vārs, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.Exactly twenty years ago, I took a sheet of paper and started writing down my responses to this question: ‘Is it possible to develop patterns of argument that will demonstrate the cognitive, experiential, and spiritual superiority of Christian discipleship over a life-form centred around devotion to Viṣṇu – or vice versa?’ Though I had thought then that I would be able to answer this question within a few days, I have to report that twenty years down the line I am yet unable to do so in either the affirmative or the negative. However, over the course of these years my thoughts on this question have rambled down the alleys of history, theology, postcolonial theory, sociology of knowledge, and philosophy of religion, and gradually taken the shape of this book. I begin with this glimpse at the audacity of my youthful self partly to provide one token of the type of question that I believe lies at the conceptual heart of Hindu and Christian debates over ‘conversion’ and partly to point to certain topics that I do not directly address in this book.
First, this book is not a fine-grained historical survey of conversion movements in different parts of the Indian subcontinent over the last three hundred years. I seek to bring together several such existing studies with the philosophical literature on the problem of ‘epistemic peer conflict’: given that knowledgeable, sincere, and truth-seeking individuals across religious boundaries disagree over how to conceptualise the human predicament and the ultimate reality, is it possible to demonstrate that one of these is more consistent, coherent, and adequate than the others on cognitive, experiential, and spiritual grounds? Even a brief survey of polemical Hindu responses to Christian conversion shows that a key question that repeatedly turns up is: ‘who got it right, then?’ I show at several places in this book that several Christian and Hindu responses to this problem of epistemic peer conflict both share the following dialectical structure. They propose ‘the Religion’ as the ultimate truth which encompasses, to different degrees, the truths of ‘the religions’, though they sharply disagree, of course, over what ‘the Religion’ is – whether a form of life rooted in Christ for mainstream Christian theology, the transpersonal ultimate for Advaita Vedānta, devotion to Viṣṇu for Vaiṣṇavism, and so on. This structure provides several strands of Christian and Hindu philosophical theology with the conceptual lens through which religious diversity is assessed, classified, and, to different degrees, accommodated. However, whether rational argumentation can settle the most momentous question of what is, in fact, ‘the Religion’, remains an intensely contested matter within Christian theological circles. Some influential strands of contemporary Christian thinking argue that the ‘knowing subject’ cannot settle this question through a ‘spectatorial’ stance because it needs to undergo a volitional transformation through Christ’s ‘cognitive grace’ before it is able to properly assess the evidence (Thiemann 1985; Wainwright 1995; Moser 2010). More concretely, it is claimed that fallen human reason cannot arrive at God through a ‘dispassionate’ investigation of public evidence that is accessible from third person perspectives – it needs to be regenerated by grace so that it can develop the sensitivities to see aspects of the natural world as pointers to the Christian God (Evans 1998). The ‘hermeneutical loop’ within which Christian knowing is dialectically interrelated with Christian faith was already noted by Sydney Cave in 1939 when he argued that these epistemological debates in Hindu–Christian contexts ‘will not be solved by the academic discussion of two alternative world-views. Interesting and illuminating as such discussion can be, it can never be decisive, for the values by which men [sic] judge are dependent on their ideals, and these ideals are created in part by the doctrines they already hold’ (Cave 1939: 236). For a more recent articulation of this view, we may turn to M. A. Rae who argues that the Christian news that in Jesus God has dwelt amongst humanity ‘can only be confessed and proclaimed. It cannot be the subject of rational verification; nor can it be confirmed within the categories of secular historiography’ (Rae 2011: 92). If ‘neutral’ reason is indeed unable to adjudicate these matters (we will encounter some dissenting views in Chapter 6), this cognitive failure can be seen as an instance of the ‘rather depressing general truth’ noted by Peter van Inwagen (2006: 2) that ‘no philosophical [and theological] argument that has ever been devised for any substantive thesis is capable of lending the same sort of support to its conclusion that scientific arguments often lend to theirs’. Fierce debates continue to rage in religious epistemology between, on the one hand, philosophers who seek to develop arguments that would present Christian theism as true over and against other religious systems (Swinburne 1993; Yandell 1993; Taliaferro 2011), and, on the other hand, philosophers who claim that there are no good truth-indicating grounds for establishing the cognitive superiority of one such system over others (Schellenberg 2007; Gellman 2008).
