiality in a sense, in that it made implicit divisions between Hindus. But the movement did put an unmistakable Hindu stamp on the nationalist agitation. Some of the Congress leaders were closely associated with local gaurakshini sabhas, alienating the Muslims further.

Linguistic identities

Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities points to the critical role that language and literature play in nationalist formulations. In colonial India, language was another instrument through which contours of a new nation were traced and through which community identities were strengthened. Various languages were given a new fixity, thereby creating languages of power and leading to the emergence of distinct linguistic identities in many parts of India. India’s various language were collected, classified, standardized, enumerated and thus dramatically transformed from ‘fuzzy’ and ‘uncounted’ entities into a neatly bounded, counted and mapped configuration by the British. The result was an arsenal of grammars and dictionaries, culminating in the grandest example in the form of The Linguistic Survey of India.

The colonized Indians were divided by many languages, cultures and religions. In such a scenario, the concept of one language, one nation became powerful and seductive.

Hindi vs Urdu

However, this concept of one language, one nation was highly problematic. To take the example of north India, its linguistic map was filled with classical languages like Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian, known to specialists and to the courtly elite. Then there was Urdu, followed by Hindi. There was Hindustani, which was less Persianized than Urdu and less Sanskritized than Hindi. Alongside existed many regional dialects like Bhojpuri, Awadhi and Braj. Thus in polyphonic India, a single ‘national’ language had to be created, and its power established. Most Hindi intellectuals from the second half of the 19th century came to believe that chosen language to be ‘Hindu Hindi’ and not Urdu or ‘Islamic Hindustani’ or even Bengali. Language became, both among the Muslim gentry and the Hindu upper castes, a means and symbol of community-creation.

Till the early 19th century, in the heartland of north India, including Punjab, Urdu was the government language used in the lower levels of the bureaucracy and the judiciary. The area, particularly UP and Bihar, witnessed a Hindi movement, posited in opposition to Urdu, and guided by a Hindu consciousness. The larger context of the movement was a growing split between Indo-Persian (symbolized by Urdu) and Hindu (symbolized by Hindi) merchant culture from the 19th century. This was accelerated by the post 1857 expansion of government services, education and publications. Among the middle

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

classes, there was increasing scramble for educational opportunities, government jobs and positions on municipal boards. In some UP towns, Muslims were relatively advanced in literacy and employment,which led to a feeling among many upper-caste Hindus that Muslims were usurping their jobs. In such a scenario, the assertion of Nagari (denoting script and language) and the attack on Urdu by the upper caste Hindu literati was an attempt to assert a distinct community identity and to prepare itself for a culturally hegemonic role in the new nation. It symbolised another element by which self- conscious Hindu nationalism emerged in north India. It based itself on separation from and rejection of earlier symbols of joint Hindu-Muslim culture. As a result, overlapping literary cultures came to function separately. There was a new identification of Hindi with Hindu, and Urdu with Muslim through several avenues.

Bharatendu contributed to the standardization and codification of Hindi and slowly the slogan ‘Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan’ came to be a part of the Hindi movement. The Arya samaj too played a crucial role in attempting to promote Hindi as the national language. An organized movement in support of Hindi however began with the establishment of the Nagari Pracharini Sabha in Banaras in 1893, a voluntary organization explicitly formed to promote Hindi language and the Devnagari script. It attempted to standardise the Hindi language through dictionaries, grammars, newspaper campaigns, introduction of large numbers of Sanskrit words into Hindi, and publication of books and periodicals, especially school textbooks. Organizations like the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan of Allahabad too sought to Sanskritize Hindi, removing Persio-Arabic words from it, simultaneously marginalizing the spoken forms of Hindi like Avadhi and Braj. Similar efforts were made by other groups to induct more Arabic and Persian words into Urdu. It is to be noted that the bulk of supporters of the Hindi movement came from the ranks of vernacular elite who were educated in more standardized vernaculars of Hindi and Urdu. It did not come from the English-speaking elite or from local-dialect speaking masses.

Value addition: what the sources say Raja Shivprasad on Persian language To read Persian is to become Persianized, all our ideas become corrupt and our nationality is lost…. All the evils which we find amongst us we are indebted to our ‘beloved brethren’ the Muhammadans. Source: Shivprasad. 1868. Memorandum Court Character in the Upper Provinces of India. Banaras, 1.

A major portion of the debate centred on the proper language and script for government courts and offices. The Hindi side argued that the bulk of the population used Hindi; the Urdu script had foreign origins, its use made court documents illegible, encouraged forgery and fostered the use of difficult Arabic and Persian words. Urdu supporters argued that even the inhabitants of remote villages spoke Urdu fluently, Urdu language had originated in India even if the script had foreign origins, any script could lend itself to forgery, numerous dialects of Hindi lacked standardization and that Hindi had an impoverished vocabulary, especially in scientific and technical terms. Both sides tended to identify language with religion. Both assailed government policy, either for encouraging Urdu and turning all Hindus into semi-Muhammadan and destroying Hindu nationality, or for encouraging Nagari script which would lead eventually to the abolition of Urdu, and would cause Muslim boys to become Hindu in thought and expression. Both sides confused names for language and script. However, script was critical as grammars

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of both Hindi and Urdu derived from a regional dialect that was almost identical. Vocabularies in everyday discourse overlapped considerably, but scripts focused and heightened differences between Hindu and Indo-Persian cultures.

Value addition: common misconceptions Hindi and Urdu: of virtue and vice Pandit Gauri Datta wrote a play titled Nagari aur Urdu ka Swang in 1883 and Munshi Sohan Prasad penned Hindi aur Urdu ki Larai, which was published from Gorakhpur in 1884.In these plays, Hindi was upheld as much superior to Urdu, by misrepresenting the two languages. Interestingly, the two languages were represented as women: Hindi was a patient and respectable Hindu wife or a Brahman nurturing matron; while Urdu was nothing less than a heartless aristocratic strumpet or a wanton Muslim prostitute. Further, queen Devnagari was as much of the new middle class Hindu housewife as of any queen; Begum Urdu was the unreformed, the uncontrolled woman. Source: King, Christopher R. 1994. One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in Nineteenth Century North India. Bombay: Oxford University Press, 135-37, 173.

Hindi was not a homogenous language. However, modern Khari Boli Hindi evolved through a rejection of various regional dialects and bolis like Awadhi and Kaithi and particularly Braj, which was identified as the language of the erotic and ‘feminine’. Khari Boli was seen as introducing a ‘symbolic order’. However, this modern and new Hindi propounded by the likes of Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi and organizations like the Nagari Pracharini Sabha posed a problem. It lacked a known past, and thus a clear link was established with Sanskrit to lend it greater lustre. The University of Allahabad was also active in the propagation of such ideas.

Value addition: common misconceptions Hindi and other languages Hindi was declared the daughter or granddaughter of Sanskrit, which was seen as having united India into a coherent entity, into one heart, in ancient times, and Hindi was to play the same role now. The Nagari Pracharini Sabha tried to show that other languages like Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi were sisters of Hindi, since it was assumed that they had a common source in Sanskrit. In fact, they were all taken to be basically Hindi, attired in various dresses. Even other north Indian languages were shown as dialects of Khari Boli. Source: Kashi Nagari Pracharini Sabha. 1900. Hindi Kya Hai. Banaras, 1- 2.

In 1835, Urdu replaced Persian as the official language of the courts in north India. This was accompanied by complaints about excessive Persianization of Urdu, as it was forced to operate immediately as a new official language. From 1850 onwards, the government recognized Hindi and Urdu as separate subjects in schools at lower levels of education. Printing of textbooks in both Nagari and Urdu scripts heightened existing differences and helped create opposing vernacular elites. The new recognition of Hindi led to a demand

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

for thousands of Hindi texts in the Nagari script. Many career opportunities dependent on literacy in Hindi arose. It is significant that all the three founding members of the Nagari Pracharini Sabha made their careers in education.

