(Routledge South Asian Religion Series, 4) Esther Bloch - Marianne Keppens - Rajaram Hegde - Rethinking Religion in India - The Colonial Construction of Hinduism (2010, Routledge) PDF

RETHINKING RELIGION IN INDIA
This book critically assesses recent debates about the colonial construction
of Hinduism. Increasingly scholars have come to realise that the dominant
understanding of Indian culture and its traditions is unsatisfactory. Accord-
ing to the classical paradigm, Hindu traditions are conceptualized as features
of a religion with distinct beliefs, doctrines, sacred laws and holy texts.
Today, however, many academics consider this conception to be a colonial
‘construction’. This book focuses on the different versions, arguments and
counter-arguments of the thesis that the Hindu religion is a construct of
colonialism. Bringing together the different positions in the debate, it pro-
vides necessary historical data, arguments and conceptual tools to examine
the argument.
Organized in two parts, the first half of the book provides new analyses of
historical and empirical data; the second presents some of the theoretical
questions that have emerged from the debate on the construction of Hinduism.
Where some of the contributors argue that Hinduism was created as a result
of a western Christian notion of religion and the imperatives of British colo-
nialism, others show that this religion already existed in pre-colonial India;
and as an alternative to these standpoints, other writers argue that Hinduism
only exists in the European experience and does not correspond to any empir-
ical reality in India. This volume offers new insights into the nature of the
construction of religion in India and will be of interest to scholars of the
History of Religion, Asian Religion, Postcolonial and South Asian Studies.
Esther Bloch and Marianne Keppens are Doctoral Researchers at the

Research Centre Vergelijkende Cultuurwetenschap, Ghent University,
Belgium. Rajaram Hegde is Professor in History and Archaeology at
Kuvempu University, Karnataka, India. He is also the Director of the Centre
for the Study of Local Cultures – a research collaboration between Ghent
University and Kuvempu University.
ROUTLEDGE SOUTH ASIAN
RELIGION SERIES
1. HINDU SELVES IN A MODERN WORLD

Guru faith in the Mata Amritanandamayi Mission
Maya Warrier
2. PARSIS IN INDIA AND THE DIASPORA

Edited by John R. Hinnells and Alan Williams
3. SOUTH ASIAN RELIGIONS ON DISPLAY

Religious processions in South Asia and in the Diaspora
Edited by Knut A. Jacobsen
4. RETHINKING RELIGION IN INDIA

The colonial construction of Hinduism
Edited by Esther Bloch, Marianne Keppens and Rajaram Hegde
RETHINKING
RELIGION IN INDIA
Edited by Esther Bloch,

Marianne Keppens and
Rajaram Hegde
First published 2010
by Routledge
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© 2010 Esther Bloch, Marianne Keppens and Rajaram Hegde

for selection and editorial matter; individual contributors
their contribution
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
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invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Rethinking religion in India : the colonial construction of Hinduism /
edited by Esther Bloch, Marianne Keppens, and Rajaram Hegde.
p. cm. – (Routledge South Asian religion series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Hinduism–Historiography. 2. Hinduism–History–18th century.
3. Hinduism–History–19th century. 4. India–Civilization–18th
century. 5. India–Civilization–19th century. I. Bloch, Esther.
II. Keppens, Marianne. III. Hegde, Rajaram.
BL1151.5.R48 2010
294.509′034–dc22
2009025369
ISBN 0-203-86289-9 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN10: 0–415–54890–X (hbk)

ISBN10: 0–203–86289–9 (ebk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–54890–8 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–203–86289–6 (ebk)
The Trustees of the Bhagat Family Trust, which kindly sponsored a part of
the first conference Rethinking Religion in India, would like to acknowledge
their parents and mentors, Harish and Suraj Bhagat and Manghan and
Sheela Manwani.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ix
Notes on the contributors xi
Preface xiii
Introduction: rethinking religion in India 1

MARIANNE KEPPENS AND ESTHER BLOCH
PART I
Historical and empirical arguments 23
1 Hindus and others 25

DAVID N. LORENZEN
2 Hindu religious identity with special reference to

the origin and significance of the term
‘Hinduism’, c. 1787–1947 41
GEOFFREY A. ODDIE
3 Representing religion in colonial India 56

JOHN ZAVOS
4 Colonialism and religion 69

SHARADA SUGIRTHARAJAH
5 Women, the freedom movement, and Sanskrit:

notes on religion and colonialism from the
ethnographic present 79
LAURIE L. PATTON
vii
CONTENTS
PART II
Theoretical reflections 93
6 Colonialism, Hinduism and the discourse of religion 95

RICHARD KING
7 Who invented Hinduism? Rethinking religion in India 114

TIMOTHY FITZGERALD
8 Orientalism, postcolonialism and the ‘construction’

of religion 135
S.N. BALAGANGADHARA
9 The colonial construction of what? 164

JAKOB DE ROOVER AND SARAH CLAERHOUT
Index 185
viii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The contributions in this volume were inspired by an intellectual gathering in

New Delhi in January 2008, at the inaugural conference of the five-year
conference cluster Rethinking Religion in India. This meeting of minds
would not have been possible, if not for the generous support of the Bhagat
Family Trust, and the munificent help of Dr. Purushottama Bilimale, Dinesh
Shenoy and Gurudath Baliga.
The contributors to this volume sat together in Platform and Roundtable
sessions for sustained discussions, sharing their different visions, at times
involved in passionate disagreements, at times enthusiastically agreeing.
The fertile soil of the contributions together with the glasshouse effect of
the heated discussions brought forth unforeseen and fruitful ideas, eventu-
ally crystallizing into the chapters of this volume. Footage of the talks
and discussions that took place during the conference can be watched
on www.youtube.com/cultuurwetenschap, a video project that would not
have been possible without the hard work of two people, Rana Ghose and
Raf Gelders.
We would like to thank the contributors for their timely and insightful
contributions. We are also deeply indebted to the unremitting support and
help, and the constructive suggestions and comments of the ‘Ghent group’ –
the members of the Research Centre Vergelijkende Cultuurwetenschap of
Ghent University (Belgium) – namely S.N. Balagangadhara, Sarah Claerhout,
Nele De Gersem, Jakob De Roover, Raf Gelders, Alexander Naessens, and
Sarika Rao as well as of the ‘Kuvempu team’ – the members of the Centre
for the Study of Local Cultures of Kuvempu University (Karnataka, India)
– namely J.S. Sadananda, Shilpa Achari, Dunkin Jalki, Kavitha P.N.,
Mahesh Kumar C.S., Santhosh Kumar P.K., Vani Palve, Praveen T.L., and
Shankarappa N.S. We would also like to thank Routledge for their assist-
ance, and especially Dorothea Schaefter for her continued interest in and
following up on the research and projects of the latter groups.
The editors and the publisher would like to thank the following for permis-
sion to reprint the following material in Rethinking Religion in India:
ix
AC K N OW L E D G E M E N T S
Oxford University Press for permission to reprint excerpts in Chapter 5:

Laurie L. Patton, ‘Women, the Freedom Movement, and Sanskrit: Notes on
Religion and Colonialism from the Ethnographic Present’, from an article
originally published as ‘Cat in the courtyard: the performance of Sanskrit
and the religious experience of women’ in T. Pintchman (ed.) Women’s Lives,
Women’s Rituals in the Hindu Tradition, 2007, Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press (parts of pp. 126–129; 131; 135–138), www.oup.co.uk.
Interventions for permission to reprint excerpts in Chapter 8: S.N. Balagan-

gadhara, ‘Orientalism, Postcolonialism and the “Construction” of Religion’
from an article previously published in Balagangadhara, S.N. and Keppens,
M. (2009) ‘Reconceptualizing the postcolonial project: beyond the strict-
ures and structures of Orientalism’, Interventions, 11: 50–68, http://
www.tandf.co.uk/journals/routledge.
S.N. Balagangadhara for permission to reprint excerpts from Balagangad-

hara, S.N. (1994; 2nd edn 2005) ‘The Heathen in his Blindness . . .’: Asia,
the West, and the dynamic of religion, New Delhi: Manohar, pp. 231–247,
© 2005 S.N. Balagangadhara.
x
CONTRIBUTORS
S.N. Balagangadhara (a.k.a. Balu) is Professor in Comparative Science of

Cultures and Director of the Research Centre Vergelijkende Cultuur-
wetenschap, Ghent University, Belgium. In recent work, he analyses the
dominant accounts of India as descriptions of the western cultural
experience.
Esther Bloch is Doctoral Researcher at the Research Centre Vergelijkende
Cultuurwetenschap, Ghent University, Belgium. Her research focuses on
the contemporary European experience and images of India.
Sarah Claerhout is Teaching and Research Assistant at the Research
Centre Vergelijkende Cultuurwetenschap, Ghent University, Belgium. Her
research concerns religious conversion and the conversion debates in India.
Jakob De Roover is Post-Doctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation (FWO)
Flanders at the Research Centre Vergelijkende Cultuurwetenschap, Ghent
University, Belgium. His research concerns the cultural history of
toleration and secularism in the West and the impact of western political
thought on colonial and post-colonial India.
Timothy Fitzgerald is Reader in Religion at the School of Languages, Cul-
tures and Religions, , Scotland. He has published
important works that question the legitimacy of the category of religion
and the use of other concepts like ‘politics’, ‘the secular’, ‘the sacred’ and
‘the profane’ in the academic study of other cultures.
Marianne Keppens is Doctoral Researcher at the Research Centre Vergelij-
kende Cultuurwetenschap, Ghent University, Belgium. Her research
focuses on the European experience and images of India and more
particularly in the debate on the Aryan Invasion theory.
Richard King is Professor of Religious Studies and Professor of Religion and
Culture in the Divinity School, Vanderbilt University, USA. He works on
Hindu and Buddhist philosophical traditions, comparative mysticism,
theory and method in the study of religion and postcolonial approaches to
xi
C O N T R I BU T O R S
the study of South Asian traditions and has published a number of

important essays on the colonial construction of religion in India.
David N. Lorenzen is Professor at the Centre of Asian and African
Studies, El Colegio de Mexico, Mexico. He has published widely on the
Bhakti traditions of India and is well-known for his stance against the
constructionist argument in the contemporary study of Hinduism.
Geoffrey A. Oddie, an Honorary Research Associate in History at the Uni-
versity of Sydney, Australia, has published a series of important works on
Christian missions, missionary perceptions of Hinduism, conversion and
popular religion in India during the colonial period.
Laurie L. Patton is Charles Howard Candler Professor and Professor
of Early Indian Religions at the Department of Religion at Emory Uni-
versity, Georgia, USA. Her interests are in the interpretation of early
Indian ritual and narrative, Hinduism and gender, comparative mythology,
and religion and literature.
Sharada Sugirtharajah is Senior Lecturer in Hindu Studies in the School of
Philosophy, Theology and Religion at the University of Birmingham, UK.
Her research interests include the representations of Hinduism in the
colonial and contemporary periods, women and spirituality, and inter-
religious relations.
John Zavos is Lecturer in South Asian Studies in the School of Arts, Histories
and Cultures at the University of Manchester, UK. His areas of interest
are religion, politics and identity formation in South Asia and the South
Asian Diaspora.
xii
PREFACE
A major inspiration behind this book was the first edition of the Rethinking
Religion in India conference cluster, which took place in New Delhi in January
2008. This five-year cluster was organized by three partners: the Research
Centre Vergelijkende Cultuurwetenschap, Ghent University, in Belgium, and
the Centre for the Study of Local Cultures, Kuvempu University, and
the Academy of Social Sciences and Humanities in India. Rethinking
Religion in India aims at re-conceptualizing the study of the Indian culture
and its traditions and at developing an alternative approach to the dominant
framework of religious studies. While the present volume is an independent
collection of essays, it shares the aim of making the reader aware of the
importance and urgency of the task of re-conceptualizing ‘religion’ in India.
It is becoming increasingly clear today that the term ‘religion’ and its cog-
nates like ‘worship’, ‘secularism’ or ‘religious freedom’ fail to make sense
to Indian minds. Naturally, we have centuries of scholarship talking about
religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism. Both our school
textbooks and scholarly treatises in history, politics and sociology insist on
the existence of such religions in India. To a large extent, the required
vocabulary has been translated into Indian languages and is now available to
the average Indian. For example, ‘religion’ is translated as ‘dharma’ and we
are taught in school about how Hindu dharma and Bauddha dharma exist in
India along with Islam dharma and Christian dharma. Our educational and
bureaucratic systems impress on Indian citizens that they belong to one
religion or the other. However, in spite of all such efforts, many Indians seem
to be unable to understand this conceptual vocabulary.
Let me illustrate this point with an anecdote from my own experience as
an Indian. Whenever I used to read in newspapers about ‘religion’, ‘secular-
ism’, ‘religious tolerance’ or the call for ‘Hindu unity’, I felt as though
I understood the meaning of these terms. When I pursued higher studies and
research in this field, I thought that I had a perfect understanding of the
debates on secularism or the theories on Hinduism and the caste system,
because the entire vocabulary was translated into sets of native terms famil-
iar to me. In my everyday life, I had heard words like ‘dharma’, ‘mata’, ‘jati’
xiii
P R E FA C E
and was familiar with the things these words referred to. Hence, I also
thought I had made proper sense of terms like ‘Hindu dharma’ or ‘Hinduism’
and ‘the caste system’. I considered them to be descriptions and explanations
at a meta-level, which we Indians are not aware of. During my research, I was
also introduced to the unresolved debate on the inadequacy of such transla-
tions of words and applications of concepts, especially after the postcolonial
studies started to percolate into the native languages. However, these argu-
ments complicated my understanding and left a feeling of discontent in me.
At this juncture, I was exposed to S.N. Balagangadhara’s work in this
field. I gradually started to realize that I could neither fully understand nor
participate in the debates and theory building on ‘religion’ and ‘secularism’,
because they were completely unrelated to my lived experience. I had never
seen a phenomenon like Hinduism, the religion to which I was supposed to
belong. No one in my family or the traditional society in which I grew up
had instructed me about any such thing called ‘Hindu dharma’ and its char-
acteristic features. It was only through my school education that I learned
about this ‘Hinduism’, which is supposed to consist of religious scriptures
called the Vedas and the Bhagavad-Gita, beliefs about reincarnation, social
divisions called the four varnas and things like ashramas.
Sharing my experience with friends, colleagues and acquaintances, I dis-
covered that they too, without exception, had similar experiences. At the
Centre for the Study of Local Cultures at Kuvempu University, we con-
ducted a field study, which confirmed that even the college-educated in
Karnataka fail to figure out what this Hindu dharma is, once they forget their
textbook lessons in the process of living in the actual Indian society. Though
they know the term ‘dharma’, they never use it in the sense of religion.
Dharma is something like duty, good deeds and meritorious acts of human
beings, to which gods are largely irrelevant. They find the term ‘Hindu’ very
peculiar. Those who happen to remember this term do not know its precise
meaning or implications. They say that they learned about things like Hindu
dharma, the four varnas, the four Vedas etc. in school. They still remember
these terms, they add, because of seeing them repeated in newspapers and
hearing them used by politicians and social activists.
Fascinatingly, these facts are not at all startling to social scientists brought
up in this society. Some of them even asked us what the point was of con-
ducting field research only to come to know such trivial and obvious facts.
These social scientists gave us a variety of explanations for this state of
affairs. They said one cannot rely upon the answers of the ignorant to prove
that ‘Hindu dharma’ does not exist. They added that this only reflected the
pathetic status of Hinduism today and that this ignorance had been caused
by the Brahmanical priesthood, who had kept lay people ignorant about
their own religion. How could a society ever exist without religion, they
asked, and what would explain ‘Hindu fundamentalism’, ‘communal strife’
and the attacks on churches and mosques in India, if it were not for Hindu
xiv
P R E FA C E
religion? The fact that many of the supposed Hindus did not have a clue about
this ‘Hindu religion’ was explained away, instead of being taken seriously as
a fundamental aspect of Indian experience.
This anecdote raises certain basic questions: If the common experience
of Indians does not know of any such thing as Hinduism, what are these
‘religions’ that we have been trying to investigate for all these years? Why is it
that social science research brushes aside this experience, as though it is
without value or importance? Why is it that these peculiar concepts and
vocabulary are being forced upon us as truths about our society that we all
have to accept? What is the nature of this ‘religion’ that we see and judge in
the name of secularism or Hindu nationalism? In other words, the situation
calls for a fundamental reformulation of the questions and reorientation of
the research programme of religious studies, if this field of study is to have
any future in India.
By bringing together several major contributors to the debate on the con-
struction of Hinduism and some new theoretical and historical reflections,
this collection will introduce the reader to the basic problems of discussing
‘religion’ in contemporary India. Even though the book is but an initial
step towards rethinking religion in India, its purpose will be served if the
reader begins to appreciate the true dimension of this task. With more
projects such as this one, the study of religion and culture should take off
at Indian universities in a much more serious fashion than has so far been
the case.
Rajaram Hegde
Shankaraghatta, India, June 2009
xv
INTRODUCTION
Rethinking religion in India
Marianne Keppens and Esther Bloch
Rethinking religion in India: a larger project

Today, many scholars argue that the theoretical framework of religious stud-
ies is inadequate for the Indian context. Some go as far as to argue that the
use of the concept religion only makes sense within a western, basically
Christian, framework. This conceptual inadequacy is illustrated by the state
of religious studies in the Indian universities as well as by Indian academic
debates on religion. First, the academic study of religion has never really
taken off in India. Very few departments and programmes on religion exist at
Indian universities. The existing departments and programmes often focus
on questions that are irrelevant to Indian society today. Second, the absence
of serious academic study of religion and tradition in India has produced a
vacuum, which has allowed a political and ideological struggle to dominate
the universities. Two opposing political positions, secularism and Hindutva,
have hijacked reflection on the nature of Indian culture. This makes it
increasingly difficult to hold an academic debate on these issues on cognitive
grounds. Textbooks are written to represent one of the two positions; social
science research aims to confirm the views of one of the two camps; academ-
ics are appointed as partisans. This shows that the need to ‘rethink religion in
India’ and to develop an alternative theoretical framework for the study of
religion and traditions in India has become acute today.
Moreover, if the very characterization of Indian traditions as religion
is problematic, we will need to rethink our current understanding of many
problems in contemporary India that are generally related to religion.
Amongst the most pressing of these problems are the clash over religious
conversion and the growing communal conflicts in contemporary India
(e.g. Balagangadhara and De Roover 2007; Claerhout and De Roover 2005).

The issue of the colonial construction of Hinduism plays an important role
in this larger debate on the adequacy of the theoretical framework of
1
religious studies. It raises fundamental questions such as: Is the concept of

religion western? Do we need to develop an alternative concept of religion
that allows us to also include non-western traditions? Do Indian traditions
like Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism form a different kind of religion? Do
such ‘Indian religions’ exist at all? Did a new religion, namely Hinduism,
come into being during the colonial era? How could this happen?
Before we can get a better understanding of issues like the controversy
over conversion in India, Hindu–Muslim conflicts or other problems related
to religion, we first need to acquire clarity on these questions. That is, unless
we get a grip on the nature and problems of the current theoretical frame-
work, we cannot even begin to develop an alternative framework to make
sense of the pressing problems India is facing today.
Nevertheless, the number of books and articles that has appeared on the
construction of Hinduism is not proportionate to the importance of the
issue. Moreover, the discussion has not had much impact on the study of
India in general. Even though postcolonial thinkers argue that Hinduism is a
construction, this has not been taken seriously by most Indologists and
scholars of religion who continue to study Hinduism as the ancient religion
of India. Neither has it become clear how, if Hinduism is a construction, we
should study problems in Indian society which are taken to be related to
religion. Thus, if we want to take further steps in the development of an
alternative theoretical framework for the study of religion and tradition in
India, we need to clearly understand what it means to say that Hinduism is a
construct and what the implications of this claim are.
This volume brings together some of the most important voices in the
debate on the construction of Hinduism. The main objective of the volume
is to provide the reader with the required historical data, arguments and
conceptual tools to come to a well-grounded position on its central ques-
tions. The volume also engages with new theoretical questions generated by
this debate. By providing answers to the question whether Hinduism is the
ancient religion of India, or whether it was constructed and if so what this
means, the volume hopes to give new vantage points to look at Indian culture
and some of the problems that it confronts today.
Two threads: the concept of religion and orientalism

The account about the construction of Hinduism can be regarded as a child of
developments in two different domains of study, which came together in the
last decennia of the previous century. On the one hand, there were discus-
sions in the domain of religious studies about the adequacy of the concept
of religion in general and of its use in the study of Hinduism in particular.
On the other hand, there was the emerging domain of postcolonial studies,
where scholars studied how the colonial descriptions of India were tainted
by European cultural assumptions and the needs of the colonial project.
2
I N T RO D U C T I O N
The concept of religion

In the field of religious studies there is a longstanding problem of how to
recognize Hinduism as a religion. The tremendous diversity of doctrines,
texts, gods and practices in India has puzzled scholars, missionaries and
others who tried to get a grip on the Indian religion (Brockington 1981: 1;
Flood 1996: 16; Klostermaier 1989: 15). As an answer to this problem many
scholars have stated, from an early period onwards, that Hinduism is not
one religion, but should be seen as a collection of many separate religions
or faiths.1
Against this background, Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s influential work
The Meaning and End of Religion (1962 [1991]) argues that the concept of
Hinduism is a construction of the West. ‘Hinduism’, he says, ‘refers not to an
entity, it is a name that the West has given to a prodigiously variegated series
of facts. It is a notion in men’s minds – and a notion that cannot but be
inadequate’ (1962 [1991]: 144). The name ‘Hinduism’, he argues, was
wrongly given to the varied series of Indian religious facts as if these formed
one system of doctrines. According to Smith, this misconception was the
result of the use of a Christian, and more specifically, a Protestant concep-
tion of religions as systems of doctrines.
Smith’s main thesis is that the concept of religion is itself Christian and
therefore inadequate to study religious phenomena in general. To Smith, the
term ‘Christianity’ does not capture the religious phenomena of Christians
any more than ‘Hinduism’ does for those of Hindus. The alternative he sug-
gests is to study religious phenomena not as systems of doctrines but rather
as faiths and cumulative traditions.
Orientalism
Predating Edward Said’s seminal work Orientalism (1978 [1995]), scholars
like Raymond Schwab, David Kopf, Bernard Cohn and P.J. Marshall had
already begun providing historical overviews of the orientalist and mission-
ary descriptions of India, situating these within the European debates, needs
and questions of their time. For instance, Marshall shows in The British
Discovery of Hinduism (1970) that orientalist writings on Hinduism were
not so much about India, but rather about issues and controversies within
Christian theology, such as the question of the truth of mosaic chronology,
or whether Hinduism contained traces of the original true monotheism given
by the Biblical God. These European religious controversies, Marshall argues,
circumscribed the limits of orientalist scholarship, which entailed that they
‘did not try to understand what Hinduism meant to millions of Indians’
(Marshall 1970: 44). Another emerging trend in the scholarship on oriental-
ism was to look at the relation between the orientalist descriptions and the
needs of colonialism. A scholar who became very influential in this regard
3
was Bernard Cohn. Since the 1960s, Cohn had been arguing that the colonial
study of India had shaped a predictable India that could be classified and
hence dominated and controlled (Cohn 1987 [1998], 1997).
In Said’s Orientalism, both arguments were brought together in a compel-
ling way. His work sparked off a whole new school of thought, viz. the
postcolonial studies. It is one of Orientalism’s central theses that specifically
western concepts and assumptions limited the orientalist descriptions of the
East (e.g. Said (1978 [1995]: 42). The other central point of Orientalism is
that the orientalist descriptions were intrinsically related to the colonial pro-
ject and the process of acquiring power and dominance over the East. By
capturing the Orientals in unchanging essences, by classifying and system-
atizing them, Said argues, they could be controlled and dominated.
The postcolonial studies have picked up mainly one thread of Said’s thesis.
They have focused more on how orientalist descriptions were used to domin-
ate and to ‘essentialize’ other cultures and on the motives behind the colonial
constructions and less on Said’s question of how the conceptual limitations of
orientalism reflect a European cultural experience of the Orient. As a result,
the emphasis of postcolonial studies has come to lie on attempting to develop
a non-colonial and non-essentialist way of studying different cultures.
Hinduism as a construction
The critiques of the concept of religion and that of orientalism have some-
thing in common. Both point to certain distorting aspects of the conceptual
framework that the West has used to study other cultures. Moreover, both
plead for the development of alternative concepts that do justice to the real-
ity they are meant to describe.
Together, these two threads form one of the central theses in the account
about the construction of Hinduism. According to this thesis, the colonizer
represented the variegated Indian reality in an ‘essentialist’ manner in order
to classify and control the colonized. Thus, the postulation of one religion,
Hinduism, unified the diversity of doctrines, texts, practices and gods that
existed on the subcontinent. Along with the colonial needs of domination, a
western Christian concept of religion is said to have inspired the description
of Indian religions in terms of a pan-Indian Hinduism with a specific set of
core characteristics or essences. In other words, the constructionist thesis
tells us that orientalist descriptions made certain features of Indian reality,
such as the Sanskrit texts or Brahmanism, into the essence of Indian reli-
gion, thereby distorting Indian realities (by taking a part for the whole).
A third thread: Hindu nationalism and native agency

