Religious Traditions in Modern South Asia

9 The Construction of Religious Boundaries

This chapter is in many ways a continuation of the themes of Chapter 8, in that it explores further ways in which the encounter with ‘the West’ impacted on South Asian religious traditions. Here, however, we are focused on one particular area that is of critical importance to the way in which these traditions are practised and represented in the modern and contemporary era: the ways in which definite boundaries have been constructed or developed between these traditions. This process has been critical to contemporary understandings of South Asian religions. The ‘construction of religious boundaries’ is actually a term deployed by the Punjabi academic Harjot Oberoi (1994) in his study of the development of Sikh traditions in the Punjab over the period from the sixteenth century up to the present. Oberoi’s thesis is a rather startling one at first sight, and has led to him being aggressively targeted by some Sikhs as an apostate (as he is himself a Sikh). It is, briefly, that the religion of Sikhism was not established by Guru Nanak in the sixteenth century and subsequently developed through the work of the nine Gurus who succeeded him. Rather, the notion of Sikhism as a religion was really established at the end of the nineteenth, beginning of the twentieth century, through a number of socio-economic and cultural changes associated with colonialism. In this sense, he presents it as part of a broader process of religious boundary construction, in which different traditions coalesced through similar processes in order to form the different religions that we now understand as ‘the religions of South Asia’. In short, the Oberoi thesis suggests that this period saw the creation of religions in South Asia.

The thesis is problematic for a range of reasons. Perhaps most significantly, it seems to deny the antiquity of South Asian religious traditions, and prioritize (yet again) the agency of Western traditions, their ability to provide a kind of model or blueprint for the cultures of South Asia and other parts of the postcolonial world. This is a critique that we will examine in this chapter; but we should also look at the kind of evidence that Oberoi produces, and other evidence which may provide us with a perspective on this interesting and indeed critical area. In line with the pattern of the book so far, however, we should begin with an example, from which to work outwards to explore the various dimensions of the issue at hand. Here, we follow Oberoi (1990: 153) by focusing on an event he describes as a ‘watershed in the history of modern Sikhism’.

Case Study: The Anand Marriage Act, 1909

In 1909 the Imperial Legislative Council in Calcutta passed what was known as the Anand Marriage Act. A part of the Act is reproduced here:

THE ANAND MARRIAGE ACT, 1909

An Act to remove doubts as to the validity of the marriage ceremony common among the Sikhs called Anand.

Whereas it is expedient to remove any doubts as to the validity of the marriage ceremony common among the Sikhs called Anand;

It is hereby enacted as follows:

1. Short title and extent. –

(1)This Act may be called The Anand Marriage Act, 1909; and

(2) It extends to the whole of India

2. Validity of Anand Marriage. – All marriages, which may be or may have been duly solemnised according to the Sikh Marriage ceremony called Anand shall be and shall be deemed to have been with effect from the date of the solemnisation of each respectively, good and valid in law.

3. Exemption of certain marriages from Act. – Nothing in this Act shall apply to –

(a)Any marriage between persons not professing the Sikh religion, or

(b)Any marriage, which has been judicially declared to be null and void.

(Government of India 1909)

Task

What questions might reading this text generate? Discuss with a peer or jot down what the text does or does not tell you about Sikhism and marriage practices associated with this religion in the early twentieth century.

A reasonable question to ask in exploring this text is what it really can tell us about religion. What importance do legal texts, or, to be more precise, Legislative Acts, have for those of us who are interested in religious traditions? You might also have asked why this particular Act was passed at this point; why was it perceived to be necessary? The preamble to the Act speaks of ‘doubts’ that need to be removed in relation to this Sikh ceremony. What kind of doubts existed about this practice, and why was a law needed to dispel them? What exactly was the ‘Sikh marriage ceremony called Anand’, and how did it relate to other forms of ceremony? Was it the only ceremony associated with Sikh marriage, or were there others? The reference to ‘professing the Sikh religion’ may also have invoked you to ask what it meant to ‘profess’ the Sikh religion at this time – or, perhaps more pertinently in the context of this book, was there anything different about ‘professing the Sikh religion’ during this time, or was it much the same as doing so at any other point in history?

Obviously, given what we have already said about Oberoi’s thesis, there is a suggestion that ‘being Sikh’ was perhaps conceptualized differently at this time. To understand how this might be the case, we need to get a broader sense of the idea of ‘being Sikh’, and the evidence associated with the historical development of this idea. This, then, is one form of contextual data that will help us to understand the Anand Marriage Act. But to understand the precise timing of the Act, at the beginning of the twentieth century, we also need to explore a variety of contexts from this period. These include dynamics associated with Sikh identity, and also associated with religious identity more broadly during the period. The objective, then, is to provide several twists of the kaleidoscope in order to examine the Anand Marriage Act in different ways, and hence help us to answer some of the questions generated by reading this short historical text.