The significance of these somewhat abstract issues for Hindu and Christian debates over ‘conversion’ can be seen by considering the structure of Swami Vivekananda’s (1863–1902) argument: ‘Plainly, if all religions are true, there would be no point in exchanging one true religion for another. Conversion, then, must be vigorously resisted …’ (Quoted in Sharma 2011: 47).
The argument runs as follows:
Premise 1: If truth-values are equally distributed across the religious matrices of the world, ‘conversions’ across religious boundaries are sociologically and metaphysically futile.
Premise 2: Truth-values are equally distributed across the religious matrices of the world.
Conclusion: ‘Conversions’ across religious boundaries are sociologically and metaphysically futile.
However, no major Hindu religious tradition – whether Advaita Vedānta, Vaiṣṇavism, or Śaivism (with its diverse Tantric configurations) – has accepted the ‘epistemic parity’ thesis of Premise 2 (for one example, see Sarma 2005: 15–18). Therefore, the vital questions are whether all religions are true, whether ‘objective’ reason is capable of assessing the cognitive integrity of religious systems, and whether it is possible to adjudicate truth-claims across religious traditions. Through a careful examination of the pronouncements of Hindu apologists such as Swami Vivekananda, we will show that what they, in fact, mean to say is that ‘the religions’ of the world have truth-filled elements to the extent that are they are fragmentary approximations to ‘the Religion’ of Advaita Vedānta. This is the view that is reflected in Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan’s (1888–1975) more cautious remark that while ‘Hinduism … affirms that all relevations refer to reality, they are not equally true to it’ (Radhakrishnan 1927: 49). For Radhakrishnan, one of these ‘revelations’, namely, Advaita Vedānta, is ‘the Religion’ which hierarchially encompasses the limited, provisional, and partial truths of ‘the religions’ of the world.
Second, I seek to highlight the point, in a number of chapters in this book, that Hindu and Christian debates over ‘conversion’ sometimes lack conceptual precision. Terms such as ‘exclusivism’, ‘dogmatism’ and ‘conversion’ itself (often regarded as dirty words), on the one hand, and ‘toleration’, ‘inclusivism’ and ‘pluralism’ (often regarded as nice words), on the other, are sometimes bandied about in these debates without an explication of their inner logic. For instance, the term ‘toleration’, as I use it in this book, does not mean merely the practices of ‘being nice’ to the neighbours but also of acknowledging the rights of others to hold views which are believed to be wrong, incorrect, or inadequate. That ‘tolerating’ others does not imply a diffuse sense of ‘respect’ for other life-worlds can be seen by considering whether one would wish to ‘tolerate’ a group that practises genocidal violence. In other words, ‘toleration’ requires clearly articulated conceptual bases (or, at the least, an accepted modus vivendi with its own conceptual presuppositions) which specify what, if any, are the moral limits of ‘toleration’. Therefore, the crucial question involving ‘toleration’ in Hindu and Christian debates is not whether but why, which, and whose ‘toleration’. Some Christian and Hindu responses to this question employ the above dialectical structure: because all human beings are encompassed by the fundamental reality intimated by ‘the Religion’, even if they themselves are not aware of this reality, therefore their ways of life are to be tolerated, in the sense that I have specified. For an initial sample of how this dialectic is worked out in some Christian and Hindu universes (the detailed argument is in Chapters 5, 6 and 7), consider the following examples from an Anglican Christian, a Vaiṣṇavite Hindu and an Advaita Vedānta Hindu perspective respectively. Rowland Williams argued in 1856 that the truths of Hindu universes had to be transcended by Christianity which would meet more completely their religious needs:
For it [Christianity] mediates and harmonizes between them [the non-Christian religions], adding to the strong belief of the Hebrew, something of the largeness of thought of the Hindu and of the heroic humanity of the Greek, while it sobers these with the household virtues of the Roman, and with the deeper sense of truth and right….
