got this from bharat-rakshak
Book Review
Representing Hinduism: The Construction of Religious and National Identity
by Heidi Pauwels
Representing Hinduism: The Construction of Religious and National
Identity. Edited by VASUDHA DALMIA and HEINRICH VON STIETENCRON. New
Delhi: SAGE PUBLICATIONS, 1995. Pp. 467. $24.95 (paper).
Even if scholarship sometimes may happen in ivory towers, the walls
are quite permeable to real-life events. Contemporary politics
unavoidably influences scholarly exchanges, even if the setting is a
place as remote from India's heat and dust as a hilltop castle in
Tubingen, Germany. The castle was the unlikely site of an
interdisciplinary conference on modern Hindu self-perception in
October 1990, during the build-up of political tension in India.
Between the time of the conference and the publication of the volume,
the tension had led to the destruction of the so-called Babri Masjid,
the mosque in Ayodhya, by self-proclaimed "liberators of the
birthplace of Lord Rama" in December 1992. The ensuing communal
rioting shocked many, including the editors, who envisage this volume
as an answer to the violence. They hope it will contribute to "digging
up the ground beneath the feet of the stereotypes being projected
currently" (p. 32). The destruction of an edifice called for the
deconstruction of a hegemonic discourse.
This is not to discredit the volume as tainted by political
motivation. The articles, though of uneven quality, are scholarly and
well supported. Even those who do not agree with the political
perspective of the editors (shared by at least some of the authors)
will have to admit that the volume is a major contribution to
understanding Hinduism and other South Asian religions in all their
diversity.
Taken together, the articles show how the current perception of many
urban Hindus of their religion has come about historically through the
interaction of many factors. In the past two centuries, the Christian
critique, Orientalist perceptions, and the nationalist movement have
led to privileging in Hinduism's self-definition the devotional
(bhakti) and monistic (advaita) strands, and to stressing the issue of
foreign origin in its demarcation against other religions.
At the very least, this rich volume will be thought-provoking. The
very topic alluded to in the title, the representation of Hinduism, is
one of considerable interest to contemporary academics, as witnessed
by the recent special section devoted to it in the Journal of the
American Academy of Religion (68.4 [2000]: 705-835). It should be
pointed out, however, that the volume under review does not directly
address the issue of who should represent Hinduism, but rather aims at
undermining the authority of a (politically empowered) discourse that
claims to represent Hinduism.
It is impossible to do justice to all the arguments within the scope
of this review. The volume is conceived as a collection of
perspectives from different disciplines. What the articles have in
common is that they set Out to challenge current stereotypes regarding
Hinduism in its many aspects.
Two articles concentrate on legal issues. Dieter Conrad unmasks legal
reforms in personal law, in particular with regard to the scheduled
caste issue, as "legal Hindutva" (p. 335). Sudhir Chandra counters the
notion that British legislation in India was progressive, especially
on the issue of women's rights. He presents as a case study a
late-nineteenth-century, much-publicized legal case known as Dadaji
Bhakaji vs. Rukhmabai, which revolved around a husband's seeking legal
resort to force his child-bride to be restored to him.
Two other articles tackle historical truisms. Partha Chatterjee shows
that the notion that Indian nationalism is synonymous with Hindu
nationalism is a modern, rationalist, and historicist idea. He does so
by comparing the view of history as expressed in early and later
colonial Bengali historical textbooks. More directly bearing on the
Babri Masjid issue is Gyanendra Pandey's insightful analysis of Hindu
histories of Ayodhya. He shows that these texts remove agency (and
thus responsibility) from the Hindu "martyrs" and instead invest it in
timeless agents.
Three articles by South Asian political scientists, Ram Bapat, Sudipta
Kaviraj, and Suresh Sharma, deal with Hindu ways of coming to terms
with Western modernity (and its claim of superiority) without losing
one's traditional "self." They analyze nineteenth- and
twentieth-century writings that grapple with this issue, but, within
the political frame of the book, the arguments can be seen as
challenging the apparently attractive solution of the issue presented
by the Hindu Right and proposing alternative ways to assert one's
Hindu identity in the face of modernity.
