This chapter focuses on the forty years between the Rebellion of 1857 and the time when the Indian National Congress, founded in 1885, truly began to make an impact on Indian political life. During this period, organizations and individuals committed to social and religious reform became vocal and active throughout India, but especially in the Presidencies (administrative units of the territories under the sovereignty of the British crown), where British power and influence were strongest. Vital concerns included the appropriate response to Christian teaching and to the figure of Jesus; the compatibility of rational thinking with religious faith; the ideal behavior of, and toward, women; and, for Hindus, the appropriateness of image worship and of the institution of caste. Although one finds the seeds of anti-European, anti-British feeling—especially in the language of spiritual battle in certain of Swami Vivekananda’s speeches—by and large this period is one of confidence in British rule among the Anglicized elites, and attention to the challenges to Hindu and Muslim tradition by Christian religious ideas and modern Western rationalist and utilitarian thought. Half the authors included in this chapter wrote in English; at least half were fluent in English, and many spent time in England with a view to bringing back knowledge for the benefit of India. Several felt that East and West had significant resources to offer each other.
The most important reformist institutions in this period were Rammohan Roy’s Brahmo Samaj, which under the subsequent leadership of Debendranath Tagore and Keshab Chandra Sen remained into the 1880s in eastern India the focus of efforts to “purify” Hinduism and recapture a golden age; the Prarthana Samaj in the Poona/Bombay area, founded in 1867 by a circle of social reformers including Mahadev Govind Ranade; Swami Dayanand Sarasvati’s Arya Samaj, established in 1875, also in Bombay; and the various educational and social service institutions initiated from the 1860s to the 1880s by Sayyid Ahmad Khan in Aligarh, Jotirao Phule in Poona, and Ramabai Sarasvati in Bombay and Ahmedabad. Although in the south the main reformist movements—the anti-Brahman and anti-devadāsī movements—did not gain momentum until after 1900, during our period in Madras the Russian Madame Blavatsky and the American Colonel Olcott founded the Theosophical Society (1875), which held reincarnation, karma, and other Hindu or Buddhist conceptions as central doctrines and which harked back to what was seen as a once-golden period of Indian religious history.
The degree to which elements of Christian teaching could or should be incorporated into a reformed Indian religious tradition was debated widely—though, interestingly, not nearly as much among Muslims as among Hindus. There were a few important converts to Christianity, like Michael Madhusudan Datta, Krishna Mohan Banerjee, and Lal Behari De in Bengal, the Sathianandan family in South India, and the Sorabjis and Pandita Ramabai Sarasvati in western India, although it must be noted in Ramabai’s case that her approach to Christianity was decidedly nondenominational. Most Hindus—such as Keshab Chandra Sen, the mystic saint Ramakrishna, and his disciple Swami Vivekananda—were either very open to the example or person of Jesus Christ, even while being put off by the attitudes of Christian missionaries, or, like Swami Dayanand, scornful of Christian teaching. Dayanand in fact was one of the early critics of the Brahmo Samaj, for what he saw as its Christocentric and hence, he alleged, anti-nationalist leanings.
An attraction to rational thought and attempts to make it compatible with religious belief were also common to this period, as is borne out in autobiographical accounts of agonized soul-searching: Debendranath Tagore wonders about faith, reason, and the rightness of his refusal to participate in “idolatrous” rites; Swami Vivekananda feels called to preach Ramakrishna’s message to the world but is held back by the demands of his indigent family; Swami Dayanand cannot accept the Shaiva faith of his father once he sees a mouse crawling over a Shiva linga; and in his search for a rational Islam, Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan encounters opposition from various sections of the Muslim community.
The “woman question”—partly generated by official British and missionary critiques of the so-called backward nature of Hindu and Muslim society—surfaces repeatedly in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Ranade enunciates the vision of religious reform groups, as they sought to end repressive practices based supposedly on scriptural dicta, such as infant marriage and the non-remarriage of widows. Ramabai Saraswati and Tarabai Shinde provide firsthand accounts of the conditions of Indian women—conditions that Ramabai terms “not much better than that of animals in hell”; D. K. Karve and his wife, Anandibai Karve, recount what couples who practiced widow remarriage had to endure in contemporary society; and Amir Ali, while praising the Prophet for his farsighted treatment of women in sixth-century Arabia, challenges his coreligionists to follow the Prophet in his compassionate flexibility and sensitivity to context. But social critique is only half the story in the pre-nationalist period, for both Muslim and Hindu authors fill a popular demand by composing manuals for women that describe the “proper behavior” for the virtuous wife; here we include examples from Ashraf Ali Thanawi, written in Urdu, and from Nagendrabala Dasi, in Bengali.
In the decades under survey here, the links between social reform and political freedom were not, as they would become in the decades to follow, strongly marked; the nature, and the desired pace, of improvements to Hindu and Muslim society were debated largely on their own merits, without the contenders’ berating each other for enabling the continuation of British rule. Should one proceed gradually in matters of social reform? Should caste separations continue? In this chapter we encounter for the first time the views of an influential low-caste thinker, Jotirao Phule, who argues forcefully in support of women’s emancipation and against the privileges of, and depredations committed by, Brahmans. It is no wonder that—in opposition to Swami Vivekananda, who believes the Aryan homeland to be within India—Phule portrays the Aryan hordes as illegitimate outsiders who spoiled by their invasion the social balance then prevalent in India.
Although some of the concerns of the authors in this chapter will have faded by the early twentieth century—social and religious reform as a value is challenged, and elite Hindus and Muslims no longer feel the need to respond intellectually to Christians and Christian teaching—a careful observer of this period will see hints of views that have only grown in importance over time. Keshab Chandra Sen is moved to hope that Hindus and Muslims will be able to come together in a “national Indian church”; Dayanand Saraswati feels compelled to offer stinging critiques of the Quran from a rationalist perspective; and Sir Sayyid, distrusting the newly formed Indian National Congress, asserts his belief that only the British can prevent the two communities from clawing each other’s eyes out. Indeed, looking ahead, we see that the lines of “community” begin to become ever more sharply delineated, as does the gulf created between those who know English well enough to argue in it, and those who do not.
The influence of Rammohan Roy on succeeding generations was kept alive by the Brahmo Samaj. After Roy’s death in England, his close friend Dwarkanath Tagore, one of India’s first entrepreneurial capitalists, gave the little group his financial support, but its numbers dwindled steadily. Meanwhile, Dwarkanath’s eldest son, Debendranath (1817–1905), who played in Rammohan’s yard as a boy in Calcutta, had started a small association of his own, the Tattvabodhini Sabha, that met monthly to discuss religious questions. In 1843 Debendranath merged his group with the remnant of Rammohan Roy’s, preserving the original name but injecting a new spirit into the older organization.
Under Debendranath’s leadership, the Brahmo Samaj attracted numbers of Bengal’s ablest young men, many of them belonging, like Debendranath, to the Brahman caste. Their spiritual center was the worship of the one true God. Like Rammohan Roy, the Brahmos (as they came to be called) opposed both the teachings of Christian missionaries and what they perceived to be the idolatry of popular Hinduism. However, Debendranath did not subscribe to a radical break from orthodox Hindu custom; when his fiery young disciple, Keshab Chandra Sen, split the Samaj by insisting that Brahmos discontinue wearing the sacred thread used by high-caste Hindus, Debendranath withdrew from active leadership and spent months traveling to places of pilgrimage and meditating in the Himalayas. His piety throughout his long life earned him the honorific title of Maharshi, “the great sage.”
In addition to his work in strengthening the Brahmo Samaj, Debendranath continued the campaign, started by Rammohan Roy, to revive what was alleged to be an ancient Hindu monotheism. To find an authoritative scriptural canon for the Samaj, he sent four students to Banaras, each assigned to learn one of the four Vedas. Since the results of their researches were inconclusive, Debendranath came increasingly to rely on personal intuition as his authority; he even composed a creed and a sacred book for the use of Brahmos. Their lofty theism and deeply devotional spirit springs from the same blend of Upanishadic and Christian inspiration that we find in the writings of Rammohan Roy.
Debendranath tells in his autobiography the story of his search for religious certainty. The following passage describes the way he resolved the conflict between the two intellectual traditions in which he had been educated.
As on the one hand there were my Sanskrit studies in the search after truth, so on the other hand there was English. I had read numerous English works on philosophy. But with all this, the sense of emptiness of mind remained just the same, nothing could heal it, my heart was being oppressed by that gloom of sadness and feeling of unrest. Did subjection to nature comprise the whole of man’s existence? … To an atheist this is enough, he does not want anything beyond nature. But how could I rest fully satisfied with this? My endeavor was to obtain God, not through blind faith but by the light of knowledge. And being unsuccessful in this, my mental struggles increased from day to day. Sometimes I thought I could live no longer.
Suddenly, as I thought and thought, a flash as of lightning broke through this darkness of despondency. I saw that knowledge of the material world is born of the senses and the objects of sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste. But together with this knowledge, I am also enabled to know that I am the knower. Simultaneously with the facts of seeing, touching, smelling, and thinking, I also come to know that it is I who see, touch, smell, and think. With the knowledge of objects comes the knowledge of the subject, with the knowledge of the body comes the knowledge of the spirit within. It was after a prolonged search for truth that I found this bit of light, as if a ray of sunshine had fallen on a place full of extreme darkness. …
One day, while thinking of these things I suddenly recalled how, long ago, in my early youth, I had once realized the Infinite as manifested in the infinite heavens. Again I turned my gaze towards this infinite sky, studded with innumerable stars and planets, and saw the eternal God, and felt that this glory was His. He is infinite wisdom. He from whom we have derived this limited knowledge of ours, and this body, its receptacle, is Himself without form. He is without body or senses. He did not shape this universe with his hands. By His will alone did He bring it into existence. He is neither the Kali of Kalighat,1 nor the family Shalgram.2 Thus was laid the axe at the root of idolatry.
[From Debendranath Tagore, The Autobiography of Maharshi Devendranath Tagore, translated from the Bengali by S. Tagore and I. Devi (London: Macmillan, 1914), 47–49, 50–51.]
Debendranath grew up in a family very much involved in the business world, with the accompanying financial responsibilities and, eventually, troubles, for his father died deeply in debt. Debendranath’s own innermost desire, by contrast, was to seek salvation through the traditional path of renunciation. After his father’s death, Debendranath was faced with the choice of performing the customary Hindu funeral rites, in which offerings are made to various gods, or of remaining true to his vow to renounce idolatry. The decision came to him in this dream, the conclusion of which gives us a good insight into Debendranath’s conceptions of religion and filial piety.
Which would triumph, the world or religion?—one could not tell—this was what worried me. My constant prayer to God was “Vouchsafe strength unto my weak heart, be Thou my refuge.” All these anxieties and troubles would not let me sleep at night, my head felt dazed on the pillow. I would now doze off and again wake up. It was as if I was sleeping on the borderland between waking and sleeping. At such a time some one came to me in the dark and said “Get up,” and I at once sat up. He said “Get out of bed” and I got up; he said “follow me” and I followed. He went down the steps leading out of the inner apartments, I did the same and came out into the courtyard with him. We stood before the front door. The durwans3 were sleeping. My guide touched the door, and the two wings flew open at once. I went out with him into the street in front of the house. He seemed to be a shadowlike form. I could not see him clearly, but felt myself constrained to do immediately whatever he bade me. From thence he mounted upwards to the sky, I also followed him. … In the course of my journey across this plain I entered one of its cities. All the houses and all the streets were of white marble, not a single soul was to be seen in the clean and bright and polished streets. No noise was to be heard, everything was calm and peaceful. My guide entered a house by the road and went up to the second floor, I also went with him. I found myself in a spacious room, in which there were a table and some chairs of white marble. He told me to sit down, and I sat down in one of the chairs. The phantom then vanished. Nobody else was there. I sat silent in that silent room; shortly afterwards the curtain of one of the doors in front of the room was drawn aside and my mother appeared. Her hair was down, just as I had seen it on the day of her death. When she died, I never thought that she was dead. Even when I came back from the burning ground after performing her funeral ceremonies, I could not believe that she was dead. I felt sure that she was still alive. Now I saw that living mother of mine before me. She said “I wanted to see thee, so I sent for thee. Hast thou really become one who has known Brahma? Sanctified is the family, fulfilled is the mother’s desire.” On seeing her, and hearing these sweet words of hers my slumber gave way before a flood of joy. I found myself still tossing on my bed.
[From Debendranath Tagore, Autobiography, 115–116, 117–118.]
After Keshab Chandra Sen had seceded from the Samaj, taking many Brahmos with him, Debendranath pronounced in 1867 his views on “gradualism” in matters of social reform.
We are worshipers of Brahma, the Supreme Being. In this we are at one with Orthodox Hinduism, for all our shastras declare with one voice the supremacy of the worship of Brahma, enjoining image worship for the help of those who are incapable of grasping the highest Truth.
Our first point of distinction is in the positive aspect of our creed wherein worship is defined as consisting in “Loving Him and doing the works He loveth”—this at once differentiates us from all religions and creeds which postulate a special or verbal revelation or wherein definite forms, rites, or ceremonials are deemed essential one way or the other.
The negative aspect of our creed which prohibits the worship of any created being or thing as the Creator further distinguishes us from all who are addicted to the worship of avatars or incarnations or who believe in the necessity of mediators, symbols, or idols of any description.
We base our faith on the fundamental truths of religion, attested by reason and conscience, and refuse to permit man, book, or image to stand in the way of the direct communion of our soul with the Supreme Spirit.
This message of the Brāhmo Samāj in the abstract does not materially differ from the doctrines of the pure theistic bodies all the world over. Viewed historically and socially, however, the Brāhmo Samāj has the further distinction of being the bearer of this message to the Hindu people. This was the idea of its founder Ram Mohun Roy, this points to the duty incumbent upon all Brahmos of today, and will serve as the guiding principle in the selection of texts, forms, and ceremonials as aids to the religious life.
We are in and of the great Hindu community and it devolves upon us by example and precept to hold up as a beacon the highest truths of the Hindu shastras. In their light must we purify our heritage of customs, usages, rites, and ceremonies and adapt them to the needs of our conscience and our community. But we must beware of proceeding too fast in matters of social change, lest we be separated from the greater body whom we would guide and uplift.
While we should on no account allow any consideration of country, caste, or kinship to prevent our actions being consistent with our faith, we must make every allowance for, and abstain from, persecuting or alienating those who think differently from us. Why should we needlessly wound the feelings of our parents and elders by desecrating an image which they regard with the highest reverence, when all that our conscience can demand of us is to refrain from its adoration?
The steering of this middle course is by no means an easy task, but during my long experience I have been led greatly to hope for a brighter future by the sympathetic response of our orthodox brethren to the ideal held up before them. The amount of conformity nowadays expected by even the most orthodox, demands so little of us that a little tact and common sense will in most cases be sufficient to obviate all friction.
Nevertheless, great as are the claims of our land and our people, we must never forget that we are Brahmos first, and Indians or Hindus afterwards. We must on no account depart from our vow of renouncing the worship of images and incarnations, which is of the essence of our religion. It is a sound policy on our part to sink our minor differences, but on matters of principle no compromise is possible. Our Motherland is dear to us, but Religion is dearer, Brahma is dearest of all, dearer than son, dearer than riches, supreme over everything else.
[From Debendranath Tagore, Autobiography, 152–153.]
The stormy career of Keshab Chandra Sen (Anglicized in his own time as Keshub Chunder Sen) (1838–1884) encompassed both the peak and the later decline of the influence of the Brahmo Samaj on Indian intellectual life. With his great energy and oratorical skill, he brought to fulfillment the openness to Christian inspiration of Rammohan Roy and the intuitionist doctrine of Debendranath Tagore. Yet his very enthusiasm was his undoing, for by the time of his death he had caused the Samaj to shatter into three separate organizations and had irrevocably damaged its prestige.
Keshab joined the Samaj when he was nineteen, and within a short time had become Debendranath’s most beloved disciple. His fiery oratory in fluent English stirred educated audiences in many parts of India, especially in Bombay, and branches of the Samaj sprang up in cities beyond the borders of Bengal. In 1860 he published his first Brahmo tract, Young Bengal: This Is For You, which argued for the necessity of social reform (as against the conservative orthodox) through a Brahmo-derived religious sensibility (as against the Vidyasagar-inspired atheists).
Keshab’s zeal for reform carried him far beyond the moderate position taken by Debendranath. When the two reformers finally parted company in 1865 over the wearing of the sacred thread, Keshab set up an independent organization that he named the Brahmo Samaj of India. In 1878 a more dangerous fissure opened within his own movement. Despite his advocacy of a minimum age for Brahmo marriages, and his opposition to idolatry, he married his thirteen-year-old daughter to a Hindu prince, feeling that such was the will of God. Scandalized by this betrayal of his previous principles, most of his followers abandoned him and set up a third group, the Sadharan (General) Brahmo Samaj.
Toward the end of his life, Keshab experimented with synthesizing elements from the world’s major religions. He borrowed Hindu devotional practices, emphasizing the blissful street-singing behavior of the Vaishnava saint Chaitanya, and was influenced by his meeting with Ramakrishna in 1875 to draw inspiration from “the motherhood of God.” From this year onward he also commissioned his core followers to steep themselves in the study of the various religious traditions of the world; in a few cases—Girish Chandra Sen’s thirty works on Islam and Aghore Nath Gupta’s life of the Buddha—their scholarship produced fair assessments and expositions unprecedented for their time.
In addition to Hindu resources, Keshab mined Christian teachings and practices. The New Dispensation (Nava Vidhan) that he proclaimed in 1879 appropriated much from the Christian church it claimed to supplant, including a direct revelation from God, apostles, missionaries, monastic orders, and the doctrines of sin, salvation, and the divinity of Christ. Keshab never wanted to become a Christian, but rather sought Indian expressions for his own devotion to Jesus. To his detractors, his near self-deification at the end of his life, placing himself in a direct line from Moses and Jesus, was the exact opposite of the original vision of the Brahmo Samaj under Debendranath, for whom God was known through imageless prayer and intuition, not the ecstatic teachings of a God-man.
