PAST & PRESENT NUMBER 179 MAY 2003 CONTENTS page REVENGE, ASSYRIAN STYLE: by Marc Van De Mieroop ............ 3 WRITTEN ENGLISH: THE MAKING OF THE LANGUAGE 1370–1400: by Jeremy Catto ........................................................... 24 ABSOLUTISM, FEUDALISM AND PROPERTY RIGHTS IN THE FRANCE OF LOUIS XIV: by David Parker .................................... 60 GRAVESTONES, BELONGING AND LOCAL ATTACHMENT IN ENGLAND 1700–2000: by K. D. M. Snell ...................................... 97 THE NEW ROSS WORKHOUSE RIOT OF 1887: NATIONALISM, CLASS AND THE IRISH POOR LAWS: by Virginia Crossman .......... 135 BHAKTI AND THE BRITISH EMPIRE: by Vijay Pinch ................... 159 THE CAUSES OF UKRAINIAN–POLISH ETHNIC CLEANSING 1943: by Timothy Snyder ....................................................... 197 NOTES ............................................................................... 235 Published by Oxford University Press for the Past and Present Society BHAKTI AND THE BRITISH EMPIRE* Love God, Government and goodness. Rupkala, 19231 I PROLOGUE A government ofWcial named Sitaramsharan Bhagvan Prasad was travelling through a rugged section of Bhagalpur District in rural Bihar, deep in northern India, on his way to conduct an inspection of a school. His route took him across a stream in the middle of a dried-up riverbed. So that his kahar (carriers) could navigate the stream more easily, Bhagvan Prasad decided to alight from his palanquin and cross on foot. When he had reached the middle of the stream, a sudden torrent of water began to swirl up around him. The kahar watched from the shore as the water level rose precipitously. Despite the water’s great depth, Bhagvan Prasad did not sink below his waist. He remained suspended in the river for many hours, and when the Xood Wnally subsided, he completed his crossing. As he recounted the incident, ‘I don’t know who or what grasped me Wrmly by the waist, but I wasn’t able to move forward nor was I * This paper was originally written for a panel entitled ‘Dialogues and Monologues: East Meets West on the Historiographic Frontier’, held at the 2002 American Historical Association meeting. I am grateful to Sumit Guha, Ronald Inden and Phillip Wagoner for their comments at that occasion; to Richard Elphick and Christian Novestke for their detailed responses; and to Kailash Jha for facilitat- ing contacts in New Delhi. I also extend thanks to the children of Sarjoo Prasad, son of Brajendra Prasad, who welcomed me into their New Delhi home and generously granted permission to reproduce the family photograph of Rupkala-ji. The research for the article was supported by a variety of funding agencies since about 1986, including: the Fulbright-Hays Program of the US Department of Education; the Joint Committee on South Asia of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council with funds provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation; and the OfWce of Academic Affairs at Wesleyan University. I am grateful to these organiza- tions for their support. 1 From a printed leaXet by ‘Rupkala’ (also known as Sitaramsharan Bhagvan Prasad), pasted into his 1923 diary, cited in Brajendra Prasad, Shri Rupkala Vak Sudha [The Nectar Discourse of Rupkala] (New Delhi, 1970), 374. © The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2003 160 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 179 permitted to sink and drown’. One of his devotees would conclude the story thus: ‘It is said that on that day people came to realize that his constant love for God (ishvar) sanctiWed the very ground of India (bharat bhumi)’.2 According to the Census of British India, about 100,000 Britons and 287,000,000 Indians lived in the Indian subconti- nent in 1891.3 This article is about two of those people, one on each side of the racial divide: Sitaramsharan Bhagvan Prasad (1840–1932) and George Abraham Grierson (1851–1941). More precisely, it is about the interpenetration of their religious worlds, and what that tells us about their understanding of British India and, by extension, the British Empire. I argue that the lives and thoughts of these two men encourage a rethinking of recent post-colonial depictions of British India as a site of unidirectional mental colonization inXicted by a rationalizing, scientiWc Europe on a pliable, pre-modern Orient.4 Such de- scriptions, while politically compelling in the present, do not explain how it was that nearly three hundred million Indians could be governed by, and gradually govern themselves along with, one hundred thousand Britons. I argue, inter alia, that we need to pay