A third thread in the account of the construction of Hinduism became
important because of challenges posed by developments within India itself.
4
At a time when scholars started to point out that the descriptions of

‘Hinduism’ were problematic and did not correspond to any existing religion
in India, Indians themselves began to claim that the same descriptions
were true.
This problem became prominent due to a series of events in India. After
independence there had been a rise of Hindu nationalism and an upsurge
of violence between Hindus and Muslims. Events such as the destruction of
the Bābri Mosque at Ayodhyā increasingly began to occupy scholars and
became the focus of several conferences and books (see Dalmia and von
Stietencron 1995; Sontheimer and Kulke 1989 [2001] and the special volume
of the Wilson Quarterly 1991). After 200 years of the scholarly study of
Hinduism and its failure to find a common core of doctrines, sacred texts,
belief in one God etc., Indians themselves began now to claim that a religion
with those characteristics existed in India after all. Not only did the Indians
say this. This claim also united Hindus of different traditions into nationalist
movements and incited some to undertake violent acts against Muslims and
Christians. The latter seemed to prove that this religion was a reality (for at
least some sections of Indian society).
This posed a challenge for those scholars who claimed that the use of the
concept ‘Hinduism’ distorted the Indian reality. One had to explain either
how a religion that had not existed before had now come into being, or how
and why Indians could have adopted such a false notion of Hinduism.
The main approach to account for these questions has been to argue that the
construction of Hinduism could not have been a product of European
colonials and orientalists alone.
In this context, one of the arguments directed Said’s arrows back at his
own work and that of his followers. Many came to question whether authors
such as Inden (1986, 1990) and Cohn (1987 [1998], 1997) were not acting
as ‘neo-orientalists’, ending up essentializing the Indians once again – this
time as passive receivers of false notions and even of a new Sanskritized
Hinduism (see B.K. Smith 1996; Viswanathan 2003). Nevertheless, in order
to keep the thesis about the colonial construction of Hinduism intact two
conclusions were drawn:
1 The Europeans could not have brought a religion into being that had
not existed before without the help of the Indians. Hinduism could
not have been constructed out of thin air by the colonizer and sub-
sequently imposed upon a passive Indian population. Instead, it is
argued, Hinduism was the result of a dialectical collaborative enterprise,
with the colonials and Indians mutually contributing to the construction
of this edifice (see Frykenberg 1993: 534–35; Haan 2005; King 1999a;
Lorenzen 1999, 2006; Pauwels 2002: 151; Pennington 2005; van der Veer
1993: 23). Ignoring the colonized would be ‘to erase the colonial subject
from history and perpetuate the myth of the passive Oriental’ (King
5
1999a: 146). Interesting to note is that it is almost exclusively the brah-

mans who are held responsible for the Indian contribution.
2 If Indians had accepted the orientalist descriptions so easily, there must
have been more truth to them than was thought by their postcolonial
critics. Indeed, many scholars have pointed at traces of a pre-colonial
Hindu religious identity and to the existence of phenomena similar to the
Christian religion in India prior to the colonial period (see Dalmia 1995,
2007; Frykenberg 1989 [2001], 1993; King 1999b; Lorenzen 1999, 2006;
Oddie 2003, 2006, this volume; Thapar 1989; Viswanathan 2003). Again,
it is worthwhile noting that it is the brahmans who are thought to have
played a central role. One of the central assumptions in the construction-
ist thesis is that at least Brahmanism can be characterized in terms of the
properties of the western notion of religion.
Both elements are necessary to make the different versions of the con-
structionist thesis coherent. As King (2006: 709) has already pointed out,
none of the constructionists have left out the contribution of the Indians in
the construction of Hinduism, even though some have emphasized it more
than others. On the contrary, most of the discussions in the debate about the
construction of Hinduism have revolved around the question which of the
two has contributed the most. Those who see ‘Hinduism’ as a constructed
concept focus more on the European and colonial agency; others for whom
Hinduism is a reality see the construction of Hinduism more as a historical
evolution of elements that were already present in India.
Why was Hinduism constructed?

Apart from finding out who was responsible, the other central question in the
debate is what caused this collaborative construction. Here, scholars have
mainly looked for explanations in the motives and purposes of the British
colonials on the one hand and those of the Indians (or native collaborators)
on the other.
British imperialism and the western concept of religion

In the account of the European and colonial contribution to the construc-
tion of Hinduism many have provided a genealogy of the term ‘Hinduism’
and of the notion of a pan-Indian religion. Even critics of the construction-
ist thesis agree that the word ‘Hinduism’ is relatively young and not native to
India. The term ‘Hindu’ is traced back to the ancient Greek and Persian
‘Sindhu’, which referred to anything native to the region beyond the river
Indus. This is also, many authors argue, how the Muslim administration
later used it: not to denote a people united by religious identity but to
bring together various communities within the political structure of imperial
6
Muslim rule. Thus, the term ‘Hindu’ did not ascribe religious unity to these
communities and was inclusive of Indian Muslims and Christians. Europeans
only adopted the term ‘Hinduism’ as a name for the religion of India
towards the end of the eighteenth century. Before that, European travellers
and missionaries had regarded the Indian traditions as instances of heathen-
dom. Heathendom or paganism, according to medieval Christianity, was one
of the four religions of the world, next to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.
The Indian form of paganism later acquired the name of ‘gentooism’, fol-
lowed by the ‘religion of the Hindus’ to be finally replaced by ‘Hindooism’,
and then ‘Hinduism’ by the end of the eighteenth century (see King 1999a:
162–66 and 1999b; Oddie 2003: 156–59 and 2006; B.K. Smith 1987: 34–35;
von Stietencron 1989 [2001]: 33–35 and 1995: 70–77).
The constructionist thesis has it that, in this process, different religious
phenomena wrongly came to be seen as parts of one religion of all Hindus.
The form attributed to this religion was based on a Christian understanding
of what religion is. Europeans, so the argument goes, focused only on those
aspects which they considered to be properties of religion, viz. sacred texts,
doctrines and priests, while neglecting the myriad of other aspects of Indian
religion. As a result they mistook Brahmanism – with its texts and priests –
for the religion of all Hindus (see Hardy 1995: 48; Hawley 1991; King 1999b:
103; Oddie 2006: 100). This idea of a unified and clear-cut Hindu religion
was then used by the British to rule India (Hawley 1991; King 1999a: 159–60,
172; Pandey 1990 [1999]; Sugirtharajah 2003). Several colonial administra-
tive measures, based on the idea of one Hindu religion, helped in creating
this religion: the census and legislation of aspects related to religion (Dalmia
2007: 14–15; Frykenberg 1989 [2001], 1993; Haan 2005; Ludden 1996 [2005]:
9–10; Oddie 2003, 2006; Zavos 2000, 2001). To summarize, three elements are
identified as central to the role played by the Europeans in the construction
of Hinduism: a western Christian concept of religion, the idea that the
Indian religions formed one pan-Indian religion and the needs of the colonial
enterprise.
The Indian contribution: Brahmanism, nationalism and the

reform movements
The literature characterizes the role of the Indians in the construction of
Hinduism as follows: Indians adopted some of the orientalist and colonial
ideas, combined these with elements from their own (pre-colonial) culture
and used this combination for their own purposes. Two elements are generally
identified as the pre-colonial foundations of Hinduism, namely Brahmanism
or the Vedāntic religion of the brahmans, and a pre-colonial Hindu self-
awareness. On the one hand, Brahmanism is regarded as the Indian religion
that has properties similar to those of the Christian religion, namely Sanskrit
sacred texts, doctrines, priesthood etc. The brahmans are thought to have
7
formed the priestly elite of India’s textual religion, which they represented to
the British as if it were the religion of the whole of India (see Frykenberg
1989 [2001], 1993; King 1999b: 103; Oddie 2006: 99, 265–67; Thapar 1989:
213; van der Veer 1993: 26–27). On the other hand, some authors argue, the
awareness of a common Hindu identity, opposed to the Muslims, also
existed in pre-colonial India (see Bayly 1985; Dalmia 1995, 2007; Lorenzen
1999, 2006; Oddie 2003, this volume; Talbot 1995; Viswanathan 2003).2 The
constructionists argue that Indian elites combined the orientalist assump-
tions about Hinduism and the colonial policies with these pre-colonial foun-
dations in order to create a Hinduism that served their purposes and motives,
viz. to gain prominence and power over other groups in India, to form a
nation, to resist colonialism etc.
In this regard, a lot of work has been done on the role of the Hindu
Reform Movements. It is argued that, in response to missionary criticisms of
their religion, Indians tried to give a positive portrayal by presenting it as a
religion that had the same properties as Christianity (Laine 1983: 165; King
1999a: 173; Oddie 2003: 158–59, 181 and this volume; Pennington 2005;
Thapar 1985: 18 and 1989: 218; Viswanathan 2003: 27, 35–36). The reform-
ers are said to have tried to ‘rid religion of the features most attacked by
Christian missionaries, [and] driven by a similar will to monotheism in their
attempts to make the Hindu religion correspond more rigorously to the
Judeo-Christian conceptions of a single, all-powerful deity’ (Viswanathan
2003: 27). Other authors describe the ‘native complicity’ more as an attempt
to form a unitary group or organized religion, so that the Hindus could form
a religious majority in India and stand strong against Muslim and Christian
proselytism and missionary and colonial attacks on their traditions (King
1999a; Oddie 2003: 166–73; Pennington 2001, 2005; Zavos 2000, 2001).
These reform movements – consisting mostly of elites, intellectuals and
brahmans – are thought to have played an important role in transforming the
Indian traditions into a unified and textualized religion mainly based on the
Vedāntic religion of the brahmans. They are also held to be the precursors of
the Hindutva movement of today (see Frykenberg 1993: 548; Thapar 1989:
218; White 2000: 105).
Some authors emphasize that Indians used the idea of religious unity in
order to form a Hindu nation or for political mobilization (see Dalmia 2007:
15–19; Dalmia and von Stietencron 1995: 19; Duara 1991; Frykenberg 1993:
526, 538–39; Hardy 1995: 47; Hawley 1991; King 1999a: 151, 160, 176–77;
Pennington 2005: 169; Thapar 1989: 210, 228–30; van der Veer 1992: 96 and
1993: 39–43; von Stietencron 1995: 71, 79); others say that it was a means to
get access to state resources distributed according to religion (see Frykenberg
1989 [2001], 1993). Some also see it as part of an agenda of the brahmans
to promote their own religion, the Sanskritic Brahmanism as a world religion
(see King 1999a: 170–71). It is said that because Europeans relied almost
entirely on brahmans as their informants, the latter could make use of this
8
to present their religion as that of all Indians, to the detriment of other local
or smaller religions. Additionally, the religion of the brahmans also
resembled what Europeans were looking for: a religion with doctrines and
sacred texts. Thus, Brahmin collaboration and Hindu nationalist and Reform
Movements are said to have led to the Sanskritization, textualization, unifi-
cation, and essentialization of Hindu traditions (see Doniger 2009; Hardy
1995: 35–37; King 1999a, 1999b; B.K. Smith 1996: 368; van der Veer 1999:
430; Viswanathan 2003).
Contra construction
Most criticism of the constructionist thesis has been directed against the
claim that it is not legitimate to speak of Hinduism as one homogeneous
religion and the idea that before colonialism there was no Hindu identity
based on this religion. Instead, these critics argue, a Hindu identity did exist
in India prior to colonialism. For David Lorenzen (1999, 2006; see also his
chapter in this volume), for instance, the fact that poets like Kabir and
Gorakh had spoken about ‘Hindus and Muslims’ shows that a notion of
‘Hindu religion’ must have already existed in pre-colonial India. Wendy
Doniger (1991) argues that Hindus have always had a sense of a common
identity based on markers such as being native to India, having a shared
social structure, etc. These critics of the constructionist thesis, however,
focus more on showing that non-Muslim Indians already shared a com-
mon identity, than on explaining what exactly makes this identity into a
religious one (see also Mahmood 1993; Oddie 2003: 159–61, this volume;
Talbot 1995).
Moreover, critics say, the constructionist thesis once again denies agency
to the natives, and it is Eurocentric ‘to assume that when we [westerners]
made the name we made the game’ (Doniger 1991: 36). Even if the con-
structionist historiographies did restore agency to elite native informants,
they again leave other Indians – lower-caste, women, illiterates etc. – without
agency or without a voice in India’s history. Therefore, many scholars take
this debate as an occasion to advocate recognition of the agency of minor
religions, folk religions, oral traditions, the lower castes, women etc. by giving
them a place in their historiographies (see Chakravarti 2006; Doniger 1991,
2009: 1–3; Mahmood 1993).
Some critics say that the constructionists fail to recognize the existence of
Hinduism or of a common Hindu identity, because the latter are themselves
guilty of using a western (or Judeo-Christian) concept of religion (Sweetman
2003; Viswanathan 2003). These critics suggest that ‘Hinduism’ is a different
kind of religion. It is not a religious system with a core of common charac-
teristics, but one with separate instances that share family resemblances.
Hinduism is polythetic in nature and should be studied accordingly. As such,
to capture the nature of Hinduism we need something like a Venn diagram
9
or an enumeration of family resemblances (see Doniger 1991; Ferro-Luzzi

1989 [2001]; Hiltebeitel 1991; Larson 1995; Lipner 1994; Mahmood 1993;
Olson 2007).
A different story
Two authors have been left out of the story so far: Frits Staal and S.N.
Balagangadhara. Even though both have often been located among the con-
structionists, their claims differ from the latter in significant ways. Both
speak about the creation of ‘Hinduism’, but only in the sense of the creation
of a concept. To them, Hinduism is a conceptual unit, which exists only in
western universities and minds. Neither today nor in the past did the concept
of Hinduism correspond to any reality in India. These two authors do not
claim, as the postcolonials do, that Hinduism is in fact a collection of differ-
ent religions, nor that one aspect of Indian religions has been presented as
the religion of all Hindus. Instead they argue the following: if Christianity,
Islam and Judaism are religions, then Hindu, Buddhist and other traditions
cannot be religion. Moreover, ‘Brahmanism’, with its sacred texts and
Brahmin priesthood, as well as the many ‘local religions’, are as much ficti-
tious entities as ‘Hinduism’ is.3 Thus, they deny the validity of two central
elements of the constructionist thesis – namely that Brahmanism came to
represent the religion for all Indians, and the existence of a multitude of local
religions that were thus dominated and ignored.
More particularly, Frits Staal questions the applicability of the western
concept of religion to non-western traditions. This concept, he says, is
incoherent and has either to be abandoned or confined to the western tradi-
tions (Staal 1989: 415). Staal shows that the Indian traditions do not have
any of the characteristics that make Christianity, Islam and Judaism into
religions. Thus, the construction of Hinduism, according to Staal, is not that
of a homogenization of the different religions into one religion, but rather a
conceptual creation of something that does not exist in India. According to
him, different unconnected elements were taken together and transformed
into a religion. Moreover, contrary to most of the participants in the con-
structionist debate, the focus of Staal is not on showing who constructed
Hinduism and why (see above), but on developing a new understanding
of the Indian traditions and on showing in what way they differ from the
religions of the West. To put it in Staal’s own words:
The inapplicability of Western notions of religion to the traditions

of Asia has not only led to piecemeal errors of labeling, identifica-
tion and classification, to conceptual confusion and to some name-
calling. It is also responsible for something more extraordinary: the
creation of so-called religions . . . The reasons lie in the nature of
Western religion, which is pervaded by the notion of exclusive truth
10
and claims a monopoly on truth. . . . In most parts of Asia, such

religions do not exist, but scholars, laymen and western converts
persist in searching for them. If they cannot find them, they seize
upon labels used for indigenous categories, rent them from their
original context and use them for subsequent identification of what
is now called a ‘religious’ tradition. Thus there arises a host of reli-
gions: Vedic, Brahmanical, Hindu, Buddhist, . . . In Asia, such
groupings are not only uninteresting and uninformative, but tinged
with the unreal. What counts instead are ancestors and teachers . . .
concepts with ritual rather than truth-functional overtones.
(Staal 1989: 393, emphasis in original)
Balagangadhara (1994 [2005]; see also this volume) makes this point even
more strongly. He not only argues that Hinduism is neither a religion, nor
a collection of religions, but also explains why Europeans were compelled
to look for and see religion in India, regardless of their motives or attitudes
towards India. Different elements from the Indian culture, he points out, have
been taken together and presented as a religion. ‘Hinduism’ (also Buddhism,
Sikhism, Jainism etc.), then, is an entity that exists only in the western
experience of India and in the writings of scholars.4
In this way, one could say, Balagangadhara picks up a thread of Said that
has been largely ignored by the postcolonials, namely that the orientalist
descriptions tell us more about the West than about the Orient. He shows
that Europeans have seen religion in India, not because they used a western
concept of religion, but because Christian theology compelled them to look
for and recognize religion in some aspects of the Indian culture. As such, the
conceptual construction of Hinduism has little to do with the exigencies or
demands of colonialism or with the goals and motives of Indians.5
Even though he argues that it is wrong to look at the Indian traditions
as though they were religions, Balagangadhara differs with critics of the
concept of religion (e.g. Fitzgerald this volume; King 1999b, this volume;
McCutcheon 1997). He does not claim that the concept of religion is inade-
quate to study human phenomena. On the contrary, developing a theory of
religion allows him to distinguish between what constitutes religion among
the human phenomena and what does not. This distinction allows him to
show that India does not have, and never had, indigenous religions, and to
start conceptualizing the Indian traditions differently.6 Moreover, he also
claims that the construction of the experiential entity ‘Hinduism’ is not
caused by using a western concept of religion. Instead, it has to do with the
nature of Christianity as a religion that has compelled Europeans to see
religion in India.
Balagangadhara’s thesis generates important questions: if it was not reli-
gion, what did the Europeans see which they mistook for religion? What kind
of traditions exist in India, if the texts and practices do not form religions?
11
Why have generations of Indian intellectuals spoken as though they possessed

their own religion of ‘Hinduism’? How should we make sense of so-called
‘Hindu–Muslim conflicts’? Some of these questions have been analyzed in
earlier writings (Balagangadhara 1994 [2005]; Balagangadhara and Claerhout
2008; Balagangadhara and De Roover 2007; Balagangadhara et al. 2008),
and are also addressed in this volume.
Raising questions
The importance of the constructionist arguments lies in the fact that they
point to a mismatch between the descriptions of ‘Hinduism’ and the realities
of Indian culture. However, the different positions in the debate are still
deeply contested. We would like to introduce a number of questions that need
to be answered, in order to take the debate on the construction of Hinduism
further and to allow for the development of an alternative conceptual frame-
work for the study of Indian traditions.
1. The constructionist theses are characterized by an ambiguity about the
nature of the process of construction. It is unclear what is constructed: a
concept, an idea or an object in the world. Did the Europeans and their
informants invent a new concept to describe and classify the religious and
social phenomena of India? If so, what are the implications of using such a
new term (concept)? Or did they actually produce a new religion, which is
now a real entity in Indian society? Or did they do both? Or does ‘Hinduism’
merely describe a pattern in the western cultural experience of India? Even
though most authors try to defend one of these positions, they continue to
struggle with these very different and incompatible options (see the chapter
by De Roover and Claerhout in this volume).
2. While they disagree as to whether Hinduism is really one religion or
covers multiple religions, both the constructionists and their critics share
the assumption that the phenomena described as Hinduism are manifest-
ations of religion. Some say that Hinduism is a ‘religion of a different kind’
than Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Others say that we need to look for
the common elements or family resemblances that characterize this collec-
tion of religious phenomena. However, such suggestions do not suffice.
One needs to show what makes this collection of phenomena into religion
(differentiating it from, say, social, ethnic, political, etc. phenomena). The
same problem applies to the claims that a Hindu identity already existed
in pre-colonial India. One needs to demonstrate what makes this identity
into a religious identity and not a geographical, ethnic, social or other
identity.
3. Another problem in the constructionist account is that it is not clear
what is problematic about the fact that Europeans used a western-Christian
concept of religion. Merely saying that this concept is influenced by Christian
theology does not reveal any fundamental problem. To draw an analogy,
12
Newton’s physics was deeply influenced by his Christian theological pers-

pective, which told him that the world embodied God’s will. However, this
influence did not have any impact on the truth value of his theory. There is
also an additional problem: it is commonly argued that the properties attrib-
uted to religion by this western-Christian concept were never present in the
Hindu traditions. If that is the case, then the use of this concept of religion
should have prevented the Europeans from seeing religion in India. Thus, any
attempt at characterizing the construction of Hinduism would need to
explain as to why Europeans, in spite of their concept of religion, saw religion
in India.
4. Some authors say that the European descriptions were not that wrong
after all. In fact, they argue, a religion that corresponded to the western
concept of religion did exist in India, viz. in the textual and doctrinal
religious system of the Brahmin priests. However, until today no one has
been able to show that such a Brahmanism really exists or existed in India.
Scholars have not found a common core in the so-called sacred texts and
doctrines of the brahmans either: these texts and stories are varied and often
contradictory; it is unclear whether any and which of the texts could be
canonical; the so-called Hindu priests often do not even know the content
of these texts etc. (see Gelders and Derde 2003; Hegde 2008; Lipner 1994;
Quigley 1993). Moreover, if Brahmanism had really become the core of the
religion of all Hindus under the name of Hinduism, it becomes very difficult
to explain why scholars have been unable for more than 200 years to clearly
identify this religion. Even contemporary scholars of Hinduism start the
introduction of their work by saying that it is impossible to define Hinduism
or to find its core.
5. If we accept the constructionist account that Brahmanism was one reli-
gion among many in pre-colonial India, later to be imposed as the pan-Indian
religion, some other problems arise. First, this presupposes the existence of
a unified priesthood and power centre today, which dominates the religion
of all Hindus and decides about Hindu orthodoxy or orthopraxy. Many
authors have thrown doubt on this idea: not all Brahmins are priests and not
all priests are Brahmins, nor has anyone been able to identify such a pan-
Indian clerical authority (see Gelders and Derde 2003; Hegde 2008; Lipner
1994; Quigley 1993). Second, if there were indeed different religions in pre-
colonial India, why had non-Brahmins come to accept Brahmanism as their
religion, or at least as its core? Neither the need for a common national
identity nor a wish to stand strong against the Christians and Muslims are
able to explain this.
At the same time, we see that a majority of Indians call themselves Hindu
and differentiate themselves from Muslims and Christians. However, this
does not imply that a pan-Indian Hindu identity exists and that it concerns a
religious identity, or that all Hindus now follow the doctrines and practices
of Brahmanism (a similar point has been made by Chatterjee 1992: 147–48).
13
On the contrary, even today, we have many indications that Indians still
practice their ancestral traditions rather than any common pan-Indian
Hinduism.7 Nevertheless, if this is true, we have to explain why generations
of Indians have spoken as though they possessed a religion ‘Hinduism’ and
why a Hindutva movement could come into being that appeals to Hinduism
as one of the world religions.
6. Another problem in the constructionist writings is that most explan-
ations take the form of identifying the motives and purposes of the different
actors. That is, instead of giving explanations of how Hinduism could be
constructed, scholars dispute who was responsible for the construction and
which reasons and motives inspired them to do so. However, there is no
direct relation between the motives one has for doing something and what is
done. Someone’s motives for opening the door, for instance, cannot be read
from them opening the door; nor does their opening the door tell you any-
thing about their motivations for doing so. In the case of the colonial con-
struction of Hinduism, would it be possible to say that all colonials shared
the same motives, namely to colonize, control, and rule? And even if this is
possible, why should this lead to the creation of a new religion? For instance,
with the same motive of colonizing India, the British created Hinduism and
the Muslims did not. If colonial needs led the British to construct Hinduism,
then why did the Muslims not do the same?
Moreover, long before colonialism with its particular needs and motiv-
ations, Jesuit missionaries and European travellers had already described the
existence of a pan-Indian religion, even though they named the pattern dif-
ferently (paganism, heathenism, idolatry) (Oddie 2006, Sweetman 2001). In
fact, the British colonial descriptions of the Indian traditions were very
much coloured by what their continental European predecessors wrote
(Gelders 2009). Thus, the needs of the colonial government cannot become
the explanation for the European descriptions of the phenomenon that was
later called Hinduism. Likewise, in the constructionist account, the know-
ledge that allowed the British to colonize and control the Indians was also
the knowledge that allowed the Indians to fight and resist colonialism. These
motives are diametrically opposed – to dominate and to resist domination.
In other words, there exists no clear relationship between the motives for the
construction and the fact of the construction of Hinduism.
The structure of the book

