Religious Traditions in Modern South Asia

8 Encounters with the West

In the course of this book, we have quite frequently noted the impact of colonialism on the development of modern religious traditions in South Asia. In addition to our discussion of the concept of ‘religion’ in the introduction, Chapters 2 and 3 in particular have demonstrated this impact. They showed how colonialism encouraged the articulation of Hinduism as a supremely rational monotheism, and the assertion that the Vedas may be seen as the ‘true scripture’ of that religion. These chapters were, however, primarily designed to explore different aspects of social and religious life in South Asia, rather than being specifically directed at assessing the way in which the colonial encounter produced change. In Chapter 7B, we altered this focus and explored how colonial conditions created the space for the representation of low castes as an identifiable group, defined by their position in the so-called ‘caste system’, now identified increasingly as a defining feature of Hinduism. In this chapter, we address the issue of colonial encounter even more directly, looking at interactions with Europe (especially Britain) and America during the nineteenth century, first in relation to the emergence of different modern representations of Islam and ‘the (Indian) Muslim community’, and then more broadly.

But first a couple of caveats. By focusing on the nineteenth century, we are not supporting a view that it is only at this juncture and because of colonialism that Hinduism or forms of Islam that radically break from the past are created. In the first part of this book, we have constantly given examples from the longue durée to indicate not just the rich diversity of religious expression and behaviour in South Asia but also how the roots of modern forms go back much further than British India. However, this is not to deny that certain colonial forms become intertwined with modern presentations of religion, whether these are projected as modern, or as ‘traditional’, and this is what we investigate in this chapter.

Second, in the chapter title, we have used the vague term ‘the West’, even though we have some misgivings about it (which we will explore when we review the work of Edward Said later). Our main justification for using the term is that, if you look at evidence from the nineteenth century and beyond, many people did and still do use it as a means of capturing their sense of a perceived flow of ideas, practices, people or just general ‘forces’ from Europe and America into South Asia (as to other parts of the world). We will be qualifying the term as we go along, but there is a sense in which this generalized idea of ‘the West’ itself captures some of the concerns of people reflecting on traditions and changes in South Asia, as we shall see. We have also used the term ‘encounter’ in our title, because of our concern that the flow of ideas, practices, people or indeed ‘forces’ referred to above has never been only in one direction, even during those periods of the greatest imbalance of power between South Asia and aspects of ‘the West’. We hope, then, to demonstrate not how South Asian religious traditions have been changed by the force of ‘Western power’, or the impact of ‘Western ideas’, but rather how they have been influenced by the complex cultural interactions that both informed and developed out of the colonial experience.

You may reflect that there are quite a lot of disclaimers already in this chapter. Is there any need to be this cautious? Our answer to this is yes. There is every need for caution, because of the power imbalances mentioned above. In recent years postcolonial theory has uncovered the deep-seated operation of power in the way that colonial societies have been thought about, or represented. In fact, the sociologist and cultural critic Stuart Hall has identified what he calls a ‘system of representation’, which he refers to as ‘the discourse of the West and the Rest’. ‘By this strategy’, he says:

the Rest becomes defined as everything that the West is not – its mirror image. It is represented as absolutely, essentially, different, other: the Other. This Other is then itself split into two ‘camps’: friendly–hostile, Arawak–Carib, innocent–depraved, noble–ignoble.

(Hall 1992: 308)

Watch out for legacies of such dichotomization in South Asian contexts in the rest of this chapter.

Case Study: Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Islamic Learning in the Colonial Milieu

Our initial case study in this chapter acquaints us with the work of a distinguished Muslim figure of the nineteenth century, Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–1898) (Figure 8.1).¹

Figure 8.1 A photo of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan Bahadur. Reproduced courtesy of Afzal Usmani.

Sayyid Ahmad was an elite Muslim: a member of the so-called ashraf class that saw itself as descending from the Persian aristocracy associated with the Mughal empire.² In fact, Sayyid Ahmad’s family was directly associated with the Mughal rulers, as his grandfather had served in the Mughal administration of Emperor Akbar Shah II. From the early 1830s Sayyid Ahmad was employed by the East India Company in the judicial branch, rising to become a member of the Imperial Legislative Council towards the end of his life. Sayyid Ahmad’s public profile rose after the rebellion of 1857, also known as the Indian Mutiny. Not only had he been an active supporter of the British during the rebellion (therefore endearing himself to the colonial administration), he also became increasingly active in its aftermath as a self-styled spokesperson for Indian Muslims. In particular, Sayyid Ahmad was concerned that Muslims should not be disadvantaged in relation to the colonial state, because of their perceived association with the previous dominant power on the subcontinent. One answer to this concern was to promote the idea of Islamic learning in a colonial milieu. This excerpt from a letter to an associate demonstrates his approach.