(Hedges 2001: 84)
On the Hindu side, Swami Prabhupada (1896–1977), the founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), argues that ‘[a] directly Kṛṣṇa conscious person is the topmost transcendentalist because such a devotee knows what is meant by Brahman or Paramātmā. His knowledge of the Absolute Truth is perfect, whereas the [Advaitin] impersonalist and the meditative yogī are imperfectly Kṛṣṇa conscious’ (1972: 318). Prabhupada was drawing on the medieval theologian Jīva Gosvāmī who noted, in his commentary on the Brahma-sūtras, that the supreme object of meditation is Viṣṇu alone and not others gods such as Śiva (śivādayaś ca vyāvṛttāḥ) (Gupta 2007: 139). In contrast, Swami Sivananda argues that ‘[n]on-dualism is the highest realisation … The [theistic] Dvaitin and the Visistadvaitin eventually reach the Advaitic goal or Vedantic realisation of Oneness’ (Quoted in Miller 1986: 178). Or one can, in place of the ‘ladder’ metaphor, choose the planar one of the ‘circle’, and argue, as does Swami Nikhilananda, that just as numerous radii converge upon the centre of a circle, so too the religious streams of the world converge into the Advaitic non-dual Brahman (Swami Nikhilananda 1963: 126–30). In other words, the imperfect truths of ‘the religions’ are somehow elevated to the fullness, the ultimacy, and the perfection of ‘the Religion’ – whether the latter is Christian discipleship for Williams, Kṛṣṇa consciousness for Swami Prabhupada, or Advaitic insight for Swami Sivananda and Swami Nikhilananda.
More schematically, the argument can be laid out as follows:
Premise 1: All humanity is rooted in the Fundamental Reality = X.
Premise 2: Not all the religious traditions of the world are centred around a conscious recognition of or an orientation towards X.
Premise 3: To be directed towards X one must minimally cultivate a conscious recognition of or an orientation towards X.
Conclusion 1: Therefore, not all the religious traditions of the world are directing their adherents towards X.
Conclusion 2: Regarding the religious traditions noted in Conclusion 1, it may be possible to place them on a scale such that their location on it would indicate whether they are more X-directed or less X-directed.
This argument is the conceptual core of Hindu and Christian debates over ‘conversion’. Both Christian thought and the major Hindu soteriological systems such as Advaita Vedānta, Vaṣṇavism, and Śaivism accept Premises 1, 2 and 3. They differ, of course, over what they take X to be: a covenantal fellowship between God and humanity that is centred in Jesus Christ, the transpersonal ultimate (nirguṇa Brahman), Viṣṇu, and Śiva respectively. On the Christian side of these debates, theologians have employed different formulations of this argument to ‘comprehend’ religious diversity through the conceptual lens of what might be called Karl’s Kaleidoscope: those who use this kaleidoscope with the slant of Karl Barth (1886–1968) accept Conclusion 1 but usually reject Conclusion 2, while those who look through it from the perspective of Karl Rahner (1904–84) accept both Conclusions 1 and 2. On the Hindu side, while the classical Vedāntic traditions emphasise Conclusion 1, some medieval and most modern forms of Hinduism have affirmed Conclusion 1 as well as Conclusion 2.