In 1877 the provincial government first prescribed successful performance in the school vernacular examination as a qualification for government service. By the mid 1880s, changes were further accelerated. Hindi became the language of the lower courts in the Central Province (now Madhya Pradesh) in 1882 and in Bihar in 1883. In 1900, a resolution of the UP government granted equal status to Hindi along with Urdu in courts and administration all over. It is important to note that while almost all Hindus knew Urdu well and majority knew Hindi too, a very small minority of Muslims knew Hindi. Thus Muslim government employees had strong stakes in Urdu, as a large number of educated Muslim elite lived in urban areas of UP and held government jobs. 17% of Muslim population lived in towns, constituting 44% of the urban population in UP. It is significant that up to 1900, the ratio between Hindi and Urdu publications had remained roughly constant -- about 14-15 in Hindi for every 10 in Urdu. By 1914 this ratio changed dramatically. There were 27 in Hindi to every 10 in Urdu. Thus it appears that there was expansion of Hindi, almost at the expense of Urdu.

Other linguistic passions

In Bengal too there were movements towards greater separation between Hindu and Muslim Bengalis. From 1860s onwards, there was a growth of vernacular pamphlet literature and the rise of Musalmani Bangla. At the same time, the Hindu middle class bhadralok were reforming the Bengali language and literature and increasing Sanskrit loan words in it, while purging it of Persian loan words. However, in Bengal the script remained common. In Punjab too there was a battle over the script. Persian was pitted against Gurmukhi. By the1920s, most Sikhs had switched over to Gurmukhi. In Maharashtra, taking Marathi sentiments of linguistic regionalism and parochialism to new heights, Tilak too demanded the constitution of a unilingual province of Maharashtra.

In Madras Presidency, Tamil devotion in the 19th century transformed the language into a primary site of attachment, love and loyalty. Tamil emerged as an autonomous subject of praise and was eulogized as a language that enabled the schooling of its citizenry. Tamil revival organisations sprang up, using print, public rallies, street poetry and processional songs effectively to promote Tamil. It produced intense movements of Tamil linguistic nationalism, revivalism and even Tamil separatism.

In colonial India thus languages came to be seen as the personal property of their speakers. It was perceived that in the well-being of their language lay the future of a community.

Why such identities?

Hindu nationalism came out of a ‘rediscovery’, a redefinition and a reconstruction of Hindu identity. It claimed to represent Indian nationalism, as it posited a community based solidarity, minimising differences of region, caste and language. Hindu religious revivalist ideas became an established political force in the late 19th century. In the process however, they created various fractures and frictions, particularly with lower

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

castes and Muslims. The explosion of new literary forms and printed materials helped various religious communities in formulating a victimology, with the other side as the victimizer.

At the same time, the forging of religious and linguistic identities was also grounded in education, language and employment. It was tied to economic well-being and thus intensified rivalries. An increasing need was felt for community mobilization as constitutional questions were now being discussed and new competitive institutions were being created. In such an environment of competition, there was need felt by both communities to mobilize along religious and linguistic lines in order to register their collective presence in new public spaces.

6.6: Caste and colonialism: Sanskritizing and anti- Brahmanical trends

An overview of caste

Caste has been considered by anthropologists and social historians as the most important mode of social stratification and oppression in India. It is expressed in the two parallel concepts of varna and jati, which have a great degree of overlap in their meanings. The four fold division of society into varnas had been visible since 1000 BC, when the ‘Aryan’ society was divided into Brahmans or priests; Kshatriyas or warriors; Vaishyas or farmers, traders and producers of wealth; and Sudras, who served these three higher groups. The system was highly hierarchical. Untouchability as a fully developed institution appeared sometime between the third and sixth centuries CE, when the untouchables came to constitute a fifth category, known by various names like Panchamas, Ati-Sudras or Chandalas (Bandyopadhyay 2004: 342). However, while the varna-model represents a ‘textbook view of caste’, the jati-model represents a ‘field- view’ or the actual reality of caste (Banerjee-Dube 2008: xvii). Jatis as occupation groups, which number more than three thousand in modern India, were emerging side by side with the varnas, and were often again further subdivided on the basis of professional specialization and occupational groups. Which jati a person would belong to was determined by birth, and exclusiveness was maintained by stringent rules of commensality restrictions. At the same time, there were some opportunities for limited social mobility. Further, a singular idea of dharma was at times contested, most significant being the bhaktimovement.

Debates around caste

Louis Dumont, a structural anthropologist, in his landmark work in 1970 titled Homo Hierarchicus, put caste at the centre of Hindu social life. He believed in the inherent and deeply religious quality of the caste system. He imagined it as a religious system that had enveloped the secular world and imposed a ranking system of purity and pollution. In this schema, the Brahman priest was more powerful than the Kshatriya king. M. N. Srinivas in his work Caste in Modern India and other Essays, published in 1962, too in a different way accepted the ritual pre-eminence of the Brahman in the caste system. He put forward the theory of ‘Sanskritization’, i.e. the tendency among lower castes to accept and absorb the ‘customs, ritual, belief, ideology and style of life’ of upper castes,

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which is often followed by claims to higher position in caste hierarchy. These positions however, have not remained uncontested.

Anthropologist and social historian Nicholas B. Dirks has refuted the position of Dumont in this two works The Hollow Crown (1987) and Castes of Mind (2001). He says that the crown was never that hollow as made out by colonial ethnographers like Dumont. He argues that ritual rank was never unconnected with the power structure, and there was a close positive correlation between power, wealth and rank. Thus often the Kshatriya king was more powerful than the Brahman. Historian Sekhar Bandyapodhyay further effectively argues that caste identity is not a given. Caste categories do not represent an ‘undifferentiated mass of people’ who act in a uniform way. Moreover, he states, what defined the collective identity of lower castes was often not Sanskritization but an ‘ideology of protest’.

Colonial impact: continuities & discontinuities

There is much debate on what happened to caste with the coming of colonialism. The central point of the debate is whether colonialism marked a dramatic shift and fracture in terms of caste categories and identities or whether there were continuities from pre- colonial pasts. While Nicholas Dirks represents the first viewpoint, Susan Bayly tends to emphasize the latter. Both positions are partly valid, depending on different contexts. It appears that caste was a meeting ground between Indian reality and colonial knowledge and strategy.

Western Orientalist scholars often propounded fixed understandings of caste, as they relied mainly on the Sanskrit textual tradition. Their knowledge about Indian society was largely mediated through Brahmanical texts, leading to an understanding from a top- down perspective (Dirks 2001). They strengthened the notion of a ‘spiritual’ India, where the social life of its members was strictly determined by religious norms. Thus more often than not, they regarded Indian society as based on a rigid grid of hierarchy with fixed caste categories. Communities thus came to be seen as marked by primordial caste and religious identities. This has led some scholars like Nicholas Dirks and Ronald Inden to argue that caste was an ‘invention’ of British rule, especially in a discursive sense. Dirks states that a religious understanding of caste identity was imposed by the British colonizing authority, by which caste was refigured as a distinctly religious system. He further states that the colonial rule ‘disengaged’ the caste system from its pre-colonial political contexts, but gave it a new lease of life by redefining and revitalizing it within its new structures of knowledge, institutions and policies.