Sikh Organizations in the Late Nineteenth Century

As noted above, Oberoi cites the 1909 Act as ‘a watershed in the history of modern Sikhism’. The passing of the Act in 1909 in fact was the result of a quite concerted political campaign, the success of which owed a great deal to the emergence and development of a series of Sikh organizations, known as Singh Sabhas. These organizations had spread across Punjab from the early 1870s, first being established in the major urban centres of Amritsar and Lahore. By the turn of the century there were more than 100 Sabhas across the northwest, and, although there was a great deal of differentiation and competition between these organizations, it was this basic network of organized Sikh identity that was to inform the campaign in support of the Anand Marriage Bill. Between October 1908 and September 1909, more than 300 meetings were held in support of the Bill, and some 700,000 Sikhs petitioned the colonial administration in order to persuade them to pass the Bill into law (Oberoi 1990: 153). These demonstrations of concerted action were supported by vigorous print campaigns in newspapers and journals associated with the Singh Sabha movement. In short, the Anand Marriage Bill agitation was a very modern form of protest and mobilization, in which recognizable civil society techniques were deployed to achieve a specific political objective. As this implies, the organizations behind the agitation were equally modern in their form, and well suited to this kind of deployment.

Oberoi argues that the emergence and growing public profile of these organizations was indicative of fundamental changes in the structure of Punjabi society in the second half of the nineteenth century. In particular, he points to the emergence of a new social elite during this period – ‘a restless new elite who cut across kin ties, neighbourhood networks and even caste affiliations’, ushered in by a combination of colonial patronage and what Oberoi (1990: 149) calls ‘the lethal armies of advancing capitalism’. The processes that were intensified by these ‘lethal armies’ were similar to those in other areas of the empire: the commercialization of agriculture, increasing urbanization, the development of rapid communications technologies were all factors that had a profound impact on colonial societies. In Punjab the impact of these factors was intense. Agricultural land was particularly productive here, and became more so as a result of a network of irrigation canals built by the British.¹ The market in agricultural land became increasingly competitive in the late nineteenth century, with urban commercial classes profiting as small-scale farmers relinquished their holdings (Barrier 1966).

Allied with these processes were some very particular colonial patterns of social development, instigated by a developing British approach to Sikhs as a group. From early on in the colonial period in Punjab, Sikhs were identified as especially suitable recruits for the British Indian army. There were practical and historical reasons for this. The fact was that Punjab was close to a region of India where the British most anticipated deploying the army, that is, the North-West Frontier, where in the late nineteenth century there were real concerns about an invasion from Russia. As such, recruiting in Punjab was pragmatic and cheaper, as troops from this region would be paid at a local service rate if deployed in the northwest. Punjab had also largely remained loyal during the rebellion of 1857, when large parts of northern India had been engulfed by a violent uprising against British rule. This loyalty was valued greatly by army commanders. In addition to these reasons, however, it was generally recognized during the second half of the nineteenth century that Sikhs were a ‘martial race’. Based on the burgeoning race science of the time, the British understood Sikhs, amongst others, to have a particular propensity for military valour and fighting skill.² As a result, Sikh communities were fostered through administrative policies such as the granting of valuable land in canal colonies (Ali 1994: 8–9). Interestingly, the army also engaged in the explicit promotion of what was perceived as normative Sikh identity. For example, Tony Ballantyne refers to the 1896 Handbook on Sikhs for Regimental Officers, written by recruiting officer R.W. Falcon (published in Allahabad). In the handbook Falcon identifies ‘true Sikh tribes’, noting of ‘Singhs, the members of the Khalsa’: ‘These are the only Sikhs who are reckoned as true Sikhs … the best practical test of a true Sikh is to ascertain whether in calling himself a Sikh he wears uncut hair and abstains from smoking tobacco.’ Falcon goes on to warn officers away from recruiting Sikhs whose identity was ‘very diluted by Hinduism’ (Ballantyne 2006: 65). These clear ideas about what constituted proper Sikhism were reinforced by the insistence that Sikh recruits maintained their external symbols of Sikhism (the so-called five Ks) and accepted the authority of the army-appointed granthis, or ritual readers and interpreters of the Sikh text. In this way, then, the difference of Sikhs was reinforced by social and economic practices associated with colonial rule. The social mobility and competition that these processes instigated informed the formation of groups such as the Singh Sabhas.

The approach of Falcon and the implication of a different form of Sikhism projected by the Singh Sabhas begs the question of what exactly changed in terms of Sikh practice and identity during this period. Falcon’s reference to the ‘true Sikhism’ of the Khalsa suggests that there was a range of other approaches to the idea of Sikh-ness, a point that also reminds us of the ‘doubts’ about Sikh ritual referred to in the Anand Marriage Act. The Khalsa is a particular Sikh tradition, established by the tenth in the succession of Sikh Gurus, Guru Gobind Singh, at the turn of the eighteenth century. Gobind initiated the formation of this semi-military ‘brotherhood’ at a time of political instability in Punjab, marking membership through an initiatory ‘baptism’ ceremony and a commitment to maintain the five Ks. The most noticeable of these ‘Ks’ is of course kesh, the commitment to leave the hair uncut, a tradition that has led to the wearing of the turban and beard, perhaps the most visible sign of modern Sikhism. What is frequently overlooked, however, is that this tradition is one amongst many, most of which are not bound by these specific ritual elements. Thus there are Sikhs of, for example, the Udasi, Nirmala, Suthreshahi, Jitmali and Sahajdhari traditions. All these have, in one way or another, claimed to follow the teachings of the succession of Gurus that began with Guru Nanak in the sixteenth century. Most, however, have not necessarily been constrained by this allegiance, taking part in a constellation of ritual and devotional activities extant in the region. This entangled history leads Oberoi to claim that:

