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Rethinking Orientalism: Colonialism and the Study of Indian Traditions

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Rethinking Orientalism: Colonialism and the Study of Indian Traditions !"#$%&'%&()*+%"&#,-%./0)12-2&%,-%./),&3)#$")4#536)27)8&3%,&)9+,3%#%2&. :5#$2+;.<0)!,7)="-3"+.),&3)4>)?>)@,-,(,&(,3$,+, !"A%"B"3)B2+';.<0 425+C"0)D%.#2+6)27)!"-%(%2&.E)F2->)GHE)?2>)I);?2A"/J"+)IKHH<E)LL>)HKHMHIN O5J-%.$"3)J60)The University of Chicago Press 4#,J-")P!Q0)http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/660928 . :CC".."30)KRSHHSIKHH)KT0IK Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to History of Religions. http://www.jstor.org Raf Gelders RETHINKING ORIENTALISM: S. N. Balagangadhara COLONIALISM AND THE STUDY OF INDIAN TRADITIONS It is a commonplace today to claim that the term “Hinduism” came into general use in the nineteenth century. It is said to be derived from “Hindoo- ism,” !rst employed in 1787 by the missionary and later director of the East India Company Charles Grant. 1 The subsequent construction of Hinduism is said to have been a part of the British colonial project to impose concep- tual and administrative order upon a world alien to them. 2 Though written primarily with the Middle East in view, Edward Said’s study of the West- ern representations of the Orient can also be applied in the study of Indian traditions. In the process of applying Said’s critique to the study of Indian traditions, postcolonial scholarship has advanced two important claims: (a) Orientalism of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries systematized Europe’s knowledge about the Indian traditions into rigid, homogenous cat- egories, and (b) these categories played a crucial role in the functioning of 1 Geo"rey Oddie, Imagined Hinduism: British Protestant Missionary Constructions of Hinduism (London: Sage, 2006), 68–72. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (1964; repr., Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), 144, can be seen as a precursor of this thesis. 2 See Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Prince ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990); Romila Thapar, “Imagined Religious Communities? Ancient History and the Modern Search for a Hindu Identity,” Modern Asian Studies 23, no. 2 (1989): 209–31; and Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). © 2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0018-2710/2011/5102-0001$10.00 102 Rethinking Orientalism the colonial state. Let us call this set of claims about the colonial representa- tions of India “the colonial constructionist thesis.” In this essay, we focus on the above thesis to explore its explanatory power. Its defenders claim that they have identi!ed the elements that gave birth to the colonial representations of Indian traditions. The !rst element is the “textual attitude” of the British: by assuming that the key to under- standing Indian traditions was to be found in the ancient texts of India, the Orientalists are allegedly guilty of understanding the various Indian tradi- tions by looking for textual foundations. 3 A criticism of such an orienta- tion is not meant to deny the existence of indigenous literary traditions, as Richard King points out, but emphasizes instead “the sense in which West- ern presuppositions about the role of sacred texts in ‘religion’ predisposed Orientalists towards focusing upon such texts as the essential foundation for understanding the Hindu people as a whole.” 4 Guiding the “textualization of tradition” are speci!c presuppositions of the Orientalists or what Richard King also calls “the dominant Anglo-Protestant conception of religion.” 5 The emphasis upon scriptures as the locus of religion channeled the interest of many scholars into the textual aspects of Indian culture. They applied what Sharada Sugirtharajah calls “Western Protestant hermeneutical prin- ciples” in their search for a body of texts that, far from being pan-Indian, represented the views of the priestly elite. 6 This, then, is said to be the second element in the construction of Hindu- ism: the role of native agency. The British did not merely single out texts picked at random from the many available to them; instead, when they spoke of Hinduism, they were referring to a religion constituted by the canonicity of the Vedas, which carried the authoritative approval of the Brahmins. The second element in the colonial constructionist thesis came into vogue in the process of adding nuances to the bare claim that Oriental- ism is an exclusively Western a"air. Many scholars felt that to claim simply 3 See Robert E. Frykenberg, “Constructions of Hinduism at the Nexus of History and Religion,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23, no. 3 (1993): 523–50; and Rosane Rocher, “British Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century: The Dialectics of Knowledge and Govern- ment,” in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 215–49. 