In Part I: Historical and Empirical Arguments some of the key scholars
in the debate on the colonial construction of religion contribute chapters
with the main historical arguments for and against the thesis that Hinduism
is a colonial construct. Other authors give original analyses of historical
and empirical data, which show the relevance of the debate on colonial
construction.
14
The volume opens with one of the most important challenges to the idea
of a British construction of Hinduism – a challenge that has come from
David Lorenzen. In his Hindus and Others, Lorenzen argues that Hinduism
existed as a religion in India prior to the emergence of British colonialism.
His historical evidence lies in the fact that the medieval Indian poetry of
Kabir and Gorakh already referred to distinctions between ‘Hindu’ and
‘Turk’ or ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’. According to Lorenzen, this indicates a pre-
colonial consciousness of Hindus as a religious group and Hinduism as a
religious institution.
Geoffrey Oddie puts forward one of the main historical arguments against
the idea that Hinduism already existed prior to British colonization. In his
Hindu Religious Identity with Special Reference to the Origin and Significance
of the Term ‘Hinduism’, c. 1787–1947, Oddie discusses the gradual emergence
and spread of a sense of an all-India Hindu religious identity and explores
the origin and significance of the term ‘Hinduism’ in further developing this
awareness. Oddie points out that the term, first coined by the Europeans, was
readily adopted in India, especially by western educated Hindus. He argues
that it was used as a method of mobilization and self-defence for Indians
in the struggle against missionaries and colonials, especially during the later
stages of British rule. In conclusion, he relates these findings to the ongoing
debates about the definition of ‘Hinduism’.
John Zavos, in his Representing Religion in Colonial India, puts the ques-
tion of the construction of Hinduism in a broader context. He discusses the
opportunities of ‘rethinking religion in India’ with regard to the debates on
the colonial construction of Hinduism, the rise of the nationalist movement
and the impact of colonialism on religious identity formation in India. He
argues that we need to think beyond traditional orientalist representations
and normative western models of ‘religion’. Yet, he adds, even though ideas
of religion may be based on European structures of knowledge, these have
been dynamically developed through the colonial encounter. Therefore, we
should not just recognize the pre-colonial genealogy of this concept, but also
its continuing development in the context of colonialism, and more broadly
in the modern world.
Sharada Sugirtharajah is another voice, which argues that Hinduism is a
colonial construction. In her Colonialism and Religion, she points out that,
besides territorial expansion, colonialism also involved intellectual and cul-
tural expansion. The colonized were thought to be lacking in maturity and
colonialism was seen as a civilizing activity. She explores how these motives
of intellectual and cultural expansion informed the orientalist and missionary
understanding of ‘Hinduism’ and the Indian culture in general. Moreover,
she emphasizes that colonialism did not begin or end in the colonial era but
cuts across time and space and still determines our current understanding
of Hinduism.
In her Women, the Freedom Movement, and Sanskrit: Notes on Religion
15
and Colonialism from the Ethnographic Present, Laurie L. Patton brings in an

empirical perspective on the issue, by showing the relevance of the historical
arguments about the construction of religion to the contemporary situation
in India. She shares with the reader her empirical study of the changing role
of women in the study of Sanskrit in India. On the basis of fieldwork among
two age groups, Patton concludes that older women who learned Sanskrit
did not regard the language as religious in nature, but saw it as the vehicle
of freedom. In contrast, the younger women of postcolonial India regard
the learning and teaching of Sanskrit entirely as ‘Hindu’ and have thus
embedded Sanskrit in the conception of Hinduism as a religion.
Part II: Theoretical Reflections contains chapters that reflect on the theor-
etical future of the study of religion in India. They focus on the Christian
framework of religious studies, the inadequacy of the concept of religion,
the nature of orientalism and the process of ‘colonial construction’.
Richard King, in his Colonialism, Hinduism and the Discourse of Religion,
challenges the notion of religion as a cross-cultural phenomenon that is
clearly distinguishable from other phenomena in the world. Because of
colonialism, King argues, European assumptions about religion have been
universalized and religion came to be seen as part of a universal history. He
points to the ‘Eurocentric logic’ that frames the rest of the world as vari-
ations on a western Christian theme and shows that the Indian traditions do
not correspond to this logic of the discourse of religion. To describe the
Indian traditions in terms of the concepts of ‘religion’ and the ‘secular’ thus
entails a distortion. Instead, King proposes that we go back to the Indian
traditions themselves and excavate the conceptual framework these tradi-
tions used to describe themselves.
Timothy Fitzgerald questions the usefulness of the category of religion as
such. In his Who Invented Hinduism? Rethinking Religion in India, he also
calls into question the distinction between ‘the religious’ and ‘the non-
religious’ (or ‘the secular’). This distinction, he argues, comes together with a
set of binaries that have been taken for granted as ‘existing binaries’ in the
modern discourse, viz. religion/secular, natural/supernatural, church/state
etc. He points out that all these concepts originate within Christian theology.
Many societies in the world do not even have terms to distinguish between
the religious and the non-religious. The conclusion of his chapter is that
religion is a concept, just like society or state, which in fact does not exist as a
real and distinct phenomenon in the world.
S.N. Balagangadhara, in Orientalism, Postcolonialism and the ‘Construction’
of Religion, attempts to show how religions, as concepts, were constructed in
India. To him, ‘Indian religions’, with the exception of Judaism, Christianity
and Islam in India, are fictional entities on par with ‘Hogwarts’, the magical
school of Harry Potter, and entities like ‘unicorns’ and ‘satyrs’. However, he
does not advance such a claim on the basis of some general argument about
the nature of the category ‘religion’ but on the basis of a hypothesis about
16
religion. That hypothesis, which is briefly elaborated in the volume, also

explains why religious studies of today rely so heavily on a generic Christian
understanding of religion. In the course of the article, he also addresses
himself to some of the criticisms his work has met with.
In The Colonial Construction of What?, Jakob De Roover and Sarah
Claerhout raise three fundamental questions to clear the conceptual ground
required for theory formation on the construction of Hinduism. First, they
analyze the question ‘Is religion a construct?’ The claim that religion is only
a conceptual tool of the scholar, which does not refer to any empirical real-
ity, they argue, fails to make sense in the absence of a theory of religion.
However, this does not imply it is nonsensical to speak of the construction of
Hinduism. ‘Is Hinduism a construct?’ is answered in the positive, but quali-
fied in a limited empirical sense. Subsequently, they raise the question as to
‘What is constructed in the process of construction?’ On the one hand, one
could suggest that Hinduism has come into being as an object, a new religion
that materialized on the subcontinent. On the other hand, one could argue,
as De Roover and Claerhout do, that Hinduism has been created as a con-
ceptual unit in certain descriptions of India only. These descriptions have
had an impact upon Indian society, but this does not entail that Hindu
religion exists in India today.
Notes
1 Even though this answer regained prominence in the twentieth-century academic
study of religion, this claim was already widespread in the nineteenth century
and before European colonialism. See for instance Monier-Williams [1875] 1974;
Farquhar 1912; Bouglé 1908; Wilson 1877; O’Malley 1934: 67–68; Ladd 1901. This
point has also been made by Oddie 2007 and Sweetman 2001.
2 This argument is often used as a critique on the colonial constructionist thesis,
saying that the role of the colonials could at the most have been one of selection,
not one of invention (see Lorenzen 1999, 2006).
3 This is of course not to say that none of the elements that went into the construc-
tion of Hinduism exists in India. The claim is not that there are no distinct tradi-
tions or texts in the Indian culture but that the way we understand them today as
different religions with sacred texts, specific doctrines and practices, makes us blind
for many of their characteristics and at the same time makes us see phenomena that
are not there. For instance, research at Kuvempu University has shown that, even
though generations of scholars have written about it, no single ‘Brahmin’ caste
exists that is universally accepted as superior, nor do many of the people – not even
the so-called priests – know the contents of the so-called sacred texts that constitute
the religion (Hegde 2008).
4 This point is picked up and elaborated by his students (see De Roover and
Claerhout, this volume).
5 This point has been elaborated by Raf Gelders (2009). Gelders shows that the
same structure of a Hindu religion was already present in pre-colonial European
sources.
6 See Balagangadhara (2005) for a possible way of describing the Indian traditions in
a different way.
17
7 Fieldwork at Kuvempu University that has looked at the different jatis in villages
in Karnataka shows that each group has its own tradition (Hegde 2008).
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21
Part I
HISTORICAL AND
EMPIRICAL ARGUMENTS
1
HINDUS AND OTHERS
David N. Lorenzen
How can we best study religious movements? What makes a religious move-
ment religious? How can religious institutions be distinguished from secular
institutions? Is Hindu religion or Hinduism a coherent concept? Can Hindu
religion be accommodated within the general category of the so-called world
religions like Islam, Buddhism and Christianity? Is Hindu religion more a
‘way of life’ or a culture than a religion per se? How do Hindus themselves
define and negotiate their Hindu identity? Any scholar who studies religious
movements in India and their migration abroad inevitably has to adopt at
least implicit presuppositions and hypotheses about these questions.
A further set of questions relates to how a scholar’s own life experience
may condition his or her views about specific religions and religious move-
ments. Can a scholar who was raised outside of India and Indian culture have
an authentic understanding of what it means to be a Hindu? Can a Christian,
a Buddhist, a Muslim, or an atheist, even if raised in India, have such an
understanding? What is the impact of colonialism and neocolonialism on the
points of view of both Indian scholars and European and American scholars
on these questions? Is it possible for scholars of different national and cul-
tural backgrounds to establish a meaningful dialogue about these questions?
Can they arrive at something resembling an international consensus about
the possible answers? If not, what is the point of attempting the dialogue in
the first place?
Obviously, this chapter cannot attempt to seriously engage with all these
questions. Much research is done without any explicit considerations of
them at all. Nonetheless it is sometimes useful to try to make what is
normally implicit more explicit. Here I want to briefly discuss three of these
related foundational issues. First is a look at how religion is being studied in
modern universities, particularly in the United States, and the influence of
Mircea Eliade on this study. Second is a discussion of the historical construc-
tion of the concept of Hindu religion or Hinduism. Third is an examination
of how three medieval Indian religious poets – Gorakh, Kabir, and Guru
Arjan – negotiated their own religious identities in a way at least partly
independent of both Hindu religion and Islam.
25
D AV I D N . L O R E N Z E N
Eliade and the study of religions

Most academic studies on the world’s major religions over the last fifty years
owe much to the ideas of the Romanian scholar Mircea Eliade. Although a
good part of Eliade’s best work was done in Europe in the 1940s and early
1950s, much of his influence stems from his presence as a distinguished profes-
sor in the University of Chicago where he arrived in 1956 to teach courses in
the field he called ‘The history of religions’. This is particularly true of the
studies done in the religion departments of American universities, but the
influence of his ideas on studies of religions has, directly or indirectly, extended
to scholars in other departments and in other countries including India.
During the last fifty years there has been an enormous increase in the
number of scholars who teach and do research on most of the non-Christian
religions in the religion departments of American universities. Russell T.
McCutcheon’s book, Manufacturing Religion (2003) argues convincingly
that a key idea that has justified and promoted this increase and its location
in religion departments is Eliade’s idea that religions are sui generis institu-
tions, institutions that cannot be properly analysed using ‘reductive’ strategies
that discuss religions, particularly their origins, in terms of their economic,
social, and political motives and consequences.
I myself was first introduced to Eliade’s work when I was still an under-
graduate. In about 1960, one of my professors, the psychoanalytic historian
N.O. Brown, suggested that I read one of Eliade’s books, The Myth of the
Eternal Return (2005). I found it fascinating and proceeded to read all of his
books that were available in our university library. Eliade’s excellent study of
Yoga, entitled Yoga: immortality and freedom (1970) was one of the readings
which helped turn my own academic interests toward India and Hinduism.
Today, looking back on all this, I think the thing that most attracted me
to Eliade was the vision he offered of exotic new worlds of ideas: the world
of archaic man and the world of Hinduism. Ironically, much of the rest of
my academic career has been dedicated to learning and showing that these
exotic worlds are not, after all, so exotic or different from the world in which
I grew up.
Eliade claims that all religions share a unique point of origin, a personal
experience of the sacred, the experience that Rudolf Otto (1970) earlier
called the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. It is this experience that allowed
Eliade and others associated with the history of religions to make the claim
that religion is sui generis and needs to be studied by its own methodology
and not reduced to secular history, sociology, anthropology, philosophy or
psychology. Although religion is necessarily manifested in historical time
as specific, organized religions – each with its own history, churches, rituals,
beliefs, customs, and social, economic and political programmes – nonetheless,
behind all this empirical prolixity lies the experience of the sacred, the phe-
nomenon that makes religions religious.
26
HINDUS AND OTHERS
In terms of its consequences, the idea that Otto and Eliade promoted has
proved to be a powerful idea. By concentrating his research on the effects
of religious experience and not on its cause, Eliade offered a way to create an
allegedly ‘scientific’ mode of studying religion, and this possibility in turn
helped to legitimate the creation of new or expanded departments of religion
in most American universities. Since Otto’s and Eliade’s idea also posited
a common origin for all religions, these same religious departments were
also now free to expand into studies not only of Christianity, Judaism and
maybe Islam, but also other so-called ‘world religions’: Buddhism, Hinduism,
Confucianism, Shinto and the like.
The idea and study of ‘world religions’ did, of course, exist in Europe
and America well before Eliade and Otto. The field known as ‘compara-
tive religion’ was a direct precursor. Tomoko Masuzawa (2005) has written
an excellent account of the history of the idea of ‘world religions’ among
European and American scholars in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Most of the earlier discussions of these world religions arranged
them in hierarchical subcategories such as universal and national, historical
and ahistorical, ethical and ritualistic, monotheistic and polytheistic. In these
arrangements Christianity always came out on top. These unequal evalu-
ations were eventually dropped by most scholars, although traces of pre-
ference for Christianity or for other religions sometimes survive in implicit
form. The scholar who did most to eliminate such bias was Max Weber
who defined ‘world religions’ simply as those with the largest number of
adherents.
Eliade’s approach made possible a new and expanded effort to study world
religions, an effort that at least partly freed the study of these religions
both from a narrow-minded Christian or Jewish ideological focus and from
the reductive methodologies of the secular historians, anthropologists, philo-
sophers and psychologists. A new academic enterprise was born, one that
had clear affinity with the general need of the new post-war American
empire for more information about the cultures of the Asian and African
countries where the political and economic involvement of this empire was
growing rapidly.
This does not mean, however, that the young scholars, myself included,
who worked on Hinduism and other Asian religions during the 1960s and
1970s, were simply the dupes and stooges of Eliade and the new American
Empire. We were simply following our own hearts and our own curiosity, but
the fact that the American universities were now willing to hire persons who
worked in such fields certainly made things much easier. Nonetheless, my
own enchantment with Eliade’s history of religions approach did not last
long. I began to support the view that the chief function of religions was to
ideologically express the economic, social, political and psychological needs
of their adherents, needs that were often distorted by the priestly elites that
usually managed and controlled the religions. This, of course, is an idea quite
27
at odds with the view of Eliade that such material and psychological needs
are purely incidental to the uniquely religious or spiritual foundation of all
religions in the experience of the sacred.
More recently, however, I have come back to a position partly akin
to that taken by Eliade, namely that religions are associated with a par-
ticular emotion or emotional experience that corresponds to Otto’s mysterium
tremendum et fascinans. I would argue, however, that Otto probably over-
emphasized the ‘terror’ and ‘awe’ aspects of this experience. Religions other
than Christianity, Judaism and Islam usually describe what must be roughly
the same experience without the same degree of terror and awe. We must
assume, after all, that this is a human experience and that different religi-
ous cultures can have only a limited role in shaping how it is perceived.
Sigmund Freud (1958: 1–12), in his Civilization and Its Discontents, called the
experience an ‘oceanic feeling’ and this description may be closer to what is
common to it in all religious cultures.
In any case, it is the association with this experience that makes religious
institutions religious. Furthermore, it is this association that imbues religious
institutions and their leaders with an aura of authority that helps them to
legitimate and prescribe the rules of the social, moral and political order
among their followers. Against Eliade’s view, however, it also seems to
me to be more useful to seek the source of this experience in human genetic
predispositions and not in an ineffable, empirically unverifiable encounter
with a supernatural ‘sacred’ identified as a god, a spirit, or some absolute
reality. Several recent books by prominent geneticists, most notably Dean
Hamer and Marc Hauser, point in precisely this biological direction.
The problem with Eliade’s approach to the study of world religions and of
religion as a general category was not just its affinity to the practical needs of
the American empire in the second half of the twentieth century. Another
difficulty was that Eliade was never able to fully divorce his history of reli-
gions methodology from the theistic and ultimately Christian biases that
were built into his and Otto’s intellectual visions. In practice, the writings
and teaching of many historians of religion in American universities have
tended to offer too much religion, often surreptitiously Judeo-Christian
religion, and too little history.
In India, both the political and religious problems of the history of reli-
gions approach were illustrated, making allowances for obvious differences,
during the recent period of national rule in India by the Hindu nationalist
BJP political party. Although Indian universities, unlike American ones,
have no tradition of religion departments, efforts were made under the BJP
to promote the creation of centres for Vedic ritual and astrological studies
within Indian universities. Studies of such topics can, of course, be under-
taken for strictly academic purposes, but in this case the main purposes seem
to have been religious and political, namely the promotion of Hindu nation-
alism, and not academic. Certainly religion should be more and better
28
HINDUS AND OTHERS
studied in Indian universities, but a strong case can be made that this study is
best left where it is: namely, dispersed among history, social science, literature
and philosophy departments.
Inventing Hinduism
In an essay entitled ‘Who invented Hinduism?’ (Lorenzen 2006), I attempted
to trace back the history of the terms ‘Hindu’, ‘Hindu religion’, and
‘Hinduism’ and their near equivalents in a variety of earlier texts written by
both Indians and Europeans (and also the Central Asian scholar al-Biruni).
The main motive for writing the essay was to contradict the view of several
recent scholars who had claimed that Hinduism was in some sense first
invented, imagined, constructed or fabricated by European scholars, princi-
pally those associated with the academic current known as orientalism.
As far as the specific English word ‘Hinduism’ is concerned, the earliest
published uses of the term that I had found were written by the early
nineteenth-century Hindu reformer, Ram Mohan Roy (see Killingley 1993:
62–63). The Australian scholar, Geoffrey Oddie (2006: 68–72), has since
noted that ‘Hinduism’ was earlier used by the evangelical writer, Charles
Grant, in a text said to have been written in 1792 that was first published in
1797, as well as in some still earlier private letters by Grant. Although this
fact overrules my suggestion that Roy might have been the first to coin the
term ‘Hinduism’, I had also argued that the terms ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Hindu
religion’ were basically synonyms and that ‘Hindu religion’ was used much
earlier than ‘Hinduism’. It is worth noting, for example, that the essay
by Charles Grant that Oddie cites as the earliest published text to use the
word ‘Hinduism’ also uses the term ‘Hindu religion’ and uses it much more
frequently and in exactly the same sense.
When it comes to early sources written in Indian languages (and also
Persian and Arabic), the word ‘Hindu’ is used in a clearly religious sense in a
great number of texts at least as early as the sixteenth century. The earliest
important references seem to be the discussion of Indian religion by al-Biruni
in the early eleventh century, and a text by the Vaishnava author Vidyapati
written about 1400 (al-Biruni 1964; Simha 1988: 269–70). Although al-
Biruni’s original Arabic text only uses a term equivalent to ‘the religion of the
people of India’, his description of Hindu religion is in fact remarkably simi-
lar to those of nineteenth-century European orientalists. For his part,
Vidyapati, in his Apabhransha text Kirtilata, makes use of the phrase ‘Hindu
and Turk dharmas’ in a clearly religious sense and highlights the local conflicts
between the two communities. In the early sixteenth-century texts attributed
to Kabir, the references to ‘Hindus’ and to ‘Turks’ or ‘Muslims’ (musalamans)
in a clearly religious context are numerous and unambiguous. The somewhat
earlier Hindustani texts attributed to Gorakhnath also contain several
unambiguous references to Hindus and Muslims in a religious context.
29
Not only these various texts but also still earlier Sanskrit and Tamil texts
such as the Puranas, Vedantic and Mimamsa commentaries, songs of the
Nayanars and Alvars, and particularly the twelfth- or thirteenth-century
Sarva-darsana-samgraha all show clear evidence that their authors recog-
nized a close affinity and collective identity among all the religious currents
that symbolically recognized the authority of the Vedas (Lorenzen 2010;
Madhava 1964), an affinity and identity that is virtually indistinguishable
from Hindu religion even if the religion was not then given a specific name
beyond rather vague terms like ‘sanatan dharma’. Furthermore, these texts
also make it clear that this Veda based religious tradition and religious iden-
tity did not include Jainism, Buddhism, and materialism. Even less did it
include the rarely mentioned mleccha religions, Islam and Christianity.
All this is not meant to imply that Hindu religion has some unchanging
essence beyond history, nor that the colonial experience did not provoke
major changes in the ways Hindus organized their own religious beliefs and
practices. Attacks on Hindu beliefs and practises by Europeans, particularly
by Christian missionaries, certainly did foster responses by Hindu religi-
ous intellectuals that led to important changes in Hindu religion. Vasudha
Dalmia’s book, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions (1997), contains an
exceptionally clear exposition of some of the ways in which the Christian
challenge modified Hindu religion. Similarly, since Indian Independence in
1947, the combined influence of modern media, particularly television, and
modern electoral politics have helped create what Romila Thapar (1985) has
called a new ‘syndicated moksha’, a standardized and homogenized sort of
Hindu religion that did not exist earlier.
Scholarly studies such as those by Dalmia and Thapar expand our under-
standing of the evolution of Hindu religion in important ways. When, how-
ever, scholars extrapolate from the existence of such changes and claim
that Hindu religion as a unified conceptual identity did not exist prior to
the British conquest of the sub-continent and that it was principally the
British orientalists who invented or constructed a unified Hindu religion, this
seems to me to be at best a highly misleading exaggeration, a wilful denial
of historical continuities that are an evident part of the historical record.
Outsiders like the colonial British may have been able to force or otherwise
convince some people to change their religion and adopt the religion of the
outsiders, in other words to become religious converts to Christianity, but
the idea that colonial outsiders can somehow invent, construct or otherwise
create a new religion, Hinduism, held not by themselves but only by those
with whom they have come into contact, is clearly an unlikely hypothesis.
If we can accept that a single Hindu religion is not simply an artificial
concept invented by European orientalists, we can move on to discuss how
Hindu religion differs from other world religions. As long as one discards the
idea that one or more major religions are better than others, some of the
classification schemes of early world religion scholars do indicate important
30
HINDUS AND OTHERS
ways in which religions differ. For instance, the dominant ideas of Hindu
religion about history, salvation and God sharply contrast with the domin-
ant ideas about these topics found in the so-called Abrahamic religions
(Judaism, Islam, and Christianity). Each world religion also has different
systems of internal organization, with Christianity having the most corpor-
ate structure and Hinduism probably the most fragmented. Similarly, all
Abrahamic religions demand much more doctrinal unity than is usually
demanded in Hindu religion (individual Hindu sects are often exceptions).
In my opinion, however, none of this justifies an attempt to argue that
Hindu religion is not a religion by claiming that it is rather a set of hetero-
geneous sects, rituals and creeds or that it is rather a general ‘way of life’
or cultural ethos. To a large extent, any world religion, not just the Hindu
religion, can be said to comprise a set of sects, rituals and creeds and a way
of life. The differences are those of emphasis, not of basic category.
Gorakh, Kabir and Guru Arjan

A more fruitful way of looking at religious differences in India is, I think, in
terms of personal and corporate identities. A person’s overall identity is, of
course, made up of a whole set of interlocking identities. A person can be
simultaneously a father, brother, son, husband, merchant, stamp collector,
gourmet, amateur musician, Hindu, Vaishnava, Ramanandi, Congress sup-
porter, homeowner etc. What is interesting in the present context is how
personal religious identities have been articulated in the writings of import-
ant religious intellectuals in India who lived in different historical periods.
Here I will limit the discussion to the manner in which three intellectuals of
precolonial India – or at least the early songs and verses attributed to them –
negotiate religious identities that are at least partly independent of both
Hindu religion and Islam but nonetheless recognize the existence of these two
religions as separate cultural entities. These three intellectuals are Kabir (died
1518), the charismatic nirguni poet of Benares; the Sikh guru Arjan (died
1606); and the Nath Yogi Gorakh or Gorakhnath, who probably lived in
about the eleventh or twelfth centuries.
One popular early song attributed to Kabir – a song found in all the early
collections of his compositions except the Adi Granth – says the following:1
These differences are full of confusions:

Vedas and Muslim books, religion and the world,
Who is male, who female?
Semen is one, piss and shit are one,
skin one, flesh one.
All arose from one light.
Who then is a Brahmin? Who a Shudra?
31
This body sprang from clay, spontaneously.