the territories in which Sikhs lived, the languages they spoke, the agrarian festivals in which they participated, the ritual personnel they patronised and the symbolic universe of their rites of passage – all these were shared by numerous other communities in Punjab.

(Oberoi 1994: 48)

This environment is what Oberoi (1994: 141), drawing on Max Weber, refers to in his book as the ‘enchanted universe’ of Punjabi popular religion. This ‘universe’ provides the context, for example, for Sikhs to be ‘deeply involved in the worship of miracle saints’ (p. 147), for the worship of Devi as ‘an integral part of Sikh sacred practices’ (p. 162) and for engagement with ‘a wide variety of sacred resources and the intermediaries who managed them’ (p. 201).

The activities of the Singh Sabhas were primarily geared towards marking out a particular notion of Sikhism in the context of this diversity. In particular, Khalsa Sikhism was increasingly identified as normative, as it represented a distinctive sense of religious identity in a manner that was, as we have seen, recognized and valued in the context of colonialism, and suitably reflected the aspirations of the emerging new elite. In particular, the emerging ethos of what was to become known as ‘Tat’ (true) Khalsa seemed to reflect the desire to fashion a religious identity that spoke of authenticity, universality and an unmediated relationship with God, free from the apparently obscurantist machinations of brahmin priests. This was to be an identity appropriate to the self-image of an elite that was educated, independent, urban and empowered by the new technologies of the colonial milieu (most immediately, of course, the printing press). In this sense, the ethos of Tat Khalsa was fashioned quite self-consciously against Hinduism, represented as the epitome of that obscurantist traditionalism.

It is no surprise that one of the most striking early articulations of Tat Khalsa thinking was a tract by the author and publicist, Bhai Khan Singh Nabha, called Ham Hindu Nahin, or ‘We are not Hindus’.³ In this text, Singh asserted the distinctiveness of Sikhism, its rootedness in the Guru Granth Sahib, the importance of the distinctive signs of Sikhism and the separation of Sikhism from Hindu forms of image worship. He also emphasized independence by asserting that Sikhs should not rely on brahmins and other traditional castes when undertaking life-cycle rituals, but should look instead to deploy distinctive Sikh rituals. This argument was supported by the steady production by a range of Tat Khalsa intellectuals of a series of rahit namas, or codes of conduct related to ritual practices. Oberoi examines these in some depth, exploring the changes they invoked to specific lifecycle rituals. For example, death rituals were to be focused on the recitation of the Adi Granth and the maintenance of the five Ks, and ashes were not to be scattered on the holy river Ganga. The naming of a newborn child was to occur through consultation of a Granthi rather than a brahmin. Marriage rituals were also to be transformed. Traditionally in Punjab, the precise details of marriage ceremonies would be configured by caste and locality, but they would almost certainly include a consultation with a brahmin to determine an auspicious date, and on the day the recitation of Sanskrit mantras by a brahmin, and the circumambulation of a sacred fire. The ceremony advocated by the Tat Khalsa stipulated no astrological consultation, a simple recitation of verses from the Adi Granth during the ceremony and a circumambulation of a copy of the Granth rather than the fire. This ceremony was known as the Anand marriage ceremony, making reference to the Anand Sahib verses of the Granth, associated with the third Sikh Guru, Amar Das. This revised ceremony is of course the ceremony referred to in the Anand Marriage Act. Its acceptance by the imperial legislature was in effect a legitimation of the Tat Khalsa campaign to fashion a new form of normative Sikhism, a distinctive religious code emerging from the multiple traditions of nineteenth-century Punjab.

Constructing Boundaries, Counting Communities, Claiming Rights

These radical developments in the perception of Sikhism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not, of course, occur in a vacuum. They were part of a general trend towards what we are, with Oberoi, calling the construction of religious boundaries in late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century India. We have already touched on some of these changes. Chapters 7 and 8 have alluded to them in relation to Hinduism and Islam. In addition, Chapter 3 touched on the emergence of the Arya Samaj. This was a dynamic, activist movement amongst Hindus of a particular class, which seemed to echo the form of the Singh Sabhas in many ways, and was initially most successful in that very region where the Singh Sabhas flourished: Punjab. It is clear from the evidence presented above that the emergence of such movements was strongly related to broader social and economic processes affecting the Punjab region (and, we might add, much more widely across British India). Processes of change related to the emergence of new class identities, changes in agricultural production, and urbanization have been emphasized. In addition to these, the colonial encounter provides the context for some more specific changes related to government policy that have been identified by a range of scholars (for example, Dirks 2001; Cohn 1987; Zavos 2000) as important forces in the construction of religious boundaries. In this section we want to explore some of these changes.