Susan Bayly, and others like Richard Eaton and Sumit Guha, while acknowledging changes brought in with colonialism, stress that the indigenous intellectuals were active participants in the production of colonial knowledge about caste. The literate Brahmans and the Brahmanized scribal and commercial populations were particularly sought after as learned informants and as providers of the shastric texts, which the colonial officers were coming to treat as authoritative sources on caste. Moreover, Bayly stresses that the voices of colonial authorities were not homogenous or singular. She makes a distinction between two schools of thought among them. Herbert Hope Risley, one of the most important officials to collect data on castes, showed a more racial understanding of caste. He saw a racial difference between northern and southern Indians and between

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high and low castes. However, William Crooke, Blunt and Nesfield had a more material and occupational interpretation of caste.

It would be irresponsible and simplistic to blame the colonial government for creating caste categories or misrepresenting Indian society in terms of caste alone, as the institution had a much larger history. But there were distinct yet overlapping ways in which configurations of caste changed and gained legitimacy during colonial times. Thus there appear to be both continuities and changes in caste structures during colonial rule. The salience of caste politics bears important colonial legacies. Caste acquired new connotations at this time and became an important term capable of expressing, organizing, and above all ‘systematizing’ India’s diverse forms of social identity. A critical tool for doing so became the census.

Colonial knowledge, census and caste

Paradoxically, the colonial agenda of rationalistic administration necessitated collection of census data on the Indian population, which led to the classification of populations in terms of their caste and religion, and furthered the process of consolidation of caste identities. The census was taken to be the basis of enumeration. Susan Bayly calls it the ‘single master exercise of tabulation’ of colonial society (Bayly 1999: 244). Moreover, colonial laws and judicial administration pronounced on the status of the collective caste category, investing such units with a legal identity before the law. Particular configurations of caste thus took shape and gained new significance and legitimacy under imperial initiatives.

Value addition: did you know? The role of the census Bernard Cohn shows how the inhabitants of India and their cultures were objectified through the census. Colonial classification along caste lines was not merely ‘academic speculation’. It had important economic and political repercussions. For example, those categorized as ‘low’ castes were often excluded from the army. Caste became a major factor in recruitment policies in other sectors as well. There were other implications of the census. It gave shape to communities of ‘martial races’, criminal castes and tribes, and depressed and scheduled castes. Source: Cohn, Bernard S. 1987. An Anthropologist among the Historian and Other Essays. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 224-54.

Numerical enumeration, apart from serving ‘justificatory’ and ‘disciplinary’ purposes, undermined the huge diversity of castes, and allowed the colonial state greater control over the subject population. Arjuna Appadurai argues that even if census operations ‘built upon’ indigenous initiatives, renewing existing identities rather than creating them, the motive and criteria behind these operations demonstrated that quantification was never totally ‘innocent’. Colonial ethnography, by applying a seemingly scientific precision to caste across India helped to transform what had been fuzzy, rather localized identities into far more strictly defined and tightly enumerated notions of community. Census transformed a huge array of variable data into uniform and clear registers of

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Indian people. In this way, British helped in firmly establishing caste as a Hindu institution.

Emerging caste associations: Sanskritization?

As we have shown, colonialism did lead to consolidation of caste identities especially from the 19th century. Indigenous people saw census and other British efforts as attempts at freezing a constantly changing hierarchy. The 1901 census is especially significant here, as then a decision was made to attempt to rank the castes in the census records according to ‘social precedence’. This led to the emergence and proliferation of a large number of caste associations and ‘caste sabhas’, and an explosion of writings on caste.

There was the emergence of caste-cluster consciousness and various caste groups began vying for prestigious caste positions. Modern administrative tools of census and judiciary were utilized in their moves towards claiming a higher socio-ritual status. There was a deluge of caste petitions made to the government for moving up the ladder of caste hierarchies, and ranking in the census. Though the practice of caste classification in the census was discontinued, caste-based endeavours persisted. Caste inventories made people realize their numerical strength in the population and improved means of communication allowed greater horizontal solidarity among the caste members. The growth of the modern printing press, urban centres and government employment further helped caste associations flourish. Many of them started their own journals, and used newspapers and the press effectively to publicize their appeals. A large number of caste genealogies, pamphlets and booklets around specific castes were also penned at this time. Susan Bayly argues that most leaders of these caste associations came from scribal, trade and middle status cultivating backgrounds. There was a growing realization of the significance of the new sources of status i.e., education, jobs and political representation, leading to more organized demands for more special privileges. New vistas of thinking were evolved around caste, kinship, identity and hierarchy. Caste became a legitimate site for defining social identities within a more institutionalized and apparently secularized public space.

While many castes struggled to fit into a higher varna, and this may fit into the theory of ‘Sanskritization’, still others used this opportunity to organize across regions and unionize. The creation of caste sabhas and focus on practical habits and customs over ‘arbitrary’ varna title also brought caste movements opportunities for socio-political advancement.

Non-Brahman movements

It was not just in the form of caste associations that caste consciousness and movements asserted themselves. Western and southern India, where Brahman dominance was far in excess of numerical proportion, were the first to see the growth of anti-Brahmanical trends, by way of emergence of non-Brahman movements in late 19th and early 20th centuries. Some other regions too witnessed such movements. As a side note, it is significant that some princely states in South India like Mysore and Kolhapur introduced caste-based reservation in public employment for people of non-Brahman birth, in order to make up for their past losses. In this section, we will study some of the non-Brahman movements.

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Maharashtra: Jotirao Phule and the inversion of Brahman myths

The non-Brahman movement started in Maharashtra under the outstanding leadership of Jotirao Phule (1827-1890), popular known as Jotiba Phule. He was a member of the Mali (gardener) caste. He formed the Satyashodhak Samaj (Truthseekers Society) in 1873. The Marathi non-Brahman public sphere was distinguished by a critique of caste hegemony. The Kunbis or Marathas constituted a large per cent of the population in this region. Being a rich peasant class, they controlled agricultural production. However, due to traditional ideologies and caste institutions, they were subservient to the Brahmans. The Brahmans, on the other hand, exercised considerable influence due to their ritualistic power and monopoly of knowledge.

Phule blamed the ritual power and domination of the Brahman for the predicament of Sudra and Ati-Sudra castes. Rosalind O’ Hanlon argues that Phule attempted to bring together non-Brahman peasant castes (Kunbis) and the untouchables by turning the myth of Aryan invasion and the Orientalist theory of Aryanization upside down. There was a creative deployment of missionary accounts of Indian history by many lower caste leaders in their constructions of anti-Brahman lower caste identity. Phule portrayed the Brahmans as descendents of Aryan invaders. He presented the lower castes as the original inhabitants of India, as veritable fighters who refused to easily submit to the conquerors. This defiance also meant their terrible subjection once the Brahmans consolidated their power. He stated, ‘Brahmans hide Vedas from Sudras because they contain clues to understand how Aryas suppressed and enslaved them’. Such distinct understandings of the past proved vital in the emergence of a distinctive ‘Maratha’ identity and its demands for the rectification of inequalities.

Figure 6.6.1: Jotirao Phule Source: http://www.payer.de/dharmashastra/dharma04a02.gif

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

In the latter part of the 19th century, Phule’s writings against Brahmanism utilized forms of speech and rhetorical styles associated with the rustic language of peasants, but infused them with demands for human rights and social equality that bore the influence of nonconformist Christianity to produce a unique discourse of caste radicalism. He was an iconoclast through his satirical writings. He was a great promoter of education. He wrote, ‘No riches without vigour, no vigour without morality, no morality without knowledge, no knowledge without education’. He was also a champion of women’s liberation and challenged the authoritarian family structure. During marriages he asked the bridegroom to promise the right to education to his bride. A journal titled Deen Bandhu in Marathi was edited and published by Phule. His book Gulamgiri (slavery), published in 1873, revealed his conception of the historical roots of Sudra slavery under Brahmanical domination. Phule had an ambiguous stand towards the British. He praised their rule for breaking the slavery of Sudras, by imparting them education, and hoped for further transformation of Indian society for the better under their rule. In fact various non-Brahman movements had an ambivalent relationship with colonialism, which did not always align with the views of dominant Hindu communities.