4 Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and “the Mystic East” (London: Routledge, 1999), 101. 5 Richard King, “Colonialism, Hinduism and the Discourse of Religion,” in Rethinking Religion in India: The Colonial Construction of Hinduism, ed. Esther Bloch, Marianne Kep- pens, and Rajaram Hegde (London: Routledge, 2009), 95–113. 6 Sharada Sugirtharajah, Imagining Hinduism: A Postcolonial Perspective (London: Rout- ledge, 2003), 25. This textual orientation is not restricted to the study of Hinduism. See Philip Almond, The British Discovery of Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 24; and Gregory Schopen, “Archaeology and Protestant Presuppositions in the Study of Indian Buddhism,” History of Religions 31, no. 1 (1991): 1–23. History of Religions 103 that “Hinduism was a Western construction” was to deny “agency” to the natives: therefore, the added nuance that there was “complicity” between the ruling Metropolis and the native elite in the process of construction. The native elites or informants who provided the data that gave content to the colonial discourse are identi!ed as Brahmins. Robert Frykenberg sug- gests that the Brahmins participated in the colonial process in such a way that the Hinduism that we know today emerges as “a symbiosis between government and local elites.” 7 Another proponent of this thesis, Nicholas Dirks, suggests that a myriad of traditions was delineated into a pan-Indian religion that turned out to be ever more Brahmanical. This canonization of Brahmanical texts was instrumental in dictating the colonial choices regard- ing traditions and identities. 8 While the colonial constructionist thesis can be seen as a forceful critique of the Orientalist discourse, it falls prey to its own criticism. One could eas- ily argue that the thesis itself is a product of Orientalism: after all, this thesis presupposes a monolithic and nonhistorical Brahmanism. One of the central ideas of the colonial constructionist thesis is this: the Orientalists focused upon manuscripts that were only representative of the ecclesiastical elite. Notice that this statement seems to carry with it an inconsistency. If there was no uni!ed Hindu religion prior to the colonial interventions, what do the constructionists mean when they say that Orientalism focused solely on the texts of the priestly elite? Whose priests were these elites? This remains obscure, unless we assume that they were the priests of the Brahmanic re- ligion, or Brahmanism. If this answer is given, one can indeed suggest that the postcolonial scholarship recapitulates Orientalist discourse. While shift- ing the analysis from Hinduism to Brahmanism, it presupposes a monolithic 7 Robert E. Frykenberg, “The Emergence of Modern ‘Hinduism’ as a Concept and as an Institution: A Reappraisal with special Reference to South India,” in Hinduism Reconsidered, ed. G. D. Sontheimer and H. Kulke (New Delhi: Manohar, 1989), 29–49, 37. Also see Richard King, Orientalism and Religion, 103–4; Geo"rey Oddie, Imagined Hinduism, 99, 265–67; Peter van der Veer, “The Foreign Hand: Orientalist Discourse in Sociology and Commu- nalism,” in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 23–44; and Gauri Viswanathan, “Colonialism and the Construction of Hinduism,” in The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism, ed. Gavin Flood (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 23–44. 8 Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Prince- ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). This idea of the centrality of Brahmins also guides historians who seek to soften the impact of colonialism on Indian society by emphasizing the collaborations between informants and colonial administrators, leading to gradual transforma- tions. See Christopher Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 155–68; and David Washbrook, “Orients and Occidents: Colonial Discourse Theory and the Historiography of the British Empire,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire: Historiography, ed. R. W. Winks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 604. For other variations, see Brian K. Pennington, Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construction of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 104 Rethinking Orientalism and a Brahmanical system that holds sway both before and after colonial rule as a pan-Indian system. Notice too that the Brahmins can hardly be called a uni!ed group, nor do they constitute an ecclesiastical organization.
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