A particularly dramatic innovation in this period was the decennial census. The colonial state experimented with taking censuses in different regions of its Indian territories during and before the 1860s, amalgamating these to produce the first complete census of colonial India in 1872. The decennial series based on a single enumeration exercise across the whole territory of British India was then established from 1881. The first census of British India collected only eight pieces of information (age, name, caste, religion, kind of dwelling, race or nationality, literacy and infirmities). Although it was to get more elaborate in later years, the key elements for our purposes were already in place: religion and caste. These categories of information may seem straightforward enough (although you may disagree if you have read the introduction, or Chapter 7A!), but it is notable that nothing like them was apparent in the census in Britain during this period (and indeed right up until 2001, when a voluntary question regarding religion was introduced⁴).

This difference is indicative of what some scholars have detected as a broader intent in the colonial census exercise. As we noted in Chapter 7A, the colonial state developed an ethnographic impulse (Dirks 2001), driven by a desire to construct a kind of scientific picture of cultural, social and economic relations in its territories. Part of this exercise was the production of the Imperial Gazeteer and the voluminous provincial Gazeteer series that detailed the topography and daily patterns of social life in districts across British India. Part of it also was the identification of certain groups (such as the Sikhs, as we have noted) as possessing particular characteristics. And part of it was the decennial census, which, amongst other things, sought to uncover the extent of and relationships between castes and religious communities. In the age of scientific advance and industrial technology, such information would, it was assumed, enable effective rule, and mediate the uncertainties of ‘native society’. As Dirks says:

numbers were elegant, discrete, comparable, meaningful within and across categories and units… . In India, numbers could be readily compared and analysed to suggest reasons for political unrest or disaffection, to demonstrate the ‘moral and material progress’ of India under political rule, to control crime and disorder by numerical demonstration.

(Dirks 2001: 199)

Several authors have demonstrated the difficulties that arose in translating this desired enumeration of society into a representative reality. In particular, the difficulty of identifying and classifying religious and caste affiliations and relations has been documented. Complaints about the difficulty of identifying Hinduism in particular, and the puzzling answers of some who were assumed to be Hindu, are a regular feature of census reports well into the twentieth century. The comment of the Berar Census Superintendant in 1881, E.J. Kitts, is prescient:

When the hill people were pressed for a reply as to what their religion was, sometimes after much parleying, they said either they were Hindoos, or that they knew nothing about religion; that they were arani log, ignorant people. All they knew was, they were Korkus by caste … . Nowhere, as far as I can discover, did a single individual assert that there was such a distinct and separate thing as a Korku religion; he merely answered to the effect ‘I am a Korku, but I do not know what my religion is called. I worship Mahadeo, Hunuman, Byram-Bai, Chand, Suraj and the Bhagwant, who is the author of my religion, call it what you please’.

(Report on the Census of India 1881, volume 1, quoted in Zavos 2000: 74)

Of course, not all interlocutors were as perplexing to the census superintendents as these hill tribes of central India. But the response is nevertheless revealing, as it indicates an epistemological gap between the expectations of the British and some of those they ruled when it came to the idea of religion.

What significance can we attribute to this gap in the context of the construction of religious boundaries? As the scholar Michael Hann comments (2005: 16) about the actual experience of the census for most Indians: ‘after a 10 minute interlude, all would go back to their daily affairs, marking the onset of a ten year intermission.’ ‘Indeed,’ he continues, ‘compared with the big events of Indian colonial history, … the census ranks low in any list of confrontational colonial occurrences.’ There are two particular ways, however, that the census can be said to have had an impact in a manner that is important to us. The first is objectification, as discussed by the anthropologist Bernard Cohn (1987: 224–54). Cohn is precisely interested in that ten-minute interchange, as it invokes reflection for those involved on ‘who they were and what their social and cultural systems were’ (p. 248). Asking the question ‘What is your Religion?’, for example, invokes a reflection upon the category as it is presented to you, and how you relate to it. The idea of ‘Religion’ in such an exchange is rendered as an object apart from the self. In a sense this is just the process indicated by the hill tribes of Berar above, even if they ultimately appear to be uninterested in the category. Cohn argues that the effect of objectification is cumulative and part of a broader set of situations in which social and cultural practices had to be explained (p. 230). Although his argument is more focused on caste than religion, these categories are of course related, and the same process of examination and questioning is apparent, as our example indicates.⁵ In a sense, then, the census represents an important conduit through which that self-conscous notion of religion, noted as associated with different Muslim and Hindu movements in Chapter 8, becomes a feature of Indian social life.