The reason for spelling out this argument in such detail is as follows. The Christian theological view that the ‘lower’ truths of Hindu spirituality can be ‘supplememented’ by the ‘higher’ pattern of Christian discipleship is often castigated, as we will see in Chapter 8, as a species of imperialist arrogance. However, as our initial sample above has indicated, this charge of ‘arrogance’ is a red herring because this logical move has been repeatedly made also in Hindu life-settings, with, for instance, Advaitins arguing that the lower truths of Vaiṣṇavism and of the Abrahamic monotheisms can be sublated by the higher truths of Advaita. For two contemporary examples, let us turn to Radhakrishnan and Swami Prabhupada who use a similar turn of phrase in positioning ‘the religions’ at a provisional level with respect to ‘the Religion’. While Radhakrishnan argued that ‘[Advaita] Vedānta is not a religion, but religion itself in its most universal and deepest significance’ (Radhakrishnan 1927: 23), Swami Prabhupada could have been responding to Radhakrishnan when he claimed that ‘[t]he religion of the Bhagavad-gītā is not Hindu religion or Christian religion … It is the essence of religion … To accept Kṛṣṇa as our Lord … this is bhakti, or real religion’ (Baird 1987: 122–3). Therefore, so far as the logical form of this argument is concerned, Christians, Advaitins, Vaiṣṇavites, Śaivites, and others are all epistemic peers. To break this epistemic deadlock, one of these groups would have to provide substantive reasons to demonstrate the cognitive superiority of its conceptualisation of X to that of the others. I do not myself explore in this book the possibility of such a demonstration (though in Chapter 6 I discuss some Hindu and Christian attempts in this direction): I only note that this question is the hinge around which many of the debates turn.
Third, a recurring motif of the chapters of this book is that debates over ‘conversion’ in contemporary India often commit the ‘genetic fallacy’ of conflating descriptive historical statements with theological-metaphysical presuppositions. For instance, on the basis of the premise that ‘religion’ is a specifically Abrahamic product which was imported to Indic life-worlds after the nineteenth century, the conclusion is sometimes drawn that ‘religion’ is intrinsically alien to these indigenous environments. Whether or not ‘Abrahamic religion’ resonates with certain aspects of Hindu devotional universes is a question that I consider in Chapter 2; for now, I highlight the point that such an argument fallaciously moves from a historical premise (about when ‘religion’ supposedly came to India) to a metaphysical conclusion (about what the conceptual structure of Hindu life-worlds should be). To see this point, consider the ‘argument from analogy’ that moves from the historical premises that Advaita Vedānta arrived in New York after 1893 or the Hare Krishna movement in Los Angeles after 1965 or Śaivism in Hawaii after 1970, to the conclusions that Advaita, Vaiṣṇavism, or Śaivism are inherently incompatible with the western Christian ethos. In response to such an argument, an Advaitin, for instance, could reply that the historical question of when Americans first encountered Advaita has no direct bearing on the metaphysical truth that all human beings, whether or not they have had access to the Upaniṣads, are always already rooted in the transpersonal ultimate (Brahman). For a Vaiṣṇavite example, we may turn to Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī (1874–1937), who undertook the unprecedented task of spreading Caitanya Vedānta beyond the shores of India on the grounds that the ‘Lord [Kṛṣṇa] desires His word to be preached to all living beings’ (Sardella 2013: 140). Indeed, as F. Sardella notes, Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī attempted a ‘deterritorialization’ of Hindu motifs by delinking them from their classical territorial locations in the Indian subcontinent (Bhārata-varṣa), and sent his disciples to England to spread Bengal Vaiṣṇavism and to set up transnational communities of devotees (Sardella 2013: 178). Therefore, from Christian, Advaitin, Vaiṣṇavite, or Śaivite perspectives, the heart of the matter is not merely the historical question of when these soteriological perspectives crossed geographical boundaries but also the metaphysical one of whether they can be shown to possess cognitive and spiritual integrity.