Ram Bapat tries to make sense of the controversial Pandita Ramabai
(1858-1922), a highly educated high-caste Hindu who was interested in
Hindu reform, married a low-caste man, and finally converted to
Christianity. However, after her conversion, she had her fights with
Church authorities, and when she eventually set up a missionary school
for widows, she led it in an idiosyncratic way. In representing
Pandita's words: "there is no such thing as Christianity, there are
Christian religions" (p. 249), Bapat turns upside-down the whole
enterprise of deconstructing Hinduism as many Hinduisms. Sudipta
Kaviraj goes further in his essay on how the "forgotten" Bengali
author Bhudev Mukhopadhyah (1827-94) "talks back" to the empire by
means of his "reverse anthropology." One of the questions Mukhopadhyah
raises is at the very heart of the volume's critique of neo-Hindu
chauvinism, namely what constitutes the "we" of the nationalists.
Suresh Sharma discusses the most famous of all those who "talked
back," namely Gandhi, and analyzes the meta-position underlying his
seminal text Hind Swaraj (first published in 1909). He incisively
distinguishes Gandhi's sense of the past as a living tradition from
"various modernist attempts to appropriate tradition as a past no
longer alive" (p. 286).
Three articles come from the perspective of the performing arts. They
deal with what happens to religious texts when performed in
non-traditional ways. Roma Chatterji problematizes concepts of
authenticity and tradition in her analysis of the complex
interrelating discourses surrounding the rediscovered "tribal" dance
called Chho from Purulia in Bengal. Anuradha Kapur analyzes Parsi
theatre, in particular the mythological drama of the early
twentieth-century Hindutva defender Radhesyam Kathavacak. She argues
that the introduction of realism as a narrative model led on the one
hand to a "domestication" of the gods, who are forced within a logic
of cause and effect, and, on the other, to the introduction of
"miracles" made possible by stage technology. She repeatedly draws out
the relevance of her conclusions for the modern television versions of
the epics. Angelika Malinar makes the Bhagavadgita episodes on the
Mahabharata television serial the object of her research, arguing that
the intelligentsia's belittli ng of the series as a "soap" has
preempted serious analysis. Malinar alerts the reader to the serial's
dangerous reduction of the complexity of the Gita's message to a
"martial" solution for contemporary Indian society's problems.
Two articles deal with the construction of non-Hindu South Asian
religious identities, one Sikh, one Muslim. In both cases, the
parallels with Hindu militant discourse are tantalizing. Veena Das
reveals how militant Sikh discourse combines a discourse of Sikh
history with a modern one of state, minorities, and cultural rights.
Novelty is subsumed within repetition, and present and past are
intrinsically interrelated. Javeed Alam presents a case study of the
Ittehadul Muslimeen in Hyderabad, arguing that the recent avatar of
this movement has occupied a vacuum created by the perceived
withdrawal of the state as a protective institution (with the disposal
of the Nizam, compounded by the land reforms that impacted Muslims
negatively). He finds that the Ittehad's rhetoric of past Muslim
glories was instrumental only in gaining the confidence of the Muslim
community, but that it has receded in favor of cultural and linguistic
identity building.
Several other articles seek to place different ingredients of
currently mainstream political Hinduism in historical perspective.
Jurgen Lutt argues that the Ram lahar (Rama-wave) in middle-class
Hinduism is a continuation of a British puritan rejection of Krishna.
He traces the history of Rama's rise to prominence to the Maharaja
Libel Case of 1861, and the ensuing reactions of Hindu reform groups,
in particular those led by Dayanand Saraswati and Gandhi. The late
Wilhelm Halb-fass discusses one of the influential strands of modern
Hinduism, practical Vedanta, with regard to the ethical and social
applicability of Vedantic metaphysics of nondualism. He revisits
Hacker's argument that Svami Vivekananda's so-called tattvamasi ethics
were inspired by Schopenhauer through his student Paul Deussen.