more attention to religion and religious belief if we are to arrive at a fuller understanding of what Empire meant to the individuals who lived in it. The overlapping religious worlds of Britain and India at the height of Empire have attracted increased scholarly attention in recent years.5 Much of this work is inspired by a desire to understand more fully British India in terms of its intersecting British and Indian cultural arenas, and situates itself in particular 2 This story is told in Prasad, Shri Rupkala Vak Sudha, 23. The author cites Sarkar ki Jivani, which is probably Shivnandan Sahay, Shri Sitaram Sharan Bhagvan Prasad-ji ki Sachitra Jivani [An Illustrated Life of Shri Sitaramsharan Bhagvan Prasad] (Patna, 1908). Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 3 Census of India, 1891: General Tables for British Provinces and Feudatory States, 2 vols. (London, 1892–3), i, 391–2. The Wgure for all Europeans taken together was 166,428; ‘Eurasians’ added another 81,044, but this did not include Indian Christians, numbering 1,807,092 (many of whom were Goan): see ibid., ii, 16. I am grateful to Philip McEldowney for providing and clarifying this data. 4 Most notably, Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton, 2001) and Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton, 1996). 5 Two prominent examples are Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton, 2001) and Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton, 1998). 1. Rupkala (Sitaramsharan Bhagvan Prasad), 1840–1932. From a photograph held by the descendants of Sarjoo Prasad, son of Brajendra Prasad, New Delhi. By permission. 162 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 179 in the broad rubric of ‘post-colonial studies’.6 As such, it parallels and occasionally overlaps with developments in the historical investigations of women and gender, in which the imperial periphery is brought to the metropole and examined in a uniWed analytical frame.7 The extension of this uniWed frame to include the study of imperial religion is welcome, especially in so far as Western historians of Empire ‘turn the searchlight inward’, to quote Gandhi,8 in order to re-examine European — and especially British — secularism from the inside out, and rediscover in the process much that is religious. Particularly important in this context is the work of Talal Asad, and the insight that ‘the universalization of the concept of religion is closely related to the coming of modernity in Europe and to the European expansion over the world’.9 However, certain myopias are evident. One is a tendency to overstate the impact of Protestant Christianity and the agency of an undifferentiated West.10 Another is a related desire to attend too fervently to a narrowly conceived ‘zone of contact’,11 in which centre stage is given over to religious meanings that emanate from the metropole and reverberate through the 6 The insights of Edward Said, especially his Orientalism (New York, 1978) and Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1994), are foundational. 7 For example, Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill, 1994); Antoinette Burton, At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain (Berkeley, 1998); Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester, 1995). 8 Bhatgam Speech, given towards the end of the salt march, March–April 1930, in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, 90 vols. (New Delhi, 1958–84), xliii, 146, cited in Dennis Dalton, Mahatma Gandhi: Nonviolent Power in Action (New York, 1993), 110. 9 Van der Veer, Imperial Encounters, 24, paraphrasing Talal Asad, ‘Anthropological Conceptions of Religion: ReXections on Geertz’, Man, new ser., xviii, 2 (June 1983); later published with modiWcations as Talal Asad, ‘The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category’, in his Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, 1993), ch. 1. See also Viswanathan, Outside the Fold, pp. xv–xvi. 10 For example, Peter van der Veer (ed.), Conversion to Modernities: The Global- ization of Christianity (New York, 1996); cf. C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge, 1996), 191–2. As Bayly notes: ‘A generation before the modernist Arya Samaj stepped in to defend ancient religion with print, north Indian Hindu scholars were employing their skills of logical debate to refute, rebuff or incorporate the mission- aries. This was no simple Hindu “reaction” to western “impact” ’. 11 See Arjun Appadurai, ‘Is Homo Hierarchicus?’, Amer. Ethnologist, xiii, 4 (Nov. 1986), 748–9; cf. William R. Pinch, Peasants and Monks