Extract from a Letter to Mawlawi Tasadduq

I have been accused by people, who do not understand, of being disloyal to the culture of Islam, even to Islam itself. There are men who say that I have become a Christian. All this I have drawn upon myself because I advocate the introduction of a new system of education which will not neglect the Islamic basis of our culture, nor, for that matter, the teaching of Islamic theology, but which will surely take account of the changed conditions in this land. Today there are no Muslim rulers to patronize those who are well versed in the old Arabic and Persian learning. The new rulers insist upon a knowledge of their language for all advancement in their services and in some of the independent professions like practising law as well. If the Muslims do not take to the system of education introduced by the British, they will not only remain a backward community but will sink lower and lower until there will be no hope of recovery left to them.

… It is not only because the British are today our rulers, and we have to recognize this fact if we are to survive, that I am advocating the adoption of their system of education, but also because Europe has made such remarkable progress in science that it would be suicidal not to make an effort to acquire it. Already the leeway between our knowledge and that of Europe is too great. If we go on with our present obstinacy in neglecting it, we shall be left far behind. How can we remain true Muslims or serve Islam, if we sink into ignorance? The knowledge of yesterday is often the ignorance of tomorrow, because knowledge and ignorance are, in this context, comparative terms. The truth of Islam will shine the more brightly if its followers are well-educated, familiar with the highest knowledge in the world; it will come under an eclipse if its followers are ignorant and backward.

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.

(Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Letter to Mawlawi Tasadduq, see Hay 1988: 188–90)

Task

What connections do you see between this approach to religion and colonial control and that of Rammohun Roy, explored in Chapter 2?

It is clear from this excerpt that Sayyid Ahmad faces criticism for his approach to education, and perhaps for his approach to Europe more generally. Some people have accused him of turning away from the ‘culture of Islam’, or even of becoming a Christian. The reason for this is that he is advocating an opening up to European knowledge, rather than a reliance on Arabic and Persian learning, although he was well schooled in the latter. His reasoning is twofold: first, Muslims in India will not be able to progress within the parameters of colonial society – key avenues of employment, in particular, will be denied to them; second, if Muslims want to remain true to their religion, they should embrace new forms of learning – education is paramount, because Islam is ‘a rational religion’; it does not rely on superstition or blind faith.

A great deal of this reasoning is reminiscent of Rammohun Roy’s approach to colonial rule; he was also keen to embrace new forms of learning, and received criticism from more conservative elements within society. He also claimed that rationality was a key facet of his religion, and that as such it was particularly suited to the encounter with Western learning. He similarly invoked the idea of, in his case, ‘the Hindus’ as a recognizable group in Indian society, and much of his writing was concerned with the development of this group and its approach to religion.

It is no coincidence that both Rammohun and Sayyid Ahmad Khan were part of an elite class who had the opportunity to gain access not only to new forms of learning, but also to new forms of employment opened up by the development of the colonial milieu. Together, they represent a particular elite response to colonial control that places emphasis on a willingness to acknowledge the value of Western knowledge, whilst not conceding the comparative value of indigenous knowledge. This approach provides legitimation for engagement with colonial authority in the name of one or another community identified as indigenous. In Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s case, of course, this community was ‘the Indian Muslim community’, or qaum (we shall see below how this idea, like that of ‘Hindooism’, was itself contested). In particular, he aimed to provide modern leadership to the qaum through his strategy of engagement. He did this primarily through the founding of an Islamic centre of learning, the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College of Aligarh, later the famous Aligarh Muslim University, first established in 1875. As historian Kenneth Jones (1989) notes, the college aimed to provide ‘elements of English education in an Islamic context’ (p. 67), in order to fashion ‘educated, honest, public-spirited leaders able to work with the English government, and to protect the Muslim community. In time this elite would lift the Muslims into a cooperative dominance, ruling India in partnership with the British’ (p. 68).

A key point about this project was that it sought to fashion a modern lay leadership for Indian Muslims (Ahmad 1967: 37). This in itself was a rather new kind of idea: a sign of the times that seemed to identify the Muslims of British India as a discrete community in and of themselves, at least nominally linking together the vast numbers of diverse people across the subcontinent who in one way or another identified themselves as Muslim. In reality the constituency of the college was limited to ‘the north Indian Muslims literate in Urdu who formed the reservoir of Muslim intelligentsia and government servants’ (Lelyveld 1978: 123). This was the group that Sayyid Ahmad perceived as natural leaders who could then speak ‘in the name of all the Muslims of India’ (p. 123), on the basis of what the historian Barbara Metcalf terms ‘the Aligarh thesis’: ‘that the Muslims of British India had been rulers; had now declined in comparison to non-Muslim Indians; but could, through English education and Islam, once again be great’ (Metcalf 2002: 327). The idea of a lay leadership to this putative Muslim community also implicitly encroached on existing authority within these diverse Islamic communities; as such, it was largely opposed by the ‘ulema, the Muslim clerics who constituted that traditional Islamic authority.

To understand the social and political location of Sayyid Ahmad’s educational project in a bit more depth, we need to look further at the way educational systems in South Asia had changed in the first half of the nineteenth century. Under the Mughal empire and successor states, families of scholars, whether Muslim ‘ulema, Sufis or brahmins, were patronized to teach their particular specialisms on an individual or small group basis, either in their own accommodation, in madrasas or gurukuls, or as home tutors for elite families. Specialist artisans inducted the next generation into needed skills, mothers nurtured young children, cultivated courtesans shared in musical and literary education, trading routes opened up long distance travel for people to seek teachers elsewhere.