His praise for British rule and disdain for the Indian freedom movement mark Keshab as a man of his era (he died one year before the formation of the Indian National Congress); his New Dispensation, which had cohered largely through his charismatic force of character, collapsed shortly after his death. Nevertheless, he has had a more long-lasting legacy in other respects. He was a popular spokesman for Hindu reform in England in 1870, twenty years before Swami Vivekananda went to the West with a similar message; though a non-Christian, he was a pioneer in the formulation of an indigenous Christianity; and his rational call for a universal religion based on a unification between East and West, science and faith, and for the end to sectarian conflict, foreshadowed similar arguments by Vivekananda, Tagore, and others in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Keshab was only voicing the sentiments of his time when he declared British rule providential for India. His conviction that India had a reciprocal contribution to make to England was a relatively new idea, and one that was to take on increasing importance in the nationalist era. This speech was delivered in Calcutta in 1877, shortly after Queen Victoria had assumed the title of Empress of India.
Loyalty shuns an impersonal abstraction. It demands a person, and that person is the sovereign, or the head of the state, in whom law and constitutionalism are visibly typified and represented. We are right then if our loyalty means not only respect for law and the Parliament, but personal attachment to Victoria, Queen of England and Empress of India. [Applause.] What makes loyalty so enthusiastic is not, however, the presence of purely secular feelings, but of a strong religious sentiment. By loyalty I mean faith in Providence. … Do you not believe that there is God in history? Do you not recognize the finger of special providence in the progress of nations? Assuredly the record of British rule in India is not a chapter of profane history, but of ecclesiastical history. [Cheers.] … You are bound to be loyal to the British government, that came to your rescue, as God’s ambassador, when your country was sunk in ignorance and superstition and hopeless jejuneness, and has since lifted you to your present high position. This work is not of man, but of God, and He has done it, and is doing it, through the British nation. As His chosen instruments, then, honor your sovereign and the entire ruling body with fervent loyalty. The more loyal we are, the more we shall advance with the aid of our rulers in the path of moral, social, and political reformation. India in her present fallen condition seems destined to sit at the feet of England for many long years, to learn Western art and science. And, on the other hand, behold England sits at the feet of hoary-headed India to study the ancient literature of this country. [Applause.] All Europe seems to be turning her attention in these days towards Indian antiquities, to gather the priceless treasures which lie buried in the literature of Vedism and Buddhism. Thus while we learn modern science from England, England learns ancient wisdom from India. Gentlemen, in the advent of the English nation in India we see a reunion of parted cousins, the descendants of two different families of the ancient Aryan race. Here they have met together, under an overruling Providence, to serve most important purposes in the Divine economy. The mutual intercourse between England and India, political as well as social, is destined to promote the true interests and lasting glory of both nations.
[From “Philosophy and Madness in Religion,” in Keshub Chunder Sen’s Lectures in India (Calcutta: Brahmo Tract Society, 1883), 250–252.]
While Rammohan Roy welcomed only the moral influence of Jesus, Keshab embraced Christ as the fulfillment of India’s devotional striving. He also took Roy’s assertion that Jesus was an Asian by birth and used it as an argument for better understanding between the rulers and the ruled in India. The following lecture, “Jesus Christ: Europe and Asia,” was delivered in 1866.
Europeans and natives are both the children of God, and the ties of brotherhood should bind them together. Extend, then, to us, O ye Europeans in India! the right hand of fellowship, to which we are fairly entitled. If, however, our Christian friends persist in traducing our nationality and national character, and in distrusting and hating Orientalism, let me assure them that I do not in the least feel dishonored by such imputations. On the contrary, I rejoice, yea, I am proud, that I am an Asiatic. And was not Jesus Christ an Asiatic? [Deafening applause.] Yes, and his disciples were Asiatics, and all the agencies primarily employed for the propagation of the Gospel were Asiatic. In fact, Christianity was founded and developed by Asiatics, and in Asia. When I reflect on this, my love for Jesus becomes a hundredfold intensified; I feel him nearer my heart, and deeper in my national sympathies. Why should I then feel ashamed to acknowledge that nationality which he acknowledged? Shall I not rather say he is more congenial and akin to my Oriental nature, more agreeable to my Oriental habits of thought and feeling? And is it not true that an Asiatic can read the imageries and allegories of the Gospel, and its descriptions of natural sceneries, of customs, and manners, with greater interest, and a fuller perception of their force and beauty, than Europeans? [Cheers.] In Christ we see not only the exaltedness of humanity, but also the grandeur of which Asiatic nature is susceptible. To us Asiatics, therefore, Christ is doubly interesting, and his religion is entitled to our peculiar regard as an altogether Oriental affair. The more this great fact is pondered, the less I hope will be the antipathy and hatred of European Christians against Oriental nationalities, and the greater the interest of the Asiatics in the teachings of Christ. And thus in Christ, Europe and Asia, the East and the West, may learn to find harmony and unity. [Deafening applause.]
[From Keshub Chunder Sen’s Lectures in India, 25–26.]
Keshab saw in the simple theism of the Brahmo Samaj a platform on which the major religious traditions of India—Hindu, Muslim, Christian—could unite. The resulting faith, he thought, would not only sustain the future church of India, but also qualify India to take part in a worldwide religious brotherhood. Keshab’s expectation, expressed here in an address from 1869, that Hindus and Muslims would willingly merge into this national church, is but one more example of his supreme optimism.
I have briefly described the general features of the church of the future—its worship, creed, and gospel. Before I conclude I must say a few words with special reference to this country. There are some among us who denounce Mahomedanism as wholly false, while others contend that Hinduism is altogether false. Such opinions are far from being correct; they only indicate the spirit of sectarian antipathy. Do you think that millions of men would to this day attach themselves so devotedly to these systems of faith unless there was something really valuable and true in them? This cannot be. There is, no doubt, in each of these creeds, much to excite to ridicule, and perhaps indignation—a large amount of superstition, prejudice, and even corruption. But I must emphatically say it is wrong to set down Hinduism or Mahomedanism as nothing but a mass of lies and abominations, and worthy of being trampled under foot. Proscribe and eliminate all that is false therein: there remains a residue of truth and purity which you are bound to honor. … The signs of the times already indicate this process of purification and development; and I believe this process will gradually bring Hinduism and Mahomedanism, hitherto so hostile to each other, into closer union, till the two ultimately harmonize to form the future church of India. …
As regards Christianity and its relation to the future church of India, I have no doubt in my mind that it will exercise great influence on the growth and formation of that church. The spirit of Christianity has already pervaded the whole atmosphere of Indian society, and we breathe, think, feel, and move in a Christian atmosphere. …
But the future church of India must be thoroughly national; it must be an essentially Indian church. The future religion of the world I have described will be the common religion of all nations, but in each nation it will have an indigenous growth, and assume a distinctive and peculiar character. All mankind will unite in a universal church; at the same time, it will be adapted to the peculiar circumstances of each nation, and assume a national form. No country will borrow or mechanically imitate the religion of another country; but from the depths of the life of each nation its future church will naturally grow up. And shall not India have its own national church?
[From “The Future Church,” in Keshub Chunder Sen’s Lectures in India, 120–123.]
Keshab’s appropriation of Christian elements extended beyond ideas, to include ritual. In recounting an event that occurred in 1881, in Keshab’s own home, The New Dispensation newspaper describes the following Brahmo-ized eucharist.
Jesus! Is the Sacramental rite meant only for those nations that are in the habit of taking bread and wine? Are the Hindus excluded from partaking of the holy eucharist? Wilt thou cut us off because we are rice-eaters and teetotalers? That cannot be. Spirit of Jesus! That cannot be. Both unto Europe and Asia thou hast said,—eat my flesh and drink my blood. Therefore the Hindu shall eat thy flesh in rice and drink thy blood in pure water, so that the scripture might be fulfilled in this land.
On Sunday the 6th March, the ceremony of adapting the sacrament to Hindu life was performed with due solemnity in accordance with the principle above set forth. The Hindu apostles of Christ gathered after prayer in the dinner-hall, and sat upon the floor upon bare ground. Upon a silver plate was Rice, and in a small goblet was Water, and there were flowers and leaves around both.
[From Keshub Chunder Sen: A Selection, ed. David C. Scott (Bangalore: Christian Literature Society, 1979), 334–335.]
In 1875 the Arya Samaj (literally, “Society of the Noble”) was established in Bombay. It became a major force for religious and social reform in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the Hindi-speaking areas of north India. Arya Samajists played a leading role in the nationalist movement, but were also prominent in business, publishing, and education. Today they manage the largest nongovernmental education system in India, the D. A. V. (Dayanand Anglo Vedic) schools.
The founder of the Arya Samaj was born to a Brahman family in Gujarat in 1824. Developing a strong aversion to life in the world, as well as to the Shiva-worship of his father, he ran away from home as a young man to become a renouncer, and took the name Dayanand Saraswati. His Arya Samaj proved a substantial success, especially in Punjab, attracting middle-ranking caste and social groups just moving into prominence under colonial auspices. To promulgate his revivalist views, Dayanand wrote and published prolifically, using his own printing press to disseminate his work.
Dayanand was a stern critic. He rejected polytheism and mocked the worship of idols. He was also a social reformer, condemning child marriage and sati, and advocating education for girls as well as boys. In principle, Dayanand endorsed caste, but he radically reinterpreted it, advocating a practice in which caste identity would be determined by the qualities of each individual. (Not surprisingly, he left the actual workings of such a system very murky.) Dayanand mercilessly attacked contemporary Hinduism, urging the revival of what he considered to be the ancient religion of the Vedas. He wrote commentaries on the oldest Vedic literature to try to show in them an exalted spiritual monotheism, making the Vedas available to a wide audience in a way that was unprecedented. He died in 1883.
In this autobiographical account from 1879, Dayanand traces his doubts about image worship to an incident in his childhood. The image of Shiva over which he saw mice climbing is the aniconic Shiva-linga, a tall shaft rounded at the top.
When the night of Shiva4 came, having heard the praises in the sermon on the thirteenth day, my father decided that we would keep the night of Shiva vow. Though my mother forbade it and said, “The vow cannot be kept by him,” even so my father had me start the vow. … We did the worship for the first watch of the night, and having done the worship for the second watch, the priests went outside and slept.
I remembered hearing from the start that there would be no benefit from the night of Shiva fast if one slept. So I splashed drops of water on my eyes and stayed awake, but my father fell asleep. Then I wondered if this was the Great God of whom I had heard in the sermons, or something else, because this god seemed like a human being. In sermons a kind of Great God is spoken of who rides an ox, and wanders around, and eats and drinks, and carries a trident in his hand, and beats a drum, and gives out boons and curses, and is the lord of Mount Kailasa,5 and so forth. Then I woke up my father and I asked him, “Is this the Great God of the sermons or someone else?” And my father said, “Why do you ask?” So I said, “The Great God of the sermons is conscious. Why would he let mice climb on him? But there are mice crawling over this.” My father replied, “An image has been made of the Great God who lives on Kailasa, and he has been invoked and is worshiped here. Now in this dark age, there is no direct vision of this Shiva. So the Great God of Kailasa is pleased with the worship of those who make images of him out of stone and other materials and who are devoted to him.” Listening to this there was a doubt in my mind, “There must be some mixup here.”
[From Dayanand Saraswati, Atma-Katha (Ajmer: Vaidik Pustakalay, 1983), 7–8.6]
Dayanand’s most popular book is called Satyarth Prakash (“truth-seeking light”), originally published in 1875. In its first ten chapters, Dayanand sets forth his own views; in the eleventh chapter he blames India’s benighted state on its priests, who abuse their exalted social status and swindle the poor; and in the final four chapters he criticizes the religions of others—Hinduism, non-Hindu religions of India, Christianity, and Islam. The three passages that follow are all from the fourteenth chapter. Here Dayanand focuses not on the contemporary Muslim community but on the Islamic scripture. Our first passage is typical of the style throughout the chapter, with Dayanand quoting passages from the Quran and then condemning them as absurd, often on the basis of a literalist reading. The Zaid mentioned in the second passage was the adopted son of Muhammad. Here Allah permits the Prophet to marry Zaid’s ex-wife. Finally, though Dayanand’s criticism of Islam (and other religions) is strong, in the third passage below he insists that his goal is not division, but a unity born of separating true from false.
“They are the people upon whose hearts, and ears, and eyes Allah has put a seal, but they are oblivious. … And they will be given everything, on the basis of what they did, and no injustice will be done to them.” Quran 16.108, 111.
Commentary: When God himself has placed the seal, then those poor people are killed without having committed any crime. Because they are bound. How great a crime is this? And then it is said that just as someone has done, even so he will be rewarded, neither less nor more. Yet he didn’t even commit the sin independently, rather God made him do it. Once again, it is not his crime, so he should not get the result of it. It would be proper for God to get the result.
And if everything will be given, then of what does forgiveness consist? And when there is forgiveness, then justice disappears. Such muddled justice could never be the Lord’s. But it could be that of an unintelligent child.
“And We have made hell for the unbelievers, a place of confinement. … And We will get out the book on the day of judgment, the book of deeds which we have hung upon the neck of each person, and open it and see. … And We have destroyed many peoples since Noah.” Quran 17.8, 13, 17.
Commentary: If unbelievers are just those who do not have faith in the God, seventh heaven, prayer, and so forth of the Quran and the Quran’s prophet, and hell is for only them, then it is definite that this is simply a matter of favoritism. Because can it ever be that the believers in the Quran are all good, and the believers in other things are all evil?
The idea of the book of deeds on each person’s neck is very childish. We don’t see even one on anyone’s neck. If its purpose is to give the fruits of one’s deeds, then what kind of game is being played when people’s hearts, eyes, and so forth are sealed and sins are forgiven? … When God Himself destroyed the souls of those long bound who did no crime, He became unjust. When He is unjust, He cannot be God.
“When Zaid had settled the matter, then We gave her to you to marry, so there would be no restriction on believers if the wives of adopted sons were married, once the matter was settled. And this is a command issued by God. … No restriction can be put on the prophet because of this.” Quran 33.37, 38.
Commentary:… From this it is proven that Muhammad Sahib was a big sensualist. If not, then why did he make his adopted son’s wife, who was his son’s wife, his own wife? And then the person who does this sort of thing makes even God prejudiced in his favor and establishes injustice as justice. Among humans, even someone who lives in the jungle avoids the wife of his son. …
Who could be so blind of heart as to believe that this Quran was written by the Lord, and the Muhammad Sahib was a prophet, and the lord spoken of by the Quran is the Highest Lord? It is astonishing that the Arabs and other people should believe in this creed which is mixed up with things like this that are opposed to religion and devoid of reason.
…
Now, having written about the Quran, I lay before the intelligent the question: How is this book? If you ask me, this book was made neither by the Lord nor by a learned person, and it cannot be called a book of knowledge.
Only a few of its faults have been presented, so that people will not be hoodwinked and waste their lives. Learned and intelligent people accept the truths of other religions without obstinacy or prejudice, just as I have accepted whatever little is true in the Quran because it is consistent with books of knowledge such as the Vedas. Excluding that, whatever is in the Quran spreads a net of ignorance and makes people into animals, it breaks the peace and raises a ruckus, and it is a subject that spreads rebellion and promotes mutual misery. And the Quran is a veritable storehouse of redundancy.
May the Highest Spirit show mercy to people so that all may have the inclination to promote love for all, mutual concord, and the happiness of one with another. If all learned people would publish the faults of their own religion and others’ without prejudice as I have done, then what would be the difficulty in everyone giving up their mutual opposition, agreeing and blissfully uniting in one religion, and successfully attaining the truth?
[From D. Saraswati, Satyartha-Prakasah, 2nd ed., ed. Y. Mimansak (Bahalgarh, Sonipat: Ram Lal Kapoor Trust, 1975), 899–900, 918–920, and 947. Trans. J. Llewellyn.]
Dayanand loved to engage in religious debates, usually with orthodox Hindus, but occasionally with representatives of other faiths. The following summary of his 1877 debate with a Christian minister gives a good picture of his aggressively critical attitude.
As time was short, after some talk it was decided that the question “What is salvation and how to attain it,” should be discussed. …
Rev. Scott said:
“Salvation does not mean deliverance from woes. Salvation only means to be saved from sins and to obtain Heaven. God had created Adam pure, but he was misled by Satan and committed sin which made all his descendants sinful.
Man commits sin of his own accord as the clock works by itself, that is to say, one cannot avoid committing sin by one’s own effort and so cannot get salvation. One can obtain salvation only by believing in Christ. Wherever Christianity spreads, people are saved from sin. I have attained salvation by believing in Christ.” …
Swamiji replied that:
“Suffering is the necessary result of sin; whoever avoids sin will be saved from suffering. The Christians believe God to be powerful; but to believe that Satan misled Adam to commit sin is to believe that God is not All powerful; for, if God had been All powerful, Satan could not have misled Adam, who had been created pure by God. No sensible man can believe that Adam committed sin and all his descendants became sinful. He alone undergoes suffering who commits sin; no one else. You say that Satan misleads everyone, I therefore ask you who misled Satan. … The only one who could have done it was God. In that case when God himself misleads and gets others to commit sin, then how can He save people from sin? … Again, when God’s only son suffered crucifixion for the sins of all people, then the people need not be afraid of being punished for their sins and they can go on committing sins with impunity. The illustration of the clock given by the Padree sahib is also inappropriate. “The clock works only as its maker has given it the power to do. The clock cannot alter it. Then again how can you continue to live in Paradise?”
[From Har Bilas Sarda, Life of Dayanand Saraswati (Ajmer: Vedic Yantralaya, 1946), 170–172.]
