NOTE TO USERS This reproduction is the best copy available. ® UMI Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with with permission permission of the of copyright the copyright owner. Furtherowner. reproduction Further reproduction prohibited without prohibited permission. without permission. HISTORICISM, HINDUISM AND MODERNITY IN COLONIAL INDIA By Apama Devare Submitted to the Faculty of the School of International Service of American University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy In International Relations Chai Dean of the School of International Service 2005 American University Washington, D.C. 20016 AMERICAN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number: 3207285 Copyright 2005 by Devare, Aparna All rights reserved. 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Further reproduction prohibited without permission. © COPYRIGHT by APARNA DEVARE 2005 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. HISTORICISM, HINDUISM AND MODERNITY IN COLONIAL INDIA BY Aparna Devare ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the manner in which modem historicist ideas were negotiated in the lives and thought of three Hindu social and political figures from nineteenth and twentieth century, western colonial India, Jotiba Phule, M.G. Ranade and V.D. Savarkar. Using discourse analysis, I examine the writings and lives through the use of autobiographies and biographies of all three individuals. I argue that while Phule and Ranade both internalized as well as challenged historicist ideas, Savarkar’s life and thought marks an uncritical acceptance of a modem historicist world-view. Savarkar viewed the past including ancient Hindu customs, myths and practices solely through a scientific and historicist lens and had little use for religious texts and practices, viewing them as part of an objectified and museumized past. As a believer in the idea of progress, he saw all forms of faith representing a backward and atavistic consciousness. He privileged modem identities such as the nation and state along with an instrumentalist reading of religion and upheld a religious identity while rejecting any form of religiosity. On the other hand, while Phule and Ranade both historicized past Hindu customs, legends and practices, they also used them to fashion a critical consciousness. In ii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. their world-views, faith as piety and morality provided alternative critical ways of organizing the past. Anticipating Gandhi, both rejected the history/faith dichotomy prevalent in modem Europeanist thought. Phule unlike Ranade and Savarkar, provided a lower caste critique that challenged the Hindu social order, including its heavy Brahmanical leanings by drawing on modem ideas of history and scientific rationality. Yet he was also deeply steeped in indigenous modes of story-telling, including rewriting myths and practices which challenged notions of historical ‘objectivity’ and veracity. This dissertation seeks to intervene in contemporary Indian debates about history, religion and nation-hood by positing Phule and Ranade’s ideas as critical alternative Hindu and modem Indian visions to that of Savarkar. Both Phule and Ranade provide more pluralistic and humane visions comprising a limited historicism and modernity to that of Savarkar’s violent and intolerant totalizing modern historicist world-view. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. PREFACE My dissertation challenges the history/faith dichotomy in modernist thought. While this position may appear to coincide with right-wing religious perspectives such as ‘creationists’ or ‘fundamentalists’, this would be a gross misreading. The dissertation in fact aims to do the opposite and this preface is written precisely to dispel any such misinterpretations. While the dissertation rejects all right-wing perspectives as propagating hatred, oppression and intolerance, it also questions the secularists or modernists claim that any collapse between boundaries of faith and history or science and religious thought necessarily endorses religious extremism. I draw from a ‘third space’ as articulated by scholars such as Ashis Nandy who contra both fundamentalists and secularists argues that a just basis of social critique and an affirmation of plurality can be offered from within a faith over historical or modem scientific standpoint. In many cultures, especially where modernity has been less entrenched, boundaries between faith and history or science and religion have been porous and have often allowed and encouraged plurality and social critique. Nandy suggests the example of M.K. Gandhi as someone who blurred the lines between faith or myth/history, science/religion and religion/politics. In this dissertation, I have analyzed the above ideas by examining the lives and thought of two public figures from nineteenth-century western India, Jyotiba Phule and iv Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. M.G. Ranade as modernists who also simultaneously drew from this ‘third space’ of critical piety/faith. Both were ardent advocates of a modem historicist perspective who also at the same time realized its limitations. Both in many ways echoed Gandhian ideas many years before him although they were far more impressed by modem ideas than he was. I juxtapose their lives and thought which offered alternate possibilities from within both a Brahmanic (in the case of Ranade) and non-Brahmanic (in the case of Phule) Hinduism to that of V.D. Savarkar, a Hindu nationalist, who drew heavily from a modem historicist perspective. He advocated a rigid separation between the lines of faith/history and science/religion while advocating a scientific rationalist vision of Hinduism, which had parallels with Nazism. Savarkar strongly opposed the blurring of boundaries between faith/mythology and history prevalent within popular Hinduism. My dissertation advocates visions such as those provided by Ranade and Phule in contrast to that of Savarkar’s. It is relevant to contemporary politics in India which is increasingly faced with extremist Hindu sentiments such as those echoed by Savarkar. Hence my starting the dissertation by concurring with a ‘third view’ as advocated by intellectuals such as Ashis Nandy, Vinay Lai and Ramachandra Gandhi in response to the Babri Masjid tragedy in which Hindu extremists demolished an ancient mosque and attempted to rewrite history. These intellectuals critiqued both secularists and Hindu fundamentalists for their inability to understand and appreciate popular Hinduism which blurred boundaries between myth/faith and history and allowed plurality of cultures. I connected this event to my own research which focused on two public figures Phule and Ranade who allowed for a pluralistic and critical Hinduism versus a dogmatic modernist Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. vision such as Savarkar’s which tolerated little dissent, including any blurring of faith/history boundaries. While writing my dissertation, by sheer coincidence I happened to find David Myers’ book, Resisting History: Historicism and Its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought. Myers’ work comes very close to what I do in this dissertation except that he focuses on Jewish intellectuals in Weimar Germany. He examines four German Jewish intellectuals who were historicists but were also heavily drawn towards a sacral Jewish discourse which questioned historicism from a critical standpoint. Their challenging modem historicist ideas did not necessarily mean a rejection of modernity in toto or an endorsement of Jewish extremism but rather expressed a belief in the limitations of historicism and modernity, especially after the growth of Nazism in Germany. Modernity was therefore being questioned at the time not only from within non-western cultures where it was often imposed violently through colonialism but also within the heart of Europe itself by marginalized groups such as the Jews. I see a direct connection between Myers work and my own written in two different cultural contexts but expressing similar ideas and arguments. While Myers does not discuss the implications of his work on contemporary politics in any detail, I have made that central to my dissertation. The discussion on Savarkar in particular