The second point we should draw from the census is not so much to do with the actual act of census-taking; it is more to do with the census as a cultural product. The census as we know it exists as a set of statistics accompanied by commentaries on these statistics. The quotation above is taken from one of these commentaries, the Report on the Census of India 1881, volume 1. This information, statistics and narrative were of course published, and so became a feature of the colonial public sphere. Unsurprisingly, the census was published in English, so its accessibility was limited, but it was certainly open to those emerging professional classes active in establishing the Singh Sabhas. They were largely English educated, and so had access, not so much to the census reports themselves, but to comment and commentary inspired by interactions with these reports. Newspapers and tracts were to become key arenas for debates over the information and interpretations contained in the census. These debates were frequently inspired by the problems of categorization discussed in census reports, and in particular the issue of whether low castes and tribals should be classed as belonging to one or another religion (usually, of course, Hinduism; but discussion of the relationship between Sikhism and caste was also evident in census reports). These discussions invoked debate about just where the limits, or boundaries, lay between different religions.

In addition the census reports placed an obvious emphasis on comparative numbers. Objectified religions were measurable through the census in relation to one another. As the decennial series grew, this placed emphasis, for example, on the success of Christian missionary campaigns in particular regions, and on the comparative birth rates of different religious communities. A pamphlet produced by a prominent and radical Arya Samaji, Swami Shraddhananda, in 1926 demonstrates the point. Shraddhananda’s pamphlet was entitled Hindu Sangathan: Saviour of the Dying Race, and in the preface he recounts an episode that inspired him to write on this subject:

It was in February 1912, while standing in the spacious hall of the Arya Samaj in Calcutta, that a Bengali gentleman … Colonel U. Mukerji … was introduced to me… . Colonel Mukerji read out to me the following extract from ‘Census of India report’ for 1911, vol 1, page 122: ‘In the whole population of India the proportion of Hindus to the total population has fallen in 30 years from 74 to 69 percent …’. Thus did Colonel Mukerji work out the problem: taking 5 per cent to be the actual proportion of the decline of Hindus within thirty years, their present number of 69 per cent will be swallowed up within 14 × 30 = 420 years, if no efforts were made to put a stop to the present decline.

(Shraddhananda 1926: 14–15)

Here, then, we can see the impact of the census in certain public spheres of colonial India. Shradhananda’s concern is for the very existence of ‘the Hindus’, and this concern was very much framed by the comparative development of other religious communities, increasingly seen as competitors in an emerging game of numbers and power.

Debates over numbers in the census, then, provide one very pertinent means of articulating what was becoming, during this period, an increasingly intense focus on the relationship between religions and the boundaries between them, a focus that we have seen emerging in the distinctive assertions of difference represented by the growth of Singh Sabhas. Another way in which these concerns articulated themselves was through what we might call the language of religious rights. In the wake of the rebellion of 1857, the Queen Empress Victoria had issued a Proclamation in which she famously pledged, amongst other things, a form of religious freedom. ‘None’, she pronounced, ‘[shall] be in any wise favoured, none molested and disquieted, by reason of their religious faith or observances, but … all shall enjoy the equal and impartial protection of the law’ (Philips 1962: 11). This statement appears to have been designed primarily to defuse a perceived ‘native volatility’ around the issue of religion, which was understood to be the main reason for the 1857 rebellion.⁶ However, in the late nineteenth century, it came to be used increasingly by middle-class Indians as what one Hindu organization in 1894 called a ‘Charter of Religious Liberty’,⁷ a reference point for the assertion of community rights in the public spaces of colonial India. Nowhere was this more evident than in the rumbling agitations around cow protection.

Cow Protection and Religious Boundaries

The cow is of course considered a sacred animal by many Hindus. This sacredness is multi-faceted, but key elements include the perception of cow products (especially milk) as pure, and therefore appropriate for use in a range of brahminical rituals, and the association in mythical stories with Krishna, the divine cowherd. It is clear from historical evidence that, despite these associations, cows have not always been considered sacred in ways that they are today (Jha 2002). Although there is plenty of evidence to demonstrate that some rulers in precolonial Indian states banned the slaughter of cows for a range of reasons (van der Veer 1994: 90–1), cow protection and inter-community tensions around them really emerge as a major feature of Indian society in the colonial period. In particular, the late nineteenth century sees the emergence of cow protection societies, or Gaurakshini Sabhas. As with other organizations emerging during this period (such as the Singh Sabhas), these were modern organizations run by mostly professional, middle-class individuals. Gaurakshini Sabhas were concerned partly to promote good husbandry techniques amongst the rural population, because, as one English language paper put it in 1889, ‘our animals, as they appear, are wretched looking skeletons fit for shooting’.⁸ At the same time, these organizations were committed to the protection of cows from slaughter, in particular by Muslim butchers, and especially ritual slaughter in relation to Muslim festivals such as Bakr Id.

The language of cow protection disputes that subsequently emerged during this time was the language of rights and religious liberty. On the one hand, the religious liberty of Hindu cow protection societies would be infringed by cow slaughter. On the other, the religious liberty of Muslims would be infringed by the prevention of such slaughter. Although such disagreements were most often expressed through petitions to local authorities to adjudicate on the issue of ‘rights’, the tensions that developed around these disputes did sometimes spill over into violence. These scenarios were, then, powerful arenas for the construction of religious boundaries, and for the iteration of community identities in relation to those boundaries, and it is no surprise that the technologies of the colonial public space were deployed to support these ideas. The printing press was of course key here.