Even though he disliked Christianity, Swami Dayanand was impressed by the moral qualities of India’s European rulers—but warned of the folly of aping them superficially.
Q.—We see that the Europeans have made so much progress because they wear round-toed shoes, coats, pants etc. and eat in hotels, food cooked by any person.
A.—You are mistaken. Moslems and low caste people eat food cooked by any one, yet they have made no progress. The advancement of the Europeans is due to the following points; absence of early marriage; good education of boys and girls; marriage according to the choice of the married couple; no preaching by undesirable persons; they educate themselves and do not fall into the snares of anybody; whatever they do is done with mutual consultation; they devote their body, soul and wealth to the well-being of their country; they are not indolent and work very hard; they allow into their offices and courts only English shoes and not Indian shoes. This one point is sufficient to show how patriotic they are—they respect the shoes of their country more than they respect the men of other countries. These Europeans have come into this country for a little more than a hundred years, yet wear coarse clothes as they do in their own country. They have not forsaken the way of their country. Many of you have copied their ways. This shows that they are wise and you are foolish. Copying is not a sign of wisdom. These Europeans are very dutiful and well disciplined. They always help the trade of their country. These qualifications and deeds have contributed to their advancement, and not round-toed shoes, coat, pants; eating in hotels, or other evils.
[From D. Saraswati, The Light of Truth, trans. G. Prasad Upadhyaya (Allahabad: Kala Press, 1960), 549–550.]
Despite the fact that the Arya, Brahmo, and Prarthana Samaj movements appear to have been shaped by a similar reformist impulse, in their own time they were fiercely critical of one another.
1. … The Brāhma Samāja and Prārthanā Samāja are … not good in all respects. How can the principles of these who are unaware of the Vedic lore be all good? They saved many persons from the clutches of Christianity, they removed idolatry also to a certain extent, and they protected people from the snares of certain spurious scriptures. These are all good points. But they are lacking in patriotism. They have borrowed much from Christianity in their way of living. They have also changed the rules of marriage etc.
2. Instead of praising their country and glorifying their ancestors, they speak ill of them. In their lectures they eulogize Christians and Englishmen. They do not even mention the names of old sages, Brahmā etc. …
3. Not only do they not respect the Vedas etc. but they do not desist from condemning them. The books of the Brāhma Samāja include among the saints Christ, Moses, Mohammad, Nānaka and Chaitanyā. They do not mention even the name of ṛshis and sages of ancient India. … The Brāhma Samājīsts and Prārthanā Samājīsts call themselves educated, though they have no knowledge of the literature of their own country, i.e., Sanskrita. No permanent sort of reform is expected from those who, in their pride for English education, are ready to launch a new religion.
4. They observe no restrictions on interdining with Englishmen, Moslems and low class people. They are perhaps under the impression that they and their country would be regenerated simply by removing the restriction of food and caste.
[From D. Saraswati, The Light of Truth, 548–549.]
Shri Ramakrishna (1836–1886) was among the most saintly of the many religious leaders to whom modern India has given birth. Like Debendranath and Keshab, he was a son of Bengal; unlike them, he was a child of the soil and never lost his rustic simplicity. Like Dayanand, he was taken in his time to personify the rebirth of an ancient tradition in the midst of increasing Westernization and modernization. But, unlike the aggressive Dayanand, Ramakrishna practiced a gentle faith of selfless devotion to the divine, whom he loved best as Kali, the Divine Mother, popularized in Ramprasad’s eighteenth-century songs.
At the age of sixteen he was taken by his older brother to Calcutta, where they both were installed as priests of a new temple at Dakshineswar on the Hooghly River, a branch of the Ganges. For the next twelve years Ramakrishna put himself through every known type of spiritual discipline in a determined search for God. Finally his efforts were rewarded with a series of mystical experiences during which he saw God in a variety of manifestations—as the Divine Mother, Sītā, Rāma, Krishna, Muhammad, and Jesus—and worshiped God in the manner of Muslims, Jains, and Buddhists—in each suiting his dress, food, and meditation to the particular religious tradition concerned. It was this serial religious experimentation that may have inspired Keshab Chandra Sen’s interreligious quests.
Through Keshab, Ramakrishna began to attract disciples from the Westernized middle class of Calcutta. His simplicity and purity made a profound impression on these young men, and he taught them to draw strength from the living traditions of popular Hinduism. Ramakrishna died painfully of throat cancer at the age of fifty. He interpreted his agony and death as the will of the Divine Mother; some of his more Christian-influenced disciples read the suffering as his willing assumption of their karma.
This famous event in Ramakrishna’s life demonstrates his tenacity and willingness to lose all for the sake of directly experiencing the divine. It is narrated by Swami Saradananda, a direct disciple, and refers approximately to the year 1856.
We were told by the Master himself that one day at that time, he sang for the Divine Mother to hear, and then prayed to Her, weeping in his eagerness to have the vision, “Dost Thou not, O Mother, hear even a little of the many prayers I address to Thee? Thou didst show Thyself to Ramprasad. Why shouldst Thou not then reveal Thyself to me?”
He used to say, “There was then an intolerable anguish in my heart because I could not have her vision. Just as a man wrings a towel forcibly to squeeze out all the water from it, I felt as if somebody caught hold of my heart and mind and was wringing them likewise. Greatly afflicted with the thought that I might never have Mother’s vision, I was in great agony. I thought that there was no use in living such a life. My eyes suddenly fell upon the sword that was there in the Mother’s temple. I made up my mind to put an end to my life with it that very moment. Like one mad, I ran and caught hold of it, when suddenly I had the wonderful vision of the Mother, and fell down unconscious. I did not know what happened then in the external world—how that day and the next slipped away. But, in my heart of hearts, there was flowing a current of intense bliss, never experienced before, and I had the immediate knowledge of the Light that is Mother.”
[From Swami Saradananda, Ramakrishna, The Great Master, trans. Swami Jagadananda (Mylapore: Sri Ramakrishna Math, 1952), 162–163.]
Unlike Rammohan Roy or Keshab Chandra Sen, who made detailed studies of Christian teaching, Ramakrishna encountered Jesus experientially. The following incident from his early period of religious practice has led his followers to insist not only that Ramakrishna understood Jesus but also that Ramakrishna was in fact one with him. The setting is the garden house of a Bengali Christian friend in Calcutta.
There were some good pictures hanging on the walls of that room. One of those pictures was that of the child Jesus in his mother’s lap. The Master used to say that he sat one day in that parlour and was looking intently at that picture and thinking of the extraordinary life of Jesus, when he felt that the picture came to life, and that effulgent rays of light, coming out from the bodies of the mother and the Child, entered into his heart and changed radically all the ideas of his mind! On finding that all the inborn Hindu impressions were disappearing into a secluded corner of his mind and that different ones were arising, he tried in various ways to control himself and prayed earnestly to the Divine Mother, “What strange changes art Thou bringing about in me, Mother?” But nothing availed. Rising with a great force, the waves of those impressions completely submerged the Hindu ideas in his mind. His love and devotion to the Devas and Devis vanished, and in their stead, a great faith in, and reverence for Jesus and his religion occupied his mind. … The Master came back to Dakshineswar temple and remained constantly absorbed in the meditation of those inner happenings. He forgot altogether to go to the temple of the Divine Mother and pay obeisance to Her. The waves of those ideas had a mastery of his mind in that manner for three days. At last, when the third day was about to close, the Master saw, while walking under the Panchavati,7 that a marvelous god-man of very fair complexion was coming towards him, looking steadfastly at him. As soon as the Master saw that person, he knew that he was a foreigner. He saw that his long eyes gave a wonderful beauty to his face, and that the tip of his nose, though a little flat, did not at all impair that beauty. The master was charmed to see the extraordinary divine expression of that handsome face, and wondered who he was. Very soon the person approached him, and thereupon from the depth of the Master’s pure heart came out with a ringing sound, the words, “Jesus the Christ! the great Yogi, the loving Son of God, one with the Father, who gave his heart’s blood and put up with endless tortures in order to deliver man from sorrow and misery!” Jesus, the god-man, then embraced the Master and disappeared into his body and the Master entered into ecstasy, lost normal consciousness and remained identified for some time with the omnipresent Brahman with attributes. Having attained the vision of Jesus thus, the Master became free from the slightest doubt about Christ’s having been an incarnation of God.
[From Sri Ramakrishna, The Great Master, 338–339.]
Ramakrishna, a married man, could be consistent in his denial of women and gold because he and his wife, Sharada Devi (the Holy Mother) never consummated their marriage; they lived together on what was apparently an altogether different, spiritual plane. The following memory, of 1873, is from Swami Saradananda. “Samadhi” is a bliss-filled state of union with the divine.
Ordained by the Divine Mother, an extraordinary desire arose in his heart now, which he carried out into practice without the slightest hesitation. We shall now tell the reader in a connected way what we heard about it now and then from the Master. …
It was the day of a special festival at the Dakshineswar temple. The Master had made special preparations on that day with a view to worshipping the Mother of the universe. The preparations, however, had not been made in the temple, but, privately, in his own room at his desire. … It was 9 p.m. when all the preparations for the mystery-worship of the Devi were completed. In the meantime, the Master had sent word to the Holy Mother to be present during the worship. She came to the room and the Master started the worship.
The articles of worship were purified by the Mantas and all the rites preliminary to the worship were finished. The Master beckoned to the Holy Mother to sit on the wooden seat decorated with the Alimpana. While witnessing the worship, the Holy Mother had already entered into a divine semi-conscious state. Not clearly conscious, therefore, of what she was doing, she like one charmed with Mantras, sat facing north to the right of the Master, who was seated with his face to the east. According to scriptural injunctions the Master sprinkled the Holy Mother repeatedly with the water purified by Mantras from the pitcher placed before him, then uttered the Mantra in her hearing and then recited the prayer:
“O Lady, O Mother Tripurasundari who art the controller of all powers, open the door to perfection! Purify her [the Holy Mother’s] body and mind, manifest Thyself in her and be beneficent.”
Afterwards the Master … worshipped her with the sixteen articles, as the Devi Herself. He then offered food and put a part of it into her mouth with his own hand. The Holy Mother lost normal consciousness and went into Samadhi. The Master, too, uttering Mantras in the semi-conscious state, entered into complete Samadhi. The worshipper in Samadhi became perfectly identified and united with the Devi in Samadhi.
[From Sri Ramakrishna, The Great Master, 334–335.]
Many famed personalities of the day came into contact with Ramakrishna: Bankim Chandra Chatterji, Michael Madhusudan Datta, Girish Chandra Ghosh, Shivanath Sastri, Keshab Chandra Sen, and Ishvarchandra Vidyasagar. The following is Ramakrishna’s account of his meeting with Debendranath Tagore, as he described it, in October 1884.
Once I visited Devendranath Tagore with Mathur Babu. I said to Mathur: “I have heard that Devendra Tagore thinks of God. I should like to see him.” “All right,” said Mathur, “I will take you to him. We were fellow students in the Hindu College and I am very friendly with him.” We went to Devendra’s house. Mathur and Devendra had not seen each other for a long time. Devendra said to Mathur: “You have changed a little. You have grown fat around the stomach.” Mathur said, referring to me, “He has come to see you. He is always mad about God.” I wanted to see Devendra’s physical marks and said to him, “Let me see your body.” He pulled up his shirt and I found that he had very fair skin tinted red. His hair had not yet turned grey.
At the outset I noticed a little vanity in Devendra. And isn’t that natural? He had such wealth, such scholarship, such name and fame! Noting that streak of vanity, I asked Mathur: “Well, is vanity the outcome of knowledge or ignorance? Can a knower of Brahman have such a feeling as, ‘I am a scholar; I am a jnāni [mystical knower]; I am rich]’?”
While I was talking with Devendra, I suddenly got into that state of mind in which I can see a man as he really is. …
I found that Devendra had combined both yoga and bhoga8 in his life. He had a number of children, all young. The family physician was there. Thus, you see, though he was a jnāni, yet he was preoccupied with worldly life. I said to him: … “I have heard that you live in the world and think of God; so I have come to see you. Please tell me something about God.”
He recited some texts from the Vedas. He said, “This universe is like a chandelier and each living being is a light in it.” Once, meditating in the Panchavati, I too had had a vision like that. I found his words agreed with my vision, and I thought he must be a very great man. I asked him to explain his words. He said: “God has created men to manifest His own glory; otherwise, who could know this universe? Everything becomes dark without the lights in the chandelier. One cannot even see the chandelier itself.”
We talked a long time. Devendra was pleased and said to me, “You must come to our Brahmo Samaj festival.” “That,” I said, “depends on the will of God. You can see my state of mind. There is no knowing when God will put me into a particular state.” Devendra insisted: “No, you must come. But put on your cloth and wear a shawl over your body. Someone might say something unkind about your untidiness, and that would hurt me.” “No,” I replied, “I cannot promise that. I cannot be a babu.” Devendra and Mathur laughed.
[From [Mahendra Nath Gupta], The Gospel of Ramakrishna, trans. Swami Nikhilananda (New York: Ramakrishna-Vivekananda, 1942), 650.]
Among Shri Ramakrishna’s disciples was a young Calcutta-born student on whom he showered special attention and praise. This boy, Narendranath Datta (1863–1902), came from a Kayastha9 family of lawyers and had received a good Western-style education. When he first visited Ramakrishna, he was planning to study law in England, the high road to success in British India. Within a year’s time, however, his interviews with the mystic had changed the course of his life. He resolved to give up worldly pursuits and adopt the life of a sannyāsī. After twelve years of ascetic discipline, he became famous as Swami Vivekananda, the apostle to the world of his master’s philosophy of God-realization.
Vivekananda’s meteoric career as missionary of Vedantic Hinduism to the West began in 1893 when he addressed the first World Parliament of Religions at Chicago. He spent four of the remaining years of his life lecturing in the United States and Europe (1893–1896 and 1899–1900); in his return visits to India he was greeted as a national hero and took up the task of regenerating his fellow countrymen. He literally burned himself out in their service, dedicating the Ramakrishna Mission to social work and religious education, rousing people in fiery speeches to uplift the millions of India’s poor.
Although he died at thirty-nine, Vivekananda’s example had a powerful impact on the thinking of his own and later generations. Despite his scorn for politics, his success in preaching to the world the greatness of Hinduism gave his countrymen an added sense of dignity and pride in their own culture. His zeal for serving the downtrodden masses opened a new dimension of activity to Indian nationalist leaders, whose Western outlook had heretofore isolated them from the vast majority of their countrymen.
In spite of Vivekananda’s call to India to become great by realizing her own possibilities and recognizing the divinity of each person, his message was not completely inclusive. When in the West he undercut the speeches of Pandita Ramabai, by denying her accusations, leveled against Brahmanical society, of cruelty to women (see the selection on her below). Moreoever, his list of Indian brothers included low-caste Hindus but not Muslims; since his death he has been taken up by Hindu nationalists, who value his call for a proud, masculine, regenerated India that is to be defined in almost entirely Hindu terms.
In his celebrated opening speech in Chicago on September 11, 1893, Vivekananda, claiming to represent all of Hindu India, enunciated his pride in his own tradition, his belief in the unity of all religions, and his disappointment over continuing religious intolerance.
Sisters and Brothers of America,
It fills my heart with joy unspeakable to rise in response to the warm and cordial welcome which you have given us. I thank you in the name of the most ancient order of monks in the world; and I thank you in the name of millions and millions of Hindu people of all classes and sects.
My thanks, also, to some of the speakers on this platform, who, referring to the delegates from the Orient, have told you that these men from far-off nations may well claim the honour of bearing to different lands the idea of toleration. I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true. I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth. I am proud to tell you that we have gathered in our bosom the purest remnant of the Israelites, who came to Southern India and took refuge with us in the very year in which their holy temple was shattered to pieces by Roman tyranny. I am proud to belong to the religion which has sheltered and is still fostering the remnant of the grand Zoroastrian nation. I will quote to you, brethren, a few lines from a hymn which I remember to have repeated from my earliest boyhood, which is every day repeated by millions of human beings: “As the different streams having their sources in different places all mingle their water in the sea, so, O Lord, the different paths which men take through different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee.”
The present convention, which is one of the most august assemblies ever held, is in itself a vindication, a declaration to the world of the wonderful doctrine preached in the Gita: “Whosoever comes to Me, through whatsoever form, I reach him; all men are struggling through paths which in the end lead to Me.” Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful earth. They have filled the earth with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed civilization and sent whole nations to despair. Had it not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than it is now. But their time is come; and I fervently hope that the bell that tolled this morning in honour of this convention may be the death-knell of all fanaticism, of all persecution with the sword or with the pen, and of all uncharitable feelings between persons wending their way to the same goal.
[From The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda (Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1977), 1:3–4.]
In his series of lectures entitled “Practical Vedanta,” delivered in London in 1896, Vivekananda set forth the teachings of his master, Ramakrishna. The central point of his message was that God is within man; in his inmost being, man is God.
I shall call you religious from the day you begin to see God in men and women and then you will understand what is meant by turning the left cheek to the man who strikes you on the right. When you see man as God, everything, even the tiger, will be welcome. Whatever comes to you is but the Lord, the Eternal, the Blessed One, appearing to us in various forms, as our father, and mother, and friend, and child; they are our own soul playing with us.
As our human relationships can thus be made divine so our relationship with God may take any of these forms and we can look upon Him as our father or mother or friend or beloved. Calling God Mother is a higher idea than calling Him Father, and to call Him Friend is still higher, but the highest is to regard Him as the Beloved. The highest point of all is to see no difference between lover and beloved. You may remember, perhaps, the old Persian story, of how a lover came and knocked at the door of the beloved and was asked: “Who are you?” He answered: “It is I,” and there was no response. A second time he came, and exclaimed: “I am here,” but the door was not opened. The third time he came, and the voice asked from inside: “Who is there?” He replied: “I am thyself, my beloved,” and the door opened. So is the relation between God and ourselves. He is in everything, He is everything. Every man and woman is the palpable, blissful, living God.