In this great plurality were two key features: personal or family inclination, and informality – not that strict codes of behaviour were not inculcated, but there was no ‘organized sector’ of education as such. Sayyid Ahmad Khan was himself taught by his mother, Azizunnissa Begam (a woman in purdah, see Chapter 10), who spoke and read Urdu and Persian, and had studied the Qur’an. She and her husband held interesting, reformist positions that undoubtedly had an impact on their son: they followed a Sufi Naqshbandi Mujaddidi reformer, Shah Ghulam Ali, who was opposed to practices such as making offerings at the tombs of pirs (Minault 1998: 16). They were also influenced by the significant eighteenth-century reformer Shah Wali Ullah (see Chapter 5). Sayyid Ahmad went on to study with influential ‘ulema families in Delhi, Kandhla and Chiryakot (Lelyveld 1982: 88), was educated in both an Islamic curriculum and Persian literature, became familiar with British educational methods through his juridical work for the East India Company and later admired the ‘Oxbridge’ model. He then applied a critical, enquiring approach acquired through this eclectic education to the four sources of Islamic knowledge (Qur’an, Hadith, reasoning through analogy, and consensus). In particular, he emphasized the possibility of ijtihad, or independent reasoning. Ijtihad refers to individual reasoning based on a rational approach to the four sources of Islamic knowledge.³ It was, importantly, through an emphasis on this reasoning as ‘the inalienable right of every individual Muslim’ (Ahmad 1967: 54) that Sayyid Ahmad saw the possibility of rapprochement with Western forms of knowledge, and so it was partly to this that many of the ‘ulema of the time objected (Jalal 2000: 68).

The thrust of British education policy in India was towards the development of a formal, institutionalized system, perceived as a necessary basis for ‘progress’ and ‘civilization’; this formed quite a contrast to the diverse, inclination-led, informal spectrum of possibilities referred to above. From the Madrasah ‘Aliyah (Calcutta Madrasa), set up in 1780 by the East India Company to train qazis for local courts, through missionary schools, Macaulay’s notorious Minute of 2 February 1835 decreeing the use of English (rather than ‘native’ or classical Oriental languages) for instruction in government educational institutions, and on to the work of individual European reformers later in the century, colleges and schools were set up variously to produce suitably trained officials and administrators, to convert people to Christianity, to extend the reach of the colonial authorities, to foster citizenship and to promote and control bourgeois interests, in parallel with developments in education in Britain. The principles and techniques of these institutions, a ‘crucial weapon of rule’, were then adopted and adapted by those educated in them (still a small elite) in order to establish their own institutions (Kumar 2000: 20; see also Lelyveld 1978: 113–18). These covered a wide range, from traditionalist establishments such as one we will look at in the next section, to reformist ones such as the Aligarh college. They all sought in various ways to negotiate curricula deemed suitable for both current progress and faithfulness to their own (often re-presented) traditions of learning (and belief), and to participate through these new organizations in projecting particular, often religious, identities in a newly forming public space (see Chapter 10).

In such a context, Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s was one particular way in which the encounter with Western knowledge was translated into an approach to religion and community in South Asia. In one sense, this was by no means a radical move; Sayyid Ahmad was indeed anything but a radical in his approach. In his own eyes, the historian Ayesha Jalal comments, he acted only to ‘shepherd a straying flock of co-religionists into greener pastures within the colonial system’, in the process producing ‘a conception of Muslimness consistent with the colonial state’s epistemology of communitarianism’ (Jalal 2000: 61). At the same time his approach did represent a kind of Islamic modernism (Ahmad 1967), placing a particularly strong emphasis on individual Qur’anic interpretation and promoting the need for a modern, rationalist intelligentsia capable of leading an identifiable Muslim community, distinct in its projected political and social aspirations from the perceived Hindu majority. As the historian Aziz Ahmad (1967: 38) says, Sayyid Ahmad’s work consequently had significant effects on the conceptualization of Islam and Muslims in the region.

Other Islamic Encounters

Parallel developments during this period demonstrate the diversity of ways of negotiating this encounter with the West. One of the most interesting alternative developments in the field of Islamic education was the Dar ul-Ulam of Deoband, which was established in 1867 (Metcalf 2002, 2004). Unlike Sayyid Ahmad’s institution, destined to become the Aligarh Muslim University, the Dar ul-Ulam was a madrasa – that is, a school specifically designed to deliver theological education and Islamic law. In this sense the Deoband school, as it became known, was more closely related to the traditional concerns of the ‘ulema.

At the same time, there were some crucial differences in the approach of the Deoband school that we need to take into account. In the first instance, the madrasa was established independent of any particular mosque or locally prominent family, as was the norm in northern India at that time (and indeed more widely than this). As an independent institution, the madrasa acquired its own buildings that housed classrooms and a library, and it employed its own staff to deliver classes and administer the organization. The students were admitted to a fixed course of study over a fixed period of time, and their period of study was assessed by regular examinations. If this is beginning to sound rather familiar, there is no coincidence in that. The Deoband madrasa was really distinctive in the way in which it emulated the structure of British educational institutions, even whilst its curriculum remained resolutely Islamic.