Christopher Pinney (2004) has explored the role played by chromolithographic images in the development of colonial politics. The image shown in Figure 9.1 was produced in 1912 by the Ravi Varma Press, but it is similar to those produced in the 1890s, which are described by Pinney through primary sources from the period. Many of these images, he says, ‘share the common feature of the presence of 84 gods within the body of the cow and a group of figures kneeling beneath the udders. One sees in these images the literal inscription of the sacred onto the body of the disputed sign’ (Pinney 2004: 107–8). Going on to comment specifically on the Ravi Varma image, he explains that:

Figure 9.1 The Cow with 84 Deities. Ravi Varma Press 1912. Reproduced courtesy of Christopher Pinney.

the figure with the drawn sword is clearly labelled … as a representative of the kaliyug, presumably the demon kali. The caption above his head reads he manusyaho! Kaliyugi mansahari jivom ko dekho (‘mankind, look at the meat eating souls of the kaliyug’), and the figure in yellow (labelled as dharmaraj) beseeches him with the words mat maro gay sarv ka jivan hai (‘don’t kill the cow, everyone is dependent on it’).

(Pinney 2004: 107–8)⁹

Here then, we can see the way in which Hindu imagery is brought together powerfully in the chromolithographic image of the cow to represent simultaneously the idea of Hinduism and the universal morality of cow protection. These powerful images achieved greater impact because of other technologies present during this period. For example, the Viceroy in the early 1890s, the Marquess of Lansdowne, commented in 1893 that increased tension over cow protection was caused partly by ‘the greater frequency of communication and the interchange of news by post and telegraph between different parts of the country’ (see Pinney 2004: 106). In this way, the community of Hindus was imagined in ways that have a real collective resonance, reiterating the idea that religious boundaries between Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs were social realities which bound communities together across the vast, multi-dimensional social geographies of India.

Hindi, Urdu and religious Boundaries

Cow protection was one of several ways in which such ideas of community were projected. A further example, briefly explored here, is provided by the so-called Hindi–Urdu controversy. This emerged particularly in United Provinces, what is today Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, during the second half of the nineteenth century, and became more broadly apparent in the twentieth century. The controversy focused on the relative status of Hindi and Urdu as languages.

Linguistically speaking, Hindi and Urdu are very closely related, part of a group of dialects and language registers spoken across northern India with a complex history. Part of this history involves the integration of Persian and Arabic elements, roughly consonant with the political history of the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal rule (i.e. from the thirteenth century onwards). By the nineteenth century English was also an influence on this language group. This entangled history has been characterized by the linguist and historian Christopher King as a spectrum:

at one end of this spectrum comes English and at the other, local dialects. In between we have, first, the classical languages Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian; then, Urdu followed by Hindi; next, Hindustani (in the sense of a language style less Persianized than Urdu, and less Sanskritized than Hindi); and finally, the regional dialects such as Bhojpuri and Awadhi.

(King 1989: 186)

Hindi and Urdu are largely distinguished by the use of a different script (Devanagari and Perso-Arabic respectively) and vocabularies that are influenced, at least in more literary forms, by Sanskrit and Persian/Arabic respectively.

In the late nineteenth century these differences were teased out in order to assert the two registers as entirely separate languages. In a move that will now be familiar to the reader of this chapter, this development was accompanied (if not produced) by the emergence of modern organizations designed to ‘protect’ the language, and accompanying petitions to authorities to ensure official recognition. In effect, these languages came to be seen as symbolic of Hindu and Muslim communities, in a similar manner to that noted around the use and protection of cows.

Religious Boundaries and Communalized Religions

South Asia is a region of the world that has been marked by some fierce incidences of violence related to religious identities. Independence and partition in 1947 was, of course, a tragedy as much as a cause for celebration. As Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal (2004: 164) have very poignantly noted, ‘the dawn of independence came littered with the severed limbs and blooddrenched bodies of innocent men, women and children.’ Since this time, the subcontinent has periodically been the site of violent clashes between religious groups, and indeed the wars that have been fought between India and Pakistan have been suffused with religious ideologies intertwined with the political and economic forces underpinning their conduct.

Very often, these violent encounters are presented as a result of irrevocable differences between these religious groups, honed and reproduced over centuries. Behind such claims of sustained antipathy lies the phenomenon that has become known as ‘communalism’, a term which in the Indian context roughly refers to hostility between identified social groups (especially, but not exclusively, religious groups) on the basis that their interests and/or characteristics are antagonistic. There has been a good deal of debate about when and how communalism emerged in India, but Gyanendra Pandey’s work has been useful in identifying what he calls the journey through which the term ‘communal’ became ‘an adjective derived not from “community” but from “tension between the [religious] communities” ’ (Pandey 1990: 9). He locates this journey very much in the modern period (with the key transitions occurring in the 1920s), when Hindu–Muslim riots became an increasingly regular feature of Indian political life. Pandey notes that for many nationalist activists this trend was symptomatic of the residual power of reactionary forces in Indian society: ‘feudal elements’ collaborating with a colonial state bent on propagating a policy of divide and rule. As Jawaharlal Nehru, who was later to become the first prime minister of India, stated, ‘Communal leaders represent a small upper class reactionary group … these people exploit and take advantage of the religious passions of the masses for their own ends’ (cited in Pandey 1990: 241).