However, fissures and tensions developed in the movement later on account of its emphasis on mobilizing the Kunbi peasantry. This shift led to the privileging of the Maratha identity and Kshatriyahood, which alienated the Sudras and Ati-Sudras. The non-Brahman movement in Maharashtra developed two parallel tendencies at the turn of the century. One was conservative, led by richer non-Brahmans, who reposed their faith in the British government for their salvation. The second however was a more radical trend, represented by the Satyashodhak Samaj. They posited Brahman and merchant interests as antagonistic to the bahujan samaj, i.e. the majority community and masses. However, by the 1930s the movement gradually merged with Congress nationalism (Omvedt 1976: 245-47).

Tamilnadu: Dravidian identity

Crystallization in the South of a non-Brahman identity centered on a Dravidian identity, with the caste of Vellalas taking the lead. The Vellala elite of Tamilnadu began the Dravidian movement in the late 19th century against the Brahman monopoly of administrative jobs and governmental posts. The Brahmans valorised Sanskrit as the language of a classical past, and showed great contempt for Tamil, the language of the ordinary people. This motivated the Vellala elite to uphold their Dravidian identity. People like P. Sundaram Pillai and Maraimalai Adigal emerged as its leaders.

Value addition: did you know? Maraimalai Aidgal and Dravidian ideology Maraimalai Aidgal privileged the Vellalas over Brahmans and generated a usurpation myth, in which the Brahmans had stolen India from the indigenous Tamils. The movement even cast Brahmans as uncivilized usurpers who infiltrated and destroyed a golden age of India, one in which society had been divided along occupational, not caste lines. Yet of course this movement had elements of paternalism and denied agency to both the non-Brahman and non-Vellala, but its key feature was the differentiation between

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Tamil/Dravidian and Sanskrit/Aryan racial backgrounds. Source: Pandian, M.S.S. 1994. Notes on the Transformation of ‘Dravidian’ Ideology: Tamilnadu, c. 1900-1940. Social Scientist, 22 (5/6): 84-104.

This movement also took two different paths in the 1920s. First, under an elitist Justice Party, it strove for privileges offered by government sponsored reforms. Second, a more militant trend of ‘Self Respect’ in Dravidian identity emerged under the leadership of E. V. Ramaswamy Naicker, popularly known as Periyar (literally meaning ‘great man’ in Tamil).

Figure 6.6.2: Periyar Source: www.tn.gov.in/tamiltngov/memorial/periyar.jpg

Under the leadership of Periyar, the Self Respect Movement in the 1920s and 1930s became a mass movement, attacking the ruling elite. Periyar converted to atheism even before his ascent into the public sphere in 1919. He had a deep belief in reason, and he functioned within the Enlightenment paradigm. Born into a non-Brahman family, he encountered several instances of discrimination and Brahman exclusivity, causing him to

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

embark on a lifelong vendetta against Brahmans and Hinduism. He argued that Hinduism did not merely give its adherents a caste identity but also invested them with a range of other inferiorized identities. He was imprisoned multiple times due to a refusal to back down from his anti-Brahman or anti-Hindu statements. Dirks describes Periyar as someone who was always positioned on the margin, often out of necessity, on societal issues. He was a great champion of the cause of women and supported love marriages. He truly extended his concept of equality and human dignity to women. He advocated birth control as essential for a woman’s freedom, and saw divorce as a woman’s prerogative, reflecting his social radicalism. Disillusioned with Congress, he left it in 1925. The same year he started publishing a series of pamphlets as Kudi Arasu (Government of the People). They were printed in Tamil and won over many lower-caste adherents, while also drawing criticism from many others. He stated in Kudi Arasu that he was perfectly willing to ‘destroy’ rather than merely ‘amend’.

In spite of the radicalism of this movement, its social basis was largely confined to the upper non-Brahman castes, the rural landowning classes and urban based business groups. At the same time, unlike the movement in Maharashtra, this movement turned more and more vocal and anti-Congress, culminating in a pronounced Tamil regional separatism.

Gangetic India: rhetoric of bhakti and militancy

In north India, namely Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, there too emerged some non-Brahman movements, though not as powerful as in western and southern India. Many of the movements in this region upheld a rhetoric of bhakti. Religiosity in fact became an important political tool in caste identity politics of the region. Upper castes used scriptural evidence to prove their superiority.Lower castes adopted the path of bhakti or devotion to both challenge as well as gain an advantageous position in caste hierarchy. Bhakti emphasized the importance of devotion rather than rituals, thereby theoretically undermining the importance of customary hierarchy.

Ramanandi Sampraday in theory was formed by Ramananda. However in the early 20th century, it was effectively used by the Kurmi, Yadav and Kushvaha peasant castes of north India, in their claims for superior status. William Pinch shows that the sect provided in the late 19th and early 20th centuries an institutional context within which members of various stigmatized communities could acquire a modicum of social and religious dignity. While using the language of bhakti and devotion, lower castes were at the same time able to carve out a martial identity, laying claims to a Kshatriya status. They established emotional and later genealogical links with the divine figures of Ram and Krishna. Such linkages served the double purpose of staking out a claim to a Kshatriya, and hence a militant, identity, as well as trying to de-stigmatise manual labour.

Value addition: new leads Being Vaishnava, becoming Kshatriya Various intermediate castes and jatis in the region, who were assigned a Sudra status, also began a new reformism, often spearheaded by articulate, educated members of their communities. These new jati reformers sought

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

personal and community dignity on their own by the unqualified assertion of status. Much of the reform advocated urged abstinence from meat and intoxicants, and encouraged Sanskrit education and wearing of the sacred thread among its members, so as to inculcate a ‘pure’ lifestyle. It is possible to see in these Kshatriya reform movements a significant degree of ‘Sanskritisation’. At the same time however there were more significant underlying meanings of ideological change implicit in such social reform. Underlying these was a complex and highly ramified Vaishnava discourse. Source: Pinch, William R. 1996. Peasants and Monks in British India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 81-83.

Besides these non-Brahman caste expressions and movements in rural areas of north India, there also emerged caste movements among the urban Sudra poor in the 1920s and 1930s. In these, primacy of militancy over devotion was particularly evident.

Value addition: new leads Urban Sudra poor Nandini Gooptu, in her study of the UP poor, argues that in the years between the two world wars, when north Indian society and its economy underwent crucial transformations, a section of the urban Sudra poor came to play a central role in militant displays of Hinduism. They began participating in Holi, Ramlila and akharaculture, and asserted themselves in political-public arenas. In some ways thus, they were co-opted within a Hindutva discourse. Why did they do so, when Hinduism had marginalized them for so long? Behind it, there were contradictory pulls and diverse economic, political and social reasons. These lower castes were functioning in an orthodox Hindu commercial environment. They wished to fortify their own position in scarce urban occupations and search for better job opportunities. Given the context of extreme competitiveness of the urban labour market at this period, the vastly expanded group of the Sudra poor entered into direct competition with other contenders for jobs such as the untouchable and the Muslim poor. From the perspective of the Sudras it was essential to stake out a claim for higher status within the Hindu caste hierarchy than to reject the caste system altogether given their dependence on the market. They thus began emphasizing their martial traditions and showed themselves as protectors of the bazaars. They showed a sense of pride and glorified physical labour and strength as it was seen as increasing their importance as manual labourers. They used education and print culture too as a way of countering marginalization in the economic sphere. These were efforts at self assertion, to claim respectability.