Another key difference was that the madrasa was funded not through a system of patronage, but through the very modern principle of public subscription. The historian Barbara Metcalf (2004: 33) explains:

The Deobandis solicited annual pledges from their supporters, a method learned from missionary associations. The system was complex, requiring careful records and dependent on the new facilities of postal service, money orders, and even the printing press. Thanks to the last, the annual proceedings were able to publish widely the list of donors who thus received recognition for their generosity. The donors were listed in the order of the size of their gift, but even the humblest contributor was included.

You will note the reference to the missionary model here. The Deoband school drew a kind of structural lesson from Christian missionaries, emulating the way in which they located themselves in social space. This also extended to the idea of the school itself as a mission, in the sense that the staff who worked there were encouraged to see their work as a kind of religious service, the public who contributed were encouraged to see their contributions as zakat (i.e. the Islamic requirement to give charitably), the school’s relatively impecunious state was positively encouraged,⁴ and the graduates of the school (as modern ‘ulema) were encouraged to take the message of Deobandi Islam to different localities, perhaps setting up approved branches of the madrasa, structured on the same basis as the Deoband institution. In this way, the distinctive approach of the Deoband school spread exponentially, and today it is a major force not just in South Asia, but also in countries such as Britain and the United States where many South Asians have settled.

In contrast to the Aligarh movement’s accommodationist stance, the Deoband school did not embrace Western knowledge in the same way, nor did it attempt to engage the state through the possibility of acquiring grantsin-aid to support the institution. Rather, it placed emphasis on the careful exploration of Islamic law and theology, with particular emphasis on the hadith as a source of knowledge and guidance. The programme of study at the madrasa was a full six years long. Graduates were religious specialists who could mediate Islamic knowledge and provide judgments (fatwa) for less well-educated Muslims. Although religious experience was valued, this experience needed to be supported by learning. The implication here is that the unmediated experience of the devotees of Sufi pirs, as explored in Chapter 5, is not recognized as appropriate religious practice. Sufism, the mystical path that is so strongly rooted in the Islamic traditions of South Asia, was therefore recognized as legitimate by the Deobandi school only inasmuch as Sufi saints were recognized as learned individuals. The reverence and devotion directed towards these individuals was shunned. This carefully articulated attitude towards Sufism reveals that even the Deobandis’ conscious rejection of the paths of Western knowledge was in some ways nevertheless a product of the colonial encounter. Sufi devotionalism was partly rejected because it was perceived as superstition, an accretion that did not represent the ‘true’ form of Islam, as articulated in the Qur’an, and elaborated through the words of the prophet in the Hadith. This approach is very reminiscent of those noted in Chapters 2 and 3 as associated with Rammohun Roy and Dayananda Saraswati. The very different approaches to religion developed in these three instances share a common structure based on the recognition of ‘authentic’ religion in ‘pure’, textualized forms. As we have seen, this common structure was a key component of the developing, modern notion of ‘religion’ as an objectified category of human experience. Indeed, the very structuring of ‘real’ Hinduism and Islam along these lines was a critical factor in the development of the category. In this way, we can view Deoband’s self-conscious, studied traditionalism as distinctively modern.

We want to look briefly at one further interesting Islamic movement that emerged in a similar time and space as Deoband: that which has become known as ‘Barelwi’. The Barelwi tradition coalesced around the scholarly figure of Ahmad Riza Khan (1856–1921) of Bareilly (hence the name, Barelvi), a town that, like Deoband, is in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Ahmad Riza Khan was a shaykh of the Qadiri Order of Sufis. Like Deoband, the Barelvi movement was identifiable institutionally through a madrasa (and subsequent ‘branch’ madrasas), although the initial impulse to develop the movement was much more clearly focused on the figure of Ahmad Riza Khan and his forthright refutation of the approach of movements like the Deobandis (Sanyal 2010: 231–67), whom he described as ‘followers of Satan the rebel’ (p. 236).

In contrast to Deoband, the Barelvi movement is strongly associated with the defence of what we might perceive as traditional devotional practices. These include the celebration of ‘urs and other ritual practices associated with the tombs of recognized Sufi saints, and a general respect for established customs and localized practices. In this sense Barelvi Islam seems rather unfocused, and you might reasonably ask why one would see this position as a ‘movement’. Like Deoband, however, Barelvi has become a very widely recognized movement in South Asian Islam, and it has a particularly strong presence amongst British Muslims. Its life as a ‘movement’ is really predicated on its context, emerging in the north Indian milieu in which a range of more recognizable movements such as Deoband and Aligarh developed. One might even say that this context invoked the idea of Barelwi as a movement: in order to be meaningful in the colonial milieu, Barelvi was fashioned as a ‘movement’ against what were perceived as innovatory practices. In this sense, just like Deoband and Aligarh, Barelwi was distinctive because it was clearly focused on the idea of Islam as a religion. As Metcalf states, this approach meant that Barelvis were ‘not … representing a continuity with the past but rather, in their very self-consciousness, representing a departure from it’ (Metcalf 2002: 296).