This kind of approach seems to deny agency to all but the smallest ‘reactionary elements’ within society, whilst the large majority of people are projected as simply acting on the basis of primordial religious passions. Looking at the evidence does not support this view. Work by historians such as Nandini Gooptu (2001) and William Gould (2004), for example, shows the vigorous action of manual workers in bazaars, artisans and transport and construction workers, as well as agents of the Congress itself, in the production of communal politics. These scenarios are frequently driven by local contexts in which the language of communalism becomes a useful tool to propagate particular positions of power. This is reminiscent of our analysis of cow protection in the 1890s; indeed, cow protection did emerge as a major element of communal antagonisms as they developed in the twentieth century. The language of religious identity and religious boundaries was a significant element of the cow protection debates. More generally it should be noted that the idea of communal conflict as a conflict between essentialized group identities is largely dependent on the existence of such categories. In this sense, the construction of religious boundaries we have examined through the Anand Marriage Act and other markers is an important prerequisite for the development of religiously based communalism as a feature of modern politics in India.

In fact, the example of Sikh identity with which we began is apposite, as, although it is communal conflict between Hindus and Muslims that has dominated understandings of this concept in modern South Asia, one of the most notorious instances of this phenomenon involved the Sikhs. This was the sequence of events set in train by the Indian Army’s Operation Bluestar in 1984 (Figure 9.2 references these events).¹⁰ During the course of this operation, the Golden Temple in Amritsar was desecrated, and many innocent Sikh pilgrims were killed, caught in the crossfire between the Army and the armed followers of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who had taken refuge in the temple precinct. This event had a deep impact on Sikhs around the world, and some months later the Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards. In the days after the assassination, the capital of India, New Delhi, was the site of a terrible slaughter of Sikhs. For four days in early November Sikhs were targeted, some say systematically and with the collaboration of state institutions, by armed groups who burned their houses and businesses and killed what official estimates put at nearly 3,000 people. During these days, the idea of a distinctive community of Sikhs, argued for so strongly by the Singh Sabhas of the late nineteenth century, and by Khan Singh Nabha in his pamphlet Ham Hindu Nahin, became an explosive idea.

Figure 9.2 Nineteen Eighty Four, a painting by London-born artists, The Singh Twins.Reproduced with permission of The Singh Twins (http://www.singhtwins.co.uk).

Of course, these horrific scenes are not the only ways in which distinctive religious identities have manifested themselves in modern South Asia. The phenomenon of communalism, however, does demonstrate that social processes associated with the construction of religious boundaries can have the most deadly effects, and that alternative histories which put these processes in context may be useful correctives in understanding the continued development of religious traditions in South Asia.

The Religion Twist: Sikhism/Nanak Panth

One way of approaching this challenge of producing ‘alternative histories’ is to consider the idea of Sikhism as a religion. Of course, in one sense this question seems rather absurd. Sikhs across the world have a strong consciousness of religious faith, and to question the status of this consciousness as ‘religious’ may just appear to be an extension of that persecution which was revealed so brutally in 1984. Applying a critical approach to the idea of religion, however, may help us to unpack this as a valuable area of reflection. We began this chapter with an examination of the Anand Marriage Act, which prompted us to ask questions about what it meant to ‘profess the Sikh religion’. An examination of vigorous organizational dynamics in the late nineteenth century enabled us to see that there were indeed some quite dramatic changes to ‘professing the Sikh religion’ advocated by some socially powerful Sikhs during this period. The success of these Sikhs led, in fact, to the Anand Marriage Act and the consequent legal recognition of Sikh identity as distinctly religious. This distinctive identity, which equates a particular reading of Khalsa practice with Sikhism, appeared to marginalize a whole range of associated traditions that Oberoi (1994: 92) brings under the umbrella term ‘Sanatan Sikh’. Interestingly, Ballantyne (2006: 66) notes that, despite what he calls ‘the productivity of Singh Sabha pens and presses and the devoted efforts of the reformers to regularize religious practice in the villages of Punjab’, nevertheless ‘long-established cultural patterns were not immediately displaced nor were heterodox identities entirely erased.’ This revealed itself in marriage ceremonies, for example, where ‘Brahman(s) continued to officiate’ long after the passing of the Anand Marriage Act (Ballantyne 2006: 66). As much as we have argued that it acted as a force in the construction of religious identities, the census also reveals that diverse identities continued to thrive, with Ballantyne (2006: 67) noting that the 1901 census included more than 130 different designations that it categorized as ‘Sikh’.