Fourth, however, the ‘argument from analogy’ noted above does have a powerful disanalogy: most of the debates over ‘conversions’ that I discuss in this book took place not in an ‘ideal speech situation’ but against the backdrop of the colonial power of the British empire, which raises the vexed issue of the relation between ‘religion’ and ‘violence’. A theme that is often articulated by Hindu polemicists against Christian conversion is that Christianity is intrinsically violent, and that Hinduism is intrinsically peace-engendering. More generally, it has been argued that ‘Abrahamic monotheisms’ lead to violent expressions against the others who are ‘constructed’ as evil, perverse, or wicked, and who need to be reined in, even if through coercive mechanisms, to see the truth. They provide a cosmic authorisation to these processes of othering through which the base community forges its own identity: ‘Whether as singleness (this God against the others) or totality (this is all the God there is), monotheism abhors, reviles, rejects, and ejects whatever it defines as outside its compass’ (Schwartz 1997: 63). While I do not directly address the issue of ‘religious violence and monotheism’ (because it is the sort of question that calls for a collaborative effort between sociologists, philosophers, and political scientists that goes beyond my individual academic competence), I wish to ‘frame’ it in the following manner for the chapters of this book.
Firstly, as historians of religion have regularly pointed out, terms such as ‘Christianity’ and ‘Hinduism’ refer not to monolithic essences but to a wide variety of internally related (and sometimes internally conflicted) dynamic processes. Consequently, statements such as ‘Christianity caused the burning of witches’ and ‘Hinduism caused the self-immolation of widows’ remain empty abstractions, unless we specify which historically shaped dimensions of these religious traditions are being considered. The point is not to deny that various forms of violence directed at the ‘religious alien’ have sometimes been associated with the Christian and the Hindu universes, but to suggest that the real debate is over whether this ‘association’ should properly be understood as a necessary implication of their inner logic or as a contingent entanglement of this logic with numerous socio-political processes (Cavanaugh 2009). A careful investigation of the ‘location’ of these instances of religious violence would show that they do not follow with ‘deductive necessity’ from the scriptural sources (whether the New Testament or the Upaniṣads) but are mediated by complex ensembles of historical factors such as court intrigues, shifting balances of state power, economic instabilities, political upheavals, patriarchal constructions, and so on (Hinnells and King 2007). Various historical studies have demonstrated that religious violence is by no means unheard of in Hindu social spaces, so that we should reject representations of ‘Hindu India’ as steeped in an Arcadian peace that was rudely interrupted by western ‘intrusions’ (van der Veer 1994: 71; Pinch 1996). For a concrete example of how ‘locating’ a religious tradition within a matrix of power relations can help us to understand the patterns of violence that may be associated with it, we turn to the twelfth-century Tamil Śaivite text Periyapurāṇam which speaks of violence in the name of devotion to Śiva. A. E. Monius (2004) argues that to understand these violent descriptions, which have been a source of intense discomfort for theologians and commentators in that tradition, we have to ‘locate’ these texts in the twelfth-century milieu where Tamil Śaiva identity was constructed in opposition to Jains who were depicted as lacking in virtue because they had strayed away from Śiva. A standard trope in Tamil Śaivism was the critique of Jain self-denial and a retrieval of the Jain notion of ‘dispassionate’ asceticism (tapas) as a prerequsite for fervent devotion to Śiva. Monius argues that we may see Cēkkiḻār, to whom the text is attributed, as opposing the Jain emphasis on the cultivation of tranquillity by employing the categories of literary theory to speak of the ‘heroic’ sentiment (rasa) directed towards the Lord Ṡiva and of a passionate engagement with the world. At a wider level, the intellectual development of the Hindu traditions has been shaped by an internal tension between, on the one hand, the ideals of the householder, who is often involved, for instance, as king or soldier, in violence of various sorts, and, on the other, the values embodied by the ascetic who abjures all kinds of violence. The classical literature consisting of texts such as the Upaniṣads, the Manusmṛti, the Bhagavad-gītā and the theological elaborations of systematisers such as Śaṁkara and Rāmānuja has variously emphasised one of these two over the other, or tried to synthesize them, so that J. D. Long concludes: ‘To generalize, mainstream Hindu thought is ambivalent toward violence’ (Long 2011: 196).