The World’s Parliament of Religions

This ‘self-consciousness’ about religion is reflected far more widely during this period than just amongst the Muslim intellectuals of northern India. It is, we would say, again evidence of that emerging modern notion of ‘religion’, an objectified category, populated by a series of roughly comparable sub-sets (the ‘World Religions’), which many commentators have located as developing gradually out of the encounters between ‘the West’ and other parts of the world, a pervasive feature of global geo-politics from the seventeenth century onwards (see Chapter 1 on this issue). Another example of the developing global impact of this process is provided by the famous ‘World’s Parliament of Religions’, held in Chicago in 1893. The objective of this event, as described by its Chair, the Reverend John Henry Barrows, was to ‘bring together in conference, for the first time in history, the leading representatives of the great Historic Religions of the world’ (Barrows 1893, quoted in Zavos 2008: 51). The august gathering opened with the tolling of the great Columbian Liberty Bell ten times, one for each of the ‘Ten Great Religions’ of humanity (Ketalaar 1993: 269). The opening ceremony then proceeded with representatives of different religious traditions on the main platform, ‘a bewildering kaleidoscope of tints, punctuated and emphasized by the still black and white of the American and European’ (Chicago Times, 12 September 1893, quoted in Ketelaar 1993: 275).

South Asia was of course represented at the Parliament by a range of individuals.⁵ Amongst them was Swami Vivekananda, a Bengali devotee of the mid-nineteenth-century mystic Shri Ramakrishna. Vivekananda’s appearance at the Parliament provides us with an interesting further example of the ‘encounter with the West’. This example is rather different, in that the encounter occurs not in India, the site of colonial domination, but in America, a land with an identity that was both part of ‘the West’, and predicated on release from colonial domination by Europe. This rather uneasy double image was reflected in the character of the Parliament, which was both dominated by white Christians and yet keen to embrace what Barrows saw as the ‘fact, which is indisputable, that there are on this planet a number of religions, among which Christianity numerically counts one’ (Barrows 1893, quoted in Zavos 2008: 50). In addition, Vivekananda’s appearance at the Parliament demonstrated a very independent agency: he arrived at the Parliament uninvited, having travelled from India with the financial assistance of Indian patrons, and proceeded to represent Hinduism in a very public and forthright manner.

Vivekananda’s approach to Hinduism was heavily based on the philosophy of Advaita Vedanta (see Chapter 2), and to this extent we can link his approach to others we might recognize as being developed through the encounter with the West, in particular the rational monotheism of Rammohun Roy. At the same time, the presentation of these ideas in Chicago was pitched at quite a different level. Vivekananda presented Advaita Vedanta as the universal religion, encompassing all others. He presented it not as an arcane set of practices and ideas from a distant and subjugated land, relevant in Chicago only as a matter of curiosity, but as a vital and enduring force that could reinvigorate the hollow spiritual existence of the industrial, alienated West. This was a combative, assertive approach, in which India was projected as a critical resource for global development. As Vivekananda is reported to have commented in the wake of the Parliament, ‘The Parliament of Religions, as it seems to me, was intended as a heathen show before the world; but it turned out that the heathens had the upper hand’ (see Vedanta Center of Atlanta n.d.).

By the end of the nineteenth century, there is plenty of evidence to demonstrate this self-confident, resistant approach to the encounter with the West in the development of South Asian religious identities. As we will see in Chapter 10, the development of the ideology of Indian nationalism was strongly bound up with the identification of religion not only as a realm beyond the reach of the colonial state, but also as a key site for the development of an independent national culture. As Vivekananda exemplified in America, many middle-class Indians were developing a self-image of superior spirituality, as an antidote to what appeared to be an evident Western superiority in material realms. This apparent dualization points us towards a critical area for understanding what we have called the encounter with the West: that is, the idea of Orientalism and the development of what has become known as ‘postcolonial theory’.

Encountering Orientalism and Postcolonialism

In exploring the key themes of this chapter (and indeed more broadly), it is important to take this influential body of theory into account. ‘Orientalism’, of course, is a term we have come across before. It was used in Chapter 3 to refer to the range of European intellectuals who engaged in study about India in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. People like William Jones have become known as Orientalists because they developed European knowledge about ‘the Orient’. Often these men were highly sympathetic towards India and other regions of the East, and critical of the development of European cultures. Nevertheless, the idea of Orientalism has developed a negative, almost pejorative inflection. This is largely the result of the influential work of Edward Said, a Palestinian academic who published a book called Orientalism in 1978 that explored the phenomenon of colonialism and the complex modes of power associated with it.

In the first chapter of his book, Said lays out three meanings of the term ‘Orientalism’ (pp. 2–3). The first relates quite clearly to Orientalist intellectuals like Jones; it denotes an ‘academic field’ developed, as we have noted, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but with an enduring influence in academic and research circles since this time. Indeed, we might reasonably make a connection between this field and some of the ‘area studies’ fields that are now quite common in universities, such as, of course, the field of South Asian Studies.