In it sound and semen joined together.
When it dies, what name will you bear?
You study and cogitate, but never learn the secret.
Brahma is red creation, Shiva black destruction.
And Hari is filled with white virtue.
Kabir says: Worship the one Ram.
Nobody is Hindu, nobody Turk.
(Kabir-bijak, pad, 75, in Callewaert and
Op de Beeck (eds) 1991, vol. 1: 365)
What makes this song particularly interesting is the final phrase, ‘Nobody is
Hindu, nobody Turk’ (hindu turka na koi). This phrase is remarkably similar,
in wording and sense, to the one that Guru Nanak (1469–1539) is said to
have uttered when he emerged from the river after his trance of enlighten-
ment, namely ‘Nobody is Hindu, nobody Muslim’ (na koi hindu hai na koi
musalaman). This statement, well known to all Sikhs, is found first not
among Nanak’s compositions in the Adi Granth, but rather in an early
legendary account of his life, the B40 janam-sakhi (see McLeod 1980a: 255;
1980b: 21).
A similar phrase does occur in the Adi Granth, however, in a song of the
fifth Sikh guru, Guru Arjan (1563–1606). In this song Arjan says: ‘We are [or
I am] neither Hindu nor Muslim’ (na ham hindu na musalaman). What is
particularly interesting about this song is that Guru Arjan gives it Kabir’s
signature (kahu Kabir). As Pashaura Singh has pointed out (2003: 16–17,
101–9), Guru Arjan several times quotes Kabir or uses his signature. Arjan
does this either to show that the theme of his song or verse is associated with
Kabir or to directly cite one or more verses from one of Kabir’s composi-
tions. Guru Arjan sometimes uses the occasion to suggest some criticism or
modification of Kabir’s point of view.
In the present case, the first three verses of Arjan’s song and the refrain
appear to be a direct quote from an early song of Kabir that is found only in
the Kabir-granthavali and in Gopaldas’s Sarvangi among the early collec-
tions.2 The last two verses are apparently written by Guru Arjan himself,
although the first of these two verses includes the na ham hindu na musala-
man phrase that, as we have seen, is probably an allusion to Kabir’s phrase
hindu turka na koi. Paradoxically, Arjan’s final verse that begins ‘Kabir says’
(kahu kabir) is evidently the verse that most clearly represents Guru Arjan’s
own words. Here is Guru Arjan’s song:3
I don’t keep [Hindu] vows, nor [fast] in Ramadan.

I serve Him who protects me when life is done.
For me the [Hindu] Lord and Allah are one.
I have separated from both the Hindu and the Turk.
32
HINDUS AND OTHERS
I don’t go on Hajj to the Kaaba nor offer puja at [Hindu] holy sites.
I serve the One [God] and no other.
I don’t do puja and don’t offer namaz.
I welcome in my heart the one Formless God (niramkar).
I am neither Hindu nor Musalman.
Body and breath belong to Allah-Ram.
Kabir says: I made this declaration.
Meeting with pir and guru, I recognized the potential in myself.
(Adi Granth, bhairau 3, in Callewaert (ed.) 1996: 1136)
The final verse in Kabir’s original song (Kabir-granthavali, no. 338) – the only
verse of the song that Guru Arjan does not quote from Kabir – reads: ‘Kabir
says: All error has fled, my mind is attached to the one Niranjan’.
These texts of Kabir, Nanak and Arjan embody two overlapping senses.
First, the key phrases can be taken to claim that all external markers of
religious identity, all particular beliefs and practices, are essentially meaning-
less in the light of direct mystical consciousness. Second, these phrases can
be taken to indicate that Kabir, Nanak and Arjan all tended to reject a
personal religious identity as either Hindus or Muslims and were moving in
the direction of building an independent religious identity, separate from
both Muslim and Hindu traditions. The change in pronominal reference
from ‘no one is’ (na koi hai) in Kabir and Nanak, to ‘we are not’ (na ham hai)
in Arjan also suggests a shift in this direction that accords well with the
course of Sikh history.
The best available collection of the early Hindustani songs and verses
attributed to Gorakh is the Gorakh-bani, edited by Pitambar Datta Barthwal
in about 1942. These texts cannot be accurately dated, but they do seem to be
earlier than the songs and verses attributed to Kabir in several collections of
the sixteenth century. As noted, both Kabir and Gorakh repeatedly refer to
both Hindus and either Turks or Musalmans in contexts that show that they
are talking about religions, not ethnic groups. What is most interesting, how-
ever, is the way in which they situate their own religious beliefs and practices
in relation to those of both the Hindus and Muslims.
The most intriguing verse from Barthwal’s Gorakh-bani (1960) relating to
the issue of religious identity is sabadi 14:
By birth [I am] a Hindu, in mature age a Yogi and by intellect a

Muslim.
O kazis and mullahs, recognize the path accepted by Brahma,
Vishnu and Siva.
(sabadi 14, in Barthwal (ed.) 1960: 6)
What makes this passage significant is, first, the clear recognition of three
separate religious traditions: Hindu, Yogic, and Muslim. Other Gorakh bani
33
verses also support this division into three general categories of religious
identity. Most intriguing, however, is the clear intent of the author to simul-
taneously identify with all three traditions. He is born a Hindu, later also
becomes a Yogi, and intellectually adopts, in unfortunately unspecified fash-
ion, the stance of a Muslim. The second line of the text seems to negate
some of the implications of the first line since it implies a rejection of
Islam, but I take this to imply a rejection of Islam in terms of ritual prac-
tice and exclusiveness, not in terms of philosophical and metaphysical
speculations.
Another Gorakh-bani verse makes a somewhat different argument for
superseding religious boundaries, one that is similar to a view that is often
argued by Kabir. Here is Gorakh’s verse:
A true Dervish is one who knows [how to find the divine] gate,
Who inverts the five breaths,
Who stays conscious day and night.
That Dervish truly belongs to the caste of Allah.
(sabadi 182, in Barthwal (ed.) 1960: 61)
Here Gorakh implicitly juxtaposes the ordinary dervish who knows nothing
of Yogic meditation and breath control with the dervish who does practice
Yoga. The latter Dervish is the one who truly belongs to the caste of Allah
(alah ki jati). In other words, Gorakh here claims that one can remain a
Muslim and nonetheless reach enlightenment.
In one of Kabir’s songs in the Kabir-bijak (ramaini 49), Kabir makes a
direct comment on this same verse by Gorakh and argues, against Gorakh,
that it is not through Yoga, but through moral conduct and inner meditation
that Muslims, Yogis, Hindus, and Sants can all attain the enlightenment
of spontaneous mystical consciousness. In particular, Kabir attacks the
Muslims for their practice of killing buffaloes, goats, chickens and cows:4
Tell me, Dervish, [how to find the divine] gate.

What does the Badshah [= Allah] wear?
Where does His army assemble?
Where does it camp?
I’m asking you, Muslim.
What colour are His robes?
Red, yellow, or multicoloured?
To what divine presence (surati)
do you offer homage?
Kazi, what are you doing?
In every house you have buffaloes killed.
Who ordered you to kill goats and chickens?
Who told you to wield a knife?
34
HINDUS AND OTHERS
You know no pity, but are called a Pir.

Reciting verse, you lead the world astray.
Kabir says: You declare yourself a Sayyid,
And persuade everyone to be like you.
They fast all day. At night they kill cows.
Blood from one, a greeting for the other.
How can this please God?
(in Callewaert and Op de Beeck (eds) 1991, vol. 1: 381)
Several other verses in the Gorakh-bani suggest a rather sharp rejection of

both Muslim and Hindu traditions, at least in terms of ritual practice, and
the affirmation of a superior and separate Yoga tradition. Here is the most
striking of these Gorakh bani verses:
The Hindu meditates in the temple, the Muslim in the mosque.

The Yogi meditates on the supreme goal, where there is neither
temple or mosque.
(sabadi 68–69, in Barthwal (ed.) 1960: 25)
The following two verses, similar to many verses by Kabir, reject Hindu
and Islamic traditions in terms of the uselessness of both the Vedas and
the Koran:
Neither the Vedas nor the [Muslim] books, neither the khani-s nor
the bani-s. All these appear as a cover [of the truth].5
The [true] word is manifested in the mountain peak in the sky
[= Brahma-randhra]. There one perceives knowledge of the Ineffable.
Neither in the Vedas nor the Shastras, neither in the [Muslim]
books nor the Koran, [the goal] is not read about in books.
Only the exceptional Yogi knows that goal. All others are
absorbed in their daily tasks.
(sabadi 4 and 6, in Barthwal (ed.) 1960: 2–3)
In these verses the religion associated with Hatha Yoga, the religion of the
Nath Yogis, is clearly preferred to the religions associated with the Vedas and
the Koran, namely the Hindu religion and Islam. As in the verses of Kabir
and Arjan we have already discussed, there is a clear attempt to move in an
independent direction, to establish a religious tradition partly separate from
the two dominant traditions. Although all three of these poets clearly recog-
nized the religious boundaries and identities of the Hindus and Muslims,
each attempted to negotiate a separate religious identity for themselves,
and presumably their followers, by either rejecting both Hindu and Muslim
identities or by seeking some sort of composite identity. In colonial times,
the Sikhs eventually successfully negotiated an independent religious identity
35
while the Naths and Kabir Panthis assumed identities as members of some-
what unorthodox Hindu sects.
Conclusion
This chapter has ranged widely: from a discussion of the influence of Mircea
Eliade on the way world religions are studied in modern universities; to an
examination of how Hindu religion has been defined by Europeans and
Indians over the past six hundred years or more; to a look at the ways in
which Gorakh, Kabir and Guru Arjan regarded their own religious iden-
tities. These different topics are connected mainly through the fact that they
depend on ideas about what religions have in common and how they are best
studied in an academic context. The topics are also part of a tacit dialogue
with two scholars who participated in the discussions of the conference
Rethinking Religion in India I, in January 2008, in New Delhi: Professors
S.N. Balagangadhara and Timothy Fitzgerald.
One of Balagangadhara’s main theses, argued at length in his book ‘The
Heathen in His Blindness . . .’ Asia, the West and the dynamic of religion
(1994), is that Hindu religion is not really a religion at all in the sense that the
Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) are religions. At the
risk of oversimplifying his complex argument, I think that he generally sup-
ports the idea that Hindu ‘religion’ is more a culture or ‘way of life’ than a
religion and has too loose an organizational and doctrinal structure to be
classed as a single religion in the way that the Abrahamic religions are single
religions. As should be clear, I do not share all of Balagangadhara’s views on
this issue. In large part the disagreement has to do with our mutual ideas
about what constitutes a religion and what does not, as viewed from the points
of view of outside observers, on the one hand, and of inside participants, on
the other. Without going into a long discussion about definitions, it is worth
noting that Balagangadhara employs a narrower idea about what constitutes
a religion, or that, expressed differently, his idea of religion is more precise.
Roughly speaking, I regard almost any set of normative ideas about how
society should be organized and how its members should behave as a religion
so long as the internal variations in these rules bear at least a reasonable
family resemblance and so long as the source of authority for these norma-
tive ideas is considered to be supernatural or at least beyond reason. I have
also noted that it seems probable that the propensity of human communities
to accept such suprarational normative ideas is directly related to the pro-
pensity of human individuals to experience a particular sort of suprarational
consciousness. The value of such sets of normative ideas and the related
suprarational consciousness for human survival is, it seems to me, quite
sufficient to explain why religions exist without recourse to supernatural
explanations, although most members of religious communities will continue
to believe that a supernatural source does in fact underlie both the ideas
36
HINDUS AND OTHERS
and the consciousness. From this perspective, both Hindu religion and the
Abrahamic religions clearly belong to the same general category. In this view,
all the religions commonly classed as world religions do have enough in
common, enough of a family resemblance, to be classed together in one
general category. In these very general terms they are all religions.
Furthermore, once these religions are adopted into a given culture and
society, the place of origin of any given religion soon becomes largely irrele-
vant. When religions extend into new regions, the moral and cultural norms
that they sponsor are soon modified so that they better harmonize with the
dominant culture of the new regions. Some religions are undoubtedly more
‘national’ than others in the sense that they remain more closely associated
with a specific territory and nation. National religions in this sense include
Hindu religion, Shinto, Taoism, the Sikh Panth, Jainism, and, to some
extent, Judaism. Other religions have extended far from the regions in which
they originated to other territories and nations by migration and/or con-
version. Such more international religions include Christianity, Islam, and
Buddhism. Nonetheless Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists in India are cul-
turally and religiously different from the Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists
of other regions, while, especially in recent years, Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, and
Jews have spread out to many regions and have modified their religious
beliefs and practices in the process. Now more than ever, the distinction
between national and non-national religions is problematic at best.
The sense of religious identity held by the Hindus themselves is, of course,
also important. What I have argued is that Hindus did in fact share a
religious identity as Hindus at least as far back as 1400 and probably much
earlier as well. On the other hand, it is also clear that outside observers, both
Hindus and non-Hindus, may justifiably regard the members of certain het-
erodox religious groups to be Hindus although these persons themselves
may not regard themselves to be Hindus, or at least not exclusively Hindus.
The examples cited were Gorakh, Kabir and Guru Arjan. Gorakh is particu-
larly interesting since he in one passage directly suggests the possibility of
simultaneously negotiating multiple religious identities: as a Hindu, as a
Muslim, and as a Yogi. Kabir and Guru Arjan, for their part, both seem to
be moving toward a religious identity that transcends and differs from both
Hindu religion and Islam.
Another disagreement is with an argument put forward by Timothy
Fitzgerald about the relation between the secular and the religious. In his
essay entitled ‘Encompassing religion, privatized religions and the invention
of modern politics’, and also in his book, Discourse on Civility and Barbarity,
Fitzgerald has shown in detail how the concepts of the secular and the
religious are historically quite problematic (Fitzgerald 2007a and 2007b).
He notes that secular institutions have traditionally carried out a great
variety of functions that we normally think of as religious. Similarly, religious
institutions have carried out an equally great variety of functions that we
37
normally think of as secular. Essentially, Fitzgerald argues that we should

abandon the distinction between the secular and the religious altogether.
Although, as I have noted, my own ideas about what constitutes a religion
stress its social functions and downplay the supernatural element, none-
theless I think that Fitzgerald goes too far in the direction of denying any
meaningful difference between religious and secular institutions.
What is needed, as is often the case, is an approach that avoids extremes.
Religious world views and religious institutions need not be regarded either
as radically different from secular world views and secular institutions or
as simply minor variants of each other. Religious and secular institutions
serve complementary social ends but are different and are supported by
different rationales. Religions are grounded in a certain type of mental
experience or emotion that somehow gives authority to cultural and moral
norms without the necessity of strict rational analysis. The extent of reliance
on such mental experiences may vary among different religions, and religions
can of course also differ in many other ways: the nature of their metaphysics,
the content of their moral and social codes, their exclusivity or tolerance
toward other religions, and the character of their rituals. Nonetheless, when
all is said and done the churches, mosques and temples of different major
religions and their approaches to philosophical, moral and social questions
have much in common and are quite distinguishable from palaces and
parliaments and their approaches to these same questions.
Notes
1 See also Kabir-granthavali, pad 57 and Kabir 2000: no. 77.
2 This song is Callewaert’s no. 423 (Kabir 2000). The number in the Sabha edition of
the Kabir-granthavali is 338 (Kabir 1968: 347). See Pashaura Singh’s (2003: 31–33)
important discussion of Arjan’s song and its relation to this song by Kabir. The fact
that Kabir’s song is only found in the Kabir-granthavali and Gopaldas’s Sarvangi
suggests that it could conceivably have been composed by a follower of Kabir
sometime after Guru Arjan. Against this idea, Arjan does directly quote other texts
by Kabir elsewhere in the Adi Granth.
3 My interpretation of the last verse differs slightly from that offered by Pashaura
Singh (2003: 32). The song may also allude indirectly to at least one other Kabir
song. This other song appears in most early Kabir collections including the Adi
Granth (1996: 1349), the Kabir-granthavali (pad 259) and the Kabir-bijak (pad 97).
The song is no. 280 in Callewaert’s collection (Kabir 2000).
4 See also the fine translation of Hess and Singh (Kabir 1983: 87–88).
5 These two terms reappear in Gorakh-bani pad 16.5. Barthwal has an explanatory
note, but it is not clear on what his explanation is based.
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—— (2007b) ‘Encompassing religion, privatized religions and the invention of mod-
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40
2
HINDU RELIGIOUS IDENTITY
WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO
THE ORIGIN AND
SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TERM
‘HINDUISM’, c. 1787–1947
Geoffrey A. Oddie
The purpose of this chapter is (a) to discuss the gradual emergence and
spread of a Hindu sense of an all-India religious identity and (b) to explore
the origin and significance of the term ‘Hinduism’, including the part it
played in further developing this type of awareness. While the term was
important for Europeans (who appear to have coined the word in the first
place) it was readily adopted, especially by western-educated Hindus. It not
only became a reference point and focus of feeling and debate, but was used
as a method of mobilization and self-defence in the struggle against mission-
aries and colonizers especially during the later stages of British rule. In
conclusion, the chapter discusses how these findings relate to ongoing
debates centred on ideas and definitions of ‘Hinduism’.
Diversity and conflict in pre-modern India

In early India there was no sense of national or political unity extending
throughout the whole of the sub-continent. Fragmented and under the
control of competing groups, it was divided into different kingdoms, repub-
lics and remote forest regions; so much so that even the famous King Ashoka
(BCE 268–231), noted for his conquests and unifying policies, failed to
extend his power beyond southern Karnataka (Thapar 2003: 184). Com-
munication was extremely difficult and, if there was a sense of the world
outside the village, it was often an awareness of other villages nearby, or a
sense of a wider region or ‘country’ within the larger geographic unit. The
basic units of power and administration remained the village, caste, clan and
other local organizations. Sanskrit was known among brahmans in south
41
GEOFFREY A. ODDIE
India as well as in the north, and became the basis of modern north Indian
languages. But apart from Sanskrit (the language of the elite) there was a
multiplicity of languages which divided ordinary people and which made
communication across the different regions extremely difficult. Alongside
this diversity is evidence of the ‘diverse and multiple religions’ which Romila
Thapar discusses in her detailed study of early India (Thapar 2003: 3).
Originally the term ‘Hindu’ had no specific religious meaning (see
especially von Stietencron 1989 [1991]: 11–12). Coined by outsiders (the
Persians and Greeks) it simply meant ‘Indian’ and, at that time in India’s
history, did not necessarily imply some form of religious cohesion or an
India-wide sense of religious identity among the people in general. Indeed,
Nainar Jagadeesan, von Stietencron and Sanjay Subrahmanyam all highlight
the extent of religious diversity, conflict and fragmentation that prevailed
among India’s people in different parts of the subcontinent prior to the
coming of Islam in the ninth century AD (Jagadeesan 1997: 230–39;
Subrahmanyam 1996: 44–80; von Stietencron 1995: 51–81). Especially well
documented is the intensity of the Vaishnavite–Saivite conflict in south
India, which, it has been argued, is best thought of as between two mutually
exclusive and distinctive ‘religions’. The lack of unity and extent of division
among the people (Hindus/Indians) has also been highlighted by André
Wink who has shown that, when Muslims first arrived in the north-west,
different Muslim factions coalesced with different groups in the local popula-
tion (Wink 1990: 196–201). This meant that rivalry was between class
or special-interest groups rather than between clearly defined religious
communities comprising the incoming invaders on the one hand and the
local people on the other.
Some underlying and influential ideas and practice

However, just as evidence of conflict between Jews and Christians does not
rule out the possibility that they shared something in common, so evidence
of religious conflict among the Hindus during this period does not rule out
the possibility that, despite these conflicts, many of them were gradually
developing assumptions, ideas and practices in common.
One of those aspects of life which Hindus, living in the more settled areas,
began to share with others across the different linguistic and geographical
regions was the caste system. Those placed within the system (even including
some who suffered a great deal from it) appear to have believed in the
importance of ideas of pollution and purity, religiously based aspects of
caste which helped determine the nature of social relationships and also
social status throughout the sub-continent.1 Another development tending to
unify Hindus religiously across geographical, political and religious divisions
was the widespread practice of going on pilgrimage – especially to the more
distant sacred sites (Bhardwaj 1987: 353–54). One of the consequences of
42
this practice was the establishment of a highly organized network of pilgrim

centres including places for accommodation and banking systems which
operated throughout the entire sub-continent. Lastly, there was the role and
presence of brahmans in many though not all parts of the sub-continent.
Certainly there were many people who never had anything to do with brah-
mans, or who were fiercely anti-brahman, but the brahmans themselves
tended to think in all-India terms and to imply that their system was an all-
encompassing structure embracing all others across the different parts of
India. Indeed, it was this brahmanical view and sense of ownership of
India’s ‘religion’ which proved to be extremely influential among Europeans
from the seventeenth century onwards.
Changes during late Mughal rule

The feeling among some Hindus that they shared with others in a common
socio-religious system, was reinforced by their experience of foreign rule,
especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Indeed, more research
suggests that, after the initial stages of Islamic conquest and settlement in
different parts of India, the native peoples very gradually became conscious
that there were general differences between themselves as ‘insiders’ or residents
of India, and the foreigners. This process was accelerated by the introduction
of what Cantwell Smith has described as the more formal, rigid, and
structured form of Islam, culminating in the policies of Aurangzeb in the
seventeenth century (Smith 1981: 177–96). Indeed, even before the introduc-
tion of these measures that heightened Hindu awareness and helped to
undermine the status and position of Hindus within Mughal administration,
there is some evidence that indigenous commentators and writers were
beginning to think of themselves as ‘Hindus’. While in some cases use of
the term ‘Hindu’ reflects little more than an awareness of general social and
material differences between the insiders and outsiders, there was also a
growing sense of religious difference separating Hindus as a whole from the
Muslims among them. David Lorenzen has, for example, referred to texts
composed by the popular religious poet-singers of north India which high-
light their sense of Hindu religious identity as opposed to the presence and
activity of the Muslim ‘Other’ (Lorenzen 2005: 70–73). Furthermore, in his
research on the situation in western India during the period of Shivaji’s
encounter with Mughal rulers, Gokhale notes the cumulative effect of
Mughal policy on Hindu religious life and practice in Maharashtra (Gokhale
1984: 146–73). This includes the effect these policies had on Marathi com-
mentators who reflected increasingly their own sense of religious identity
and difference that separated them from Muslim opponents. Alongside
this research and these developments, which are documented especially
in Gokhale’s study of the Hindu responses to the Muslim presence in
Maharashtra, are comments by ‘insiders’ such as Kabir (1400–1518) and
43
GEOFFREY A. ODDIE
Guru Arjun (1563–1606) who used the terms ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ in a
religious sense but who denied that they belonged to either camp (Oddie
2003: 161).
This material suggests that, even before the period of British rule, some
Indians (possibly a higher proportion of those in northern and western India
than in the south) were beginning to develop their own sense of having a dis-
tinctive Hindu or home-grown religious identity. This appears to have included
the notion that as residents of India, or of their own particular region, Hindus
performed rituals, and had forms of worship and ways of contacting the sacred
which were different from those of Muslims and from people who had
migrated from outside of the sub-continent. However, a key question,
unanswered by commentators on the Mughal period, remains. This is the ques-
tion as to how far, or to what extent, a sense of a distinctive Hindu religious
identity was spreading among ordinary people, or even among the higher
castes and classes in the population. Indeed, one of our central arguments is
that the effect of different political and other developments was cumulative
and that the Hindus’ sense of religious identity spread further only gradually,
even during the period of British rule when Hindu religious customs and
practices appeared once again to be threatened through outside intervention.
The advent of Europeans and origin of the term ‘Hinduism’