There were problems with this however. Their assertions revealed multi-vocal and varied levels of social constructions of meaning. Their aspirations for an egalitarian social order went hand in hand with an awareness of being deprived and powerless. Moreover class and caste prejudices remained very much entrenched among the upper castes. Hindu cohesiveness was superficial. These lower castes thus, while participating in the same public arenas, did it for different reasons, with diverse perspectives. This reflected conflict and contradiction within the putative Hindu community. Source: Gooptu, Nandini. 2001. The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early

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Twentieth-Century India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Contradictory trends

Various Sanskritizing and non-Brahman movements that emerged in colonial India in the 19th and 20th centuries revealed contradictory pulls and pressures. They cannot be easily classified under the simple rubric of ‘Sanskritization’ or ‘Anti-Brahmanism’ and ‘Anti-Hinduism’. There were complexities within each movement, and all of them had distinct trajectories. Many of the lower caste assertions were definitely against Vedic ritualism and against Brahmanical caste rigidity. Some of them were also attempts to move up the ladder of caste hierarchies by framing themselves in a language of reformism. Others articulated a militant assertion within the Hindu fold, but for very diverse reasons. At the same time, they were united in their defiance of Hindu hierarchies. Some of them however took a complete break from Hinduism and began converting to other religions. These trends were more sharply articulated in Dalit politics and movements, for example by the Namasudras of Bengal, the ad-Dharma Mandal of Punjab and the Adi-Hindu movement of Uttar Pradesh. These however will be the subject of another chapter.

6: Summary

 Print played a critical role in colonial India in creating a dynamic public sphere.

 Print not only voiced struggles for freedom, it helped in shaping various linguistic,religious, caste and national identities.

 Print stimulated the publication of conflicting opinions amongst communities.

 Print also helped in connecting communities and people in different parts of India.

 Print became a vehicle to provide new voices like those of women and subaltern classes a hearing.

 The socio-religious reform movements emerged first in Bengal in the 19th century.

 The aim of these reforms was to restructure Indian society along modern lines through social and religious reforms, while selectively upholding tradition.

 These reforms were a combination of responses to challenges posed by colonial intervention, impact of the West, and the need felt from within Indian society for rejuvenation.

 Spread of education among high castes, development of vernacular languages,improved communications and spread of print culture contributed to their growth.

 Hindus, Muslims and other religious communities witnessed these reforms from within.

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

 One of their chief focuses was the women’s question.

 Some of the most important Hindu reform movements were Brahmo Samaj, Arya Samaj and Prarthana Samaj.

 They reflected in many ways the social aspirations of a newly emerging middle classin colonial India.

 While bringing about many positive changes, these reforms also introduced elementsof revivalism.

 For example, among many Hindu reformers there was a tendency to harp back on anancient Hindu past and defend Hindu culture and civilization.

 While bringing about critical changes, there were certain limitations of thesemovements. For example, their leadership was largely male, upper caste and middleclass.

 In many ways the reformers reflected the inner tensions of colonial modernity.

 The Deoband school was at the heart of Islamic revivalist movements in north India.

 On the other hand, Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s movement in UP took the form of anmodernization campaign.

 He founded the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College in Aligarh in 1875.

 His idea of being a Muslim was not opposed to being an Indian, but it was based on the ideals of qaum or ethnic community rather than individual citizenship.

 Social reforms in colonial India had certain limitations, particularly in terms of thegender question.

 These reforms signalled the ideological reworking of the ideal woman.

 However, in spite of various limitations, the reforms also resulted in a series of devices and techniques which helped women in negotiating their spaces and voices.

 Women like Pandita Ramabai pushed for landmark changes in women’s education.

 It would be simplistic to view reforms just in terms of gains or losses for women.Rather, they had spaces for a variety of penetrations and negotiations.

 In colonial India, religion and language and their reform increasingly came to be linked to new definitions of community boundaries, cultures and traditions.

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

 The cow protection movement and the Hindi-Urdu controversy emerged assignificant markers for defining one’s religious and linguistic identities in north Indiain the 19th century.

 The cow protection movement was most visible in Punjab, North Western Provinces(UP), Awadh and Rohilkhand and the Arya Samaj played a critical role in it.

 The cow protection movement did not indicate a complete communal polarization of Indian society, as various groups and classes participated in it from different perspectives.

 At the same time, the movement put an unmistakably Hindu stamp on the nationalist agitation.

 In the Hindi-Urdu controversy, the Nagari Pracharini Sabha, which was established in 1893, played a critical role.

 Linguistic identities became a trope through which contours of a new nation were traced.

 In the course of the Hindi-Urdu controversy and the cultural campaign that followed, slowly Hindi came to be identified with Hindus and Urdu with Muslims.

 There were other attempts as well to use Hindu religious and historical symbols for the purpose of political mobilization, for example the invocation of Ganapati and Shivaji festivals in Maharashtra.

 Colonial rule signalled both continuities and certain fractures in terms of caste identities.

 There were distinct yet overlapping ways in which configurations of caste changedand gained legitimacy during colonial times.

 The census marked a classification of populations in terms of their caste and religion,and this was taken as a basis of enumeration.

 Census, growth of modern printing press, urban centres and government employment helped in the growth and development of caste associations in colonial India.

 These associations argued for upward mobility, and many have seen these as attempts at Sanskritization.

 The political culture of caste grew in tandem with the spread of Hindu nationalism.

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

 There also emerged caste movements from below, particularly the non- Brahmanmovements.

 Western and southern India, where Brahman predominance far exceeded their numerical proportion, were the first to see the growth of such movements.

6: Exercises

Essay questions

1) How did the emergence of a dynamic print public sphere affect various social groups in colonial India?

2) Reflect on the relationship between the power of print and the growth of nationalism in India.

3) Through the figures of Rammohun Roy and Ramakrishna, discuss the various facets of reform in Bengal.

4) What was the significance and the limitations of socio-religious reform movements in 19th century India? Do you think they inadvertently led to a hardening of religious identities?

5) Compare the Deoband and Aligarh movements.

6) Write a critique of various views on the relationship between women and social reforms in colonial India.

7) What were the double edged implications of education for women in colonial India?

8) Discuss the context of the language reform movement in the Hindi and Urdu speaking region. Which groups were involved and how did they engage with the colonial government’s language policy? Explore the consequences of such language movements for the formation of new boundaries among ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ communities.

9) What impact did colonial rule have on the formulation of caste identities in colonial India?

10) Elaborate on the emergence of non-Brahman movements, with reference to any two regions.

Objective questions

Question Number Type of question LOD

1 True or False 1

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Question Which of these statements is false regarding The Bengal Gazette? a) Hickey was the founder of this paper. b) The newspaper pursued the cause of Indian nationalism and became a leading proponent of the freedom struggle. c) A chief aim of the paper was to expose the private lives of servants of the English East India Company.

Correct Answer / b) Option(s)

Justification/ Feedback for the correct answer This newspaper was not at all guided by any nationalist sentiment. In fact, it appeared at a time when the freedom movement had not really emerged.

Resource/Hints/Feedback for the wrong answer a) and c): The Bengal Gazette was founded by James Augustus Hickey on 29 January 1780. He had various grievances against the East India Company and he wished to expose the corruption prevalent there, as well as attack servants of the Company, particularly the then Governor-General Warren Hastings. Reviewer’s Comment:

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Question Number Type of question LOD

2 True or False 1

Question Which of these statements is false regarding the Vernacular Press Act of 1878? a) The Act was aimed at providing limited freedom of opinion to various newspapers, and giving a voice to Indian journalists. b) This Act was directed against the Indian newspapers, particularly those who were critical of Lord Lytton’s administration. c) The Act provided for the confiscation of the printing press, paper and other materials of a newspaper if the Government believed that it was publishing seditious materials.