The second meaning highlights the idea of an Orient/Occident dualism as a means of categorizing the world. This idea, of course, is important in this chapter, as it invokes the notion of ‘the West’ as a homogeneous phenomenon, just as much as it invokes ‘the Orient’ or ‘the East’ in a similar way. There are many ways in which this meaning has cropped up in the examples we have been looking at; perhaps most straightforwardly we can see it operating in the approach of Vivekananda to Indian ‘spirituality’, in contradistinction to the materialism of the West, and we will explore this idea in more depth below. It is also apparent in Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s desire to emphasize Islam as a rational religion, as opposed to ‘irrational superstition’. This is also a highly resilient dualism, very much in evidence in the contemporary world, where it frequently operates in a wryly resistant fashion, echoing to some extent the attitude of Vivekananda. An example is provided by the 2002 film The Guru. One aspect of this film is its portrayal of the feckless fallibility of rich New Yorkers when they are confronted by the mystical spiritualism of India – as represented by the resourceful migrant, Ramu, whose ‘spiritualism’ is lifted surreptitiously from a fellow performer in the pornographic film industry. Another example is that of the Guru played by Sanjeev Bhaskar in the British Asian television show, Goodness Gracious Me. Bhaskar’s Guru is regularly presented as teaching a group of, as he calls them, ‘spiritually flatulent westerners’ about the wonders of Hinduism, which he describes in one sketch as a ‘fascinating network of philosophies, legends … and nice tunes’ (Bhaskar 2007).

The third meaning of Said’s Orientalism is as a body of knowledge by which, he says, the Orient was managed (Said 1978: 3). This refers to what is otherwise known as discursive power, the power to structure the way in which ideas, objects and practices are known and understood. This discursive power, Said argues, acts as the ideal companion to the economic and military power of colonial control. Through it, a regime of truth is established that privileges certain ways of seeing the world over others. Perhaps Said’s most radical idea was that this discursive power operated not just to manage and control colonial possessions, but also to produce the reality of colonial, or more broadly, ‘Oriental’ society. ‘The Orient’, he argued, ‘was Orientalized not only because it was discovered to be “Oriental” in all those ways considered commonplace by an average nineteenth century European, but also because it could be – that is, submitted to being – made Oriental’ (Said 1978: 5–6).

The responses to the West we have examined in this chapter may all be seen as in some sense developing from the ‘production’ of the Orient posited here by Said. The Aligarh movement was predicated on the idea that Islamic knowledge was ‘old’ or traditional (the Oriental ‘other’ of modern, Western knowledge); the approach of both Deobandis and Barelvis responded to the identification of devotional Sufism as a distinctive feature of South Asian Islam (was this, or was this not, ‘real’ religion?); and as we have seen, Vivekananda presented Hinduism at the Parliament and more broadly as fundamentally different from Western ways of knowing. In addition, we may go on to say that, inasmuch as all these examples had a self-conscious understanding of diverse traditions as ‘religion’ at their heart, they were symptomatic of a new form of reality in which the idea of religion itself was perceived as a central feature of South Asian society, a key idiom for the structuring of social relations.

It is this third meaning of Orientalism that is most closely associated with the burgeoning body of work known as ‘postcolonial theory’, which has developed not just in the study of literature (Said’s initial data source), but also across the arts and social sciences. Postcolonial theory has some similarities to that other major force in recent intellectual history, postmodernism – primarily because both of these approaches are premised on the social construction of knowledge, and so on the power of discourse to discipline the subject. Postcolonial theory begins with a recognition that the discursive power outlined here was not relinquished at the point of Independence. The aftermath of colonialism is rather marked by what the author Leela Gandhi (1998: 15) describes as the continued domination of ‘minds, selves, cultures’, and some ‘enduring hierarchies of subjects and knowledges’ (G. Prakash, cited in Gandhi 1998: 15). Postcolonial theory has developed as a kind of critical resistance to the continuation of these relations of power. It aims, on the one hand, to recognize, explore and analyse the structures of knowledge associated with the colonial project, and, on the other hand, to retrieve and exemplify what Leela Gandhi calls ‘disqualified or subjugated knowledges’ (p. 53) – those ways of thinking that have been suppressed through the domination of colonial knowledge systems. In this sense postcolonialism, as it has become known, is an avowedly political project, as well as an academic one. It has as its objective a transformation of the relations of power that currently dominate global geo-politics, relations which, it is argued, are based on the history of colonialism and the Orientalist structures of knowledge that supported it.

There have, of course, been some very trenchant critiques of postcolonialism (for a summary, see Gandhi 1998: 54–8). Postcolonialists are often accused of producing a caricature of ‘Western power’, based on the very same (East/West) dichotomy that they seek to critique. In addition, rather like postmodernism, postcolonialism is often presented in language that is difficult to penetrate. Although this in itself may be seen as a form of resistance to the dominant structuring of knowledge, it is used by critics as evidence to argue that postcolonialism has been developed by intellectuals mostly based in Western universities (a key source of the production of colonial knowledge that postcolonialists seek to critique), and that it has little impact on the real structures of power under which people work, suffer, starve in the postcolonial world.