Vasudha Dalmia unravels masterfully the complicated fabric of
nineteenth-century "traditionalist" (sanatana) reconstructions of
Hinduism. She argues convincingly that these were as deeply impacted
by missionary and Orie ntalist perspectives as the so-called reform
movements, by analyzing the complex works of the influential
Hariscandra of Banaras. Monika Horstmann focuses on the influential,
much-used but little-studied Hindi journal Kalyan and the Gita Press.
The nationalist and anti-Muslim millionaire Marvari founders started a
project to universalize dharma and streamline diverse Hindu groupings
under one umbrella with the ultimate aim of bypassing those groupings,
including Hindu sampradayas, as well as Buddhism, Jainism, and
Sikhism. The late Gunther Sonntheimer points Out that the embarrassed
discarding of folk religion by middle-class Hindus comes in the wake
of Christian missionary critiques. He argues this has an erosive
effect, which can be compared with the ecological one of
deforestation.
Several contributors suggest and demonstrate useful angles for further
research. Friedhelm Hardy argues in favor of stressing centrifugal
de-Sanskritizing features and investigating Tamil sources in
particular. Gita Dharmapal-Frick makes a start at looking at the
central notion of "caste" from the outside, via early Western
understandings of it, utilizing little-known German sources. The late
Richard Burghart provides an oft-forgotten perspective on Hinduism
from that "other Hindu nation," Nepal.
The daring sweep of some authors' conclusions has already led to
criticism. This is the case with von Stietencron's ambitious study
relating his findings about religious configurations in pre-Muslim
India to the modern concept of Hinduism. His position seems to favor
the notion that the category "Hinduism" was invented by Orientalist
discourse. For this, he has been sharply criticized, for instance, by
David Lorenzen ("Who Invented Hinduism?" Comparative Studies in
Society and History of Ideas 41.4 [1999]) and by Brian K. Smith
("Questioning Authority," International Journal of Hindu Studies 2.3
[1998]). Both critics overlook how von Stietencron's generalizations
are balanced by the carefully researched first part of his article
which, significantly, reveals that Saivas in pre-Muslim South India
saw themselves as fundamentally different from other Hindu traditions.
What von Stietencron and Dalmia seek to accomplish in this volume is
not so much to deconstruct the academic construct "Hinduism," but
rather to discredit communalists who claim to speak for Hinduism (and
Sikhism and Islam). They seek to highlight that different groups
within Hinduism did not always understand themselves as first and
foremost in opposition to Islam or other "foreign" religions, and that
such an understanding comes about in conjunction with an increasing
self-understanding as part of a monolithic religion in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries in response to Western critiques (Dalmia in
effect addresses the issue on p. 177 n. 3). Their project is a
profoundly political one, in that they express the hope that the
awareness of these two major issues may deflate the political tension
in India. It remains to be seen whether the scholarly findings of this
volume will change Hindu self-awareness and influence political
events. One of the editors envisages that "(t)he pressure of an
imagined domin ating and uniform Hindu majority would cease to drive
'non-Hindu' communities into harsh reactions" (p. 80). Though one may
disagree with the editors' position and with that of individual
authors on several points, it should be stressed that all contributors
are aware of the complexities involved in trying to make their
individual research results relevant for the study at hand. The danger
of generalizations is precisely what the whole volume sets out to
counter.
In my view, the main shortcoming of the volume is the imbalance
between articles researching the pre-colonial period and those about
nineteenth- and twentieth-century perceptions of Hinduism. The editors
are aware of this and express their hope of redressing the imbalance
in a later volume (p. 32). In general, this imbalance is symptomatic
of the current research climate, where an overreaction against the
hegemony of "classical" Indology has led to an overemphasis on the
importance of the colonial encounter. It is hoped that the pendulum
will swing back, and that a better balance may be reached. The volume
under review documents a wealth of detailed analyses of cases of
"modem Hinduism" in the making. While that is an excellent project, it
also needs to be complemented by studies of the "pre-modern" period.
For such studies to be feasible what is desperately needed is that
more of the countless "indigenous" sources that are untranslated, or
even unpublished, should be made available. If what has been said abo
ut pre-colonial Hinduism is flawed and based too exclusively on
Sanskritic and Brahmanical sources, the first priority should
obviously be to overcome the bias by making available the other
sources.
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