[From The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda (Mayavati: Advaita Ashrama, 1976), 2:326–327.]
In contrast to some of the more extreme religious reformers of his day, Vivekananda allowed a place for the worship of images.
This external worship of images has, however, been described in all our Shastras as the lowest of all the low forms of worship. But that does not mean that it is a wrong thing to do. Despite the many iniquities that have found entrance into the practices of image-worship as it is in vogue now, I do not condemn it. Aye, where would I have been, if I had not been blessed with the dust of the holy feet of that orthodox, image-worshiping Brahmana [Ramakrishna]!
Those reformers who preach against image-worship, or what they denounce as idolatry—to them I say: “Brothers! If you are fit to worship God-without-Form discarding any external help, do so, but why do you condemn others who cannot do the same?”
[From The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda (Mayavati: Advaita Ashrama, 1960), 3:460.]
Because of his colonial context and international connections, Vivekananda often wrote or spoke on Christianity. While he felt that in Jesus’s message there were hints of the truth of Advaitic wisdom, he also identified much of Christian teaching with lower forms of religion. Thus there is a certain triumphalism in his teaching about other religions: all lead to the same goal, but some lead faster than others.
Christ said, “I and my father are one,” and you repeat it. Yet it has not helped mankind. For nineteen hundred years men have not understood that saying. They make Christ the savior of men. He is God and we are worms! Similarly in India. In every country, this sort of belief is the backbone of every sect. For thousands of years millions and millions all over the world have been taught to worship the Lord of this world, the Incarnations, the saviors, the prophets. They have been taught to consider themselves helpless, miserable creatures and to depend upon the mercy of some person or persons for salvation. There are no doubt many marvelous things in such belief. But even at their best, they are but kindergartens of religion, and they have helped but little. Men are still hypnotized into abject degradation. However, there are some strong souls who get over that illusion. The hour comes when great men shall arise and cast off these kindergartens of religion and shall make vivid and powerful the true religion, the worship of the spirit by the spirit.
[From Swami Vivekananda, “Is Vedanta the Future Religion?” in The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda (Mayavati: Advaita Ashrama, 1971), 8:141.]
In these unusual reflections penned after Ramakrishna’s death in 1886, Vivekananda recounts what he went through after his master died, and describes his sense of growing dependence upon Sharada Devi, Ramakrishna’s saintly wife.
Now, I happened to get an old man to teach me, and he was very peculiar. He did not go much for intellectual scholarship, scarcely studied books; but when he was a boy he was seized with the tremendous idea of getting truth direct. First he tried by studying his own religion. Then he got the idea that he must get the truth of other religions and with that idea he joined all the sects, one after another. … He came to the conclusion that they were all good. He had no criticism to offer to any one; they are all so many paths leading to the same goal. …
Now, all the ideas that I preach are only an attempt to echo his ideas. [And] there at his feet I conceived these ideas—there with some other young men. I was just a boy. I went there when I was about sixteen. …
Then came the sad day when our old teacher died. We nursed him the best we could. We had no friends. Who would listen to a few boys, with their crank notions? …
Then came a terrible time—for me personally and for all the other boys as well. But to me came such misfortune! On the one side was my mother, my brothers. My father died at that time, and we were left poor. Oh very poor, almost starving all the time! I was the only hope of the family, the only one who could do anything to help them. I had to stand between my two worlds. On the one hand, I would have to see my mother and brothers starve unto death; on the other, I have believed that this man’s ideas were for the good of India and the world, and had to be preached and worked out. And as the fight went on in my mind for days and months. … Who would sympathize with me? None—except one.
The one’s sympathy brought blessing and hope. She was a woman. Our teacher, this great monk, was married when he was a boy and she a mere child. … Later, when the man had become a great spiritual giant, she came—really, she was the first disciple—and she spent the rest of her life taking care of the body of this man. … Well, that lady, his wife, was the only one who sympathized with the idea of those boys.
[From The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, 8:79–82.]
In a farsighted essay called “The Future of India,” Vivekananda addressed what is now called the “Indigenous Aryan Debate.” Unlike the Brahmo reformers and Dayanand, but like Gandhi, Vivekananda justified the caste system in theory, while excoriating privileged people who oppress those at the bottom of the social ladder.
Then there is the other idea that the Shudra caste are surely the aborigines. … Our archaeologist dreams of India being full of dark-eyed aborigines, and the bright Aryans came from—the Lord knows where. According to some, they came from Central Tibet, others will have it that they came from Central Asia. There are patriotic Englishmen who think that the Aryans were all red-haired. Others, according to their idea, think that they were all black-haired. … Of late, there was an attempt made to prove that the Aryans lived on the Swiss Lakes. I should not be sorry if they had been all drowned there, theory and all. Some say now that they lived at the North Pole. Lord bless the Aryans and their habitations! As for the truth of these theories, there is not one word in all our scriptures, not one, to prove that the Aryans ever came from anywhere outside of India, and in ancient India was included Afghanistan. There it ends. And the theory that the Shudra caste were all non-Aryans and they were a multitude, is equally illogical and equally irrational. … The only explanation is to be found in the Mahabharata, which says that in the beginning of the Satya Yuga there was one caste, the Brahmins, and then by difference of occupations they went on dividing themselves into different castes. …
The solution of the caste problem in India, therefore, assumes this form, not to degrade the higher castes, not to crush the Brahmins. … It is no use fighting among the castes, what good will it do? It will divide us all the more, weaken us all the more, degrade us all the more. The days of exclusive privileges and exclusive claims are done, gone forever from the soil of India, and it is one of the great blessings of the British Rule in India. Even to the Mohammedan Rule we owe that great blessing, the destruction of exclusive privilege. …
The solution is not by bringing down the higher, but by raising the lower up to the level of the higher. And that is the line of work that is found in all our books.
[From The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, 3:292–294, 295.]
Vivekananda developed the idea put forth by Keshab that India should take practical knowledge from Europe, and in exchange teach religious wisdom to the world. Lectures on this theme, such as the following one delivered in Madras, instilled self-confidence in Indian youth, thus contributing to the later movement for national independence.
This is the great ideal before us, and every one must be ready for it—the conquest of the whole world by India—nothing less than that, and we must all get ready for it, strain every nerve for it. Let foreigners come and flood the land with their armies, never mind. Up, India, and conquer the world with your spirituality! … Heroic workers are wanted to go abroad and help to disseminate the great truths of the Vedanta. The world wants it; without it the world will be destroyed. … Now is the time to work so that India’s spiritual ideas may penetrate deep into the West. Therefore, young men of Madras, I specially ask you to remember this. We must go out, we must conquer the world through our spirituality and philosophy. There is no other alternative, we must do it or die. The only condition of national life, of awakened and vigorous national life, is the conquest of the world by Indian thought.
[From The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, 3:276–277.]
In one of his last essays, written in Bengali in 1899, Vivekananda declared India’s independence of Western standards. Deriding blind imitation of foreign models as unmanly, he called on his compatriots to take pride in their past and to unite rich and poor, high and low castes, in order to make their nation strong.
O India, this is your terrible danger. The spell of imitating the West is getting such a strong hold upon you, that what is good or what is bad is no longer decided by reason, judgment, discrimination, or reference to the Shastras. Whatever ideas, whatever manners the white men praise or like, are good; whatever things they dislike or censure are bad! Alas! What can be a more tangible proof of foolishness than this?
The Western ladies move freely everywhere—therefore, that is good; they choose for themselves their husbands—therefore, that is the highest step of advancement; the Westerners disapprove of our dress, decorations, food, and ways of living—therefore, they must be very bad; the Westerners condemn image-worship as sinful—surely then, image-worship is the greatest sin, there is no doubt of it!
The Westerners say that worshiping a single Deity is fruitful of the highest spiritual good—therefore, let us throw our Gods and Goddesses into the river Ganges! The Westerners hold caste distinctions to be obnoxious—therefore, let all the different castes be jumbled into one! The Westerners say that child-marriage is the root of all evils—therefore, that is also very bad, of a certainty it is! …
Thou brave one, be bold, take courage, be proud that thou art an Indian, and proudly proclaim: “I am an Indian, every Indian is my brother.” Say: “The ignorant Indian, the poor and destitute Indian, the Brahman Indian, the Pariah Indian, is my brother.” Thou too clad with but a rag round thy loins proudly proclaim at the top of thy voice: “The Indian is my brother, the Indian is my life, India’s gods and goddesses are my God, India’s society is the cradle of my infancy, the pleasure-garden of my youth, the sacred heaven, the Vārānasi, of my old age.” Say, brother: “The soil of India is my highest heaven, the good of India is my good,” and repeat and pray day and night: “O Thou Lord of Gauri, O Thou Mother of the Universe, vouchsafe manliness unto me! O Thou Mother of Strength, take away my weakness, take away my unmanliness, and—Make me a Man!”
[From The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda (Mayavati: Advaita Ashrama, 1978), 4:478, 480.]
As we have seen in chapter 2, Sayyid Ahmad’s strategy for ameliorating the lot of the Muslim community in India, especially after they had been (unfairly) singled out as great rebels and severely repressed, was twofold: to persuade the British that the Muslims of India were loyal and worthy of help, and to teach his own community that they would only benefit by cooperating with and learning from the West. He managed to achieve both aims in some degree, but the first more easily than the second. Even though several high officials (including a viceroy) were assassinated by Muslims in the 1860s and 1870s, Sayyid Ahmad’s educational initiatives quickly won British support. After founding several schools, a “scientific society” for promoting the translation of modern Western knowledge into Urdu, and a weekly magazine printed with English and Urdu in facing columns, he took leave from his judicial work in order to see England for himself (and to enter his son into Cambridge). He was well received, found himself much impressed, and stayed for seventeen months, developing plans to found a college modeled after Harrow and Cambridge but where both Islamic and modern Western studies could be offered. In 1875, before retiring from government service, he opened a school on these lines, the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh. For the next two decades, Sayyid Ahmad remained the heart and soul of his new creation, while delegating its administration to a series of British educators. Muslim students came from all parts of India to enroll, and Hindu students were also welcomed and their dietary customs respected. Sir Sayyid’s chief concern was with educating young men from sharīf, or upper-class, families. Well-off young Hindus were encouraged to attend the college, but no attempt was made to reach out to Muslims from poor families; nor did the Aligarh plan include education for women. In these exclusions Sir Sayyid was no different from most reformers of this early period, even in Bengal.
Some orthodox Muslims objected to the college on the grounds that Sayyid Ahmad had gone too far in accepting Western ideas and ways of living. But what particularly disturbed them was his interpretation of Islam, set forth in various lectures and in his series of essays on the Quran (1876–1891). Rejecting the authority of traditional scholars, and of the sayings (hadith) attributed to the Prophet, Muhammad, Sir Sayyid relied on his own judgment as he examined and compared the actual words in the Quran itself. Further, in his enthusiasm for the progress of the natural sciences, he declared that nothing in the Quran, when rightly understood, contradicted the laws of nature. Some scholars in later generations have seen him as a pioneer in using independent experience and judgment to arrive at a truer understanding of the words that came into the heart of the Prophet; indeed, with the exception of certain contemporaries in Egypt, who also produced seminal thought along these lines, Sir Sayyid’s modernist originality was unprecedented for his time. To ensure the success of his college, Sayyid Ahmad carefully kept his own theological views out of its curriculum, made sure that both Sunni and Shia instruction was offered, and required Muslim students to pray facing toward Mecca five times each day.
In the final years of his life, Sayyid Ahmad broadened the scope of his efforts to serve and defend the interests of the Muslims of India, founding in 1886 the annual Muhammadan Educational Conference and in 1888 the United India Patriotic Association. He urged both Muslims and (secondarily) Hindus to boycott the newly formed Indian National Congress, in part because he felt that its antigovernment agitation would turn Muslims away from the modern Western learning that was essential to their progress. He also feared subjection to the will of the Hindu majority, and hence was wary of Congress attempts to wrest concessions, and perhaps eventually power, from the British. Muslims at that time formed only 20 percent of India’s population; in education, wealth, and positions in the government service they had fallen far behind Hindus. Because of his call to boycott the Congress, Sir Sayyid has been seen as a forefather of the movement to establish the Muslim-majority movement for Pakistan. In addition, Muslims both there and in India claim him as the father of their modern outlook on education—and to some extent on religion as well.
Sir Sayyid spent a total of seventeen months in England, in 1869–1870. Below are some of his reminiscences.
It is nearly six months since I arrived in London, and … although I do not absolve the English in India of discourtesy, and of looking upon the natives of that country as animals and beneath contempt, I think they do so from not understanding us; and I am afraid I must confess that they are not far wrong in their opinion of us. Without flattering the English, I can truly say that the natives of India, high and low, merchants and petty shopkeepers, educated and illiterate, when contrasted with the English in education, manners, and uprightness, are as like them as a dirty animal is to an able and handsome man. The English have reason for believing us in India to be imbecile brutes. Although my countrymen will consider this opinion of mine an extremely harsh one, and will wonder what they are deficient in, and in what the English excel, to cause me to write as I do, I maintain that they have no cause for wonder, as they are ignorant of everything here, which is really beyond imagination and conception. … I am not thinking about those things in which, owing to the specialties of our respective countries, we and the English differ. I only remark on politeness, knowledge, good faith, cleanliness, skilled workmanship, accomplishments, and thoroughness, which are the results of education and civilisation. All good things, spiritual and worldly, which should be found in man, have been bestowed by the Almighty on Europe, and especially on England. By spiritual good things I mean that the English carry out all the details of the religion which they believe to be the true one, with a beauty and excellence which no other nation can compare with. This is entirely due to the education of the men and women, and to their being united in aspiring after this beauty and excellence. If Hindustanis can only attain to civilisation, it will probably, owing to its many excellent natural powers, become, if not the superior, at least the equal of England. …
The cause of England’s civilisation is that all the arts and sciences are in the language of the country. … Those who are really bent on improving and bettering India must remember that the only way of compassing this is by having the whole of the arts and sciences translated into their own language. I should like to have this written in gigantic letters on the Himalayas, for the remembrance of future generations. If they be not translated, India can never be civilised. This is [the] truth, this is the truth, this is the truth!
[From G. F. I. Graham, Life and Work of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1974), 125–127, 132.]
As in Japan, China, and other countries, so too in nineteenth-century India was the introduction of modern Western education strongly resisted by those in charge of transmitting and interpreting the received teachings of their ancestors. Sayyid Ahmad insisted, as did his counterparts in other societies, that the new knowledge from abroad must be absorbed, not only to prevent the obliteration of his people and their culture, but also to enable the deepest truths of that culture to shine forth more brightly than before.
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 itself, 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. Is this at all a pleasing prospect? Can we serve the cause of Islam in this way? Shall we then be able to ward off the obliteration of all that we hold dear for any length of time? …
The adoption of the new system of education does not mean the renunciation of Islam. It means its protection. We are justly proud of the achievements of our forefathers in the fields of learning and culture. We should, however, remember that these achievements were possible only because they were willing to act upon the teachings of the Prophet upon whom be peace and blessings of God. He said that knowledge is the heritage of the believer, and that he should acquire it wherever he can find it. He also said that the Muslims should seek knowledge even if they have to go to China to find it. … Did the early Muslims not take to Greek learning avidly? Did this in any respect undermine their loyalty to Islam?
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 in the knowledge of 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. Any fear to the contrary betrays lack of faith in the truth of Islam.
[From a letter to Maulvi Tasadduq Husain, in Khan, Sir Sayyid ke chand nadir khutut, compiled by Ahmad Husain Yaqubi (Meerut: Namdar, 1900).]
Speaking from personal knowledge of the hostilities between Hindus and Muslims during the breakdown of order caused by the Rebellion of 1857, and fearing that even greater troubles would occur if the British were to leave India to govern herself, Sayyid Ahmad Khan vigorously opposed the nationalist aims of the Indian National Congress (founded in 1885). Maximum progress, he believed, could be achieved only through harmonious relations between Muslims and Hindus, during the course of prolonged British rule. These two excerpts derive from speeches given in Patna in 1883 and Meerut in 1888.
Gentlemen, just as many reputed people professing Hindu faith came to this country, so we also came here. The Hindus forgot the country from which they had come; they could not remember their migration from one land to another and came to consider India as their homeland, believing that their country lies between the Himalayas and the Vindhyachal. Hundreds of years have lapsed since we, in our turn, left the lands of our origin. We remember neither the climate nor the natural beauty of those lands, neither the freshness of the harvests nor the deliciousness of the fruits, nor even do we remember the blessings of the holy deserts. We also come to consider India as our homeland and we settled down here like the earlier immigrants. Thus India is the home of both of us. We both breathe the air of India and take the water of the holy Ganges and the Jamuna. We both consume the products of the Indian soil. We are living and dying together. By living so long in India, the blood of both have changed. The colour of both have become similar. The faces of both, having changed, have become similar. The Muslims have acquired hundreds of customs from the Hindus and the Hindus have also learned hundreds of things from the Mussulmans. We mixed with each other so much that we produced a new language—Urdu, which was neither our language nor theirs. … My friends, I have repeatedly said and say it again that India is like a bride which has got two beautiful and lustrous eyes—Hindus and Mussulmans. If they quarrel against each other that beautiful bride will become ugly and if one destroys the other, she will lose one eye. Therefore, people of Hindustan you have now the right to make this bride either squint eyed or one eyed.
[From Ahmed Khan, Writings and Speeches, ed. S. Muhammad (Bombay: Nachiketa, 1972), 159–160.]