There is plenty to be said for this criticism, but at the same time we can see the development of forms of knowledge in resistance to colonialism that have had a direct impact on people’s lives. The emergence of Deoband might be viewed in this manner, as might Vivekananda’s presentation of Indian spirituality. But as these examples suggest, the workings of this resistance are not straightforward. They are frequently bound into webs of colonial discourse, and their effects in terms of ‘hierarchies of subjects and knowledges’ are difficult to predict. In the final section we will explore this point in more depth by looking more closely at that idea of Indian spirituality that Vivekananda so vigorously propagated.

The Religion Twist: Spirituality and Rationalism

‘Wherever virtue subsides and vice prevails, I come down to help mankind,’ declares Krishna, in the Bhagavad Gita. Whenever this world of ours, on account of growth, on account of added circumstances, requires a new adjustment, a wave of power comes; and as a man is acting on two planes, the spiritual and the material, waves of adjustment come on both planes. On the one side, of the adjustment on the material plane, Europe has mainly been the basis during modern times; and of the adjustment on the other, the spiritual plane, Asia has been the basis throughout the history of the world. Today, man requires one more adjustment on the spiritual plane; today when material ideas are at the height of their glory and power, today when man is likely to forget his divine nature, to be reduced to a mere money-making machine, an adjustment is necessary … and again the place from which this power will start will be Asia.

(Swami Vivekananda 1896a, ‘My Master’, in Complete Works 1962: 154)

In this declaration, given in 1896 during his first European tour and after the World’s Parliament of Religions, Vivekananda states clearly his view of the dichotomy between the material West (Europe, America) and the spiritual East (Asia), and the associated claim of Eastern superiority and leadership of the globe in spiritual matters. By grounding his view that the needed spiritual revival will come from Asia in Gita 4.6 (a passage we have come across before; see Chapter 4), he asserts its cosmic, ancient and universal authority. Yet as we have seen, his is, to some extent, a ‘Western message from the East’ (Killingley 1998). In this section we will explore the way in which this idea that ‘Eastern’ religion was especially spiritual was constructed and developed as a facet of the religion discourse. As we shall see, the classic Occident/ Orient dichotomy apparent in this characterization has some complex and entangled roots.

One root was in the work of the German Romantic writers. In particular, the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) was deeply attracted to the classical Upanishads and their message of ‘pristine spirituality’. Yet Schopenhauer’s Upanishadic source was a Latin translation, the Oupnek’hat, published by the French Orientalist, Anquetil du Perron (1731–1805) in 1801–2. This was itself a translation from the Persian rendering of the Upanishads commissioned by the Mughal emperor Akbar (see Halbfass 1988: 35). The claimed ‘spirituality’ of the Sanskrit Upanishads had therefore already been mediated through several languages and cultural contexts. But it became a powerful trope.

The Theosophy movement, established in New York in 1875, was one of several to take up and develop this trope of Indian spirituality. In the cosmopolitan environment of the late nineteenth century, their activities and writings had more direct links with India than those apparent in Schopenhauer’s work. Their leaders included the American colonel Henry Olcott, the colourful Russian Madame Blavatsky, and Annie Besant, an English woman who was to become first woman President of the Indian National Congress in 1917. The Theosophists gave Vivekananda significant direct support, even though he tried to distance himself from them in later years (Baumfield 1991: 42–60). It seems more than likely that they formed one significant influence causing him to adopt the vocabulary of India’s ‘spirituality’. Another may have been the work of his Bengali contemporary, Keshab Chandra Sen, also working in a cosmopolitan environment. Keshab was a significant leader of the Brahmo Samaj, the organization established by Rammohun Roy earlier in the century. His 1883 ‘Asia’s Message to Europe’ pointed out that ‘cultured souls in the East treat spiritual realities as things that can be seen and felt’ (cited in Killingley 1998: 142). Vivekananda may also have been influenced by Schopenhauer’s disciple, the major Orientalist scholar, Paul Deussen (1845–1919), who promoted Advaita Vedanta in the late nineteenth century. They certainly met and spoke together in 1896 (Killingley 1998: 146). Yet as the historian Tapan Raychaudhuri (1998: 16) points out, Vivekananda’s ideas also grew out of his own experience as a pupil of the Bengali mystic Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, whom he saw as the realization of Advaitin truth, and he frequently drew on Indian texts to develop these ideas, as the initial quotation in this section demonstrates. So the influences are complex.