European expansion overseas, beginning with Portuguese explorations in the
fifteenth century, and leading to an increased contact with non-European
peoples in the Indian ocean and elsewhere, was a crucial factor in the devel-
opment of European ideas of ‘paganism’ or ‘heathenism’ (see especially
Oddie 2006: 14–15, 39–66). In fact, the naming of ‘Hinduism’ was the end
point in a long process of European reflection and attempts to make sense of
new knowledge and expanding horizons.
The traditional European view which persisted in certain quarters into
the nineteenth century was that there were basically four religions, namely
Judaism, Christianity, Islam and paganism or idolatry. However, as Europeans
gained a greater knowledge of the new world and extended their power and
influence, especially eastwards, the idea of paganism was less and less satis-
factory. This is because there seemed to be differences between paganism or
idolatry in, for example, India and Africa, or India and China or India and
the South Sea Islands. Thus, there was an increasing need to differentiate
between the different types of paganism. Ultimately, for early travellers, offi-
cials and missionaries who were attempting to describe religion in India, it
was not good enough to use unqualified general terms such as paganism or
heathenism, but to qualify this usage with something more specific such
as ‘Indian paganism’, ‘Hindu idolatry’, ‘the Hindu religion’ or ‘the Hindu
system’; and from the notion of an Indian or Hindu religion or system it was
but a small step to the idea of ‘Hinduism’.
44
The evidence so far uncovered shows that Europeans (or rather Britons)
used the word ‘Hindooism’ at least twenty-nine years before Rammohan
Roy, the first well known modern Indian reformer to use the term in 1816
(Oddie 2003: 156–57; 2006: 70–72, 170–71). Charles Grant, an Evangelical,
and subsequently a director of the East India Company, employed the term
in a letter written from Calcutta to a friend in England in 1787. He also used
it a number of times in his well-known Observations written in 1792. Grant,
who can hardly be described as an orientalist scholar working to uncover
India’s ancient past, was not only a convert to evangelical Christianity,
but was closely allied with missionaries, including the Baptist missionaries
who settled at Serampore in 1793. Some years after Grant used the term
‘Hindooism’ in both his private and official capacity as a Company
employee, William Ward of the Baptist mission employed it in his diary in
1801. Joshua Marshman, another member of the Serampore mission also
used it (as an alternative to ‘the Hindoo system’) in his diary in August 1802
(Marshman 1802: 344). Indeed, evidence that Rammohan Roy met Yates
(another Serampore missionary) in 1815 and visited the Baptist mission
station in the following year (Potts 1967: 230), leaves open the intriguing
possibility that Rammohan Roy himself borrowed the term ‘Hindooism’
from the Baptists.2
Significance of the term

But is this discussion about terminology ‘much ado about nothing’? How
important was it to the British and other outsiders, and especially for our
understanding of how Hindu religious identity continued to develop during
the period of British rule? What part, if any, did use of the term play in
raising awareness and in strengthening the Hindus’ sense of having an all-
India and sense of religious identity?
Firstly, the coining of the term was a clear acknowledgement that Indian
religion could be compared with the other four religions of the world.
According to Europeans, ‘Hinduism’ was part of the same genus and could
be classed with Christianity and other religions. The criteria that applied
to Christianity as a religion could also be applied to ‘Hinduism’, as well as to
Islam and Judaism. And just as one could define Christianity by its charac-
teristics, so too one could define ‘Hinduism’ in the same way. India’s religion
was therefore acknowledged, even by foreigners, as one of the units in a
comparative and global religious approach.
Imbedded in the notion that Indian religion or ‘Hinduism’ was one among
a number of world systems, was the idea that it shared with them certain
common characteristics. It was, first and foremost, an objective ‘system’
which like all religious systems was an echo of the Christian model. All
religions, including ‘Hinduism’, had boundaries which separated them from
other rival systems; and marking the boundaries between Hinduism and
45
GEOFFREY A. ODDIE
other religions eventually became one of the functions of the census com-
missioners at a later date. Religions were unified systems internally coherent
with parts that depended on each other; so, for example, ‘Hinduism’ was like
the workings of a clock – and a missionary, like Alexander Duff, could argue
that if you undermined or destroyed one part of the system the whole mech-
anism would cease to function.3 In all religions, according to this view, there
were elites (usually priests) who controlled everything from the top down.
There were sacred texts or writings (which priests or indigenous scholars
could interpret), and there was a belief system or ‘creed’, including some-
thing like an essence or hard core of belief (in the case of ‘Hinduism’ usually
‘pantheism’) that was its chief characteristic. But also, according to
Europeans, religions had their particular institutions and were also respon-
sible for the tone and kind of values permeating society.
One of the issues here is how revolutionary was this idea in India and what
difference did it make? There is a strong possibility that the European con-
struct of ‘Hinduism’ as described above incorporated some traditional
Indian elements associated with a religious system.4 There can be little
doubt, for example, that brahmans, who so often acted as pundits or
consultants for Europeans, approved of the European tendency to equate
‘Hinduism’ with what was called ‘Brahmanism’ – an elitist view of what was
supposed to be an India-wide system, and which stressed the importance of
priests and their role in the caste system and in the production and interpret-
ation of sacred texts.
But while the European idea of ‘Hinduism’ incorporated long held brah-
manical views of the overall system, it also introduced less familiar features
drawn from Christian experience and history. This was the emphasis on
creedal belief. Europeans in the census and other writings often used the
term ‘creed’ as a substitute for ‘religion’ and Indians themselves began to
describe ‘Hinduism’ in the same way. Hence the Bengali reformer
Debendranath Tagore published in his paper a ‘confession of faith’ and Lala
Lajpat Rai (1865–1928) who founded a new branch of the Hindu reform
association known as the Arya Samaj, included in his account of the move-
ment the ‘Ten principles to which every Arya is required to subscribe’ (Rai
1967: 79–80). ‘This’, he assured his readers, ‘is the simplest of creeds, to
which no Hindu, at any rate should have any difficulty in subscribing’ (Rai
1967: 80). Gandhi and other Hindus also used the term ‘creed’ in their
speeches and writing.
Furthermore the European emphasis on ‘a creed’ as one of the central
components of ‘religion’, began to influence indigenous terminology so that
by the end of the century, a term like ‘dharma’ had come to have almost the
same meaning as ‘religion’ or ‘religious creed’ (Young 1981: 34). How this
process came about (partly through missionary influence) has been discussed
elsewhere by Halbfass, myself and others (Halbfass 1988: Ch. 18; Oddie
2003: 163–64) and need not detain us here. It is perhaps sufficient to quote
46
the words of Bankimchandra Chatterji, the well-known author and patriot

who, writing at the end of the nineteenth century, declared that
[T]he word dharma has been used with different meanings. Several
of the meanings have no use for us. The meaning in which you now
used the word dharma, that is simply a modern translation of the
English word Religion. It is no indigenous thing.
(in Brekke 1999: 207; italics in original)
Apart from the influence the idea of ‘Hinduism’ had on indigenous concepts
associated with religion, there was the influence of the term in identity
formation, and as an instrument in the process of religious, political and
other forms of mobilization. Indeed ‘Hinduism’ was a label that could easily
be used as a tool or slogan by both Europeans and Indians in propaganda
and in efforts to gain support and influence others.
When out preaching and in their books and pamphlets missionaries used
the term for comparative purposes, comparing Christianity with ‘Hinduism’
to the detriment of the latter (see for example Mundy 1834). In Britain and
the USA the term was also a very effective instrument in propaganda –
missionary societies for much of the nineteenth century contrasting all that
was diabolical in ‘Hinduism’ with the purity of the Christian faith. A con-
stant stream of mission society material representing ‘Hinduism’ as some-
thing like a chamber of horrors, underlined the urgent need for social reform
and evangelism that would save the poor heathen from the consequences of a
truly horrific religious system (Oddie 2006: 226). Indeed, the perceived con-
trast between ‘Hinduism’ and Christianity was one of the factors which
encouraged young men and women to participate in missionary activity.
East India Company officials, who for the most part, thought of ‘Hinduism’
as ‘Brahmanism’, could bask in the idea that they were helping to forge a
grand India-wide unity symbolized by ‘Hinduism’ through the maintenance
of Hindu temples and ceremonial and by endorsing the efforts of scholars
dedicated to uncovering and explaining Hinduism’s ancient teachings. Fur-
thermore, administrators (most notably census commissioners) embraced the
idea of ‘Hinduism’ as a neat solution to the way in which they could record
and quantify India’s primary religion. This was at least the initial idea until
census takers discovered that the term had little if any meaning among
ordinary Hindus and was almost impossible to define.5 The ultimate solution
was to enumerate those belonging to other faiths first (e.g. Christians,
Muslims, Buddhist, Jains etc.) and then to describe ‘the residue’ as Hindus or
followers of ‘Hinduism’.
But the term ‘Hinduism’ also had its uses in different types of conflict
within Indian society. The brahmans had their own reasons for welcoming a
greater use of this type of terminology. They could argue that of course they
were the custodians of India’s entire religion, namely ‘Hinduism’, and that
47
GEOFFREY A. ODDIE
they knew what its texts and tenets were and what needed to be preserved in
the Hindu tradition. Indeed, the increasing use of the term, together with the
widespread assumption that ‘Hinduism’ was in fact ‘Brahmanism’, probably
strengthened the overall control of the brahman elite who were so often the
consultants employed in legal, socio-religious and even land revenue affairs.
Furthermore, there was the increasing ease with which Hindu religious
and political leaders used the term ‘Hinduism’ in their bid for power and
support and in the elimination of rivals. Rammohan Roy, who founded the
Brahmo Samaj in 1828, drew a distinction between the ‘real Hindooism’
(which he promoted through his reform movement) and the superstitious
practices that deformed ‘the Hindoo religion’ and that had nothing to do
with ‘the pure spirit of its dictates’ (Killingley: Ch. 4). Lala Lajpat Rai, one
of the leaders of the Arya Samaj founded in 1875, was equally emphatic in
claiming to represent the true form of ‘Hinduism’, while Gandhi, who is not
always thought of as a religious reformer, also developed his own special
definition of ‘Hinduism’ (see Jordens 1998: Chs 3–4). Indeed, it was his idea
of ‘Hinduism’ as ‘moral action’ which, as Jordens has argued, distinguished
him from many other Hindus involved in the nationalist movement. The
particular and crucial moments during which his adherence to his own
model of ‘Hinduism’ furthered division rather than unity among Hindus is a
topic for further investigation.
By way of contrast with these more divisive models was the notion of an
inclusive and all-India religious system which could be used to unite people
against foreign missionary and also colonial intervention. Hence one of the
pamphlets published by the Hindu Tract Society (an organization founded in
Madras in order to defend ‘Hinduism’ against Christian missionaries in
1887) placed a great deal of emphasis on the need for unity. The writer of
the Tamil tract no. 2, asked readers if the missionaries converted Moslems
to Christianity. Replying to his own question he remarked that:
The Moslems realize that the danger to the Moslem is a danger to all
of them and thus safeguard their religion. Is it not due to this realiz-
ation and unity among them that the Moslems are not converted
to Christianity . . . Hereafter Hindus should not fight among
themselves, calling themselves Thenkalais, Vadakalais, Saivites,
Vaishnavites, Advaitins, Visishtadvaitins and Dvaitins; they should
act as one man and oppose the Christian religion.
(Tamil Tract no. 2, July 1887)
As is well known Vivekananda also used the idea of ‘Hinduism’ in his

campaigns in ways which tended to unify Hindus from all traditions and
from all walks of life (Vivekananda 1958–63; see especially his address on
Hinduism at the World’s Parliament of Religions, vol. 1: 6–21). His central
message, emphasizing the universality of the Hindus’ spiritual yearning for
48
God, irrespective of social status or religious sophistication, not only

eliminated differences within ‘Hinduism’, but nurtured in Hindus a sense of
pride that Europeans, colonizers and even Christian missionaries could learn
from them.
All these and other appeals based on the idea of ‘Hinduism’ either helped
create, or reinforced, the Hindus’ sense of corporate religious identity. Some
years ago, after I had given a talk on inter-faith issues, I was approached by
an Indian student who said ‘I’m a Hindu, but tell me, what do I believe?’ In
his case (it seems to me) the student was trying to develop his sense of
identity – and for him it was to be found in a definition of ‘Hinduism’. In the
same way Gandhi had also developed his definition of ‘Hinduism’, his own
understanding of it, which he claimed to follow throughout his life. In other
words, one of the main reasons why the term ‘Hinduism’ was and has
become so important is because the different ideas and definitions associated
with it have provided Hindus with a starting point and framework of refer-
ence. This included the idea that Hindus, as distinct from the followers of
other religions, had their own distinctive religious contribution to make; it
also became a source of authority and empowerment, as well as providing
guidance in controversy and in other challenges of life.
Thus, while it can legitimately be argued that there is always a difference
between ‘names’ and ‘things’, this view of ‘Hinduism’, merely as a name (or
label) as distinct from the data, was hardly understood. For many Hindus,
the symbol rapidly became the thing itself – not a few developing a fierce
emotive attachment to what was (somewhat ironically) a European label.
Hence, as with some followers in other traditions, any refusal on the part of
individuals to affirm that something was or was not (in this case) ‘Hinduism’,
could be viewed as a form of betrayal or denial of identity. And whatever
else may have been involved in this emotive attachment to the name, the issue
of identity was almost certainly involved.6
Further development of the Hindu’s sense of religious identity

The emergence of a Hindu sense of religious identity even before the term
‘Hinduism’ was coined, has already been discussed in our comments on
India during the pre-colonial period. The further growth of this feeling,
reflected in the increasing Hindu use of the word ‘Hinduism’ during the
period of British rule, was encouraged by a number of factors which have
not as yet been sufficiently explored. One of these was an ongoing conflict,
especially with the Protestant missionaries, and another was fear of mission-
ary collusion with an all-powerful and intrusive colonial state (Oddie
2003: 166–77).
One factor fuelling the conflict with the missionaries was the sense of
resentment, humiliation and outrage engendered in Hindus as a result of
some of the more outspoken missionary attacks on Hindus and ‘Hinduism’;
49
GEOFFREY A. ODDIE
but more important than these verbal assaults in raising Hindu consciousness
was a real and growing fear of conversion, especially among the influential
higher-caste and western educated elites. It was this issue that did a great deal
to arouse concern, to create a sense of crisis, and to underline the need for
Hindus of different sects, cults and traditions to forget their differences and
join together in defence of what was seen increasingly as an overarching
dharma, or common religious and social heritage. As has become clearly
apparent in detailed studies, the conversion of high-caste individuals, usually
young men in mission schools, created enormous upheaval and ferment espe-
cially in the cities of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras in the 1830s and 1840s.
Adding to the fear and bitterness reflected in these events, was Government
legislation banning the practice of sati (widow burning), the proposal to
introduce the Bible as a text in government schools and especially legislation
allowing converts to Christianity to inherit their ancestral property – all these
and other measures increased the belief that the British authorities were
siding with missionaries and were merely awaiting the right moment to abol-
ish ‘dharma’, or the Hindu religion, and introduce Christianity in its place.
The British, recognizing that fear of conversion was a factor in the Indian
mutiny and civil rebellion, adopted a more sensitive and (from a Hindu’s
point of view) a more balanced approach to Hindu religious affairs up until
independence in 1947. Even so, questions about the protection of ‘Hinduism’
and Hindu interests resurfaced, especially in the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed
the establishment of the all-India Hindu Mahasabha (in opposition to the
‘secular’ and religiously inclusive Indian National Congress) in 1915 was
very largely the result of a feeling that the Hindu community was in danger
from at least two further and worrying developments.7 One of these was the
loss of numbers of ‘Hindus’ through conversions to Islam and Christianity –
a trend clearly apparent in the census. The other was the perceived failure of
British and Indian leaders involved in constitutional negotiations over
India’s future, to pay sufficient attention to the task of preserving Hindu
rights and interests, as distinct from the rights and interests of minority
communities, such as Muslims and Christians. While seeing a need for
certain constitutional guarantees, as well as social reforms within Hinduism,
the Sabha also lamented the ‘conversion’ of Hindu hill tribes to ‘other
faiths’, and appealed to Hindus:
[T]o take a lesson from the well-organized missionary efforts of

Christians and Mussalmans and to organize and strengthen Hindu
missions to check the tide of these conversions and to promote
religious, social and economic advancement of Hindus in those
places.
(Indian Annual Register, July–Dec. 1926: 354–55)
These and possibly other developments continued to play on Hindu fears of
50
losing whatever was sacred and special in their religious identity during
the period of British rule. The extent to which this awareness had actually
emerged among different classes of the population, even as late as 1921, is
still problematic.
In his introduction to the Madras Census of that year the Census
Commissioner remarked that:
The chief hindrance to the obtaining of accurate returns is the fact

that the terms used to classify the religions are unfamiliar to the
people of the country, and do not really suggest what is really meant
in common parlance by religion. The worst instances are the terms
‘Hindu’ and ‘Animist’. No Indian is familiar with the term Hindu
as applied to his religion. If asked what his religion is, he usually
replies with the name of the sect (e.g. Saivite), to which he belongs
. . . the term Hindu implies not only certain religious beliefs but
also a certain nationality and almost necessarily a certain social
organization.
(Census of India, 1921, vol. XIII, part 1, report 57)
While the Census Commissioner was clearly frustrated and exaggerating

when he claimed that ‘no Indian’ presumably in the Madras Presidency was
‘familiar with the term Hindu as applied to his religion’, his remarks do
indicate the problems census officials had among people generally. Those
with the most keenly developed awareness of being Hindu in a religious sense
were probably among the more educated (especially western educated)
classes. In south India, these included Theosophists, leaders of the Hindu
Tract Society, those associated with the Hindu newspaper and others. Like
Rammohan Roy, Lala Rajput Rai, Vivekananda and Gandhi, they often
used the term ‘Hindu’ in a religious sense, or ‘Hinduism’ when addressing
Europeans or making claims over against colonial and missionary outsiders.8
Conclusion
Continuity as well as change has been an important element in India’s
religious history. Even before the advent of British rule there is evidence that
Hindus were developing a stronger sense of their own religious identity,
partly as a result of the discrimination or even the persecution they suffered,
especially during the latter stages of Mughal rule. This feeling, involving a
sense of having their own religious ideas, customs and rituals (and eventually
reflected in the adoption of the term ‘Hinduism’) was further developed dur-
ing the period of British rule – as a result of conflict with Christian mission-
aries, continuing rivalry with Muslims, a decline in the proportion of ‘Hindus’
in the Indian population, colonial government policies and other factors
which seemed to threaten the interests and welfare of the Hindu population.
51
GEOFFREY A. ODDIE
However, even though this sense of a Hindu religious identity continued to

develop through the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, it was
possibly more keenly felt among the higher castes and those who had contact
with Europeans, at least up until the 1920s when communal (Hindu–Muslim)
riots spread through parts of the north. What happened after that and
during the post-independence period with the rise of militant ‘Hindu’ polit-
ical parties is another matter.
What light then do these developments, including our discussion of the
growing use of the term ‘Hinduism’, throw on current debates about ‘the
Hindu religion’ during the colonial period?
The debate about the development of a sense of an all-Hindu religious
identity (reflected in the work of Lorenzen and others) is clearly different
from the debate about the proportion of the people in India who (irrespect-
ive of this sense of religious identity) continued to live with other Hindus in
a similar ideational, functioning and unified system.
A useful starting point is the British Indian census, introduced into British
India in 1871 and extended to the Princely states in 1881. According to the
census, the Hindus (as defined by officials in a somewhat arbitrary fashion)
represented 74 per cent of the population of India in 1881, 68 per cent of the
people in 1931 and 85 per cent in 1951 – four years after partition and
independence.
But, among these ‘census Hindus’ were two groups, (1) a growing number
of people who had a clear sense of their own religious identity, and who felt
and claimed to be Hindus participating in an all-India religious tradition,
and (2) people who had no such feelings, but who were nevertheless
described as Hindu in the census.
This latter group labelled ‘Hindu’ is especially problematic. It included
what census takers themselves described as ‘the residuum’ – the people
left over who could not be placed in any other religious category. So,
for example, in 1871, ‘Hindu’ apparently included people later listed as
‘Primitive’. All this was changed in 1881 when, for the first time, and for the
next forty years these people were taken away from the ‘Hindu’ list and
placed in a separate category. However, in 1921 the category for ‘Primitive’
was abandoned and that for ‘Tribal’ introduced. Finally, in the census of
1941 ‘Tribals’ were no longer listed separately and appear to have been
reintegrated as ‘Hindus’. ‘Hindus’ included (a) ‘scheduled castes’, 49 million,
and ‘others’, 206 million (Oddie 1991: Appendix A).
All of these and other changes in the categories used point to official
British confusion about what ‘Hinduism’ meant. And while many of the
people themselves were either ignorant or (like some officials) confused,
increasing numbers of other ‘Hindus’ were proud to participate in the all-
India religious movement they knew and valued as ‘Hinduism’. Thus a term
which was originally British, but which alluded to ideas which were both
British and Indian, had, by the time of independence, become a matter of
52
pride and, as Vivekananda reminded his followers, one of India’s greatest

gifts to the world.
Notes
1 Especially significant in this respect are the remarks of Fa Hsien, the Chinese
Buddhist monk who visited India in the years  405–11, who remarked that
untouchables had to sound a clapper in the streets of the town so that people were
warned of their presence; and that if an untouchable came into close range, the
upper-caste person would have to perform a ritual ablution (Thapar, op. cit.: 303).
2 On Rammohan Roy’s usage of the term ‘Hindooism’, including his reference to ‘the
real Hindooism’, see Dermot Killingly (1993: Ch. 4).
3 For Duff’s views in particular see Oddie (2006: Ch. 6).
4 On the collaboration of brahman pundits with European administrators and
missionaries during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries see especially
Rocher (1994) and Oddie (2006).
5 Referring to the term ‘Hinduism’ as used in the Census of 1891, the Chief Commis-
sioner remarked that it was ‘a clumsy name’ and one ‘justifiable only by conven-
tion’. Alluding to the official method of enumerating ‘Hindus’ for the report, he
declared that this could be done only through ‘the process of successive exclusion’
whereby ‘Hinduism’ was defined as ‘the large residuum that is not Sikh, or Jain, or
Buddhist, or professedly animistic, or included in one of the foreign religions,
such as Islam, Mazdaism, Christianity or Hebraism’ (Census of India, 1891, vol. 1,
India-Report: 158). The same problems and method of exclusion were referred to in
the Census of 1921 (Census of India, 1921, vol. 1, India-Report: 108–13).
6 Another way of explaining the emotive importance of the term, including the depth
of its symbolic meaning, is to compare it with other symbols such as the flag. Those
who are familiar with controversies over national or other flags will know that
these disputes are not merely about the material objects, but also about whatever
the flag implies. Hence the jubilation of soldiers who seize the enemy’s flag, and the
desperate bravery of others who risk their lives in attempts to get it back.
7 For the origin and meetings of the Hindu Mahasabha, see especially the Indian
Annual Register, 1924–40.
8 There is a considerable body of evidence in the Hindu newspaper and in other
sources showing that Hindus in Madras were using the term ‘Hinduism’ at least as
early as the 1880s. See especially the Hindu, 22 March 1887; 21, 27 Jan. 1887;
12 Dec. 1888; 13 April, 2 July 1889.
Bibliography
Bhardwaj, S.M. (1987) ‘Hindu pilgrimage’, in M. Eliade (ed.) Encyclopedia of
Religion, vol. 11, New York and London: Macmillan.
Brekke, T. (1999) ‘The conceptual foundation of missionary Hinduism’, Journal of
Religious History, 23: 203–14.
Gokhale, B.G. (1984) ‘Hindu responses to the Muslim presence in Maharashtra’, in Y.
Friedmann (ed.) Islam in Asia, vol. 1, Jerusalem: Magnes Press.
Halbfass, W. (1988) India and Europe: an essay in understanding, Albany, N.Y.: State
University of New York Press.
India (1891) Census of India, 1891, vol. 1, Report 158.
—— (1921) Census of India, 1921, vol. XIII, part 1, Report 57. [Madras]
53
GEOFFREY A. ODDIE
Indian Annual Register, July–December 1926: 354–55.