Now, suppose that the English are not in India and that one of the nations of India has conquered the other, whether the Hindus the Mohammedans, or the Mohammedans the Hindus. At once some other nation of Europe, such as the French, the Germans, the Portuguese, or the Russians, will attack India. Their ships of war, covered with iron and loaded with flashing cannon and weapons, will surround her on all sides. At that time who will protect India? Neither Hindus can save nor Mohammedans; neither the Rajputs nor my brave brothers the Pathans. And what will be the result? The result will be this—that foreigners will rule India, because the state of India is such that if foreign powers attack her, no one has the power to oppose them. From this reasoning it follows of necessity that an empire, not of any Indian race, but of foreigners, will be established in India. Now, will you please decide which of the nations of Europe you would like to rule over India? I ask if you would like Germany, whose subjects weep for heavy taxation and the stringency of their military service? Would you like the rule of France? Stop! I fancy you would, perhaps, like the rule of the Russians, who are very great friends of India and of Mohammedans, and under whom the Hindus will live in great comfort, and who will protect with the tenderest care the wealth and property which they have acquired under English rule? (Laughter). Everybody knows something or other about these powerful kingdoms of Europe. Everyone will admit that their governments are far worse, nay, beyond comparison worse, than the British Government. It is, therefore, necessary that for the peace of India and for the progress of everything in India the English Government should remain for many years—in fact for ever!
[From Ahmed Khan, Writings and Speeches, 185–186.]
Sayyid Amir Ali (1849–1928) was one of the first Muslims in India to receive an English education. He studied at Hooghly College, outside Calcutta, from which he graduated in 1867; he went on to study law in London, returning to India in 1873 and practicing at the Calcutta High Court. He also became a lecturer in Islamic law at Presidency College, and later a professor of law at Calcutta University. In 1890 he was appointed a judge in the Calcutta High Court; in 1903 he retired, and settled in England. In 1910 he founded the first mosque ever built in London.
He was not only a jurist and legal scholar, but also a prolific author who aimed to explicate Islam—and especially Shiism, his personal faith—along rational and modernist lines. All his works were in English; he knew the language excellently, and had a thoughtful and sophisticated literary style. His first book, written when he was only twenty-four and still studying in London, was A Critical Examination of the Life and Teachings of Mohammed (1873). Later works dealt with such topics as Muslim personal law (1880), ethics (1893), and the legal position of women (1912). Of all his works, the most famous is The Spirit of Islam (1923). In it he seeks, as he says, to “be of help to wanderers in quest of a constructive faith to steady the human mind.”10 After an account of the Prophet’s life, he offers an overview of the history of the faith, including an account of its sectarian divisions. He also provides a historical and theological account of issues like religious militancy, slavery, and the status of women. His final chapters address the “literary and scientific spirit,” the “rationalistic and philosophical spirit,” and the “idealistic and mystical spirit” of Islam. Often reprinted, the book is still available today.
In a number of books, including The Spirit of Islam, he presented an interpretation, central to modernist Muslim thought, of Islam as a rationalizing force, and as a humane, sensible, modern faith compatible with Western ideas and Christian values.
The success of Islām in the seventh century of the Christian era, and its rapid and marvellous diffusion over the surface of the globe, were due to the fact that it recognised this essential need of human nature. To a world of wrangling sects, and creeds, to whom words were of far greater importance than practice, it spoke in terms of positive command from an Absolute Source. Amidst the moral and social wreck in which it found its birth, it aimed at the integration of the worship of a Personal Will, and thereby to recall humanity to the observance of duty which alone pointed to the path of spiritual development. And by its success in lifting up the lower races to a higher level of social morality it proved to the world the need of a positive system. It taught them sobriety, temperance, charity, justice and equality as the commandments of God. Its affirmation of the principle of equality of man and man and its almost socialistic tendency represented the same phase of thought that had found expression on the shores of Galilee. But even in his most exalted mood the great Teacher of Islām did not forget the limitations imposed on individual capacity which occasion economic inequalities.
Alas for the latter-day professors of Islām! The blight of patristicism has ruined the blossom of true religion and a true devotional spirit.
A Christian preacher has pointed out with great force the distinction between religion and theology, and the evils which have followed in his Church from the confusion of the two. What has happened in Christianity has happened in Islām. Practice has given way to the mockery of profession, ceremonialism has taken the place of earnest and faithful work,—doing good to mankind for the sake of doing good, and for the love of God. Enthusiasm has died out, and devotion to God and His Prophet are meaningless words. The earnestness without which human existence is no better than that of the brute creation, earnestness in right-doing and right-thinking, is absent. The Moslems of the present day have ignored the spirit in a hopeless love for the letter. Instead of living up to the ideal preached by the Master, instead of “striving to excel in good works,” “of being righteous”; instead of loving God, and for the sake of His love loving His creatures,—they have made themselves the slaves of opportunism and outward observance. It was natural that in their reverence and admiration for the Teacher his early disciples should stereotype his ordinary mode of life, crystallise the passing incidents of a chequered career, imprint on the heart orders, rules, and regulations enunciated for the common exigencies of the day in an infant society. But to suppose that the greatest Reformer the world has ever produced, the greatest upholder of the sovereignty of Reason, the man who proclaimed that the universe was governed and guided by law and order, and that the law of nature meant progressive development, ever contemplated that even those injunctions which were called forth by the passing necessities of a semi-civilised people should become immutable to the end of the world, is doing an injustice to the Prophet of Islām.
No one had a keener perception than he of the necessities of this world of progress with its ever-changing social and moral phenomena, nor of the likelihood that the revelations vouch-safed to him might not meet all possible contingencies. When Muāz was appointed as governor of Yemen, he was asked by the Prophet by what rule he would be guided in his administration of that province. “By the law of the Koran,” said Muāz. “But if you find no direction therein?” “Then I will act according to the example of the Prophet.” “But if that fails?” “Then I will exercise my own judgment.” The Prophet approved highly of the answer of his disciple, and commended it to the other delegates. …
The present stagnation of the Musulman communities is principally due to the notion which has fixed itself on the minds of the generality of Moslems, that the right to the exercise of private judgment ceased with the early legists, that its exercise in modern times is sinful, and that a Moslem in order to be regarded as an orthodox follower of Mohammed should belong to one or the other of the schools established by the schoolmen of Islām, and abandon his judgment absolutely to the interpretations of men who lived in the ninth century, and could have no conception of the necessities of the twentieth.
Among the Sunnis, it is the common belief that since the four Imāms, no doctor has arisen qualified to interpret the laws of the Prophet. No account is taken of the altered circumstances in which Moslems are now placed; the conclusions at which these learned legists arrived several centuries ago are held to be equally applicable to the present day. Among the Shiahs, the Akhbāri will not allow his judgment to travel beyond the dictates of “the expounders of the law.” The Prophet had consecrated reason as the highest and noblest function of the human intellect. Our schoolmen and their servile followers have made its exercise a sin and a crime. …
In the Western world, the Reformation was ushered in by the Renaissance and the progress of Europe commenced when it threw off the shackles of Ecclesiasticism. In Islām also, enlightenment must precede reform; and, before there can be a renovation of religious life, the mind must first escape from the bondage which centuries of literal interpretation and the doctrine of “conformity” have imposed upon it. The formalism that does not appeal to the heart of the worshipper must be abandoned; externals must be subordinated to the inner feelings; and the lessons of ethics must be impressed on the plastic mind; then alone can we hope for that enthusiasm in the principles of duty taught by the Prophet of Islām. The reformation of Islām will begin when once it is recognised that divine words rendered into any language retain their divine character and that devotions offered in any tongue are acceptable to God. The Prophet himself had allowed his foreign disciples to say their prayers in their own tongue. He had expressly permitted others to recite the Koran in their respective dialects; and had declared that it was revealed in seven languages.
In the earliest ages of Islām there was a consensus of opinion that devotion without understanding was useless. Imām Abū Hanīfa considered the recitation of the namāz and also of the Khutba or sermon, lawful and valid in any language. The disciples of Abū Hanīfa, Abū Yusuf and Mohammed, have accepted the doctrine of their master with a certain variation. They hold that when a person does not know Arabic, he may validly offer his devotions in any other language.
There is, however, one great and cogent reason why the practice of reciting prayers in Arabic should be maintained wherever it is possible and practicable. Not because it was the language of the Prophet, but because it has become the language of Islām and maintains the unity of sentiment throughout the Islamic world. And wherein lies more strength than in unity? …
The system of female seclusion undoubtedly possesses many advantages in the social well-being of unsettled and uncultured communities; and even in countries, where the diversity of culture and moral conceptions is great, a modified form of seclusion is not absolutely to be deprecated. … The Prophet of Islām found [Purdah] existing among the Persians and other Oriental communities; he perceived its advantages, and it is possible that, in view of the widespread laxity of morals among all classes of people, he recommended to the women-folk the observance of privacy. But to suppose that he ever intended his recommendation should assume its present inelastic form, or that he ever allowed or enjoined the seclusion of women, is wholly opposed to the spirit of his reforms. …
The improvement effected in the position of women by the Prophet of Arabia has been acknowledged by all unprejudiced writers, though it is still the fashion with bigoted controversialists to say the Islāmic system lowered the status of women. No falser calumny has been levelled at the great Prophet. … If Mohammed had done nothing more, his claim to be a benefactor of mankind would have been indisputable. Even under the laws as they stand at present in the pages of the legists, the legal position of Moslem females may be said to compare favourably with that of European women. … We shall … glance at the provisions of the Moslem codes relating to women. As long as she is unmarried she remains under the parental roof, and until she attains her majority she is, to some extent, under the control of the father or his representative. As soon, however, as she is of age, the law vests in her all the rights which belong to her as an independent human being. She is entitled to share in the inheritance of her parents along with her brothers, and though the proportion is different, the distinction is founded on the relative position of brother and sister. A woman who is sui juris can under no circumstances be married without her own express consent, “not even by the sultan.” … On her marriage she does not lose her individuality. She does not cease to be a separate member of society.
An ante-nuptial settlement by the husband in favour of the wife is a necessary condition, and on his failure to make a settlement the law presumes one in accordance with the social position of the wife. A Moslem marriage is a civil act, needing no priest, requiring no ceremonial. The contract of marriage gives the man no power over the woman’s person, beyond what the law defines, and none whatever upon her goods and property. Her rights as a mother do not depend for their recognition upon the idiosyncrasies of individual judges. Her earnings acquired by her own exertions cannot be wasted by a prodigal husband, nor can she be ill-treated with impunity by one who is brutal. She acts, if sui juris, in all matters which relate to herself and her property in her own individual right, without the intervention of husband or father. She can sue her debtors in the open courts, without the necessity of joining a next friend, or under cover of her husband’s name. She continues to exercise, after she has passed from her father’s house into her husband’s home, all the rights which the law gives to men. All the privileges which belong to her as a woman and a wife are secured to her, not by the courtesies which “come and go,” but by the actual text in the book of law. Taken as a whole, her status is not more unfavourable than that of many European women, whilst in many respects she occupies a decidedly better position. Her comparatively backward condition is the result of a want of culture among the community generally, rather than of any special feature in the laws of the fathers.
[Syed Ameer Ali, The Spirit of Islam: A History of the Evolution and Ideals of Islam with a Life of the Prophet (1923; Delhi: Low Price Publications, 1990), 181–187, 249, 255–259.]
Western cultural influence came, as did British rule itself, to different parts of India at different times. The coastal ports founded in the seventeenth century—Madras, Bombay, Calcutta—became (and remain today) the centers of new life and thought, although they are now called Chennai, Mumbai, and Kolkata. The spread of this network into the hinterland, however, was a slow and irregular process. Bengal, the home of a number of thinkers considered thus far, was the first province to fall entirely under British sway, and the first to react to the impact of Western ways and ideas.
On the opposite side of the Indian subcontinent, protected by their mountain fortresses in the Western Ghats, the regional Maratha kingdoms (not including Bombay, which was in British hands) were among the last to surrender to foreign rule. The leadership that made this prolonged resistance possible came notably from two caste groups. The fighting Maratha-Kunbi castes under Shivaji (1630?–1680) and his descendants provided most of the military force, while the small but influential groups of Chitpavan Brahmans provided the peshwas (prime ministers) and the intellectual leaders of later times. Even after the final defeat of the Peshwa’s government in 1818, the town of Poona remained the center of Maharashtrian intellectual life. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the Chitpavan Brahmans produced three nationalist leaders of deserved fame—Ranade, Gokhale, and Tilak.
Mahadev Govind Ranade (1842–1901), the eldest of three children, was born into a strictly orthodox household. He initially became a teacher of economics, history, and literature at Bombay University, but then chose to make his career in law. Before he was thirty he had received his first appointment as a subordinate judge in the government courts at Poona.
During his thirty years as a judge, Ranade gently but firmly worked for the reform of such social evils as child marriage, seclusion of women, and restrictions on the lives of widows (including prohibitions against their remarriage). In many ways his efforts resembled those of Rammohan Roy, whom he admired as a patriot and godly man. Ranade was one of the early members of the Prarthana Samaj (Prayer Society, modeled after the Brahmo Samaj), the founding of which (1867) was sparked by Keshab Chandra Sen’s visits to Bombay. Under Ranade’s guidance the Prarthana Samaj did not cut itself off from Hindu society, but strove gradually to bring the orthodox around to its position. Despite the vociferous and even violent opposition of Tilak and his school, Ranade’s moderate social reform policies met with increasing success.
Since he was disqualified from entering active politics by his judgeship, Ranade’s contribution to the nationalist movement was largely in the realm of social and economic reform. In 1887 he founded the Indian National Social Conference as a separate organization that met concurrently with the annual Congress sessions. He concluded that the constructive solution to India’s problems lay in a vigorous policy of industrial and commercial development under British government auspices.
Ranade was a Moderate in the best sense of the term—scholarly, patient, practical, constructive, never wasting his time in denouncing those who held other views. After his death in 1901 his memory continued to inspire the leaders of western India—Gokhale and, after him, Gandhi, who both carried on the tradition he began, and saw social and economic reform as an integral part of selfless public service.
The impracticability of reviving ancient traditions merely because they are ancient was tellingly demonstrated by Ranade in his 1897 Social Conference address. Having explained why he rejected the suggestion of the Brahmo and Arya Samajists that all social reformers convert to those faiths, he went on to analyze the four basic causes of India’s degeneration.
While the new religious sects condemn us for being too orthodox, the extreme orthodox section denounce us for being too revolutionary in our methods. According to these last, our efforts should be directed to revive, and not to reform. … They advocate a return to the old ways, and appeal to the old authorities and the old sanction. … [But] what particular period of our history is to be taken as the old? Whether the period of the Vedas, of the Smritis, of the Puranas or of the Mahomedan or modern Hindu times? … Shall we revive the old habits of our people when the most sacred of our caste indulged in all the abominations as we now understand them of animal food and drink which exhausted every section of our country’s zoology and botany? The men and the gods of those old days ate and drank forbidden things to excess in a way no revivalist will now venture to recommend. Shall we revive the twelve forms of sons, or eight forms of marriage, which included capture, and recognized mixed and illegitimate intercourse? Shall we revive the Niyoga system of procreating sons on our brother’s wives when widowed? Shall we revive the old liberties taken by the Rishis and by the wives of the Rishis with the marital tie? Shall we revive the hecatombs of animals sacrificed from year’s end to year’s end, and in which human beings were not spared as propitiatory offerings? Shall we revive the Shakti worship of the left hand with its indecencies and practical debaucheries? Shall we revive the sati and infanticide customs, or the flinging of living men into the rivers, or over rocks, or hookswinging, or the crushing beneath Jagannath car? Shall we revive the internecine wars of the Brahmins and Kshatriyas, or the cruel persecution and degradation of the aboriginal population? … These instances will suffice to show that the plan of reviving the ancient usages and customs will not work our salvation, and is not practicable. … If revival is impossible, reformation is the only alternative open to sensible people, and now it may be asked what is the principle on which this reformation must be based? … It is not the outward form, but the inward form, the thought and the idea which determines the outward form, that has to be changed if real reformation is desired.
Now what have been the inward forms or ideas which have been hastening our decline during the past three thousand years? These ideas may be briefly set forth as isolation, submission to outward force or power more than to the voice of the inward conscience, perception of fictitious differences between men and men due to heredity and birth, passive acquiescence in evil or wrong doing, and a general indifference to secular well-being, almost bordering upon fatalism. These have been the root ideas of our ancient social system. They have as their natural result led to the existing family arrangements where the woman is entirely subordinated to the man and the lower castes to the higher castes, to the length of depriving men of their natural respect for humanity. All the evils we seek to combat result from the prevalence of these ideas. They are mere corollaries to these axiomatic assumptions. They prevent some of our people from realizing what they really are in all conscience, neither better nor worse than their fellows, and that whatever garb men may put on, they are the worse for assuming dignities and powers which do not in fact belong to them. As long as these ideas remain operative on our minds, we may change our outward forms and institutions, and be none the better for the change. … In place of isolation, we must cultivate the spirit of fraternity or elastic expansiveness. … Every caste and every sect has a tendency to split itself into smaller castes and smaller sects in practical life. … Now all this must be changed. The new mold of thought on this head must be, as stated above, cast on the lines of fraternity, a capacity to expand outwards, and to make more cohesive inwards the bonds of fellowship. Increase the circle of your friends and associates, slowly and cautiously if you will, but the tendency must be towards a general recognition of the essential equality between man and man. …
The next idea which lies at the root of our helplessness is the sense that we are always intended to remain children, to be subject to outside control and never to rise to the dignity of self-control by making our conscience and our reason the supreme, if not the sole, guide to our conduct. All past history has been a terrible witness to the havoc committed by this misconception. … Now the new idea which should take up the place of this helplessness and dependence is not the idea of a rebellious overthrow of all authority, but that of freedom responsible to the voice of God in us. Great and wise men in the past, as in the present, have a claim upon our regards, but they must not come between us and our God—the Divine principle enthroned in the heart of every one of us high or low. …
Similarly, … heredity and birth explain many things, but this Law of Karma does not explain all things! What is worse, it does not explain the mystery that makes man and woman what they really are, the reflection and the image of God. Our passions and our feelings, our pride and our ambition, lend strength to these agencies, and with their help the Law of Karma completes our conquest, and in too many cases enforces our surrender. The new idea that should come in here is that this Law of Karma can be controlled and set back by a properly trained will, when it is made subservient to a higher will than ours. …
The fourth old form or idea to which I will allude here is our acquiescence in wrong or evil doing as an inevitable condition of human life, about which we need not be very particular. All human life is a vanity and a dream, and we are not much concerned with it. This view of life is in fact atheism in its worst form. … It is the beast in us which blinds us to impurity and vice, and makes them even attractive. There must be nautches11 in our temples, say our priests, because even the Gods cannot do without these impure fairies. This is only a typical instance of our acquiescence in impurity. There must be drunkenness in the world, there must be poverty and wretchedness and tyranny, there must be fraud and force, there must be thieves and the law to punish them. No doubt these are facts, and there is no use denying their existence, but in the name of all that is sacred and true, do not acquiesce in them, do not hug these evils to your bosom, and cherish them. Their contact is poisonous, not the less deadly because it does not kill, but it corrupts men. A healthy sense of the true dignity of our nature, and of man’s high destiny, is the best corrective and antidote to this poison. …
Now this is the work of the Reformer. Reforms in the matter of infant marriage and enforced widowhood, in the matter of temperance and purity, intermarrige between castes, the elevation of the low castes, and the readmission of converts, and the regulation of our endowments and charities, are reforms only so far and no further as they check the influence of the old ideas and promote the growth of the new tendencies. The Reformer has to infuse in himself the light and warmth of nature, and he can only do it by purifying and improving himself and his surroundings. He must have his family, village, tribe, and nation recast in other and new molds, and that is the reason why Social Reform becomes our obligatory duty, and not a mere pastime which might be given up at pleasure.