The diversity that such evidence uncovers demands attention from the scholar of religion. In particular, a twist of our kaleidoscope may enable us to see the relationship between Sikh traditions and religion differently. One twist in Chapter 6 has already encouraged us to view the Sikh lineage in the context of teacher–pupil traditions. Here, we want to deploy one of Roger Ballard’s alternative methods for understanding Punjabi religion (see introduction), panth. Panth is most easily translated as ‘path’, and in the Punjabi context it is particularly interesting because of what is known as the ‘Sant’ or Saint tradition. This tradition was mentioned in Chapter 2 and again in Chapter 6 as referring to groups of devotional poet philosophers operating across the Hindi-speaking areas of north India,¹¹ roughly between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries. Drawing on a range of bhakti devotional and Nath yogi traditions, these inspirational figures are distinctive for their devotion to a single God who was conceived without attributes. This approach is known as nirguna bhakti, contrasted to devotional traditions that are focused on a specific divine figure such as Krishna or Shiva, known as saguna bhakti. The tensions implicit in the idea of devotion to an attributeless God, which were pointed up in Chapter 2, are an indication of the inward-looking, contemplative trajectory of this tradition. It is also distinctive because of the strong representation of low-caste and untouchable figures who were to become leaders of the tradition. Guru Ravidas, for example, was a Chamar, a leatherworker perceived as untouchable; Kabir, as indicated in Chapter 2, was a weaver, another low-caste occupation, and he may well have been a Muslim. The lack of regard for the trappings of caste identity was consonant with the inward focus of the tradition, the search for god in the inner self.

Although he was not of a low caste, Guru Nanak (1469–1539) is very much a part of this tradition. He famously eschewed caste and spoke of equality before God. His approach to the divine was nirguna, as he criticized the idea of image worship, and advocated meditation on the name of god. He preached through poetry/songs that his followers sang together (kirtan). W.H. McLeod (1987: 230) describes the path taken by Nanak:

following some years of itinerant preaching, (Nanak) eventually settled in Kartarpur … . This village evidently became the focus of attention and devotion, earned by the appeal of his teachings and by the sanctity of his own life-style. The master thus attracted disciples. Nanak became Baba Nanak and those who were thus attracted to him became his disciples or sikhs. The Nanak Panth was born.

Over time, this panth was increasingly institutionalized. A succession of gurus provided guidance to the followers of the panth, and various specific acts associated with these gurus may be identified as contributing to the particular processes of institutionalization associated with the Nanak Panth. The third guru Amar Das was significant in that he provided some systematic structure to the Panth through the appointment of territorial deputies or masands. The fifth guru Arjan Dev is credited with compiling the Adi Granth. As we have seen in Chapter 3, this was to become the key text of the Panth, and the acknowledged guru after the demise of the tenth and last living guru, Gobind Singh. The Adi Granth is interesting for the range of verses it contains. Nanak is of course the chief contributor, but, as well as the verses of the succeeding gurus, the Adi Granth contains the verses of other sants such as Kabir and Ravidas, as well as Muslims such as Mardana (see Chapter 6). Gobind Singh, as we have seen, was a distinctive contributor to the institutionalization of the Panth through the creation of the Khalsa.

Such aspects as these, then, have certainly led to the emergence of the tradition as strong and distinctive, but the diversity of contributors to the Adi Granth serves also to reiterate that the Panth is embedded in the broader traditions of the region. Emphasizing its identity as the Nanak Panth, rather than Sikh-ism, the religion, provides an opportunity to recognize this important embedded quality, enabling us to understand the entangled history of this tradition, and its multiple relationships with other ideas and practices developed in the region. This example may help us to see that, rather than distinct religious systems, this idea of a kind of interconnected web of traditions may sometimes provide a useful alternative metaphor for the social realities of Indian life.

Conclusion

In this chapter, then, we have seen how the social dynamics of the late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century period have contributed to the distinctive emergence of religious identities in modern South Asia. It is useful to trace the activities of specific organizations and the movements associated with them in order to see how such identity notions were explicitly articulated, and how significant it was to fashion this articulation through difference. Religion develops as a modern concept defined through difference. A lot of the activities of the organizations we have examined here were strongly focused on elaborating boundary markers that emphasized this sense of difference. Cows, languages, marriage rites. All these were vital ‘lines in the sand’ that dramatically exemplified the difference between one group and another. Communalism emerged in the twentieth century as a kind of hyper-extension of such exemplifications, variously producing, amplifying and providing a language for speaking about the dynamics of power between different groups within society. Our examination of the Nanak Panth demonstrates how different perspectives (and different languages) can help to put these historical processes in context.

Questions for Further Discussion and Research

To what extent was the Anand Marriage Act ‘a watershed in the history of modern Sikhism’?
Is it correct to attribute the ‘construction of religious boundaries’ to the ‘encounter with the West’?
Discuss the impact of the ‘construction of religious boundaries’ on South Asian religious traditions. What limitations do you see in this impact?
‘Nanak Panth’/‘Sikhism’. Which term do you see as more appropriate for describing the traditions associated with Guru Nanak and the lineage of Gurus that followed him?