Jagadeesan, N. (1997) History of Sri Vaishnavism in Tamil Country (Post-Ramanuja),
Madurai: Koodal.
Jordens, J.T.F. (1998) Gandhi’s Religion: a homespun shawl, New York: St. Martin’s
Press.
Killingly, D. (1993) Rammohan Roy in Hindu and Christian Tradition, Newcastle upon
Tyne: Grevatt & Grevatt.
Lorenzen, D.N. (2005) ‘Who invented Hinduism?’, in J.E. Llewellyn (ed.) Defining
Hinduism: a reader, New York: Routledge.
Marshman, J. (1802) Periodical Accounts Relative to the Baptist Missionary Society,
vol. 2, no. XII.
Mundy, G. (1834) Christianity and Hindooism Contrasted: or a comparative view of the
evidence by which the respective claims to divine authority of the Bible and the Hindu
Shastrus are supported, 2nd edn, 2 vols, Serampore: Serampore Press.
Oddie, G.A. (ed.) (1991) Religion in South Asia: religious conversion and revival
movements in South Asia in medieval and modern times, 2nd revised and enlarged
edn, New Delhi: Manohar.
—— (2003) ‘Constructing “Hinduism”: the impact of the protestant missionary
movement on Hindu self-understanding’, in R.E. Frykenberg (ed.) Christians and
Missionaries in India: cross cultural communication since 1500, Grand Rapids,
Michigan: W.B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.
—— (2006) Imagined Hinduism: British Protestant missionary constructions of
Potts, E.D. (1967) British Baptist Missionaries in India, 1793–1837, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Rai, L. (1967) A History of the Arya Samaj, revised, expanded and edited by Sri Ram
Sharma, Bombay: Orient Longmans.
Rocher, R. (1994) ‘British orientalism in the eighteenth century: the dialectics
of knowledge and government’, in C.A. Breckenridge and P. van der Veer (eds)
Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: perspectives on South Asia, New
Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Smith, W.C. (1981) ‘The crystallization of religious communities in Mughal India’, in
W.C. Smith (ed.) On Understanding Islam: selected studies, The Hague and New
York: Mouton Publishers.
Sontheimer, G.-D. and Kulke, H. (eds) (1989) Hinduism Reconsidered, New Delhi:
Manohar.
Subrahmanyam, S. (1996) ‘Before the Leviathan: sectarian violence and the state in
pre-colonial India’, in K. Basu and S. Subrahmanyam (eds) Unravelling the Nation:
secular conflict and India’s secular identity, New Delhi: Penguin Books.
[Tamil] Tract no. 2 (July 1887) ‘What Hindus should carefully consider’, Hindu Tract
Society Pamphlets, Adayar, Chennai: Theosophical Society Archives.
Thapar, R. (2003) The Penguin History of Early India, from the Origins to AD 1300,
New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Vivekananda (1958–63) The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Calcutta:
Advaita Ashrama.
von Stietencron, H. (1989; 2nd edn 1991) ‘Hinduism: on the proper use of a deceptive
term’, in G.-D. Sontheimer and H. Kulke (eds) Hinduism Reconsidered, New Delhi:
Manohar.
54
—— (1995) ‘Religious configurations in pre-Muslim India and modern concepts of

Hinduism’, in V. Dalmia and H. von Stietencron (eds) Representing Hinduism: the
constructions of religious traditions and national identity, New Delhi: Sage
Publications.
Wink, A. (1990) Al-Hind: the making of the Indo-Islamic world, vol. 1; early medieval
India and the expansion of Islam in 7th to 11th centuries, Delhi: Oxford University
Press.
Young, R.F. (1981) Resistant Hinduism: Sanskrit sources on anti-Christian apologetics
in early nineteenth-century India, Publications of the De Nobili Research Library,
vol. 8, Vienna.
55
3
REPRESENTING RELIGION IN
COLONIAL INDIA
John Zavos
Introduction: (re-)thinking religion through colonialism

and postcolonialism
Rethinking religion is a postcolonial project. The critical trajectories of
postcolonialism provide the opportunity to think in new ways about the
network of phenomena recognized as ‘religion’. Several commentators have
recognized the implication of ‘religion’ in the development not just of mod-
ern relations of power, but more particularly in the ‘epistemic violence’ of
post-Enlightenment thinking exported to the rest of the world through
European expansion (see Fitzgerald 2000; King 1999; Masuzawa 2005).
As such, postcolonialism provides a most apposite space for the critique of
this category, and for the articulation of subversive alternatives. More specif-
ically, ‘religion’ as it is articulated in and about India may be productively
deconstructed in this way, because of the challenges this site poses to the
discursive possibilities of the category. As Richard King states, ‘what is
required of the study of Indian culture and “religion” in a postcolonial context
is an attempt to think across or beyond traditional orientalist representations
– to “transgress the boundaries” imposed by normative western models of
“religion” ’ (King 1999: 210; see also Ballard 1996; Suthren Hirst and Zavos
2005).
One way of achieving this boundary transgression might be to refer to
‘indigenous’ models of religion as appropriate alternatives to the western.
As King again indicates, there are, for example, ‘virulently anti-essentialist’
ways of thinking in the Buddhist tradition which can push us beyond the
totalizing logic of western frameworks (ibid.: 199). At the same time, the
deployment of such transgressions needs to be carefully managed if we are
to avoid sinking into an invented nativism, a projection of pre-colonial
‘purity’. In order to avoid this trap, the postcolonial project of rethinking
religion needs to develop strategies based on a conscious recognition of the
imbrication of colonial and anti-colonial discourses, and also of the rela-
tionality of these with subaltern discourses, whether explicitly resistant or
not. By acknowledging this relationality, the postcolonial can look towards
56
REPRESENTING RELIGION IN COLONIAL INDIA
the development of ‘new conceptual models and methodological frameworks

for the comparative study of cultures’ (King 1999: 211), including, of course,
religious cultures.
Such developments would certainly precipitate a rethinking of religion,
both in India and beyond. But of course it is easier said than done to
produce such conceptual shifts. In order to move towards it, an intense
awareness of the parameters and consequences of existing models needs to
be developed. To put it another way, in order to work through the idea of
postcolonial rethinking, we need to have a clear idea of what we mean by
colonial thinking. There has, of course, been a great deal of work on the
impact of colonial rule on indigenous modes of thinking about religion.
In particular, there is a substantial body of literature which deals with the
idea of Hinduism and its ‘construction’ or ‘invention’ in the colonial context
(other than those already mentioned, some examples of this literature are
Frykenberg 1989; Pennington 2005; Smith 1998; Sugirtharajah 2003; von
Stietencron 1989). Some work has challenged this thesis by insisting on
the indigeneity of Hindu religion (see Lorenzen 1999). Other work has
challenged it by further provincializing the idea of religion as a Christian
category. In this work, the idea of a fractured, degenerate Hinduism is
attributed to pre-colonial understandings of Indian religion (see Balagan-
gadhara 2008; Gelders 2009). The implication here is that such images of
Hinduism have less to do with the imbrication of power and knowledge
under the conditions of colonialism, and more to do with the assumptions
of a deeply Christianized culture about the nature of the world, well before
the conditions of colonialism were established. Historical evidence indicates
that such structures of knowledge about indigenous Indian religion were
quite widespread in Europe before the colonial era, thus suggesting that
Hinduism was not a colonial construct or invention (Gelders 2009; see also
Sweetman 2003).
Although this line of thinking contributes an important perspective to our
understanding of the development of European ideas about Indian religion,
I argue that it does not elide the significance of the colonial encounter. This
is primarily because, whether one acknowledges the Foucauldian association
of knowledge with power or not, the idea of encounter itself has to remain a
significant force in the development of a concept – religion – which was
articulated, debated, implemented analytically and indeed fought over in a
sustained fashion by a range of social agents during the colonial period.
As King emphasizes in a contribution to the ‘invention’ debate, focusing on
the colonial period is significant.
[N]ot [in order] to argue that Hinduism is a western colonial inven-

tion, but rather to point out that the modern notion of ‘Hinduism’
was framed initially by European observers of Indian cultural tradi-
tions and emerged OUT OF THE COLONIAL ENCOUNTER
57
J O H N Z AV O S
between Indians and Europeans. Recognition of the disparity of

power relations precipitated by British colonial rule is not the same
as suggesting that the British simply imposed their ideas about
religion onto a largely passive native population.
(King 2008, emphasis in original)1
Encounter, then, involves processes of interaction. Such interaction may

be configured by particular relations of power, as King says, but it is still
interaction – that is, a web of processes of give and take, translation and
negotiation. The colonial encounter creates spaces in which such webs can
form. As the image of the web implies, these are not just spaces in which the
colonizer and the colonized interact, but spaces which are open to different
social forces, even if the conditions of interaction are constrained by the
stark reality of colonial control. The resulting network of interactions pro-
duces ‘complex alliances’ between ‘progressive, regressive and oppressive
forces’ (Pennington 2005: 162) in the articulation of colonial knowledge.
These complex alliances and other unexpected forms of interaction, then, are
fashioned in the spaces of colonial encounter.
The focus in this chapter is on these spaces, and the ideas of religion which
developed within them. Much as ideas of religion may be located as based on
European structures of knowledge, my contention is that these structures
were dynamically developed through the colonial encounter. In particular,
the latter provided new possibilities for the representation of religion as a
facet of social and political life. Behind this contention is a recognition that,
as a discourse, we need to acknowledge the historical contingency of the idea
of religion. That means not just recognizing the precolonial genealogy of this
concept, but also its continuing development in the context of colonialism,
and indeed more broadly its development in the modern world of which
colonialism is such an active constituent. In this sense, then, the postcolonial
approach to religion is configured by a recognition of the role of colonialism
in the very structuring of modern religion.
Hinduism–colonialism/religion–modernity
It is already clear that debates about the relationship between religion and
colonialism in India are strongly focused on the so-called ‘invention of
Hinduism’. This rapid transition from religion to Hinduism perhaps deflects
us from considering the conditions of possibility for such debates: conditions
which are focused on the broader issue of how the idea of religion can be
located within the social and political landscape of India, and what impact
this location had not just on Hinduism but on a whole range of positions we
might now understand as religious. It is important to step back from the
specificity of ‘the invention of Hinduism’, to think about the location of
religion, and I will return to this theme presently.
58
A similar movement might be useful in relation to the other key concept in

this formulation: colonialism. British colonial rule in India was part of a much
broader and rapidly developing system of power, governed by the demands
of expanding British capital. The demand for markets and the competitive
struggle for domination with France meant that Britain was expanding in a
range of directions, developing a complex network of economic and social
interactions around the globe. Britain was, in short, becoming modern. By
this I mean that as an economic, political and social force it was engaged in
and by what Arjun Appadurai calls an increasingly ‘overlapping set of
ecumenes’ through which ‘congeries of money, commerce, conquest and
migration began to create durable cross-societal bonds’ (Appadurai 1996:
28). As is suggested by this identification, this was a phenomenon defined by
mobility. ‘Congeries of money, commerce, conquest and migration’ encour-
age both social and geographical mobility, and mobility creates new spaces
of encounter, new possibilities of interaction through which new under-
standings of the world are formed, new associations and new attitudes
of dominance and resistance develop. The colonial encounter, then, may
be understood as part of a broader model of encounter: that which, as
Appadurai argues, is constitutive of modernity.
As this suggests, the phenomenon of modernity was not confined to
Britain, or to the colonial moment. Rather, it was a long, uneven and multi-
dimensional set of processes through which social, economic and political
realities were transformed in various areas of the world. Thus, for exam-
ple, in early to mid-eighteenth century India, social mobility increased,
reflecting the dynamism of power relations towards the end of the Mughal
period. The Maratha Empire was one of several flourishing kingdoms which
expanded during this period. Expansion was accompanied by the develop-
ment of powerful mercantile and banking castes taking advantage of the
new trading opportunities emerging in this era of economic dynamism (Bayly
1999: 65–73). The development of new public spaces was a critical feature of
this period, as newly powerful social classes explored new ways of expressing
power. In addition, new technologies meant that new forms of communica-
tion became available, offering ‘new resources and new disciplines for the
construction of imagined selves and imagined worlds’ (Appadurai 1996: 3).
As is implied here, these developments led to greater interactions across the
subcontinent and beyond, and so encouraged the emergence of supra-local
identities. The activities of the British East India Company undoubtedly
contributed to these processes. Its presence was a feature of economic dyna-
mism and social mobility in the subcontinent; a feature which was to become,
of course, increasingly dominant. It is important for our understanding of
the issues under discussion, however, that we recognize the emerging colonial
power as framed by these processes of developing modernity.
Part of the impact of these developing processes of modernity was to
effect new ways of thinking about religion. Peter van der Veer argues in his
59
J O H N Z AV O S
influential book on religious nationalism that constructions of religious

communities in which state institutions were involved can be identified in the
pre-colonial era. He also argues that religious community formation occurred
through religious movements and the disciplinary practices associated with
them (1994: 32–33), as well as through the action of states. Although this is
part of a wider argument to demonstrate the resonance of religious identities
in pre-colonial India, it is notable that van der Veer tells a story of expansion
and growing understanding of these identities, in which key processes occur
in the late seventeenth and especially the eighteenth century. Thus in discuss-
ing the interrelated role of pilgrimage and trade in developing a sense of
Hindu identity, he points in particular to the role of the late Mughal empire
and successor states in ‘stimulating the expansion of communications’ which
in turn had a critical impact on the construction of community identity.
We can, then, see these developments as indicative of the ways in which
religious identities were developing in critical new ways as part of that
broader process of supra-local identity formation associated with modernity.
Religion, in this sense, is a discourse of modernity.
This is not to say that the traditions we recognize as religious had no pre-
modern existence; rather, that conceptualizing them as religions is a modern
activity. Talal Asad has been influential in developing this line of thinking.
He argues that as modernity developed in Europe, ‘from being a concrete set
of practical rules attached to specific processes of power and knowledge,
religion has come to be abstracted and universalized’ (1993: 42). The vio-
lence associated with the universalization of a European form of knowledge
is of course a significant element of this argument, but it should not obscure
the associated process of abstraction. Abstraction enables the articulation of
religion as a universal category of human experience, and this process is
associated with the kinds of mobility we have noted above as constitutive of
modernity. In particular, it provides a framework for the development of
supra-local identities as religious identities. Robert Hefner demonstrates the
ramifications of this discursive formation in his examination of modern
Islamic identity. He points up the way in which ‘the expansion of mass
higher education, the emergence of vast markets for inexpensive “Islamic
books” and newspapers, and the unsettled pace of urbanization in much
of the Muslim world’ has intensified processes of what he refers to as object-
ification, through which ‘many Muslims have come to think of their religion
as something complete, self-contained and objective – a system that can
be distinguished clearly from other ideologies and belief systems’ (Hefner
1998: 91). At the same time, Hefner significantly notes the fragmentation
of authority in this environment, as ‘populist preachers, neotraditionalist
Sufi masters and secularly educated new Muslim intellectuals vie with state-
supported scholars to define the practice and meanings of Islam’ (ibid.).
By reference to the abstract notion of religion, then, we see here the devel-
opment of new arenas for contesting authority, new possibilities for the
60
representation of the objectified reality of Islam in different ways. Dual pro-

cesses of objectification and fragmentation contribute to the production of
what Hefner refers to as ‘multiple modernities’ in which the public articula-
tion of religious identities is a significant and multidimensional force.
Although Hefner’s analysis is focused on contemporary Islam, the points
he makes are also useful in thinking about the development of religion in
colonial India. What this context produces, through a range of economic,
geographical and social mobilities, is new ways of representing identities,
new ways of making identities meaningful in public contexts. The represen-
tational possibilities of identification are transformed – objectified and
fragmented – by the development of the arenas, interactions and technologies
which characterize a mobile, dynamic modernity.
Public space and the representation of religion in

colonial India
My argument so far suggests that the context of modernity constructs the
space for the public representation of religion, and that this space is an arena
of contestation between different social groups. Hefner demonstrates how in
Europe in the nineteenth century, for example, ‘new and vibrant religious
movements . . . provided opportunities for leadership and social respectability
otherwise unavailable to unpedigreed urbanites’ (1998: 87–88). In America,
the same period saw ‘not the evacuation of religion from public life’, but
rather a diversification of religiosity – a ‘potent mix of pluralization and
heightened competition’ (ibid.: 88) through which a plethora of denomin-
ations became increasingly organized and vocal in a variety of public arenas.
It is really striking how similar processes can be identified in the emerging
modernity of colonial India, despite the rather more heavy-handed interven-
tion of the state. Robert Frykenberg’s classic work on the ‘invention of
Hinduism’ provides useful examples of the way in which new public spaces
were significant for the development of religious identities. For example,
he demonstrates that the Madras Government’s determination to adopt
the position of a local ruler in the early nineteenth century led to its implica-
tion in the conduct of temple practices and temple management. As pressure
developed from the metropolis for the Government to dissociate itself from
the conduct of such heathen practices, it began gradually to retreat from
this position. In its place, a new layer of independent, lay-led religious organ-
izations emerged: ‘Brahmin lawyers of Mylapore and Egmore, Chettiyar
mercantile and banking families in the cities, and Zamindari magnates of
the mufassal, effectively fought for control of various temple endowments’
(1989: 37). Here, then, we can see the emergence of a new form of public
space related to religion in the context of colonial modernity, in which
emerging social classes could assert their position within society. Frykenberg
argues that this process led to the development of a new ‘sense of “public”
61
J O H N Z AV O S
identity’ (2000: 21) structured around religion. In his later work Frykenberg
is careful to retain a degree of ambiguity in the character of this public
identity. ‘There were’, he says, ‘no illusions about the existence of anything
like a single “majority community”; and yet at the same time, many of the
newly “public” institutions which emerged were decidedly “Hindu” in their
religious manifestations’ (2000: 23). As is implied by the fight for control of
temple endowments, the atmosphere of competition encouraged the vocal-
ization of a range of approaches to the idea of a ‘corporate’ Hinduism.
Here, then, we see an exemplification of the twin processes of objectification
and fragmentation noted above as significant in the development of modern
religious identity.
The more recent work of Brian Pennington also demonstrates some very
interesting developments related to religion and emerging public space,
through his examination of the Calcutta newspaper Samchar Chandrika,
first published in 1822. Pennington explores the editorials, articles and cor-
respondence carried by this nominally traditionalist newspaper, set up to
protect religious ideas and practices from ‘the corrosive effects of a pervasive
reformism – both western and indigenous’ (2005: 140). In particular, he
demonstrates how this translated not as straightforward conservative resist-
ance or rejection of colonial modernity. On the contrary, the Chandrika was
driven by ‘an urgency to shape a modern, popular Hinduism through emer-
gent discourses promoting a centralization of authority and a common,
socially cohesive Hindu identity’ (ibid.: 149). This cohesive identity was
achieved by remaining strategically ‘silent on issues of doctrine and deity’,
whilst focusing on ‘patterning a general structure for Hindu action, social
and ritual’ (ibid.: 140).
The newspaper itself provided a critical public space for this patterning, as
well as contributing to the institutionalization of other significant public
spaces for such work. For example, Pennington describes how it provided a
forum for the discussion of issues related to caste regulation. Urbanization
and social mobility had, by the early nineteenth century, created a situation
in which established institutions regulating caste were being undermined,
challenged by new urban-based associations. The Chandrika assumed a pos-
ition in this fluid arena, providing authoritative comment on problems related
to ritual participation and relative status, as aired by correspondents. In this
way, the newspaper operates both as a space for debate over such issues and
as an authority in relation to their regulation. This, then, represents a new
way of imagining caste as a form of association and social relation, and it
is an arena in which the same literate, professionalized classes recognized
by Frykenberg can claim an authoritative position. As such, religion operates
as a way of enabling social classes capitalizing on the opportunities of
modernity to articulate their sense of authority in the public sphere.
How exactly does representation in these new public spaces change religion?
Referring back to Hefner’s twin processes of objectification and fragmentation
62
and the argument that these processes are bound up with the idea of repre-
sentation, we can see an example of this change in the Chandrika’s response
to the prohibition of sati in 1828. The prohibition ordinance was of course
both preceded and followed by a great deal of rancorous debate over its
efficacy in the indigenous press and other public arenas. With its self-image
of traditionalism, the Chandrika was resolutely opposed to the ban, and
demonstrated what Pennington calls a ‘venomous hostility’ towards Ram-
mohun Roy and other indigenous advocates of prohibition (ibid.: 161). In
the years immediately following the ban, the Chandrika began reporting
instances of its defiance in meticulous detail. In these accounts, the heroic
stance of the bereaved wife – the true sati – was increasingly emphasized.
As authorities intervened to prevent the act of immolation, the Chandrika
reported how distraught wives would miraculously expire in order to fulfil
their dharma. This story became increasingly familiar in the pages of the news-
paper in the early 1830s, to the extent that the pattern of action began
to acquire a formulaic quality. ‘As the genre developed into stock tales’,
Pennington says, ‘the deaths became more mechanical’ (ibid.: 156). The
implication here is that the ritual processes associated with sati acquired
a new form in the context of the newspaper’s ability to recount, to make
public, to represent the idea of sati as traditional practice. It is not just that
the practice itself is changed (whilst at the same time, not changing, in the
sense, as Pennington emphasizes, that it exemplifies ‘all the moral character-
istics of the old practice’ [ibid.: 156]), but that the site of ritual shifts towards
the arena of representation. The development of a sati genre in the tales told
in the Samchar Chandrika seems to suggest that the meaning of the act as
traditional religiosity is held as much in the telling as in the act itself. Here we
can see Appadurai’s ‘new resources and new disciplines for the construction
of imagined selves and imagined worlds’ (1996: 3) in operation, producing
new conceptions of Hindu tradition in the public spaces of colonial Calcutta.
Organizational development and the representation of