Correct Answer / a) Option(s)

Justification/ Feedback for the correct answer The Vernacular Press Act was not aimed at providing freedom but curtailing it.

Resource/Hints/Feedback for the wrong answer b) and c): The Indian newspapers had become highly critical of Lord Lytton’s administration, especially regarding its inhuman approach towards the victims of the famine of 1876-77. As a result the government decided to make a sudden strike at the Indian language newspapers. Thus it passed the Vernacular Press Act of 1878 directed only against Indian language newspapers. It was conceived in great secrecy and passed at a single sitting of the Imperial Legislative Council. It evoked huge protests, and consequently was repealed in 1881 by Lord Ripon. Reviewer’s Comment:

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Question Number Type of question LOD

3 True or False 1

Question Which of these statements are true? a) The impact of most reform movements was largely confined to upper castes and classes. b) The socio-religious reform movements radically altered caste relations as they allowed wearing of the sacred thread, inter-dining and inter-caste marriages without any restrictions for all the lower castes. c) Each reform movement was inclusive in nature, as it incorporated members of all religions. d) The reform movements were largely against superstitious beliefs within every religion.

Correct Answer / a) and d) Option(s)

Justification/ Feedback for the correct answer a): These reform movements did not seep in much to the lower castes and to the poor. d): The reforms wanted to bring about changes in religious practices of their religions from within, and one of the major attacks was on superstitious practices and beliefs.

Resource/Hints/Feedback for the wrong answer b) and c): The reform movements had a very ambiguous relationship with the caste question. Even if they stated that they were opposed to the institution, they implicitly supported the caste division of society. They were also never able to bring themselves to support inter-dining and inter-caste marriages in a free manner. The caste question in fact exposed the limitations of these movements in a stark manner. Further, they were largely meant for members of their own religious communities. Thus Hindu reformers for Hindus, Muslim reformers for Muslims and so forth. Though the reformers did speak to each other and against each other as well, there were hardly any attempts to include members of other religious communities in their discourses and suggested reforms. Reviewer’s Comment:

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Question Number Type of question LOD

4 True or False 1

Question Which of these statements are false regarding Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the Aligarh movement? a) Sir Sayyid’s movement was an attempt to modernize Muslims. b) The movement’s aim was to restore the power of the ulama and search for a new world of purified Islam. c) The curriculum of Aligarh College blended Muslim theology with 19th century European empiricism. d) Sir Sayyid had a great faith in the madrasas and wanted to teach mainly the Qur’an and the hadith.

Correct Answer / b) and d) Option(s)

Justification/ Feedback for b and d b) and d): This is applicable to the Deoband School of thought and not to the Aligarh School or Sir Sayyid. It was the Deoband School that particularly wished to strengthen the ulama and which believed in madrasa education. In fact, a large section of the ulama was greatly opposed to Sir Sayyid’s movement.

Resource/Hints/Feedback for the wrong answer a) and c): Sir Sayyid’s started a modernisation movement amongst the Muslims and founded for this purpose the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental School in Aligarh in 1875. He wished to combine the teachings of Muslim theology and Western knowledge to prepare a new generation of Muslims who would benefit from the advantages and opportunities of British rule. Reviewer’s Comment:

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Question Number Type of question LOD

5 True or False 1

Question Which of these statements is false regarding the Singh Sabha Movement? a) The Singh Sabha movement articulated a distinctive Sikh identity. b) The Singh Sabhas arose in response to the challenge of the Arya Samaj, particularly its attack on Guru Nanak. c) The movement involved a purification of Sikhism by purging all popular elements and impurities such as the influence of polytheism and idolatry. d) The movement extensively used the languages of Hindi and Urdu and published a large number of tracts in them to spread its message.

Correct Answer / d) Option(s)

Justification/ Feedback for the correct answer The Singh Sabha Movement actually made the Gurumukhi script and the Punjabi language the most authentic symbols of Sikh identity.

Resource/Hints/Feedback for the wrong answer a), b) and c): The movement emerged in late nineteenth century Punjab and was a direct result of the Arya Samaj campaign in Punjab, particularly it’s attacks on Guru Nanak. Reviewer’s Comment:

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Question Number Type of question LOD

6 True or False 1

Question Is this statement true or false?

The social reformers were gravely concerned with the issue of women’s economic freedom and wanted to promote education so that they could have better employment opportunities.

Correct Answer / False Option(s)

Justification/ Feedback for the correct answer The social reformers mainly took up issues affecting upper caste women. They did promote women’s education, but were largely concerned with making them better wives and mothers. They never linked the agenda of education to better employment opportunities for women in the public sphere.

Resource/Hints/Feedback for the wrong answer The statement therefore is not true due to the above stated reason. Reviewer’s Comment:

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Question Number Type of question LOD

7 True or False 1

Question Which of these statements are true regarding Pandita Ramabai? a) Ramabai was born in Calcutta, and belonged to the Vaishya caste. b) She was a severe critic of British colonialism and founded the Home Rule League to oppose it. c) Pandita Ramabai married a Bengali lawyer, who was of a lower caste, and was therefore severely criticised by high caste Brahmans. d) She became a widow at a young age and later converted to Christianity.

Correct Answer / c) and d) Option(s)

Justification/ Feedback for the correct answer Pandita Ramabai was one of the most remarkable women of India, born in 1858 in Maharastra. She was a pioneer in women’s education and rebel champion of women’s rights. At a young age, Ramabai married a Bengali lawyer, Bipen Behari Medhavi, who was a sudra by caste. She soon became a widow. She wanted to study further and to finance her trip abroad, she wrote The High Caste Hindu Woman. She converted to Christianity, which aroused grave suspicions and hampered her work amongst widows in India. Her greatest legacy however was her effort, the first in India, to educate widows and the pupils she left behind to carry on her work.

Resource/Hints/Feedback for the wrong answer a) and b): They are applicable to Annie Besant. Reviewer’s Comment:

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Question Number Type of question LOD

8 True or False 1

Question Which of these statements is false regarding cow-protection movements of late 19th century colonial India? a) Maharashtra and West Bengal became the storm centres of a powerful cow- protection movement in late 19th century India. b) The initiative for the establishment of gaurakshini sabhas came in many cases from petty-bourgeois elements like teachers, lawyers, clerks and officials, but the main supporters of the movement were Hindu trading and banking classes. c) In the 1880s and 1890s, the gaurakshini sabhascirculated numerous pamphlets, leaflets and pictures of the cow to drive home the sanctity of this particular symbol. d) Though the movement was sectarian in nature, it did not yet indicate a complete polarization of Indian society along religious lines.

Correct Answer / a) Option(s)

Justification/ Feedback for the correct answer It was the Bhojpuri-speaking districts of east UP and west Bihar which were at the heart of this movement in late nineteenth century. In comparison, the effect of the movement on Maharashtra and West Bengal was negligible.

Resource/Hints/Feedback for the wrong answer b), c) and d): It pertains to the cow-protection movement of the late 19th century in India. Reviewer’s Comment:

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Question Number Type of question LOD

9 True or False 1

Question Which of these statements is false regarding Jotirao Phule? a) Phule depicted Brahmans as the descendants of Aryan invaders who had conquered the indigenous people of India. b) He founded the Justice Party to articulate his anti-Brahmanical positions. c) He belonged to the Mali (gardener) caste. d) Phule particularly mobilised the Kunbi peasantry of Maharashtra.

Correct Answer / b) Option(s)

Justification/ Feedback for the correct answer Justice Party was formed in 1916 in Tamilnadu, and it published a ‘Non-Brahman Manifesto’.