Through such interactions, the idea of religion as an assertive spirituality with a strong ethical component, an emphasis on tolerance, and an engagement with social and political realities became increasingly influential not just in Vivekananda’s thinking, but more broadly as well. It became, for example, a creative force for nationalism (see Chapter 10). It is also clearly evident in the philosophy of the important twentieth-century academic and statesman, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975). It is also apparent in the philosophies of numerous modern Gurus (see Chapter 6). A further legacy is identifiable in the idea of the ‘mystic East’, central to the 1960s American counter-culture, when hippies travelled to India in search of a spirituality they found lacking in their own society, and in the UK the Beatles and others became attracted to Maharishi Yogi (on this trend, see Mehta 1990). During this period also, Swami Prabhupada brought the Hare Krishna movement, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), to the West, initially to New York in 1966. ISKCON is now a major Hindu presence in the UK, the US and other parts of the world.

Such trends seem far removed from what has been mooted as another key development through the encounter with the West, namely the stress on the rationality of religion. This seems much more congruent with Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s response and, as we noted earlier, echoes Rammohun’s concern to demonstrate the true rationality of Hinduism by contrast with the spurious rationality of the Three in One dying God of Christians and their intolerance of the views of others. Does, then, the work of Vivekananda and Sayyid Ahmad represent two divergent responses to the encounter with the West, the one spiritual, the other rational? Although this may seem persuasive, the picture is again more complex. The Theosophists, cited above as an influence on Vivekananda, provide a good example. They rejected institutionalized Christianity and engaged in séances, where people tried to contact spirits of the dead, seeking in India a form of spirituality compatible with these interests. The anthropologist and historian, Peter van der Veer (2001), however, reminds us that, at the time, séances were regarded as a form of empirical experimentation, a rational scientific method. In contrast to what we might call this spirit of scientific enquiry, the Theosophists rejected mainstream Christianity precisely because it was legitimated by appeal to revelation (with this rationalist approach, perhaps echoing the critique of Rammohun Roy). The Theosophist view was that rationality, spiritualism, spirituality and political action complemented rather than contradicted one another. Their objection was to what they saw in Europe and America as the mystification of oppression, apparent in centuries of institutionalized Christianity.

The Religious Studies scholar Richard King has commented in relation to the idea of the ‘mystic East’ associated with India that ‘colonial stereotypes … became transformed and used in the fight against colonialism.’ ‘Despite this’, he continues, ‘stereotypes they remain’ (King 1999b: 93). The evidence we have presented here suggests that the image of dichotomization between spirituality and rationality in the presentation of modern religion in South Asia is just such a stereotype. There is no doubt that it has been an influential and significant image, which has had its impact not just in the fight against colonialism, but in a range of different environments both in South Asia and more widely. Nevertheless, a stereotype it remains, masking a far more nuanced and entangled set of historical processes. Consider the following quotation from Vivekananda, again asserting the role that India can play in global development: ‘The salvation of Europe depends on a rationalistic religion, and Advaita – non-duality, the Oneness, the idea of the Impersonal God – is the only religion that can have any hold on any intellectual people’ (Vivekananda 1896b, ‘The Absolute and Manifestation’, in Complete Works 1963: 139). It is only by recognizing those nuanced and entangled historical processes that such a statement can be reconciled with the Swami’s equally forthright assertions about the spiritual superiority of India. For Vivekananda, Advaita Vedanta is both spiritual and rational, and it is on this basis that it is suited to the demands of the modern world. Sayyid Ahmad Khan may have said something similar, in fact, about Islam. As in Chapter 2, where our evidence led us to question the apparent binary opposition between monotheism and polytheism, we must here be similarly cautious with ideas of spirituality and rationality. Discourses of domination and resistance may present these as binary opposites, but as students of religion we need both to explore the operation of such discourses, and to look beyond appearances to the complex processes that have produced them.

Conclusion

In this chapter, then, we have explored the various ways in which the ‘encounter with the West’ has occurred in relation to both the representation and the development of South Asian religious traditions. It is clear from the evidence that there is again a great deal of diversity apparent in this scenario. Our examples of Islamic movements from the late nineteenth century have demonstrated this diversity. Although we may detect both ‘modernist’ and ‘traditional’ responses to the fact of colonial domination, we need to be aware that both these responses demonstrate interaction, and, through this interaction, various forms of innovation and adjustment; this is a point we may place within the wider framework of the dynamism of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ as categories more generally, which we commented on in our first chapter. One common development apparent in these examples has been evidence of a consideration or consciousness of Islam as a religion, comparable to other religions, and of the idea of Muslims as a community, comparable to other religious communities in British India. As we shall see in the next chapter, this was a persuasive and significant idea, in relation not just to Islam and Muslims, but to religious communities more generally. Indeed, in this chapter, we saw how such self-conscious approaches to religion played out in the dramatic environment of the World’s Parliament of Religions, and how they have contributed to the articulation of multilayered forms of resistance to colonial domination. Even whilst acknowledging this role, however, we should remain sensitive to the complexities through which such ideas about religion have been produced, and the unpredictable consequences that develop as they are deployed in diverse modern contexts.

Questions for Further Discussion and Research

How would you define ‘the West’ and ‘the East’?
Comparing Aligarh Muslim University and the Dar ul-Ulam at Deoband, do you see one as modernist and the other as traditional?
What is postcolonial theory? Does it help or hinder us in trying to understand the examples of ‘encounter’ explored in this chapter?
Is South Asia a uniquely spiritual place?