religion in the late nineteenth century and beyond
In the later nineteenth century, the representation of religion in the public
spaces of colonial modernity was progressively prominent and assertive, as
the power and authority of the professional classes increased, and the condi-
tions of possibility for articulation became more complex.2 In particular, the
period witnessed the proliferation of modern organizations focused on one
or another aspect of the issue of religion. As Ian Talbot notes, a whole range
of highly structured anjumans, associations and sabhas emerged, which,
although they may have had traditional concerns, were nevertheless charac-
terized by formal membership sealed through contributions and/or pledges,
rules and regulations associated with membership, branches with chairman,
secretaries and so on (2000: 86).
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J O H N Z AV O S
The state certainly played a role in intensifying this trend. The Queen’s
Proclamation of 1858 constitutes a particularly significant intervention.
By declaring that ‘none be in any wise favoured, none molested and dis-
quieted, by reason of their religious faith or observances, but that all shall
enjoy the equal and impartial protection of the law’, Victoria effectively
enshrined the idea of religious practice as a ‘right’ of subjecthood in colonial
India (see Zavos 2000). Organizations with an interest in religion consistently
referred to the Proclamation in claiming their right to practice in one or
another way. Here, then, was a further critical space for the representation of
religion, in which the ‘forging of new group identities within the arena of the
colonial state’ (Talbot 2000: 109) was effected. The imagining of religious
identity as a feature of public life was becoming increasingly institutionalized.
The representation of religions in relation to one another was of key signifi-
cance in this process of imagining. In general terms, the modern discourse
of religion was, towards the end of the nineteenth century, increasingly sub-
ject to a dominant organizational paradigm based loosely on Darwinian
theory about the natural world, now known as the ‘world religions’ model.
Although recent scholarly work on this development has tended to emphasize
the role of scholars and others in Europe and America (see Brekke 2002;
Masuzawa 2005), the role of the colonial world was intensely significant.
This is not just because the work of scholars such as Max Müller in developing
the so-called ‘science of religion’ was grounded largely in increasingly sophis-
ticated understandings of non-European religious ideas, but also because
the voices of the colonized were loud, persistent and influential contributors
to emerging debates. Torkel Brekke (2002), for example, has demonstrated
how figures such as Dharmapala and Vivekananda arrived at the World’s
Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 in a combative frame of mind,
ready to outline the qualities of Buddhism and Hinduism respectively in
relation to the other religions represented in this forum. James Ketelaar
(1993) has done much the same in relation to Chinese and Japanese delegates
at the Parliament.3 It is clear that assertive ideas about the identity of reli-
gions in relation to one another was a feature of public life – not just in the
metropolis, but also in the colonial context. Indeed, the kind of organiza-
tions we have referred to above were deeply engaged in this activity, continu-
ally articulating and examining the qualities of religious systems in relation
to one another. This was as much an activity associated with so-called
orthodox organizations as it was with reformists like the Arya Samaj,
because both orthodox and reformist organizations were modern in form,
recognizable as legitimate in the public space of colonial India. This organ-
ized form gave them the authority to comment on the idea of religions and
religious communities in relation to one another.
One public arena which produced intense debate of this nature was that
opened up by the colonial state’s quantification of religious communities
through the census. This issue has been dealt with by numerous commentators
64
so it should not detain us for long here. But it is worth emphasizing that the
census is, of course, another form of representation, through which the pro-
cesses of objectification and fragmentation are starkly evident. Several
accounts demonstrate that the attempt to map religious identity in the census
was consistently problematic. Michael Haan has examined the issue
explicitly in the context of the invention debate. Having considered the evi-
dence of census reports from the period he asks rather pointedly why, if the
colonial administration invented Hinduism, they had so much trouble identi-
fying it every ten years (2005: 18). Census superintendents were persistently
frustrated in their attempts to pin down what it meant to be a Hindu, and,
significantly, what it meant to be a member of other religious communities in
India. As Harjot Oberoi (1994) and others have pointed out, what was con-
sidered as religious practice frequently cut across the boundaries between
nominal religious traditions, calling into question the validity of categories
used in the census such as Sikh, Buddhist, Muslim and Christian, as much as
Hindu.
In effect, I think we need to recognize that this was a period in which the
idea of religious identity as a facet of social reality was becoming increas-
ingly organized, asserting itself as a dominant discursive formation in the
context of modernity. Unsurprisingly, indigenous agents – largely middle
class – were as much a part of this process as colonial administrators.
As Haan says, ‘every ten years a debate would re-emerge among Indian
intellectuals, political activists and colonial administrators over whether
Hinduism even existed, and if it did, over how it could be measured’ (2005:
15). A range of social agents, then, contested the representation of religious
identity as the categories associated with this discourse began to emerge.
Nothing demonstrates this more clearly than the shifting position of the
Arya Samaj. Prior to the 1891 census, the Arya press was vocal in its
campaign to persuade its adherents to enter themselves not as ‘Hindu’ but as
‘Arya’ in response to the religion question. By the early 1920s, significant
elements of this organization were at the forefront of the so-called Malkana
shuddhi campaign, aimed at persuading communities of western UP Rajputs
with what we might now recognize as boundary crossing or syncretic prac-
tices to identify themselves as Hindus. Although the Arya Samaj had for
quite some years used shuddhi rites as a means of recruiting marginal groups
as Aryas, often in the teeth of opposition from caste conscious Sanatani
Hindu groups, they implemented the strategy in the Malkana campaign in
conjunction with these groups, as a means of ‘reclaiming’ Hindus. The key
issue was that these communities habitually identified themselves as Muslim
in census returns, and by the 1920s the issue of the numerical relationship
between Muslims and Hindus as exemplified through the census was a mat-
ter of intense concern to a whole range of middle class Hindus, Arya or
otherwise. The Malkanas became during this period the unfortunate site of
competitive campaigning by both Hindu and Muslim groups concerned with
65
J O H N Z AV O S
the representation of religious identity in public contexts – precisely because

this representation translated into power through the articulation of firm,
clearly recognizable communities.
The emergence of what we today understand as Hindu nationalism has
strong traces of these developing processes. It is no surprise that this ideol-
ogy is driven by a strong organizational impulse; that is, the desire to organ-
ize what is known as Hindu society in pursuit of an ordered, harmonious
vision of the future. Such ideas were incipient in the sangathan movement of
the 1920s, of which the Malkana shuddhi campaign was a key component.
The impulse to organize along these lines develops out of debates about how
to shape a religion called Hinduism in the context of a modernity in which
the discourse of religion looms large. In an atmosphere of competitive plur-
alism, fuelled by the persistent, nagging problems thrown up by the census, a
degree of anxiety emerged about how to secure the identity of Hinduism.
The neurotic yet resonant notion that Hindus were ‘a dying race’ in need of
‘saving’ developed in this context.
In previous work I have identified two broad trends in terms of the
approach of protagonists in the debate about how to shape a religion called
Hinduism: one which sought to articulate the idea of Hinduism through the
restructuring of society, as exemplified by some elements within the Arya
Samaj; and one which sought to articulate the idea of Hinduism through the
consolidation of the existing structures of society, emphasizing the ‘organic’
unity of the component parts (Zavos 2000). The period from about 1870
through to 1930 is one in which these positions contested the emerging idea
of ‘Hinduism’, the world religion comparable to other world religions. By the
late 1920s the latter position had gained a dominance in the public represen-
tation of Hinduism, and it was this position, rather than what might be
termed the more reformist position, which has informed the development of
Hindu nationalism. Hindutva argues for the organic development of society
on the basis of a non-doctrinal understanding of Hindu identity, embracing
a broad range of religious and cultural systems. This catholicity is character-
istic of the spiritual, universalist approach to Hinduism and Hindu culture
developed in the nineteenth century by figures such as Vivekananda. At the
same time, however, it works obsessively on the boundaries of this range,
producing some formulaic models through which an individual or a group
may be identified as Hindu or not. Hindutva is, in this sense, all about
boundaries, and as such I contend that it may be identified as a product of
processes in the nineteenth century by which Hinduism and other religions
came to be represented, or, to put it another way, organized discursively, as
religions in the context of developing colonial modernity.
To conclude, the argument in this chapter is that the colonial period
is significant for the development of religion in India. This significance is
presented not so much in terms of invention, as in terms of providing the
conditions of possibility for the arrangement of traditional ideas, practices,
66
objects in relation to an emerging modern discourse of religion. In this sense,

colonial control represents the dominant force in the development of that
idea of modernity with which we started out, an overlapping set of ecumenes
and developing cross-societal bonds emerging out of interaction and mobility.
I have argued that as a facet of modernity, colonial control was particularly
influential in creating new public spaces for the articulation of supra-local
identities. As such, it had a major impact on the ways in which religions were
represented, the ways in which they were imagined, as modern forms of
social organization.
Notes
1 The paper cited here provided the basis for Richard King’s chapter in this edited
volume.
2 The work of Nandini Gooptu demonstrates how this process was played out in the
early twentieth century not just in terms of professional classes, but also in the
developing politics of the urban poor (Gooptu 2001).
3 On this point and the issue of representation and religious identity more generally,
see Zavos 2008.
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4
COLONIALISM AND RELIGION 1
Sharada Sugirtharajah
The chapter aims to address some of the issues raised in the debate on the
‘Construction of Hinduism’. My concern is not so much about whether
European scholars invented or created a new concept to describe and classify
what they encountered, but rather to look at their own hermeneutical strat-
egies in understanding India and its traditions. Instead of being stuck with
definitional ambiguities, I intend to focus on what western orientalists and
missionaries themselves have to say about their own methodology and their
own experience of what has come to be called ‘Hinduism’. Before I embark
on this task, let me clarify in what sense I am using the term colonialism.
Without minimizing the historical reality of colonialism, I wish to go
beyond chronological periodization and see colonialism as an attitude of
mind, a way of perceiving the world, that cuts across historical periods.
Although colonial ways of thinking and forms of knowledge were far more
pronounced and institutionalized in the colonial period, ‘colonialism’ did
not begin or end with the colonial era; it continues to inform and determine
current ways of thinking and producing knowledge about the Other within
and across cultures. Although this chapter has to do with British colonialism,
it is not my aim to privilege the British colonial period or treat colonialism as
a homogenizing category.
Whatever form colonialism has taken, it has not been an innocent activity.
As Aimé Césaire has said, ‘no one colonizes innocently’ (Césaire 1972: 39).
Historically speaking, colonialism began as a form of military and political
intrusion into alien lands for commercial benefits, resulting in territorial
expansion and the right to ownership of what was conquered. Colonialism
has taken diverse forms and has to do with not simply territorial expansion
but also intellectual, cultural and spiritual conquest. Such an ideology
formed an integral part of the colonizers’ thinking and was endorsed by
the colonizers themselves. Reflecting the prevailing mood of the time, the
German orientalist Max Müller, who adopted England as his country, not
only spoke in favour of territorial and political colonization of India but also
called for its cultural and intellectual colonization. He saw ‘Sanskrit scholar-
ship’ in terms of ‘discovery and conquest’ (Müller 1892: vi) and was keen
69
S H A R A D A S U G I RT H A R A J A H
that Britain should not stop with ‘the material conquest of India’; it should
not ‘leave the laurels of its intellectual conquest entirely to other countries’
(Müller 1892: viii). He pronounced that when the last two volumes of the
Veda were published, it would signal the ‘conquest of the world by means
of commerce, colonization, education, and conversion’ (Müller 1902a: 289).
Even a European philosopher such as Hegel saw ‘colonizing activity’ as a
civilized thing. The colonized was generally seen as weak, lacking in the
maturity of civilized nations, and the colonizer was seen as having a legitim-
ate right over the colonized. Hegel was of the view that ‘[t]he civilized nation
is conscious that the rights of the barbarians are unequal to its own and
treats their autonomy as only a formality’ (in Chidester 2000: 425). The
colonized were not entitled to or ready as yet to enjoy the fruits of civilized
societies, that is, political and civil liberty; colonial rule was seen as beneficial
both to the colonizer and colonized.
Colonial rule as divine providence

Let me now turn to colonialism and religion. The link between the two is a
complex one, but is nevertheless visible in British and Hindu conceptions of
colonial rule. Both the colonizer and the colonized saw British rule as a sign
of Divine Providence, although this view did change. Even before the advent
of modern colonialism, Christian missionaries and others were engaged in
the study of other cultures. Colonial rule not only provided opportunities to
further the cause of the Christianizing mission, but it also came to be seen as
an act of Divine Providence. Some missionaries such as B.F. Westcott, who
was involved in the Cambridge Mission to India, even saw Britain as the
chosen nation entrusted with the task of evangelization. Therefore the con-
quest of other lands was seen as a rightful and legitimate activity undertaken
by civilized societies for the material, moral and spiritual benefit of the con-
quered (this is not unique to British colonialism). They saw themselves as
bringing rationality and Christian enlightenment to the benighted natives.
Among other things, one principal aspect that undergirded missionary
enterprise was their salvific mission. Although some scholars tend to confine
missionary aims to saving souls, imperial expansion was also seen by some as
part of the process – as exemplifying Christian manliness in the late Victorian
period. Colonizing was seen as a mark of manly nations and the colonized
were seen as too weak to resist being conquered. Monier-Williams, whose
main concern was the Christianization of India, believed that India was
given to the British to ‘be elevated, enlightened and Christianized’ (Monier-
Williams 1879: 253). Remarking on the benefits of British rule to the colon-
ized, Monier-Williams declared:
No one can travel in India and shut his eyes to the benefits conferred
on its inhabitants by English rule. In fact, our subjugation of the
70
COLONIALISM AND RELIGION
country affords an exemplification of the now trite truth that the

conquest of an inferior race by a superior, so far from being an
evil, is one of the great appointed laws of the world’s progress and
amelioration.
(Monier-Williams 1879: 168)
It is worth recalling that the Boden Professorship of Sanskrit which had been
offered to Monier-Williams, which had ‘for its object the conversion of the
natives of India to Christianity’ and the study of Sanskrit, among other
things, was meant to serve the purpose of conversion and Christianization of
India (Monier-Williams 1887: 20–21). This was the aim of the retired Colonel
Boden of the East India Company, who had ‘bequeathed the whole of his
property to the University of Oxford’ (Monier-Williams 1887: 20).
Colonialism and Hinduism

The question of whether Hinduism is a colonial construct or not, or what
makes it a colonial construct, will continue to be debated, but that colonialism
was a crucial factor in the European experience of India cannot be denied.
There were colonialisms before the advent of modern colonialism, but it
is western colonialism, and the kind of ‘Hinduism’ or rather ‘Hinduisms’
(whether real or imaginary) constructed during the height of this colonialism
that continues to determine in varying degrees the current understanding
and study of Hinduism. There are no doubt continuities and discontinuities
between pre-colonial, colonial and contemporary European encounters with
Indic traditions, but some of the ideological and hermeneutical underpin-
nings of the nineteenth-century western engagement with ‘Hinduism’ con-
tinue to inform the present academic study and representation of Hinduism.
The marks of colonialism are embedded in the nature of thinking about the
Other, in the theorizing, categorizing, and classifying of the knowledge pro-
duced about the people and societies under control directly or indirectly.
These marks are not specific to the colonial context, but are transhistorical
and have contemporary relevance.
Scripting the sacred

One may endlessly argue about whether ‘Hinduism’ is a nineteenth-century
construct or not, but regardless of what goes on in academic discourses, the
religious experience of an ordinary Hindu is not affected by the ambiguity
surrounding the term. Even without a defining or descriptive term, the
religious life or experience of a Hindu will continue to follow its own course.
What I am concerned about is the institutionalization of this experience and
the hermeneutical presuppositions underpinning the codification of textual
knowledge. The written word came to be seen as a sign of modernity and
71
progress, and orality as unreliable and as a mark of backwardness. European

scholars and native pundits were no doubt joint collaborators in producing
knowledge, but the former were the privileged and dominant partners in
textual activities such as purifying, translating, editing, categorizing, and
codifying texts, and in formulating a fixed body of knowledge and treating it
as an authoritative source. Hindu laws were no good as they were; they needed
to be restored to their original purity and made to conform to European
legal categories. In seeing this exercise as a form of textual colonization, it is
not my intention to undermine the genuine scholarly curiosity, interest, and
benign views that formed a significant part of European exploration of other
cultures. Textualization democratized as well as domesticated the ancient
Sanskrit texts, but had little room for other equally legitimate forms such as
dance, music, art, and folk traditions that are more telling about how Hindus
relate to their traditions. In other words, textualization had little to do
with Hindu conceptions of scripture and day-to-day Hindu practices and
more to do with European Enlightenment notions such as rationality, mod-
ernity, search for the origins, and with varied Protestant hermeneutical
presuppositions.
The word/concept ‘religion’

The word ‘religion’ itself is problematic in that it has been defined and inter-
preted in many different ways (both in complementary and contradictory
terms). Whether it can be treated as a universal category has been called into
question. As is well known, the concept ‘religion’ which has come to be used
for European engagement with other religious traditions is also problematic
in that it is deeply rooted in nineteenth-century western Christian theology
and is seen as universally valid – an issue that has engaged western academic
discourse and continues to pose challenges. The marks of colonialism are
visible in the nineteenth-century construction of the category of ‘religion’
itself as well as in what came to be called ‘Comparative Religion’ or the
‘Science of Religion’.
The question is whether European scholars were looking for a ‘religion’ in
India, or whether they were concerned to show that there was no ‘religion’ in
India, or whether, if there was one, it was a proper or true ‘religion’. What
comes across clearly in some of their writings is that Hinduism is seen as
having the semblance of a religion but that in fact it is not. William Ward,
the nineteenth-century Baptist missionary, remarks:
The reader will perceive, that in all these religious ceremonies not a
particle is found to interest or amend the heart; no family bible . . .
no domestic worship; no pious assembly . . . No standard of morals
to repress the vicious; no moral education in which the principles of
virtue and religion may be implanted in the youthful mind. Here
72
everything that assumes the appearance of religion, ends . . . in an

unmeaning ceremony, and leaves the heart cold as death to every
moral principle.
(Ward 1817: lxxxiii–iv)
To put it differently, Ward is concerned to show what it is that makes a ‘true’

religion (never mind the ambiguities surrounding the term). What is ‘false’ or
‘true’ is seen in terms of Christian notions of natural and special revelation.
It is the gift of special revelation that makes Christianity a ‘true’ religion. In
other words, Christianity is the revealed religion and others are repositories
of natural revelation. The implication is that others are false. It seems to be a
contradiction in terms to look for ‘religion’ when one begins with the convic-
tion that there can be only one ‘true’ religion. For those who subscribe to a
progressive theory of revelation, the differences between religions is one of
degree, as is the difference between the child and adult. All religions are seen
as embodying truth to a lesser or greater degree and this was established by
the nineteenth-century Science of Religion or Comparative Religion. What
lessons are meant to be drawn from this supposed scientific or objective
study of religions? Hindus are told that Hinduism in its pure form is ‘true’
and in its impure form (idolatrous practices) is ‘false’. They are urged to
renounce the impure form and return to the pure form, although this is of a
primitive kind. Once they return to the purity of childhood, they are in a fit
position to make the journey to adulthood.
Let us take a look at what the Scottish missionary John Nicol Farquhar
has to say about his own methodology which has roots in a particular version
of nineteenth-century western Protestant conceptions of religion. He remarks:
‘Religion is always found in a community, in an organized, historical form;
and each individual receives it from the community in that shape. This is
what distinguishes a religion from a mere theory, whether philosophical or
religious’ (1913: 445). Both the philosophical and living traditions of Hindus
as well as Jains and Buddhists are seen as ‘lacking altogether that creative
power which alone can produce a living religion’ (1913: 453), and the living
religion is no good either because it is infested with idolatrous practices. In
short, ‘it is the character of the Hindu system itself that is at fault’ (1913:
456). He ventures to offer a solution to the problem, which is to turn to
western modernist liberal values and Christian principles. In his Primer to
Hinduism, Farquhar declares: ‘Thinking Indians must inevitably form new
conceptions of God, man, morality, religion, and the meaning of the world’
(1912: 201). He goes on to say ‘Except Christianity, there is no religion in the
whole world that is rich enough in theology, worship, emotion, literature to
take the place of Hinduism’ (1912: 202). It appears that Farquhar and his
Protestant counterparts are approaching other religious traditions with a
checklist to see to what extent they qualify as a religion. They are keen to
show that Hinduism is not a religion but at the same time tend to classify it
73
as a religion. Terms such as ‘false’, ‘erroneous’, or ‘defective’ are used as

hermeneutical devices to indicate the nature of Hinduism. In other words,
Hinduism does not measure up to the nineteenth-century Protestant under-
standing of religion. It is seen as lacking the ingredients that make up a
religion – a coherent system of beliefs and practices, a single text, a single
saviour figure, a monotheistic god, prompting moral behaviour. Such a her-
meneutical approach reveals more about what European missionaries are
looking for in the Hindu tradition than about the nature of Hindu under-
standing and experience of their own tradition. To put it differently, the
question is about the kind of knowledge about Hinduism one gains from
such a description in terms of absences.
Hermeneutical framework
It is important to look at the hermeneutical factors that inform the European
study of Hinduism. Let us turn to what missionary – orientalists themselves
have to say about their own theoretical and methodological framework.
Monier-Williams emphasizes the need to study non-Christian scriptures so
that one may become acquainted with them which is necessary to conquer
the enemy:
But it seems to me that our missionaries are already sufficiently con-

vinced of the necessity of studying these works, and of making
themselves conversant with the false creeds they have to fight against.
How could an army of invaders have any chance of success in an
enemy’s country without a knowledge of the position and strength
of its fortresses, and without knowing how to turn the batteries they
capture against the camp of the foe?
(Monier-Williams 1887: 10)
Similarly Horace Wilson states explicitly his purpose: ‘The task that has been
proposed to the members of the University is twofold. They are invited to
confute the falsities of Hinduism, and affirm to the conviction of a reason-
able Hindu the truths of Christianity’ (Wilson 1862: 41). He then goes on to
say that ‘for the effective performance’ of the task, it is important to under-
take ‘some preliminary study’ of the tradition in order to show its errors:
‘It is indispensable that we should be well acquainted with the practices and
doctrines and belief, the erroneousness of which we would demonstrate’
(Wilson 1862: 41). He also emphasizes that in order to convince Hindus that
their religion is erroneous, one ‘must satisfy them that they are in error before
you can persuade them to accept the truth. To overturn their errors we must
know what they are’ (Wilson 1862: 42). Such a methodological approach is
also taken by Farquhar. He cautions that the missionary should keep the
knowledge of Hinduism gained ‘in the background, to be utilized only when
74
absolutely necessary, it will be an invaluable weapon’ not only to bring to

attention the Hindus’ own ignorance and misrepresentation of their trad-
ition but also to make way to woo them to the Christian gospel (Farquhar in
Sharpe 1963: 124). Although all of them call for a sympathetic study of
Hinduism and insist on the use of honest, rational and benevolent methods,
they make it clear that their single main goal is to shake the very foundations
of Hinduism.
Religious diversity
Scholars of Religion are keen to show that although some Europeans con-
structed a unified Hinduism, they were not oblivious to the diversity of the
Indian traditions. While it is true that not all orientalists and missionaries
constructed a monolithic Hinduism, some nevertheless tended to use terms
such as ‘the Hindu system’, ‘the Hindu religion’, and so forth. While it is
true that they acknowledged religious diversity, they saw it as a sign of
weakness rather than strength. For example, Horace Wilson drew attention
to the heterogeneous character of Hinduism but remarked that most of it
was hugely unbecoming and scandalous and that the entire foundation on
which it is based should be demolished:
[T]he practical religion of the Hindus is by no means a concentrated

and compact system, but a heterogeneous compound, made up of
various and not infrequently incompatible ingredients, and that to
a few ancient fragments it has made large and unauthorized add-
itions, most of which are of an exceedingly mischievous and dis-
graceful nature. It is, however, of little avail yet to attempt to
undeceive the multitude; their superstition is based upon ignorance,
and until the foundation is taken away, the superstructure, however,
crazy and rotten, will hold together.
(Wilson 1862: 79–80)
Similarly, Monier-Williams took great pains to explain to Europeans about

the heterogeneity, complexity and flexibility of Indian traditions, but regarded
it as a mark of infirmity rather than their enduring quality. He likened
Hinduism (which he differentiates from Brahmanism) to ‘a colossal edifice
formed by a congeries of heterogeneous materials, without symmetry or
unity of design – a vast, over-grown, irregular structure’ (Monier-Williams
1891: xviii). What is implied here is that Hinduism lacks a firm monotheistic
focus and this is what makes it a weak religion. Clearly for these European
scholars, religious diversity is a problem that needs sorting out.
75
Real or imaginary ‘Hinduism’