Resource/Hints/Feedback for the wrong answer a), c) and d): The non-Brahman movement started in Maharashtra under the leadership of Jotirao Phule who belonged to the Mali caste. He started his Satyashodhak Samaj in 1873. Reviewer’s Comment:

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

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10 True or False 1

Question Which of these statements is false regarding the role of census in colonial India, especially in terms of caste identities? a) The first modern census was taken in colonial India in 1791. b) The census was the single master exercise of tabulation of colonial society. c) The census gave the colonial state greater control over the subject population. d) The census gave shape to communities of ‘martial races’, criminal castes and tribes, and depressed and scheduled castes.

Correct Answer / a) Option(s)

Justification/ Feedback for the correct answer The first general census in India started in 1860 and was finished in 1871.

Resource/Hints/Feedback for the wrong answer b), c) and d): This reflects some of the features and roles of census in colonial India. Reviewer’s Comment:

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

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11 Multiple choice question 2

Question The famous Newal Kishore Press was located in which of these places? a) Lucknow b) Benaras c) Allahabad d) Kanpur

Correct Answer / a) Option(s)

Justification/ Feedback for the correct answer While Allahabad saw a large number of publications and the establishment of a number of presses, the Newal Kishore Press, one of the oldest and the most reputed press, was established in Lucknow. It published material in both Urdu and Hindi.

Resource/Hints/Feedback for the wrong answer Places like Allahabad, Kanpur and Benaras too had a number of presses, but this particular press and publication house was located in Lucknow. Hence this option is false. Reviewer’s Comment:

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Question Number Type of question LOD

12 Multiple choice question 2

Question The following was the earliest socio-religious reform movement launched in 19th century India: a) Prarthana Samaj b) Brahmo Samaj c) Ramakrishna Mission d) Arya Samaj

Correct Answer / b) Option(s)

Justification/ Feedback for the correct answer Brahmo Samaj was the first socio-religious reform movement. It began in Bengal. Other movements followed later. Bengal was the region that felt the colonial impact first and most severely. It also saw the spread of English education much earlier than other regions.

Resource/Hints/Feedback for the wrong answer Prarthana Samaj, Ramakrishna Mission and Arya Samaj emerged much later. Reviewer’s Comment:

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Question Number Type of question LOD

13 Multiple choice question 2

Question The motto ‘Back to the Vedas’ is attributed to which of the reform movement leaders? a) Raja Rammohan Roy b) Keshub Chandra Sen c) Dayananda Saraswati d) Vivekananda

Correct Answer / c) Option(s)

Justification/ Feedback for the correct answer While many other reformers too referred to teachings in ancient texts, it was Dayananda who explicitly gave the slogan of ‘Back to the Vedas’, the most ancient of Hindu texts. He claimed that any scientific theory or invention which was thought to be of modern origin actually derived from the Vedas.

Resource/Hints/Feedback for the wrong answer This option is false as only Dayananda explicitly declared ‘Back to the Vedas’ to be the motto of his reformist agenda. Reviewer’s Comment:

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Question Number Type of question LOD

14 Multiple choice question 2

Question The following was written and published by Sayyid Mumtaz Ali: a) Bihishti Zevar b) Sultana’s Dream c) Mirat-ul-Arus d) Huquq un-Niswan

Correct Answer / d) Option(s)

Justification/ Feedback for the correct answer Huquq un-Niswan was a book written by Sayyid Mumtaz Ali. It was a book in defence of women’s rights in Islamic law.

Resource/Hints/Feedback for the wrong answer a): Bihishti Zevar was written by Ashraf Ali Thanwi. b): Sultana’s Dreams was penned by Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, which was a short story in which women run the world and men hide indoors. c): Mirat-ul-Arus was a didactic novel written by Nazir Ahmad, and published in 1869. Reviewer’s Comment:

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Question Number Type of question LOD

15 Multiple choice question 2

Question The 1891 Age of Consent Act raised the consent age for girls to: a) 10 years b) 12 years c) 14 years d) 18 years

Correct Answer / b) Option(s)

Justification/ Feedback for the correct answer Before the passing of the 1891 Age of Consent Act, the age for consensual sex for girls was 10 years. This act raised it to 12 years. It revised Section 375 of the Penal Code of 1860, and raised the minimum age of consent for married and unmarried girls from 10 to 12. Under the earlier penal code regulation a husband could legally cohabit with a wife who was 10 years old.

Resource/Hints/Feedback for the wrong answer It was the Sarda Act of 1929 that raised the age of marriage to 14 years for girls. It was only much after independence that the age of marriage for girls was revised to 18 years. Reviewer’s Comment:

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

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16 Multiple choice question 2

Question Which of these women refused to live with her uneducated husband and was constantly referred to in the Age of Consent Debate? a) Phulmoni Das b) Rashsundari Devi c) Pandita Ramabai d) Rakhmabai

Correct Answer / d) Option(s)

Justification/ Feedback for the correct answer Rakhmabai carried on a legal crusade for freedom from the conjugal claims of a husband she disliked. She was twenty-two years old, when in a gesture of defiance, she refused to be obligated to a marriage solemnised when she was eleven. She would not, she said, offer her person to one for whom, during the eleven years of their unconsummated marriage and separate living, she had grown to develop a strong dislike.

Resource/Hints/Feedback for the wrong answer a): Phulmoni Das was the young girl who died due to forced sex by her husband. b): Rashsundari Devi was a high caste Bengali Hindu woman, who was married, and was the author of the first women’s autobiography in Bengali. c): Pandita Ramabai was a high caste Hindu widow, who carried on a campaign against Brahmanical patriarchy. Reviewer’s Comment:

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

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17 Multiple choice question 2

Question Bal Gangadhar Tilak used this to inculcate a spirit of Hindu nationalism among people: a) Vihbuti Sangam b) Ganapati festival c) Gaurakshini Sabha d) Nagari Pracharini Sabha

Correct Answer / b) Option(s)

Justification/ Feedback for the correct answer In Maharashtra, Tilak in a way ‘politically recruited God Ganapati’. He revived the Ganapati festival and used Hindu religious and historical symbols for the purpose of political mobilization.

Resource/Hints/Feedback for the wrong answer a): Vihbuti Sangam emerged in Madras in the 1820s and preached re-conversion of the radicalized Shanar Christians. c): Gaurakshini Sabhas emerged mainly in north India to spread the cow-protection movement. d): Nagari Pracharini Sabha was established in Banaras in 1893, with the explicit aim of promoting Hindi language and the Devnagari script. Reviewer’s Comment:

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Question Number Type of question LOD

18 Multiple choice question 2

Question Who wrote the song Bande Mataram? a) Premchand b) Ram Mohan Roy c) Rabindranath Tagore d) Bankimchandra

Correct Answer / d) Option(s)

Justification/ Feedback for the correct answer The song Bande Mataram (Hail Mother) was a part of Bankimchandra’s celebrated novel Anandamath, published in 1882. The song invented an icon of the motherland for the nation. It became the anthem of the nationalist movement in India, and was particularly invoked by Hindu nationalists.

Resource/Hints/Feedback for the wrong answer a), b) and c): Premchand wrote in Hindi. Rammohan Roy and Rabindranath Tagore too did not pen this song. Reviewer’s Comment:

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

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19 Multiple choice question 2

Question Who of these leaders was the founder of ‘Satyashodhak Samaj’? a) B. R. Ambedkar b) Gandhi c) Jotirao Phule d) Malabari

Correct Answer / c) Option(s)

Justification/ Feedback for the correct answer The organization Satyashodhak Samaj (Truth Seekers Society) was founded by Phule in 1873. It critiqued upper caste hegemony.