[From C. Y. Chintamani, ed., Indian Social Reform (Madras: Thompson, 1901), 2:89–90, 91–93, 94–95.]
It is hard to call Jotirao Phule (1827–1890) a reformer and not a revolutionary, since he wanted to overturn the entire Indian caste and economic order. But he also wanted to work within the framework of the British Raj, to which he gave a positive nod; thus it may be appropriate to call him a radical reformer. His powerful energy, courage, and intelligence attracted considerable attention during the second half of the nineteenth century in western India. Born into the low-caste Mali community in Maharashtra, he attended a missionary school, and came into contact with a circle of young men critical of traditional society and religion. Influenced not only by missionary views but also by the more radical ideas of writers like Thomas Paine (particularly “The Age of Reason”), Phule decided to become an educator; with his wife, he opened a school for girls from the lowest groups in society. Finding his program too radical, his own father turned him out. Phule continued to work for the education of women and of the lowest castes—including Untouchables, whom he called “atishudras.” He founded several more schools in the 1850s, including a night school for working people. In the 1860s he established a house for illegitimate children and their mothers, and challenged the caste order by opening the household water tank to Untouchables. In the next decade he helped found the Satyashodhak Samaj (“Truth-Seeking Society”), a radical reform organization; in pursuit of social change, he became a member of the Poona Municipal Council.
He also developed a penetrating critique of Brahman dominance over the lower castes as the main theme of Indian history from the time of the Aryan invasions to the present. He drew upon decades of polemics by non-Brahmans and missionaries, as well as the centuries-old bhakti traditions of Maharashtra in formulating his views. Although he did not present a Marxist dialectic of class struggle, there are affinities. He assimilated all the lower castes—including Untouchables—into one large category of the oppressed, and insisted that they could only flourish if the extended dominance of the Brahmans at the top of the socioreligious order was overturned. As a monotheist of sorts, he rejected the traditional notions of karma, avatars, and the four varnas. He believed in the necessary destruction of the old to make way for the new, and in this process foreign missionaries and rulers were valuable allies. But he thought that the British had been misled by the Brahmans, and had allowed the latter to control the new educational order that was coming into being. Therefore he testified before the Hunter Commission on Education in 1882, pressing for educational institutions for the lower orders without Brahman teachers or Brahman control. His advocacy of more attention to primary education is being echoed more than a century later.
Although he did not himself convert to Christianity or Buddhism, as some other radical reformers did, Phule asserted the right of Pandita Ramabai to convert. He was one of her few defenders in Poona society. He was also active in supporting prohibition, widow remarriage, and the whole spectrum of reforms for women. He included all women, even those in the highest castes, as among the shudras and atishudras of Indian society, because of the oppression they had to endure.
The selection below contains part of his critique of Indian society, in the preface to his book Slavery, which he dedicated to “the good people of the United States as a token of admiration for their sublime disinterested and self-sacrificing devotion in the cause of eradicating Negro Slavery; and with an earnest desire, that my countrymen may take their noble example as their guide in the emancipation of their Sudra brethren from the trammels of Brahmin thraldom.”
Recent researches have demonstrated beyond a shadow of doubt that the Brahmins were not the aborigines of India. At some remote period of antiquity, probably more than 3000 years ago, the Aryan progenitors of the present Brahmin Race descended upon the plains of Hindoo Koosh, and other adjoining tracts. According to Dr. Pritchard, the Ethnologist, they were an off-shoot of the Great Indo-European race, from whom the Persians, Medes, and other Iranian nations in Asia and the principal nations in Europe like-wise are descended. The affinity existing between the Zend, the Persian and Sanskrit languages, as also between all the European languages, unmistakably points to a common source of origin. It appears also more than probable that the original cradle of this race being an arid, sandy and mountainous region, and one ill calculated to afford them the sustenance which their growing wants required, they branched off into colonies, East and West. The extreme fertility of the soil in India, its rich productions, the proverbial wealth of its people, and the other innumerable gifts which this favoured land enjoys, and which have more recently tempted the cupidity of the Western nations, no doubt, attracted the Aryans, who came to India, not as simple emigrants with peaceful intentions of colonization, but as conquerors. They appear to have been a race imbued with very high notions of self, extremely cunning, arrogant and bigoted. … The aborigines whom the Aryans subjugated, or displaced, appear to have been a hardy and brave people from the determined front which they offered to these interlopers. … From many customs … traditionally handed down to us, as well as from the mythological legends contained in the sacred books of the Brahmins, it is evident that there had been a hard struggle for ascendancy between the two races. The wars of Devas and Daityas, or the Rakshasas, about which so many fictions are found scattered over the sacred books of the Brahmins, have certainly a reference to this primeval struggle. …
This, in short, is the history of Brahmin domination in India. They originally settled on the banks of the Ganges whence they gradually spread over the whole of India. In order, however, to keep a better hold on the people they devised that weird system of mythology, the ordination of caste, and the code of cruel and inhuman laws, to which we can find no parallel amongst other nations. They founded a system of priestcraft so galling in its tendency and operation, the like of which we can hardly find anywhere since the times of the Druids. The institution of Caste, which has been the main object of their laws, had no existence among them originally. That it was an after-creation of their deep cunning is evident from their own writings. The highest rights, the highest privileges and gifts, and everything that would make the life of a Brahmin easy, smooth going and happy—everything that would conserve or flatter their self-pride,—were specially inculcated and enjoined, whereas the Sudras and Atisudras were regarded with supreme hatred and contempt, and the commonest rights of humanity were denied them. Their touch, nay, even their shadow, is deemed a pollution. They are considered as mere chattels, and their life of no more value than that of the meanest reptile … Happily for our Sudra brethren of the present day our enlightened British Rulers have not recognized these preposterous, inhuman and unjust penal enactments of the Brahmin legislators. They no doubt regard them more as ridiculous fooleries than as equitable laws. Indeed, no man possessing even a grain of common sense would regard them as otherwise. …
In the days of rigid Brahmin dominancy, so lately as that of the time of the Peshwa, my Sudra brethren had even greater hardships and oppression practised upon them than what even the slaves in America had to suffer. To this system of selfish superstition and bigotry, we are to attribute the stagnation and all the evils under which India has been groaning for many centuries past. It will, indeed, be difficult to name a single advantage which accrued to the aborigines from the advent of this intensely selfish and tyrannical sect. …
Under the guise of religion the Brahmin has his finger in every thing, big or small, which the Sudra undertakes. Go to his house, to his field or to the court to which business may invite him, the Brahmin is there under some specious pretext or other, trying to squeeze out of him as much as his cunning and wily brain can manage. …
The Brahmin of the present time finds to some extent, like Othello, that his occupation is gone. But knowing full well this state of matters, is the Brahmin inclined to make atonement for his past selfishness? Perhaps, it would have been useless to repine over what has been suffered and what has passed away, had the present state been all that is desirable. We know perfectly well that the Brahmin will not descend from his self-raised high pedestal and meet his Coonbee12 and low caste brethren on an equal footing without a struggle. Even the educated Brahmin who knows his exact position and how he has come by it, will not condescend to acknowledge the errors of his forefathers and willingly forego the long cherished false notions of his own superiority. At present, not one has the moral courage to do what only duty demands, and as long as this continues, one sect distrusting and degrading another sect, the condition of the Sudras will remain unaltered, and India never advance in greatness or prosperity.
Perhaps a part of the blame in bringing matters to this crisis may be justly laid to the credit of the Government. Whatever may have been their motives in providing ampler funds and greater facilities for higher education and neglecting that of the masses, it will be acknowledged by all that in justice to the latter this is not as it should be. It is an admitted fact that the greater portion of the revenues of the Indian Empire are derived from the Ryot’s labour—from the sweat of his brow. The higher and richer classes contribute little or nothing to the state’s exchequer. …
Perhaps the most glaring tendency of the Government system of high class education has been the virtual monopoly of all the higher offices under them by the Brahmins. If the welfare of the Ryot is at heart, if it is the duty of Government to check a host of abuses, it behoves them to narrow this monopoly, day by day, so as to allow a sprinkling of the other castes to get into the public service. Perhaps some might be inclined to say that it is not feasible in the present state of education. Our only reply is that if Government look a little less after higher education and more towards the education of the masses, the former being able to take care of itself, there would be no difficulty in training up a body of men every way qualified and perhaps far better in morals and manners.
My object in writing the present volume is not only to tell my Sudra brethren how they have been duped by the Brahmins, but also to open the eyes of Government to that pernicious system of high class education which has hitherto been so persistently followed and which statesmen like Sir George Campbell, the present Lieutenant Governor of Bengal, with broad and universal sympathies, are finding to be highly mischievous and pernicious to the interests of Government. I sincerely hope that Government will ere long see the error of their ways, trust less to writers or men who look through high class spectacles and take the glory into their own hands of emancipating my Sudra brethren from the trammels of bondage which the Brahmins have woven round them like the coils of a serpent. It is no less the duty of such of my Sudra brethren as have received any education to place before Government the true state of their fellowmen and endeavour to the best of their power to emancipate themselves from Brahmin thraldom. Let there be schools for the Sudras in every village; but away with all Brahmin school-masters! The Sudras are the life and sinews of the country, and it is to them alone and not to the Brahmins that the Government must ever look to tide them over their difficulties, financial as well as political. If the hearts and minds of the Sudras are made happy and contented the British Government need have no fear for their loyalty in the future.
1st June, 1873 Joteerao Phooley [From Phule, Selected Writings of Jotirao Phule, ed G. P. Deshpande (New Delhi: LeftWord, 2002), 27–28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34–35.]
On June 11, 1885, Phule wrote the following letter to M. G. Ranade, declining an invitation to a Marathi literary conference. He had little patience with meetings and organizations dominated by Brahmans, even one to be conducted by the widely respected Ranade.
Dear Sir,
I acknowledge the receipt of your letter regarding the proposed conference of the [Marathi] authors and I was delighted to receive your request that I should participate in the conference. But then esteemed sir, the conferences and the books of those who refuse to think of human rights generally, who do not concede them to others and going by their behaviour are unlikely to concede them in future, cannot make sense to us, they cannot concur with what we are trying to say in our books. The reason is that their ancestors, with a view to taking revenge on us, included in their pseudo-religious texts an account of how they turned us into slaves and thus gave our enslavement religious authority. Their dated and decadent texts are witness to this phenomenon. These upper-caste authors who are forever miles away from reality and who can only make ceremonial and meaningless speeches in big meetings can never understand what we the shudras and atishudras have to suffer and what calamities we have to undergo. All this is not entirely unknown to the high-caste founders of various conferences and organizations. They pretend to be modernists as long as they are in the service of the British government. The moment they retire and claim their pensions, they get into their brahmanical touch-me-not attire, become caste chauvinists, incorrigible idol worshippers and, what is worse, treat the shudras and atishudras as lowly and contemptible. If they happen to be in their touch-me-not ritual dress they would not even touch paper notes as if that were a blasphemy! How can these Arya brahmans improve the lot of this unfortunate land? Be that as it may. We shudras do not any longer wish to trust these people and their specious and dishonest stories, for they cheat us and eat off our labour. In a word, we shudras have nothing to gain by mixing with such people. We must ourselves think about our situation and how we should relate to these upper-caste people. If these leaders of men are genuinely interested in unifying all people they must address themselves to the discovery of the root of eternal love of all human beings. Let them discover it and may be formulate and publish it as a text. Otherwise to turn a blind eye to the divisions among the human beings at this hour is simply futile. Of course, they are free to do what they like. I would nevertheless be thankful if my short letter is placed before your Conference for consideration. In any case accept the salute of this old man.
Your friend,
Jotirao G. Phule
[Letter to the Conference of Marathi Authors, trans. G. P. Deshpande, from Selected Writings of Jotirao Phule, 200–201.]
Pandita Ramabai (1858–1922) was a remarkable Maharashtrian woman whose father, a Chitpavan Brahman, against the strictures of contemporary pandits, trained his second wife, and then an older daughter and son, in Sanskrit. After her parents and sister died in 1874, Ramabai and her brother made their way to Calcutta, where she began to display and use her learning. Her brother died in 1880; then her husband, a Bengali Shudra who was also a Christian, died in 1882. She went back to Maharashtra, and founded the Arya Mahila Samaj. In 1883 she traveled to Great Britain to seek aid for her work in helping destitute women, to learn English, and to become a doctor (she later changed her field to education). Given a home by the Wantage Sisters, she converted to Christianity. But feeling too constricted by them and the Church of England, she voyaged to the United States in 1886, where she met friendly women in Philadelphia who encouraged her to complete her powerful, polemical, and very successful book, The High Caste Hindu Woman. Touring the United States (1886–1888), she found women actively working in voluntary associations and committed to a variety of reforms. She also admired the industriousness of Americans, and their separation of church and state. All this inspired her to return to India to work energetically for the reform of her own society.
In India she was primarily concerned with the fate of degraded and abandoned women, who were also aided by Hindu reformers, including Ranade, but in addition she worked in famine relief and for temperance and against smoking. The Ramabai Association in the United States provided her with some of the funds she needed for her work. American money was indispensible to the success of her work, although there was also occasional friction between Ramabai and her donors.
This first selection is a powerful letter written from London on June 11, 1883, to British official and former Bombay governor Sir Bartle Frere, describing the plight of women and asking for aid in her work.
TO THE HON’BLE SIR BARTLE FRERE SAHEB BAHADOOR
Honoured Sir,
While I was in India, I have at various times heard of your renown. The Indian people would never be able to obliterate from their minds the various good deeds done by you while Governor of the Bombay Presidency. I, as an Indian female, am so greatly obliged to you for the acts of kindness done to my country.
I cannot say how much I feel delighted at your kindly granting me an interview today, even though you had an urgent appointment elsewhere. …
It was only today that I heard from yourself that you were in India for fifty years. Is not that dear country of my birth, where you passed half your life, and its people entitled to your friendship? … And for this reason only I made myself bold to write this letter. And if in doing it I have been mistaken, you will kindly pardon me.
It is rather ridiculous for a person like myself to give information about Indian matters to you who have lived in India for so many years, and who are older than myself and possess superior knowledge. Yet the object of this letter is not to inform you but to present you the picture of the female community of India, as to their condition, which I beg leave to mention briefly.
The females in India consider it to be a result of sin to be born a female; and I myself endorse this view, because I think that the condition of women in India is not better than that of animals in hell. By this I don’t mean to say that all women in India are miserable. Though there are many women in India that are happy, yet considering the entire female population of India, the happy ones are very few. I will try to give you an idea of the life of a Hindoo woman.
To commence with, the Indian people seem to think that no one ought to have a female child born to him. The supposed reason is that there is no use of a female in this life. Though this belief is not universal, yet it is general. If a female child happens to be born to anyone, there is a feeling of sadness. And it is sometimes observed that the parents of female children treat them badly. The reason for it is not that they are wanting in parental affection, but that they follow the general tide of opinion. As the girls grow older, their fathers feel them to be more burdensome. There is a saying that “it is more difficult to rear up a girl than to keep an elephant.” …
The Indian people do not take the same amount of care for the education of their girls as they do of their boys. Because it is not only considered to be of no use to give education to girls, but it is the general belief that girls rather spoil by education. …
And thus it is that people rid themselves of their daughters by marrying them [off] at an early age, following the general practice. When a girl has attained the age of ten or eleven, she has to live with her husband’s family. For the time they live with their parents they pass a tolerably happy life. But when these girls are married there is a life of misery in store for them in the future. Those that lead happy lives after marriage are very rare, and are considered to be very fortunate. Young children not even able to speak well, are snatched away from the lap of their mothers and thrown into the crush of worldly life. …
There are very few mothers-in-law that treat their sons’ wives as their own daughters. In India a mother-in-law and daughter-in-law hold the same relation towards each other, as there is between a cat and a rat. There is no hope for a girl to receive education when she has gone to her husband’s house. A girl, when she has gone to her husband’s house, unlearns all she might have learnt while with her father. There is no occasion offered to girls to receive their education, for while young their lives are spent in [enduring] the cruelty of their mothers-in-law and sisters-in-law. …
The state of the wives of such men is greatly deplorable. These men treat their wives in the same way as from history we know the Spaniards treated the Indians in America. In India when women are married, their husbands stand to them in the place of their parents, sovereign, and owner. If they treat them badly there is no one in the world to protect them. … There is not a single day that passes, without recording that their husbands beat them like animals and call them names. Some wives, when they feel the treatment [to be] unbearable, live apart from their husbands, or die a suicidal death; and in their great distress they do not find suicide a difficult deed. And there are some ignorant women, who not knowing the boon of this human existence, cling to an immoral life. They do not, by any means, like that greatly sinful life, but in their deplorable state, no other remedy suggests itself to them.