Secondly, once again, we must be careful not to conflate historical description with theological interpretation, that is, to argue from the historical premise that ‘Christianity’ (if the monolith be allowed) is associated with the persecution of heretics and conclude that its truth-claims are thereby falsified. The reason why, from the perspective of Christian theology, the conclusion does not logically follow is because the argument can be strengthened by supplying the crucial missing premise – flawed, sinful human beings often deviate from the path of Christian love (caritas) of neighbour. For instance, after noting that Christians have sometimes not emphasised the spiritual dimension of human existence as clearly as Hindus, Cave (1939: 113) argues: ‘That is an accusation hard to refute for … we of the West often appear as too engrossed in the seen to be at home in the unseen and the eternal. But if that be so, the lack lies in us, not in the Gospel we profess’. While from non-Christian perspectives these rejoinders might seem to be post hoc rationalizations, what is crucial for our purposes is that the same logical move has often been made in Hindu universes, as we will note in Chapter 4. In response to certain British Christian missionary claims that the structures of Hindu social existence are fundamentally deficient in morality, influential figures such as Rammohun Ray and Swami Vivekananda retorted that practices such as the self-immolation of widows, untouchability, and so on are latter-day historical ‘excrescences’ which do not follow from the conceptual core of Hindu thought and which therefore need to be carefully excised. For instance, in response to an article by the Scottish missionary J. N. Farquhar in 1908 where he expressed his belief that under the dual strain of the erosion of social conservatism and the efforts of Christian missionaries, the ‘defensive armour’ that had shielded Hinduism had finally been shattered, Lala Lajpat Rai wrote a vigorous reply claiming that Hinduism, springing from the ‘pure monotheism of the Vedic times’, was still vibrant and was responding by adapting to the changing times (Sharpe 1965: 244–6). Consequently, we need to move beyond the ‘comparative martyrdom’ of tabulating facts such as the number of ‘witches’ burnt in Christendom and the number of widows who ascended Hindu pyres to a detailed examination of the truth-claims that undergird the theological interpretations of why such violence took place.
Fifth, as an extension of the fourth point, the forms of organised religious persecution that have characterised certain strands of European Christianity are by and large absent in Hindu universes where individuals sometimes move across denominational boundaries with an ease that might have intrigued Calvinists, Lutherans, Anabaptists, Puritans, and Roman Catholics who often excommunicated, censured, and anathematised one another in post-Reformation Europe. For instance, notwithstanding intense sectarian rivalries between Vaiṣṇavites and Śaivites, the famous temple of Lingaraj–Mahaprabhu in Bhubaneswar attracts pilgrims from both groups (Lipner 1994: 238). I suggest that this trans-denominational mobility, and more generally attitudes of hospitality to ‘religious others’, should be explained in terms not of abstractions such as ‘Christianity causes violence’ and ‘Hinduism promotes peace’ but, at least partly, of the doctrine of karma and rebirth which often imparts to Hindu universes a somewhat relaxed attitude to the question of the ultimate destiny of the world. Consequently, the apocalyptic anxieties that have sometimes shaped Christian orthodoxy’s encounters with the ‘religious alien’ – based on the theological view that the eternal salvation of the individual depends on the finite stretch of one (earthly) lifetime – are usually absent in Hindu life-settings. For instance, Swami B. H. Bon Maharaj argues that:
An individual must have developed through practises in various births a given degree of intellectual and moral maturity before he or she can aspire to understand, practise, follow and realise absolute knowledge … One has got to go through many births … in religions of partial or relative truths before one is born with the requisite intellectual and moral eligibility [adhikāra] to practise [Hinduism].
(Quoted in Young 1981: 148)
That is, the individual self’s quest for the divine may require several lifetimes, and the law of karma allows the self, when one of its empirical existences is cut short, to pick up from where it had broken off and pursue the project once again (Radhakrishnan 1932: 288).