Resource/Hints/Feedback for the wrong answer a), b) and d): The ‘Satyashodhak Samaj’ came into being in 1873 in Maharashtra under the leadership of Jotirao Phule. Hence this options is wrong. Reviewer’s Comment:

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Question Number Type of question LOD

20 Multiple choice question 2

Question Which of these movements found a dynamic leader in Periyar? a) Self Respect Movement b) Adi Hindu Movement c) Nationalist Movement d) Communist Movement

Correct Answer / a) Option(s)

Justification/ Feedback for the correct answer Under the leadership of Periyar, the Self Respect Movement in the 1920s and 1930s became a mass movement, attacking the ruling elite.

Resource/Hints/Feedback for the wrong answer b): The Adi Hindu Movement emerged in north India. c): Periyar was critical of the nationalist movement and later distanced himself clearly from the Congress. d): Periyar was never associated with the Communist Movement. Reviewer’s Comment:

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Question Number Type of question LOD

21 Match the following 3

Question Match the following: a) James Hicky i) Young India b) O. Chandu Menon ii) Chhote aur Bade ka Sawal c) M. K. Gandhi iii) The Bengal Gazette d) Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi iv) Mahratta e) B. G. Tilak v) Indulekha f) Kashibaba vi) Saraswati

Correct Answer / a) and iii), b) and v), c) and i), d) and vi), e) and iv), f) and ii) Option(s)

Justification/ Feedback for the correct answer a): James Hickey was the founder of The Bengal Gazette. b): O. Chandu Menon was the founder of Indulekha. c): M. K. Gandhi was the founder of Young India. d): Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi was the founder of Saraswati. e): B. G. Tilak was the founder of Mahratta. f): Kashibaba was the author of Chhote aur Bade ka Sawal.

Resource/Hints/Feedback for the wrong answer Same as above. Reviewer’s Comment:

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Question Number Type of question LOD

22 Match the following 3

Question Match the following: a) Rammohun Roy i) Prarthana Samaj b) Mahadev Gobind Ranade ii) Ramakrishna Mission c) Vivekananda iii) Arya Samaj d) Dayananda Saraswati iv) Brahmo Samaj

Correct Answer / a) and iv), b) and i), c) and ii), d) and iii) Option(s)

Justification/ Feedback for the correct answer a): Rammohun Roy was the founder of Brahmo Samaj. b): Mahadev Gobind Ranade was the founder of Prarthana Samaj. c): Vivekananda was the founder of Ramakrishna Mission. d): Dayananda Saraswati was the founder of Arya Samaj. Resource/Hints/Feedback for the wrong answer Same as above.

Reviewer’s Comment:

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Question Number Type of question LOD

23 Match the following 3

Question Match the following: a) Ahmadia Movement i) Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi b) Deoband School ii) Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan c) Bihishti Zevar iii) Mirza Ghulam Ahmad d) Aligarh Movement iv) Ashraf Ali Thanwi

Correct Answer / a) and iii), b) and i), c) and iv), d) and ii) Option(s)

Justification/ Feedback for the correct answer a): Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was the leading light of the Ahmadia movement. b): Muhammad Qasim played a leading role in laying the foundations of Deoband School. c): Bihishti Zevar, a manual, was penned by Ashraf Ali Thanwi. d): The Aligarh movement was founded by Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan.

Resource/Hints/Feedback for the wrong answer Same as above.

Reviewer’s Comment:

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Question Number Type of question LOD

24 Match the following 3

Question Match the following women to their respective books: a) Pandita Ramabai i) Amar Jiban b) Rashsundari Debi ii) Contentious Traditions c) Lata Mani iii) The High Caste Hindu Woman

Correct Answer / a) and iii), b) and i), c) and ii) Option(s)

Justification/ Feedback for the correct answer a): Ramabai wrote The High Caste Hindu Woman, which gave an account of the miserable condition of high-caste Hindu women, particularly widows. b): Rashsundari Debi penned Amar Jiban, which is the first recorded autobiography printed in the Bengali language by an Indian woman. c): Lata Mani is a scholar who has written a book on sati in colonial India. The full title of her book is Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India.

Resource/Hints/Feedback for the wrong answer Same as above.

Reviewer’s Comment:

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Question Number Type of question LOD

25 Match the following 3

Question Match the following regions to events, books, organisations: a) Maharashtra i) Anandamath b) Bengal ii) Prayag Hindu Samaj c) Allahabad iii) Shivaji festival d) Banaras iv) Vibhuti Sangam e) Madras v) Gausewak

Correct Answer / a) and iii), b) and i), c) and ii), d) and v), e) and iv) Option(s)

Justification/ Feedback for the correct answer a): Maharashtra saw the revival of the Shivaji festival. b): The novel Anandamath was written by Bankimchandra in Bengali, and first emerged in Bengal. c): Prayag Hindu Samaj was an organization founded in Allahabad. d): Gausewak was a newspaper published from Banaras. e): Vibhuti Sangam was an organisation based in Madras.

Resource/Hints/Feedback for the wrong answer Same as above.

Reviewer’s Comment:

6: Glossary

Arya samaj: Activist Hindu revival association founded in 1875 Bhadralok: Gentlefolk. The term is used generally in the context of Hindu urban middle class Bengalees Chamar: Major ‘untouchable’ caste of north India, sometimes associated with leather work Gau Mata: Mother cow

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

6: Further readings

Bandyopadhyay, Sekhar. 2004. From Plassey to Partition: History of Modern India. Delhi: Orient Longman.

Bayly, Susan. 1999. Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age.Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Blackburn, Stuart H. 2003. Print, Folklore, and Nationalism in Colonial South India. Delhi: Permanent Black.

Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Delhi: OxfordUniversity Press.

Datta, K. K. 1965. Renaissance, Nationalism and Social Changes in Modern India. Calcutta: Bookland Private Limited.

Dirks, Nicholas B. 2001. Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press.

Dube, Ishita-Banerjee (ed.). 2008. Caste in History. Delhi: OxfordUniversity Press.

Forbes, Geraldine. 1996. Women in Modern India. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Ghosh, Anindita. 2006. Power in Print: Popular Publishing and the Politics of Language and Culture in a Colonial Society, 1778-1905. New Delhi: OxfordUniversity Press.

Gupta, Charu. 2001. Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims and the Hindu Public in Colonial India. Delhi: Permanent Black.

Heimsath, Charles H. 1964. Indian Nationalism and Hindu Social Reform. Princeton.

Jones, Kenneth W. 1989. Socio-Religious Reform Movements in British India. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

King, Christopher R. 1994. One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in Nineteenth Century North India. Bombay: OxfordUniversity Press.

Mani, Lata. 1998. Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Nair, Janaki. 1996. Women and Law in Colonial India: A Social History. New Delhi: Kali for Women.

O’Hanlon, Rosalind (ed.). 1994. A Comparison Between Women and Men: Tarabai Shinde and the Critique of Gender Relations in Colonial India. Madras: Oxford University Press.

Cultural changes and social and religious reform movements

Pandey, Gyanendra. 1990. The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India. Delhi: OxfordUniversity Press.

Rau, M. Chalapathi. 1974. The Press. New Delhi: National Book Trust.

Sangari, Kumkum and Sudesh Vaid (eds). 1989. Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History. New Delhi: Kali for Women.

Sarkar, Sumit and Tanika Sarkar (eds). 2007. Women and Social Reform in Modern India: A Reader. 2 Vols. Delhi: Permanent Black.

Sarkar, Sumit. 1997. Writing Social History. Delhi: OxfordUniversity Press.

Sarkar, Tanika. 2001. Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism. Delhi: Permanent Black.