During the lives of their husbands the wives bear all the pain that is inflicted on them. And if through misfortune their husbands die in their lifetime, there is no end to their misery. On [the] one hand the sorrow of the death of their husbands is unbearable, and on the other the ill-treatment they receive at the hands of all is really great. The indignities to which widows are subjected in India is [sic] indescribable. All people look on them with disgust. [People] seem to think that it is a fault of theirs because [of which] their husbands have died (as if they themselves had killed their husbands). … Widows are allowed but one meal a day. It is considered sinful for a widow to eat oftener than once in a day. If there be a widow in a household there is considered to be no need for a servant-girl in it. It is considered to be a widow’s duty to be working all day and night like a female slave. A woman if she happens to be a widow in her youth is not allowed to marry again. She is shut up day and night in a dark house. These demons in the shape of human beings don’t content themselves with this treatment, but deprive the poor helpless widows of their natural ornament, the hair on their heads. … After doing this cruel act, and feeding them only once a day, those people shut them up in the house, thus trying to enclose every chance of their satisfying their carnal desires. …
Some kind-hearted people have set the practice of re-marrying widows, but owing to the sternness of our caste, their attempts have been rendered futile. In former days there was the practice of Suttee (burning widows), but Government having put a stop to it, has left us in a worsening state of existence. It would have been far better to be burnt once [and] for all, than being scorched gradually in the fire of misery for the whole of our lives; such exclamations of sorrow are frequently heard coming from the mouths of millions of women. Oh you English brethren of ours, since you have saved us from immediate death by the prevention of Suttee (widow-burning), you can as well now render the rest of our existence happy by some means! Is it proper that one of our sex, the great Queen Victoria, should be the Sovereign of England and Hindoostan, and that we, women, should be subjected to this unbearable torture? …
Last year I was at Poona and have established there a female association called Arya Mahila Samaj. This Association is working now even and has its branches at Bombay, Ahmedabad and Viramagaum[?]; and it is hoped that in a few years to come branches of this Association will be spread throughout India. The objects of that Association are three—1st, to put a stop to the marriage of children; 2nd, to prevent a man re-marrying while the first wife is living; 3rd, to give help to destitute women; and to encourage female education.
The accomplishment of the first two objects requires the countenance of the Government and the consent of the entire community; and so just now we do not make ourselves anxious about them. The third object is feasible just now, and we try our best to accomplish it as much as possible, and direct our energies to its achievement. …
Honoured Sir, I am a poor, helpless, ignorant and weak being. I by my own self would not be able to do much good to my sisters in India. But I feel thankful to Almighty God for having offered me the opportunity of enabling the cry of distress of the female sex of India to reach your ears. I have not the power of relieving the poor helpless females of my country from their misery with money, but am prepared to give my powers and life for the object. Is it possible that yourself and fellow-countrymen of yours would not redress the grievances of your Indian sisters? I hope and feel that this adventurous mission of mine of bringing to you this cry of my Indian sisters would not prove useless, having left my own dear country and come to your land after travelling over six-and-a-quarter thousand miles. …
In conclusion I beg to take leave of you by wishing you every blessing from God, and that the Almighty may give you the power and will to give us your aid.
Your most obedient servant
Ramabai
Member of the Committee of the Arya Mahila Association
[From Pandita Ramabai Sarasvati, The Cry of Indian Women (1883), reproduced in Pandita Ramabai Through Her Own Words: Selected Works, ed. and trans. M. Kosambi (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), 105, 106, 107–108, 108–109, 110, 111, 112, 113.]
Ramabai composed this brief autobiographical sketch just before she sailed to America in 1886.
I was born in Mangalore District, in a forest named Gangamul, on the Western Ghats in April 1858. My father’s name was Anant Shastri Dongre. He belonged to the caste of the Chitpavana Brahmins, and was a good scholar in the Sanskrit Shastras. … From the time of their marriage, my father began to educate my mother. At that time, that is to say fifty years ago, in the Mangalore District, there had been nothing done by the English Government for the improvement of the people. All classes were against female education, and the prejudice clings to them still (e.g. I have received a letter last month from my half-brother, disapproving of my coming to England to learn English, etc). When my father began to teach my mother Sanskrit and Dharma Shastras, the people in the neighbourhood disapproved of it, and threatened to put him out of [their] caste but he would not heed them and as he was in no way beholden to them, he pursued his own ways. …
In 1874, I lost both my parents within two months of each other. We were living then in the Madras Presidency. After their death, because of the persecution which was carried on against us on account of my not being married and because he advocated female education, we were obliged to leave our country [region]. After a few months my sister died of cholera, and my brother and I travelled for six years in various parts of India. In our travels we were obliged to go on foot, not having the means to afford ourselves conveyance. In this way we went a distance of 2,000 miles, and thus we had a good opportunity of seeing the sufferings of Hindu women and were much touched by their sorrows. We saw it not only in one part of India, but it was the same in the Madras Presidency, Bombay Presidency, Punjab, the North-West Province, Bengal, Assam, etc. This made us think much of how it was possible to improve the condition of women and raise them out of their degradation. We were able to do nothing directly to help them but in the towns and villages we often addressed large audiences of people and urged upon them the education of the women and children. In order to be able to converse with the different races we were obliged to learn Hindi (as it is a general language in India) and Bengalee. In the year 1880, when we were in Dacca, my brother died, and then I was alone in the world. Six months after, I married a Bengalee gentleman, Bipin Behari Das [Medhavi]. He was a great friend of my brother, and I knew him two years before I married. He was born in the Sylhet District in Assam, and belonged to the caste of Shudras (the fourth of the Hindu castes). … It was against the Hindu religion for me, being a Brahmin, to marry a Shudra, but neither my husband nor I believed in the Hindu religion, so we were married under the Civil Marriage Act.13 After our marriage, we lived together in Cachar (Silchar) in Assam, for 16 months. In 1882, my husband died of cholera, leaving me with one little daughter. After his death, I had to pay off his debts; then I went to the Bombay Presidency and lived there for a year. During that time my countrymen helped me and they were willing to maintain me in independence, but my wish was to come to England and thus fit myself for a life of usefulness, in order to benefit my countrywomen. I had not money to pay my passage, so I wrote a book [Stri Dharma Niti] and published it. The Government kindly bought 600 copies of it (which was a great help to me) and other copies were sold by booksellers. In this way I received sufficient money for my passage, but how to support myself and [my] child in England I knew not. It was my good fortune to become acquainted with the Wantage Sisters working in Poona; so I asked them if they would help me, and they promised to do so. Now I am staying in Wantage with them, and they are kindly supporting and teaching me. I am very grateful for their kindness. If my health allows me to carry out my plans, and it is God’s will that I should do so, it is my intention to study medicine in England in order to benefit my countrywomen and with the hope of inducing some of them to follow my example. As I was by birth a Brahmin, my religion was at first Hinduism. Then for a time, I was a Theist, believing that Theism was taught in [the] Vedas. In the last two months, however, I have accepted Christianity and hope shortly to receive Holy Baptism.
[“An Autobiographical Account,” in Pandita Ramabai Through Her Own Words, 115–116, 117, 118.]
Tarabai Shinde (ca. 1850–1910) was a well-educated, high-caste, wealthy Maratha woman who used her acerbic wit and keen powers of observation to pillory conservative Hindu opinions of women, defend a female victim of patriarchal oppression, and provide an outlet for her own disappointing experiences as a woman in society. Shinde was a friend of Jotirao and Savitribai Phule, whose school for Untouchable girls and shelter for upper-caste widows (who were forbidden from remarrying) she supported. In turn, Jotirao Phule defended Shinde when her Marathi book, Strī Purush Tulanā (A Comparison Between Men and Women), caused a storm of outrage. Strī Purush Tulanā, a booklet of about forty pages, was written in response to a vitriolic editorial that appeared in an antireformist weekly, the Pune Vaibhav. Commenting on the general moral turpitude of women, as evidenced in the killing of her illegitimate son by a woman named Vijayalakshmi, the editorial accused women of inherent vices and weaknesses; Shinde challenged this conclusion, blaming men not only for exhibiting worse behavior but also for being the cause of desperate women’s moral lapses.
In the excerpts to follow, one gets a feel for Shinde’s intelligent style of argumentation, her daring in focusing an attack on the Hindu scriptures as contributing to misogynist attitudes, and her own sadness at having been married as a child to a man whom she never loved. The text, though published in 1882, was virtually unknown until it was rediscovered and republished in 1975.
Let me ask you something, Gods! You are supposed to be omnipotent and freely accessible to all. You are said to be completely impartial. What does that mean? That you have never been known to be partial. But wasn’t it you who created both men and women? Then why did you grant happiness only to men and brand women with nothing but agony? Your will was done! But the poor women have had to suffer for it down the ages.
One comes across several charges against women both in the written literature and in everyday discourse. But do men not suffer from the same flaws that women are supposed to have? Do men not cheat as women do? Theft, incest, murder, robbery, deception, fraud, swindling of government funds, taking bribes, changing truth to falsehood and falsehood to truth—do men not do any of these? …
If, as you claim, a woman has more power than a device for witchcraft or black magic, let me ask you, you who are endowed with an intellect far more powerful than hers, what have you not achieved with your intellect? You who have made possible what was believed to be impossible, of what worth can a woman’s power be before your valiant deeds? Of none.
Second, it may be true that women are a whirlpool of suspicion. But that is because they are uneducated and all kinds of doubts inhabit their minds. But even then, it must be borne in mind that their suspicions are usually and necessarily about their own relationships. But if one casts just a fleeting glance at the webs of doubt in your minds, one’s eyes will surely be dazed. Your minds are full of all kinds of treacherous plans. “Let’s bluff this moneylender and pocket a thousand rupees from him.” Or, “Let’s tell that jagirdar such and such a thing and swindle him out of some five hundred rupees.” Or, “Let’s lie to that officer about that particular case and change his judgment to X’s favor.” Or, “Let’s register those false documents instead of the true ones.” Or, “That woman Y, what a coquette she really is! What airs she gives herself! Must corner her one of these days, and see whether some affair with her can be managed. My current affair has begun to bore me. This is the chance to end it once and for all and begin a new one.” Such disgusting thoughts never enter a woman’s mind. …
Third, women are called the acme of impudence. But does your own species lack this quality in any measure? A judicious comparison would reveal the balance weighted far heavier on your side in this respect. Fourth, women are considered a megapolis of inadvertent acts. But what about you, the dastardly, perfidious, treacherous people that you are? You, who would not hesitate even for a moment in cutting somebody’s throat immediately after winning his confidence. Do you never commit such insidious acts? You speak as if you are Holy Temples of Reason! Bravo! Yet can you find a match, anywhere, at any time, for the perfidious acts that you commit every day? On top of all this, you have the audacity to call yourselves judicious! What can anyone say? …
Furthermore, we need to ask, what is the greatest crime that women commit? Adultery. That is the highest peak of their criminal ventures. They behave recklessly only because of such inclinations. But then, who takes the first step of sowing the seeds of such designs in their minds? Who else but you? However shameless a woman may be, she will never throw herself into the arms of a strange man. That is an eternal truth. Do you know what a woman’s idea of happiness is? First, the husband of her choice. One whom she can love. Once their hearts are united, she will not worry about poverty. She will endure any calamity for him. … But … can adultery really be considered an act of the most heinous nature? Our shastras certainly do not seem to think so! There is no need to think that such things did not happen in the past. In fact, those very shastras that you so very glibly quote are full of the most supreme confusion regarding this problem. For example, the shastras most freely sanctioned such practices in several circumstances. Suppose a king died, leaving behind him a queen who did not have a son, she could select any rishi of her choice and beget sons from him to order to augment the family. And she could keep him till she had as many children as she wanted. What was this if not adultery? But wasn’t it sanctioned by the shastras? …
The fifth charge against women is that they are the treasure houses of transgressions. But in fact, it is you who fit that description best. It is you who cause women to transgress. Let me substantiate this. Many fathers give away their beautiful and very young daughters, who are hardly ten or eleven years old, to men who are eighty or ninety in exchange for a purse of gold. They do it with an eye only on his wealth. … In this world, who is there who would love a woman as much as the husband does, apart from her mother, of course? That is a fact. But what about her who loses both? Who can she depend on when the red-hot fire of youth is burning in the pallav of her sari? This, then, is the fate of the women who are married off to old husbands. …
I have one suggestion to offer in this regard. The government should brand the stupid prattling mouths of these men with red-hot irons. This will strike terror in their hearts and such crimes will never be committed! Think of that miserable woman who later on spends her life in some godforsaken corner, or in the jail, mourning her fate, weeping her heart out, trying to wash the stains off her character. All her honor is torn to rags by such public disgrace. Many commit suicide, many abandon their relatives, give up their wealth, and go into exile. Even a cobra is preferable to you. At least it kills immediately. But the poison that you inject into her afflicts her with intolerable agony and causes her to die a slow, slow death. Thus you are more treacherous than even a poisonous snake. …
I’m sure that there are very few men who are ruined by women. But it would be difficult even to guess at the number of women ruined by men. … You are nothing but learned asses! Yes, that is what you are really. It is said that it’s always dark just under a lamp. You are no exception to that rule! If only you realized how much evil you contain, it would break your heart! …
[From Women Writing in India, 600 B.C. to the Present, vol. 1: 600 B.C. to the Early Twentieth Century, ed. Susie Tharu and K. Lalita (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993), 1:223–224, 225–226, 227–228, 234–235. Trans. M. Pandit.]
As we have seen in chapter 2, the Widow Remarriage Bill had passed in 1856, largely through the efforts of Ishvarchandra Vidyasagar. And various reformers like Pandita Ramabai and Tarabai Shinde used their position in society to tend to the needs of, or argue for the rights of, widows. In the following selections, however, one gets a glimpse of what it was like in the late nineteenth century to marry a widow, or to be remarried as a widow. The experiences of D. K. Karve and Anandibai Karve demonstrate the degree to which a legislated right takes decades, even a century or more, to be realized and accepted as common practice.
Dhondo Keshav (D. K.) Karve (1858–1962) hailed from a Chitpavan Brahman community that did not sanction widow remarriage. A prominent social reformer who had already broken with his community in believing intellectually in widow remarriage, Karve lived up to his principles: after the death of his first wife in 1891, he chose to marry a twenty-three-year-old widow, Anandibai (1865–1950), the sister of one of his best friends. Thereafter he devoted himself to improving the lives of widows, with special attention to educational opportunities. In 1894 he established the “Widow Remarriage Association,” to aid widows who wished to remarry; in 1896 the Hindu Widows’ Home, for the education of those who could not or did not wish to remarry; and in 1916 the Indian Women’s University. Anandibai and her husband had three sons, the daughter of one of whom was the celebrated anthropologist Irawati Karve (1905–1970).
D. K. Karve’s autobiography, Atmavritta (My Life Story), was first published in Marathi in 1915, with a second edition in 1928 and a third in 1958. Anandibai’s Māzhe Purāna (My Story) was edited from reminiscences by her youngest daughter-in-law, and first published in Marathi in 1944. Two passages by D. K. Karve, and one by Anandibai Karve, are translated below.
Whenever I thought of marrying again, the prospect of marrying a girl who was young enough to be my daughter frightened me. There was no possibility of marrying anyone older, because no girl remained unmarried beyond the age of twelve or thirteen in those days. Naturally the question of marrying a widow came to my mind.14 I had thought about this matter even when I was a boy. Widow remarriage was quite unknown among the higher castes although one or two such marriages had taken place. I was only eleven years old when the first such marriage was celebrated in Bombay in 1869. We in Murud were especially interested because the bride belonged to our village. This event produced a great commotion in Maharashtra. In 1871, a public discussion among learned Brahmans was held in Poona to determine whether the marriage of widows had the sanction of the ancient Hindu lawbooks. The verdict was six to four against the marriage of widows, and the religious elder gave his final decision in accordance with that. …
A different kind of incident, which I remember very well, took place in Murud about the same time when I appeared for the public service examination. An orthodox priest who lived not far from our house had a daughter whose husband had abandoned her. She was living in her father’s house, wearing the red kunku mark on her forehead,15 when somehow she fell victim to some unscrupulous man. She continued to live with the family until her condition could no longer be concealed but had to leave the house after that. The father was threatened with excommunication by the village council for having harboured a sinner and had to pay a heavy penalty. Some years later I met the woman in a place of pilgrimage in southern Maharasthra which incurably sick people, women in difficulties, and lunatics often seek out. The poor creature saw me while she was going round and round the temple counting her rounds on the beads of a rosary and turned her face away. The episode left an indelible impression on my mind.
Joshi and I often discussed the question of the marriage of widows; both of us were sympathetic about the subject. As long as my wife was living, the matter was only of academic interest. But after the death of my wife I thought deeply about the problem and came to the conclusion that if I were to marry again, it would be to a widow.
Now after I had been in Poona for some time, not only friends but my brother and mother also began to press me to give my consent to a second marriage. In those days marrying a widow meant being cut off from society, especially in the case of persons who had relatives living in the rural areas, which were very orthodox. My first task was, therefore, to persuade my brother and mother. They were very good-natured and had a high regard for me. No doubt my marrying a widow would cause them great humiliation and they had to prepare themselves to face it. I also told them that if they did not give me their consent, I would prefer to remain a widower throughout my life. They were thus in a dilemma. They realized how strong my convictions were, but they also knew what they would have to endure in our village. Finally, however, they gave me permission to do what I thought right, provided however that I did not involve them in any way.