Therefore, a specifically theological reason for the relative absence of the ‘crusading mentality’ in Hindu life-worlds is not that the essence of ‘Christianity’ is geared towards violence or that ‘Hinduism’ is intrinsically keyed into peace but that the view that human existence is a project that can be fulfilled across several lifetimes provides greater temporal leeway for spiritual progress (and error) than forms of Christianity which regard the present lifetime as the only chance that an individual has to move towards the divine. More picturesquely, if it is true that ‘not all who wander are lost’, then the Hindu life-worlds provide wider temporal vistas for creative meanderings through numerous vales of soul-making, even if these ‘experiments with truth’ are wayward from the standpoint of ultimate reality. I therefore offer the hypothesis (which sociologists of Christianity might wish to explore) that strands of Christianity which regard death as the irrevocable ‘cut-off’ point for spiritual re-formation into Christ might have a greater elective affinity with violence than those which allow the possibility of a post mortem ‘purgatorial’ purification. Be that as it may, it is crucial to emphasise that Hindu soteriological systems such as Advaita, Vaiṣṇavism, or Śaivism are not based on a doctrinal nihilism of anything goes, for the temporal leeway is usually structured by a clearly articulated (or implicitly presupposed) scheme of doctrinal truths. While the Hindu polemical literature on Christianity sometimes suggests that monotheism is an ‘Abrahamic invention’, the notion of single-minded devotion (bhakti) to a unitary supreme divinity is by no means unknown in Hindu life-settings. For instance, the Civañāṇacittiyār, a fourteenth-century Śaiva Siddhānta text of Aruḷananti, presents a detailed outline series of doctrinal positions in order of decreasing error in the following manner:
1 the materialists (Lokāyatas),
2 the non-theistic schools such as the Buddhists and the Jains,
3 the Mīmāṁsa ritual theory,
4 the Grammarian view that the ultimate reality (Brahman) is the Word,
5 non-dualists such as Śaṁkara,
6 thinkers such as Bhāskara who see the world as real and not-real,
7 dualists such as the Sāṁkhya thinkers, and
8 the devotees of Nārāyaṇa.
(Clooney and Nicholson 2001: 114–15)
Such hierarchical rankings were not merely theoretical devices to ‘comprehend’ religious diversity, for, on certain occasions, they had wide-ranging political ramifications. For instance, after Ram Singh II, the ruler of Jaipur, who was initially raised as a Vaiṣṇavite, declared himself as a Śaivite in 1862, a series of measures were taken against the Vaiṣṇava lineages (sampradāyas). He set up a religious council (dharma-sabhā) to investigate their religious practices, made it obligatory for them to use the Śaivite triple horizontal mark on the forehead, and confiscated the temples of monastic authorities who refused to comply with his orders (Clementin-Ojha 2001). Turning the tables on Śaivism, Tamil Vaiṣṇavism and Vaiṣṇavisms in northern India instead declare that there is no refuge other than the supreme abode of Nārāyaṇa (ananya-gatitva), a declaration that is also articulated by Nammāḻvār: ‘Oh Lord, what can I do and who shall be my protector? What indeed do you propose to do with me? I do not crave for means other than you’ (Chari 1997: 140). Therefore, sociological reports which state that religious Hindus believe that ‘God is one’ (Bhagvān ek hai) should be carefully interrogated on the crucial theological points, ‘Which ‘God’? Whose ‘liberation’?’ However, Vaiṣṇavites have sometimes encompassed ‘wayward’ Śaivites within a wider theological fabric, and ṣaivites have sometimes returned the gesture to ‘wayward’ Vaiṣṇavites, not in the sense that they believe that their opponents are doctrinally correct about the nature of reality and of the human response to it, but in that their opponents can attain rebirth subsequently in their own doxastic community, and thus, properly qualified, the opponents can finally move towards the true goal (parama-gati) of liberation.
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