The next question was perhaps more difficult in the society in which I was living, namely, to find a suitable bride. Some friends had actually suggested some suitable widows as possibilities, but I was hesitant and could not make up my mind. The question was solved in an unexpected manner. My friend Joshi had a younger sister named Godu, who had been widowed at the age of eight. She had lived in the family of her late husband until she was about twenty-three, when Joshi brought her to Bombay intending to educate her. She lived in our joint family for a few months before she was admitted to the famous Pandita Ramabai’s school as its first widow student. When the school later moved from Bombay to Poona, Godubai went with it. Her head had been shaved according to the prevalent custom, and as her parents were orthodox in their views, the idea of marrying her never entered my mind.
About this time Joshi’s father was in Poona on a short visit and came to see me. To my surprise he asked me directly why I had not married again. When I told him of my intention of marrying a widow if at all, he remained silent for a few minutes and then replied that, in that case, I did not have to go far to seek a suitable bride. I replied that I understood what he had in mind but asked whether he was serious. When he answered in the affirmative, I requested him to see his daughter to ask whether she was agreeable to the proposal.
Although the elder Mr. Joshi was an orthodox Brahman in his day-to-day behavior, he was in essence a liberal-minded person who attached great importance to sentiment and purity of thought. One could really describe him as having very broad human sympathies. He went to Godubai’s school and reported to me that she was willing to marry me. I also learned that the head of the school had persuaded her not to submit to the barber and she had let her hair grow. She was thus ready to marry me as soon as convenient. Her father could not, of course, associate himself openly with the marriage and went away to his village.
My friends were ready to help in all the arrangements. It was the first marriage of a widow to be celebrated in Poona, and they wanted to make it an important event. The question of a house in which to celebrate the wedding would normally have been difficult but a householder whose widowed daughter had herself been married in Bombay some years back came forward and offered his house. We even secured the services of a very learned priest with advanced views in this matter, although a couple of my friends were prepared to recite the sacred verses and perform the religious ceremonies if it became necessary.
My second marriage was celebrated on March 11, 1893. It caused a great commotion all over Maharashtra.
[From D. D. Karve, ed. and trans, The New Brahmans: Five Maharashtrian Families (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), 39–42.]
According to my usual practice of spending at least some part of the annual summer vacation at my native village, I decided to go there with my wife. I had resolved to submit to whatever treatment the people there would give me. Without letting anyone know our exact programme, we suddenly arrived there one evening and occupied a room on the outside of our house but attached to it. The news spread among the Brahman population of the tiny village like wildfire. Everybody began to discuss what steps should be taken against me, and a meeting of the Brahman caste-council was called the next day, to which every adult Brahman in the village was invited by means of criers. … [T]he meeting passed the following resolutions:
1. No person should sit on the same carpet with me.
2. No one should attend a meeting where I was present.
3. My brother should be excommunicated if I entered his compound again.
It was understood that nobody would touch either my wife or me or take food with us. … During our short stay, I could not even speak with my mother or my sister. There was no lack of voluntary detectives who kept a watch in order to find out if any food was passed to us from the house.
[From Karve, The New Brahmans, 46–47.]
[Anandibai Karve writes] Once Father came to Poona to pay me a visit in the Sharada Sadan and stayed with Mr. Karve, whom he knew through Mr. Karve’s friendship with Narharpant, my eldest brother. Mr. Karve was a professor in the Fergusson College now. Father asked Mr. Karve whether he was considering marrying again, and Mr. Karve replied that if he married at all, he wanted to marry a widow.
Next day Father came to see me. He spoke to me about marriage and persuaded me that this was the best course. With some hesitation I gave my consent.
… In a few days Mr. Karve came to see me in the Sharada Sadan and made me an offer of marriage, explaining at the same time that he was a poor man and that we would have to face persecution from society. I accepted his offer, and he went away to his village to get his mother and elder brother to consent to this step. …
Pandita Ramabai was not very pleased about my plan to remarry. She thought Mr. Karve’s small stature a sign of bad health and also drew my attention to the fact, which of course I knew already, that he had a twelve-year-old son. But when she saw that I had made up my mind, she persuaded Mr. Karve to assign a life policy worth Rs. 3,000 to me and had the document drawn up.
Even now, I am surprised at the progressive nature of my father. No ordinary Brahman father in those days would ever have thought of even tolerating the marriage of his widowed daughter, let alone persuading her to follow that course. Even in our house, where everybody feared the pollution of the shadow of the Untouchable Mahar, my father used to allow them to come up to our porch and often gave them buttermilk. In the first few years of my widowhood, he allowed me to make all the preparations for the worship of the house gods. He used to say, “The God who allowed you to become a widow must allow you to do all this.” Altogether, he was exceptionally reformist and liberal for his times.
My marriage was celebrated with orthodox rites by a learned priest on March 11, 1893. That was also the anniversary of the Sharada Sadan, which had been started on that day four years back; and Pandita Ramabai held a big reception there, which all the students attended. My name was changed to Anandibai. …
After I began my married life, I went once or twice to the Sharada Sadan as a young bride would go to her parents’ house. But very soon the institution gave up its secular policy and became openly a Christian missionary institution. Most Hindus removed their wards from it and it moved to a place about twenty miles from Poona. Once or twice Ramabai tried indirectly to get us converted, but when she found that we had no inclination for it, she gave up her attempts.
[From Karve, The New Brahmans, 70–72.]
Ashraf Ali Thanawi (1864–1943) was a leader of the Deobandi reform movement that gathered momentum in North India in the late 1800s. Leaders of this movement believed that Muslims had lost their way, and sought to reeducate them through reaching out to religious leaders, preaching and teaching, public debate, and pamphlets and books. Ashraf Ali Thanawi’s most famous work, Bihishti Zevar (Heavenly Jewelry, ca. 1900), sought to provide a basic education for a respectable Muslim woman. It rapidly became a classic gift for North Indian (Sunni) brides, and has been often reprinted and reedited; despite being much criticized, it remains widely available today.
The Bihishti Zevar sought to empower women through their own moral agency: they were to choose to submit to God and to accept the social restrictions that He had ordained. Thanawi invited women to become literate, and even to attain learning equal to that of men; he also imparted what he considered to be appropriate instruction in Islam. Like many Hindu reformers of the period, he also urged the inculcation of a self-conscious respectability, shorn of the extravagance of competitive display and flirtation.
ON WOMEN GATHERING FOR CELEBRATIONS
The women of a family gather for many celebrations, including those described above as well as many others. All described here are illegitimate …
Celebrations aside, whenever women have a whim, they just think, “I have not seen so and so for ages!” Someone gets sick, and off they go to see her. They may hear of some occasion of celebration, and off they go to offer congratulations. Some women are so free that they set out at night without even summoning a palanquin! Worse yet, as soon as night falls, they think of travel! To go out on a moonlit night is even more shameless. The point is that it is wrong for women to leave their homes and go about here and there.
At most, it is permissible for them to visit their parents or other close relatives, and then only once or twice a year. Beyond that, to go out imprudently, as is the custom, is simply illegitimate, whether it is to the home of relatives or someone else and whether the occasion be a wedding or a condolence, visiting the sick, offering congratulations, or joining the wedding procession from the bridegroom’s house. It is not proper to go out for a wedding at all, even if it is at the home of close relatives. A husband who gives permission is guilty, and so is the wife. It is lamentable that in all Hindustan this rule is nowhere acted upon, and the custom is not even considered improper. Indeed, it is regarded as legitimate, although it is the source of so many sins. Now that you know the practice to be wrong, you must wholly repent. This is the injunction of the sharīʿat Here follows a list of the evils of going out.
When the news spreads among the kinfolk that such and such a ceremony is set in such and such a house, every wife starts thinking about a costly new outfit. Sometimes she asks for money from her husband; sometimes she just summons a cloth merchant on her own and shops on credit or takes a loan with interest. She refuses to accept her husband’s objections if he says he does not have the means. The outfit is obviously made just for showing off. In the hadis it is written that a person who dresses to show off will be dressed on the Day of Judgment in garments of ignominy. Thus a woman commits one sin.
To spend money with this motive of showing off is to waste it. The evil of such waste has already been discussed in the section above. This is a second sin.
To make demands on a husband beyond his means, without necessity, is to cause him vexation. This is a third sin.
To summon the cloth seller and to converse unnecessarily with a strange man to whom you expose half your arm, decorated with bangles and henna, as you handle the cloth—all this is to violate a proper sense of modesty. This is a fourth sin.
To take a loan on interest is to pay interest. This is a fifth sin.
To make inappropriate demands on a husband may lead his good resolve astray. He may be tempted to deprive someone else of rights or to take a bribe so that he can fulfill demands that cannot be met by legitimate means. This sin takes place because of the wife. To be the cause of this is the sixth sin.
Often, a woman purchases gold and silver edging or fillets of brocade for her outfits. Out of ignorance or carelessness, she may pay interest on the purchase, because she does not understand the complexity of buying silver and gold and things made out of them. … This is the seventh sin.
Women do not regard an outfit made for one wedding as adequate for another wedding. A woman needs a new outfit for each occasion, for fear that the other women may taunt her for having only one outfit and arriving in the same dress. Thus all the sins are repeated again. To keep on committing a sin is a sin. This is the eighth sin. So much for preparing the clothes.
Now, thoughts turn to jewelry. If a woman has none, she wheedles a loan of someone else’s jewelry and displays it as her own. This is a form of lying and deception. The noble hadis says that those who falsely display something as their own are like a person who wears two garments, one of lies and one of deceit. From head to foot, that person is wrapped in lies. This is the ninth sin.
The jewelry may jingle so much that everyone’s eyes are riveted on it as the wearer enters. The noble hadis forbids jingling jewelry, because Satan is present in every sound. This is the tenth sin.
Now comes the matter of conveyance. Either the woman orders her servant to fetch a palanquin, or a palanquin is sent from the house where the gathering is to be held. Then the lady suddenly thinks of bathing. There is some delay in preparing water and khali [a cake of mustard seed oil for washing hair]. Then there is further delay in “forming the resolve” to bathe. In all this delay, she fails to say her prayers. No matter! Or she disrupts something else important. No problem! In fact, such disruption occurs daily upon the occasion of the bath of these grand ladies [bhalamanus]. If the prayer is missed or read at a disapproved time, that is the eleventh sin.
The bearers of the palanquin, the kahar, are summoning the lady at the door, and from within the woman is shouting curses in return. To dismiss someone or to curse them without cause is tyranny and sin. This is the twelfth sin.
Now, with great difficulty, and muttering, “God, God,” the lady is ready. She has the bearer move away and seats herself. Many ladies are so careless that they let their hem hang out of the palanquin, or leave the curtain open on one side, or reek so much of perfume that its sweet smell hangs about them on the road. That is to display beauty before strangers. The noble hadis says that any woman who goes out of her house wearing perfume in such a way that its odor reaches others is very bad. This is the thirteenth sin.
Now she arrives at her “intended destination.” The bearers put down the palanquin and move aside. She descends without hesitation and enters the house, not even thinking whether some strange man might be in the house. Frequently on these occasions she will encounter a stranger, and their eyes will meet. Women lack the common sense to first make inquiry. Not to inquire when there is a strong likelihood of possible sin is the fourteenth sin.
Now she has arrived at the house. She greets the women of the house. Fine, for many do not even take the trouble to speak but simply place their hand to their forehead in greeting. The hadis says that this style of greeting is forbidden. Some say the word “salam,” simply “salam.” That too is against the sunna. One should say, “As-salamu ʿalaikum” [“Peace be upon you”]. … Always to oppose the sharīʿat is the fifteenth sin. …
There are even more faults and sins in women’s gatherings. How can something be legitimate that entails such innumerable ills? To abandon these customary gatherings is absolutely necessary.
[Ashraf Ali Thanawi, Bihisthi Zewar, in Perfecting Women: Maulana Ashraf ‘Ali Thanawi’s Bihishti Zewar. Trans. Barbara Daly Metcalf. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 108–112.]
It is important to stress that most women during the reformist era were not authors of controversial tracts on women’s issues, nor were they lone heroines struggling to learn to read in the most adverse of circumstances. Most women lived within the confines of married life, raised children, did household chores, and were expected to embody the auspicious qualities of Lakshmī they were generally subject to various constraints, especially of movement and education. Since the 1830s, elite male reformers, from Rammohan Roy and Ishvarchandra Vidyasagar to Jotirao Phule, had been campaigning on behalf of women’s legal rights, but often the customary rights, such as the right to education, and freedom of movement and choice, were of more value to women in average contexts. Nor were such goods necessarily desired outside the life of the family, as can be seen from the following excerpts drawn from an advice manual for girls and women.
In 1900, Nagendrabala Dasi (1878–1906), a well-known woman poet from Bengal, wrote an advice manual called Women’s Dharma (Nārī Dharma). In Nagendrabala’s view, it is the relationship between husband and wife that is the main crucible for change. Nagendrabala employs the central ideas from the most popular domestic manual of the period, Dhirendranath Pal’s Conversations with the Wife, one of several typically Brahmo-authored texts designed to create an interior space for the Bengali man in which order, hygiene, and enlightened morality would complement his own developing sense of gentility.
Like Dhirendranath and other male manual writers, Nagendrabala wants to organize family life around the marital relationship. But unlike them she talks about the husband/wife relationship using the older “traditional” concept of the pativratā (the woman devoted to her husband). She asserts that “the husband is a woman’s only visible god,” encourages women to follow the examples of “ancient Aryan heroines,” and is also explicitly critical of “the mother-in-law” whose sins destroy the family. In the new family she is imagining, the husband will be the sole authority over his wife and family life, and the extended family elders, particularly the mother-in-law, will lose their traditional authority.
Nagendrabala’s vision may fall short of later feminist hopes for women’s relations with men, and to modern readers the devotion to the husband that she enjoins may seem unappealing, but in early twentieth-century Bengal it represented what Judith Walsh has called a particularly female version of a “new patriarchy.” That is, it was the creative response of married women to the companionate marriage ideal promulgated by the reformers, in which freedom from the oppression of the extended family, and the chance to learn to read and write so as to be a better friend and assistant to the husband, were enthusiastically embraced, as purchased by submission to the husband’s benevolent wisdom.
A wife has four different relationships with her husband, and because of this a husband can claim from her four different kinds of love: devotion, passion, affection, and true love. Among the many kinds of love, these four are the most important; and among these four, true love is the most important of all. Only when love is separated from worldliness, that is, when it lacks self-interest, is it called “true love.” Hindus say about such love: “Nothing else is as perfectly pure.” In most cases, people, regardless of whether they are men or women, offer each of these four kinds of love only within the relationship for which it is most appropriate, yet because a wife has four different relationships with her husband, he receives all four kinds of love from her.
The first relationship a wife has with her husband is that of a “partner”; the second is that of a “wife”; the third, a “friend”’; and the fourth is the “spiritual relationship.” In the first case, “partnership” means the sharing of precious things, such as fame, respect, wealth, knowledge, bravery, happiness, peace, pleasure, dharma, and so forth. Together husband and wife earn these riches, these precious things, in the world, and they make each other happy by sharing what they have earned. That is why there is a “partnership” relationship between them. The husband is the wife’s sole protector; he provides her with food, clothing and shelter; he takes care to always keep her safe. All this is in his domain. And, because it is her husband’s maintenance that protects her throughout her life, the wife is grateful to him and he deserves her devotion.
Second is the “wife” relationship. This relationship exists for the creation of offspring and it is because of this that a husband has the right to his wife’s passions.
Third is the relationship of a “friend.” A friend is someone who gives good advice, who wishes you well as much in prosperity as in danger. It is precisely because one especially notices this little sentiment between husbands and wives that a “friend” relationship is said to exist between them. And it is because of this relationship that a husband receives his wife’s affection.
Fourth is the “spiritual” relationship. This relationship is the most serious. It is not just for this world—it remains unimpaired in the next life as well. The love that connects the souls of husband and wife is “spiritual” love—or the “spiritual” relationship. It lasts forever. A husband and wife who lack this sacred relationship are neither a real husband nor a real wife. Their relationship has no more meaning than that which exists between utensils in a household. “My husband and I are different”—as long as such a sense persists within a wife’s heart, she and her husband will lack this “spiritual” relationship. Only when a wife is able to understand—“My husband and I are one and the same”—only when she can understand the words of the marriage ceremony—… [“This heart which is mine, let that heart be yours”]—only then do we know that a “spiritual” relationship exists between husband and wife. It is only then—when this relationship becomes established and the wife is fit to be called a “true wife”—that a marriage achieves fulfillment. Such a marriage is full of sweetness. …
A wife considers even her husband’s relatives as her own. As a result she should be as devoted to her husband’s father and mother and love and respect them as if they were her own. Unfortunately, such feelings are now disappearing from many places, and it would be no exaggeration even to say that the world no longer has brilliant portraits of model mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law—such as we did, in the past, with Kaushalya and Sita. Nowadays one sees many joint families ruined by the inability of the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law to get along. In such cases, it is extremely difficult to determine who is really at fault. …
Beginning some years back women’s education ceased to be practiced and society began to consider the class of women inferior to the class of men. Because of that many mistaken prejudices arose about women. For without education a life cannot be built nor can intelligence flourish. An ignorant person suffers terrible mental anguish at every step, and such a person often does great harm to society. Therefore, it is essential that everyone, women and men, receive an education appropriate to their own field of work. Beginning some years back, people did not understand this, and since then, as a result, we saw the beginning of the mother-in-law’s unjustified tyranny over the daughter-in-law.
[From Judith E. Walsh, How to Be the Goddess of Your Home: An Anthology of Bengali Domestic Manuals (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2005), 144–145, 145–146, 147–148, 149.]