While not all descriptions of ‘Hinduism’ are illusory, distorted or imaginary,
there are some which do not correspond to or relate to the actual experience
or realities of Indian culture. One cannot expect all descriptions to be per-
fect; there is bound to be some element of distortion. No representation is
value free; it is not a neutral or an innocent engagement. The act of descrip-
tion or representation results in the production of knowledge. No doubt
genuine scholarly curiosity and interest in other cultures have played a vital
role in the production of knowledge, but the question is what kind of know-
ledge is produced and for whom, and what purpose is it meant to serve. Let
us take the example of the orientalist conception of the Veda. What is it that
they discovered in the Veda? Something totally new or unexpected or some-
thing that is already there but has not been made known? In other words,
does their discovery correspond to something real or is it imaginary, or a bit
of both? When we read orientalist perceptions of the Veda, what we learn is
their notion of the Veda, or rather what they thought it ought to be. To put it
differently, they were discovering what they saw as ‘true’ or ‘real’ Hinduism.
Orientalists saw themselves as helping Hindus to understand what consti-
tuted pristine Hinduism, and this was seen to be located in ancient texts such
as the Veda. The Veda became important for orientalists not so much for its
own innate value, but because in it Europeans found the supposed lost ori-
gins of their own European childhood. In what way does this newly dis-
covered knowledge affect the status of the Veda or contribute to a deeper
understanding of the Veda? We are told that the Veda is a pure document but
an infantile one, containing the stammering of a new-born who has yet to
arrive at full maturity. What we are offered is a construct, a concept that does
not resonate with the Indian experience of the Veda. We are called upon to
celebrate this child-like status – this is what was discovered and we did not
know about it. Now that it has been revealed to us, we need to rejoice in this
new knowledge and discard idolatrous practices and return to the purity of
the Veda. The thesis does not end there. The Vedic monotheism is seen as
too fragile to serve as the basis for ‘reformed’ Hinduism. For a full-fledged
monotheism Hindus need to turn to Semitic monotheism. What does the
orientalist discovery of the Veda tell us? One gets the impression that the
Vedic sages and those who are inspired by the Veda are no more than little
children. It also means that the Veda has little cognitive value – it has been
granted the cognitive thinking of a new-born child and so to look for signs
of rationality would be a serious mistake. While one cannot deny the reality
of this experience for those who saw it this way, does it facilitate any serious
hermeneutical engagement? The orientalist conception of the Veda not only
determines how it ought to be approached but also trivializes the experiences
of those who have a different story to tell. Although Müller spoke favourably
of the Vedanta during the last years of his life, he regarded the Veda as no
76
more than an archaic historical document shedding light on the origin and
growth of religious ideas and that any tampering with it would distort
the real significance of the Veda. In a letter to a Parsee Malabari, Müller
remarked:
Accept the Veda as an ancient historical document, containing

thoughts in accordance with the character of an ancient and simple-
minded race of men, and you will be able to admire it, and to retain
some of it, particularly the teaching of the Upanishads, even in these
modern days. But discover in it, ‘steam engines and electricity, and
European philosophy and morality’, and you deprive it of its true
character, you destroy its real value, and you break the historical
continuity that ought to bind the present to the past.
(Müller 1902b: 110)
I would like to emphasize that the aim of this chapter is not to be dismissive
of orientalist and missionary contributions to Indological studies, but to
draw attention to the hermeneutical presuppositions underpinning their rep-
resentations of Hinduism. This does not imply that cross-cultural perspec-
tives have no value in the study of religion, but rather that whoever speaks
for a tradition such as Hinduism, which is so diverse and complex, should
also address the question of ‘how to speak’ for a tradition. Such an exercise
requires developing alternate ways of thinking about the tradition and evolv-
ing conceptual frameworks that will facilitate a more nuanced understanding
and critical engagement with it.
Note
1 This chapter forms part of an ongoing research project.
Bibliography
Césaire, A. (1972) Discourse on Colonialism, New York: Monthly Review Press.
Chidester, D. (2000) ‘Colonialism’, in W. Braun and R.T. McCutcheon (eds) Guide to
the Study of Religion, London and New York: Cassell.
Farquhar, J.N. (1912) A Primer of Hinduism, 2nd edn, London: Oxford University
Press.
—— (1913) The Crown of Hinduism, London: Oxford University Press.
Monier-Williams, M. (1891) Brāhmanism and Hinduism; or, religious thought and life
in India, as based on the Veda and other sacred books of the Hindus, 4th edn,
London: John Murray.
—— (1887) The Holy Bible and the Sacred Books of the East, London: Shelly & Co.
—— (1879) Modern India and the Indians, 3rd edn, London: Trübner & Co.
Müller, M.F. (1892; 1st edn 1883) India: what can it teach us? A course of lectures
delivered before the University of Cambridge, London: Longmans, Green & Co.
77
—— (1902a) The Life and Letters of the Right Honourable Friedrich Max Müller,
edited by G.A.M. Müller, vol. 1, London: Longmans, Green & Co.
—— (1902b) The Life and Letters of the Right Honourable Friedrich Max Müller,
edited by G.A.M. Müller, vol. 2, London: Longmans, Green & Co.
Sharpe, E.J. (1963) J.N. Farquhar: a memoir, Calcutta: YMCA Press; London:
Longmans, Green & Co.
Ward, W. (1817) A View of the History, Literature, and Religion of the Hindoos, vol. 1.
3rd edn, London: Black Parbury and Allen.
Wilson, H.H. (1862) Essays and Lectures Chiefly on the Religion of the Hindus, vol. 2,
London: Trübner & Co.
78
5
WOMEN, THE FREEDOM
MOVEMENT, AND SANSKRIT
Notes on religion and colonialism from
the ethnographic present
Laurie L. Patton
My agreement in writing this chapter was to think (as a non-specialist

in colonial India but nonetheless generally interested party) about the role
of colonial and postcolonial realities in the construction of religions in
India. I agreed to do so through the lens of my recent ethnographic project
on women and Sanskrit in India. My exploration of the question revolves
around two major resources in my ever expanding database of now over
ninety interviews with women Sanskritists: older women and younger women.
My remarks are based on a comparison between the women Sanskritists
over sixty-five who were involved in the movement out of colonialism, and
the women Sanskritists between thirty and sixty-five, who are now fully
embroiled in the postcolonial realities of a twenty-first century liberalized
economy.
Recent methodological writing on religion and colonialism in India has
focused on the ways in which ‘religion’ is a highly contingent category, espe-
cially in colonial contexts. While the arguments vary, the basic critiques are
that ‘religion’ is a western term with a western history (Fitzgerald 2000,
2007). In the case of colonized and missionized countries such as India,
‘religion’s’ roots to Christianity are entangled at such a deep level that it is
impossible to use the term without imposing a set of biases and distortions
on indigenous traditions (Balagangadhara 1994). Others, such as Richard
King (1999), also emphasize the larger hold that epistemological orientalism
has on the western imagination about traditions outside of Europe and
America. Still others, such as Pennington (2005), argue that it is misleading
to assume the wholesale ‘fabrication’ of Hinduism in the colonial period by
missionaries and administrators; rather, it is more historically accurate to
assume a complex set of interlocking agencies between rulers and Indians in
a variety of social contexts.
79
L AU R I E L . PA T T O N
And yet, to date, very few ethnographic studies have actually been con-
ducted that focus on the common-sense idea of what the English term
‘religion’ is understood to be within postcolonial environments. My own
recent ethnographic work on women and Sanskrit was not conducted with
that end in mind, but intriguingly, my interviews yield fascinating results
when mined for this particular issue. Briefly put, the generational differences
amongst women Sanskritists also yield different approaches to the status of
Sanskrit as a ‘religious’ language.
Background
Let me begin with some background, which I have also provided elsewhere
(2002, 2007). What is the situation of Sanskrit education in contemporary
India? In his recent volume on the role of the pandita, Alex Michaels (2001)
outlines the dual education system in contemporary India in which trad-
itional teachers find themselves caught: the university system, based loosely
on the English model of governments, schools, and universities, and the
pathashalas and samskrita-vidyapithas, where Sanskrit is taught according to
the traditional methods. There, the guru-shishya sambandha, or relationship
between teacher and student, is the primary model, where the teacher stands
for wisdom, memory, personal and moral guidance. Michaels mentions the
various ways in which, after the publication of the report of the Government
of India’s Sanskrit Commission (1958), various agencies have been imple-
menting its recommendations – especially the Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan,
formed in 1970.
Despite dire predictions, Sanskrit has hung on. According to one report,
almost all of the recommendations of the Sanskrit commission have been
implemented, with 4,000 pathashalas funded by the Rashtriya Sanskrit
Sansthan, as well as many other vidyapithas and Sanskrit Colleges which are
funded independently or by local communities and temples. The study of
Sanskrit in secondary schools has also been a major priority, with more
limited success because of the other options for language study (English,
regional language, Hindi) recommended by state governments in India. The
BJP government’s support for Sanskrit study in the 1990s was higher than
previous governments, but with little improvement in the overall system of
traditional education as India increasingly competed on the global stage
in technology, science, and engineering. In the English university system,
Sanskrit has become a ‘humanities’ subject, with less qualified students, or
students with lesser need for high income, flocking to the registration desks.
While several other scholars (see in particular Bhate 1996: 383–400; van
Bijlert 1996: 347–66; Falk 1993: 103–20; Filliozat 2000; Mishra 1997;
Steinmann 1986; Van Der Burg 1996: 367–82) have recently commented on
the dual education system and its effect on the study of Sanskrit in India,
one crucial and overlooked element in this system is that of gender. Recent
80
W O M E N , T H E F R E E D O M M O V E M E N T, A N D S A N S K R I T
academic work is commendable indeed for keeping the study of Sanskrit

alive in the scholarly imagination; however, this work has totally ignored the
role of women in this sea-change in the study of Sanskrit. In many parts of
India, the dual education system is also clearly a dual gender system.
Let me be more specific. In postcolonial India, Sanskrit has become a
marker of the Hindu religiosity of women as well as men. In certain places, if
the trend continues, it will soon become entirely the prerogative of women.
With the massive entry of men into fields of science, technology, and engin-
eering, this change has happened without the help of postcolonial theory or
secular feminism, either Indian or western. It will continue without that help.
My larger book project (currently in progress), Grandmother Language, is a
study of women Sanskritists through their personal narratives. Its chapters
will comprise an examination of their lives, their religious commitments and
practices, and their understandings of their roles as teachers and scholars.
Such change is only possible with an unlikely amalgamation of factors: trad-
itional Hindu ideologies of gender combine with a historical emphasis on
women’s educational reform in Maharashtra to create a unique environment
for innovation. This combination makes it possible for women to take on their
new roles as caretakers of a classical language which has been prohibited to
them for millennia.
Let me begin with some facts about Maharashtra, the area where I did my
research. In Maharashtra, Sanskrit is still alive and well within the edu-
cational system – with eight major independent research institutes in Pune
and Bombay; six universities that offer degrees up to MA and PhD; thirty-
three major Sanskrit manuscript collections; and nine Indological journals
published in the state. The personnel needed to maintain this large educational
tradition is extensive.
The bulk of those personnel is increasingly composed of women. With one
retirement, the University of Pune Department of Sanskrit will consist
entirely of women. The ratio of male–female students registered for the MA
in Sanskrit this present year is one to six. In the Deccan College Dictionary
Project, Pune, there are seven women and two men on the regular research
staff. Bhandarkar Oriental Research institute has 50 per cent women
researchers on its staff. The number of stripurohits, or women ritual specialists,
is growing rapidly, and, according to one report by V.L. Manjul, women ritual
specialists now outnumber their male counterparts in certain neighbourhoods
in Pune. On a nationwide scale, six of the chairs of the major universities –
Delhi, Madras, Nagpur, Pune, Calcutta, and Hyderabad – are women.1
I have completed ninety oral life narratives of women in the field of Sanskrit
in Maharashtra, using as my starting point (and my starting point only!)
the questionnaire with ten questions about family life, educational experi-
ence, and vision for the future. The conversations were long and meander-
ing, lasting about two to three hours each, and longer if necessary. They
were conducted mostly in my native language of English, about twelve in
81
conversational Hindi, and some with occasional short exchanges in conver-

sational Sanskrit. My collaborator in this project, Maitreyee Deshpande,
also conducted several interviews in Marathi. She was able to clarify ques-
tions in Marathi during our conversations as well. All the conversations
except eleven were recorded.
A generational difference
So much, then, for the background. For the remainder of this chapter I would
like to focus on the ways in which the older women conceive of themselves as
public intellectuals who ‘came of age’ at the transition between colonial and
postcolonial realities. My data reveal that, for the older women involved
in the freedom struggle, Sanskrit was a cultural means by which freedom
could be achieved; it was a highly respected and ancient ‘vehicle’ that was part
of a Gandhian ideology which was not necessarily ‘Hindu’ or even ‘religious’
in nature. In postcolonial realities, Sanskrit has become something very
different – a mark of Hindu householdership. It can be a spiritual ‘ally’ and
‘support’ to the larger global realities of technological and scientific exchange
in the fields of medicine, biochemistry, information technology, and commerce.
This data, I believe, has important implications for how we might theorize
about the role of colonialism in the shaping of so-called ‘religious’ identities,
particularly around the question of what technology constitutes appropriate
and effective cultural exchange among equal, or potentially equal, cultural
partners. I want to suggest that what is understood as ‘effective technology’
can directly affect what is understood as ‘religion’, and that colonial and
postcolonial realities have had different ways of configuring this relationship.
Out of colonial India: senior women’s voices

Let us begin with the role of Sanskrit for the women who lived the transition
out of colonial India. Out of the set of eight women interviewed, all of them
were working at a time when Sanskrit was understood as a kind of multiply
relevant classical language which had homes in a variety of cultural traditions.
All of them remember it as a truly ‘linking’ language which was connected
with freedom and engagement with a kind of pan-Indian culture.
To take a regional example: As Dandekar has noted in his excellent, but
now somewhat dated Sanskrit and Maharashtra (1972),2 Sanskrit influenced
and was influenced by local cultural movements throughout the history
of the region. Most notably for our purposes, the political events of the late
colonial and postcolonial periods provided ample opportunity for creative
work in Sanskrit. Maharashtrian authors K.V. Chitale and V. Bagewadikar
produced Sanskrit works on colonial figures such as Lokmanya Tilak, as
well as Sanskrit biographies of Nehru, Gandhi, and the Freedom Move-
ment. Short story, poetry, and drama competitions have dotted the region to
82
this day, beginning from the 1930s onwards. And translations of English
works into Sanskrit by Marathi authors include Wordsworth (C.T. Kenghe),
Longfellow (G.B. Palsule), Keats (N.P. Gune), The Sermon on the Mount
(S.N. Tadpatrikar), and Goethe’s Faust (L.V. Deshpande). In 1961, A.R.
Ratnaparakhi composed the Samvadamala, which is a series of thirteen
dialogues on daily subjects like breakfast, office, shopping and so on (1961),
which might be the precursor of the ‘Speak Sanskrit’ movement of Krishna-
shastri, called ‘Samskriti Bharati’ today.
The older women I interviewed all knew of and were influenced by these
local kinds of efforts, and spoke highly of the local Sanskritic literary (not
shastric) cultures, whether it was in Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, or
Uttar Pradesh of the time. Three of the younger women I interviewed had
parents who were quite involved in the communist movements in Bengal and
Maharashtra also during the 1940s and 1950s, and whose love of Sanskrit
came from their communist fathers who saw it as an integral part of the
vibrancy of Indian culture.
But most significantly for our purposes, they also understood Sanskrit as
Gandhian. All of the women in my study over seventy years of age who were
involved in the Freedom Movement expressed a more expansive, universalist
idea of the Sanskrit language. As one woman described her ‘bicycle ride
across India’, collecting money for the Quit India movement, ‘We chanted
shlokas all the way for Gandhi-ji. It didn’t occur to us that Sanskrit was an
elite language. It was just Indian’.
So too, a very senior woman who was involved in the Freedom Movement
in Pune spoke of her father’s friend teaching her an ashirvad – or prayer of
hope and aspiration. She told me, ‘When I first began to study Sanskrit,
before Pune University was even founded, this is how I got confidence every
day, and got confidence in my heart’. Learning an ashirvada and the found-
ing of Pune University were juxtaposed in a single sentence as part of the
same cultural continuum.
Another older woman tells of how her own teacher came to teach women in
the 1920s and 1930s, and his story is integrally bound up with the Freedom
Movement. He was a resident of Gowahati, in Assam, at the time, and was on
an undercover errand as a Freedom fighter. He fell ill by the side of the road
on his way to deliver a message, and the next he knew he was being taken care
of by women in the back of a house. When he was well enough to travel again,
the women said, ‘We know who you are and the cause you are fighting for. We
would like to give you these jewels to help support the cause’. He realized then
he was in a brothel, and since these women saved his life, he vowed in his
professional life as a Sanskrit teacher to commit to teaching women. She too
remembers her teacher holding cultural salons focusing on Sanskrit literature
as part of the vibrancy of the intellectual debate of the time.
For these women, then, the movement out of colonial identity was in part
mediated by a humanistic understanding of Sanskrit that was not particularly
83
‘religious’. In a way, it could not have been, since the women who did engage
with female pundits like Pandita Ramabai were still very much ‘spectacles’
and exceptions. Female scholars, on the other hand, while understood in the
early years as ‘exceptional’, were not as problematic. Intriguingly too, the
university system was able to support much of their work, but they do not
understand themselves or their Sanskrit learning in the university as part of
a colonial legacy of education. Rather, they saw Sanskrit learning as some-
thing taking place equally in salons, courtyards, bicycle trips, streets, and
brothels.
Sukumari Bhattacarya, a senior Sankritist who wrote in the mid-twentieth
century, tells the story of coming to learn Sanskrit literature after great
resistance from the more traditional Hindu pundits. In our interview, she
spoke of the days when Sanskrit recitation was taking place, and she was
asked not to recite because people thought of her as a Christian. She recited
anyway.
Sukumari met her husband during a demonstration in Calcutta sponsored
by the Freedom Movement. He went on to become a professor of literature,
and she a lecturer in Sanskrit. Both of them understood their work to be
teaching about culture, both the positive and negative aspects of culture. As
Sukumari told me, ‘We never thought of the traditions we studied as religious.
If we did, we would not have studied them in the way we did’.
Although all of these women were very different indeed in their educational
commitments and even their larger philosophies of life, each of them under-
stood Sanskrit in a Gandhian nationalist context. The language had more to
do with the shaping of India apart from the British and less to do with the
shaping of religion per se.
Into postcolonial India: the voices of present middle age

The postcolonial reality on the other hand, is markedly different. The bulk
of the women I interviewed between 35 and 65 years of age understood
Sanskrit as a marker of Hindu identity. It may also have been more than
that, and many women also articulated that larger vision in our interviews.
However, one of Sanskrit’s primary meanings was as a ‘spiritual’, ‘religious’,
or ‘Hindu’ language.
First, my research to date suggests a similar richness and variety in women’s
experience of the Hindu domestic performance of Sanskrit in the home –
whether it was through more elaborate rituals or simple recitation. First, at a
general level, it should be noted that, in sixty-two out of the eighty inter-
views, the women reported that it was domestic use of Sanskrit in the child-
hood home that was in part responsible for their continuing with the study of
Sanskrit as an adult profession.
One woman recounts her childhood experience of learning Sanskrit by
having her mother teach her as she worked on the household chores:
84
Every household item we were cleaning or dusting, she would give

me the Sanskrit name for it. In this way I learned simple Sanskrit
words, and I began to associate in my mind the work my mother did
for all of us in the family with the Sanskrit language. I still feel as
I am doing some of that today.
Another younger woman said that her connection with her grandfather and
her association with his kindness was integrally bound up with learning
Sanskrit.
Since I was five we had to recite chapters from the Gita, and the
subhashitas. It was a compulsion for us – not our wish, but we loved
our grandfather because he never punished us. He died in 1986, and
some spirit has carried on in my mind.
Second, and relatedly, for sixty-five out of the eighty women interviewed,
Sanskrit is associated with respect and honour for women as well as men in the
early family history. And this involved early understandings and negotiations
of Hindu ways of being. As one scholar, Mrs. Manik Thakar, told me:
Eminent scholars like S.D. Joshi, and so on, came to see us. They
were all a keen group. I recited a few shlokas and felt very much a
part of the group. I was respected as a child, and what is more, my
mother was interested in educating girls.
Another woman, currently the head of the Sanskrit Department in Pune,

Mrs. Shailaja Bapat commented,
I learned it from puja only – in my childhood. In the morning, the

priest used to come for worship; he used to tell us how to worship.
Also, with Ramaraksha mantra – our father and grandmothers used
to tell us how to recite every day.
Relatedly, Ranjana Date tells of her teacher,
He used to teach only for boys, but by special tuition he taught girls on
Sundays. First girls’ batch he taught. The amount wasn’t much –
seven or eight rupees per month. But that was an age-old matter of
prestige, not of money for scholarship. He used to teach not only
Sanskrit, but Chemistry and French. Our headmistress said, ‘OK,
we’ll observe the rules of purity, so what harm is there in learning?’ He
had many different sides to him. Bhide taught us Panini. We became
familiar with that, and then we learned Laghukaumudi. We would
memorize certain portions, and as we recited he would explain.
85
Third, and most importantly for our purposes, the women report their mem-
ories of domestic Sanskrit rituals as filled with colour, light, fascination, and
variation. More than half of those interviewed spoke of fascination for the
ritual use of Sanskrit as part of the ongoing interest in the field, and forty-
two mention morning puja (both positively and negatively). One very prom-
inent Sanskritist spoke of morning pujas as the thing that oriented her and
grounded her as a child. Saroja Bhate commented, ‘Sanskrit, one can do at
home, through morning pujas, as well as being a teacher in a college’.
One woman reminisced that she became fascinated with Sanskrit from her
weekly and holiday trips to the temple. As she put it, her trips to the family
temple continued back inside the household:
The chanting from the temple was so beautiful, and there was so
much time we would spend together with my aunts and uncles and
cousins – the whole family. We would continue the chanting from the
temple back into our living room, and even some of the tunes I would
hear from my father in the puja room the next morning too.
Several of the women spoke about negotiating with the priest in learning
how to do the pujas; for each of them, understanding Hindu practices was a
matter of trial and error, learning and perfecting. Mandakini Kinjavadekar
had very powerful memories of such learning:
I remember my father’s teacher Pt. Khareshastri from Gokarna-

Mahabaleshwar. Ganesh-shastri Khare was the guru of my father.
While coming, he used to bring Konkan products – jackfruit chapati,
mango chapati. He was for us as a loving grandpa bringing all these
products. More than one year he lived with us, and he was observing
‘cleanliness’. After a bath, nobody would touch him, not speak etc.
Also we had to obey all these things. When my father and his teacher
were discussing all these things, we were not supposed to talk or go
there. The teacher was observing no speaking, maunavrata. We felt
that day very pure – that something pure is in our house.
None of these women actually performed the ritual in their childhood, but it
was clear that Sanskrit was a part of their negotiations in their narratives of
childhood learning about Hindu identity.
Recent anthropological work in performance studies has emphasized the
emotional impact of a fixed text, and this study very much supports this
idea. The women reported that Sanskrit recitation was experienced in differ-
ent ways in different climates. Forty-three of them mentioned that, while
reciting had no meaning for them initially, they were moved by the beauty of
Sanskrit to create a mood. As Saroja Bhate puts it, ‘I remember the Hindu
vaidikas of my childhood, where pronunciation was down to the minute
86
details, in the exact and correct way. I was so impressed by the beauty of the
language’.
Relatedly, forty-four of them mentioned Sanskrit as part of the development
of an inner life in some way or another. As Ranjana Date put it,
I became interested in the goal of life, and how one should be happy,
and develop an internal happiness. For this, Sanskrit only is respon-
sible. I am indebted to Sanskrit for that reason. This is a road to
wealth which has been deposited for us, and it is key. By learning
Sanskrit, one can plunge into a sagar (ocean), and the more you
go deeply in, the more gems you might find. There is a subhashita
(auspicious saying): ‘When you have good learning, why there is
worry to fill your small stomach?’
In a number of these women’s responses, Sanskrit came to symbolize domes-

tic life, Hindu householdership, inner development, and puja in the home
and with the family.
Yet, in addition to the emphasis on domesticity and the inner life, many of
these same women also reported that Sanskrit verses – sometimes even the
same verses – created a mood of seriousness and respect when publically
recited out of the home. One, Mrs. Asha Gurjar, actually reported that her
father did not allow her to recite the Gita because it seemed ‘too big’ for her,
but over time she began to experience it as ‘smaller’, and eventually learned
how to recite it publically. Mrs. Menakshi Kodnikar also connected the work
of the stripurohits or women priests, with the work of women Sanskritists:
There are large number of women priests now – and they want to do
service, to be of service like we do. And so whatever branch of know-
ledge they know, they perform this service for the family line. Many
women, they don’t take a degree. They teach more in the household,
and they perform service for the householders – Shrisukta and things
like that. And there are many ladies now doing this. Ladies also teach
puja-vidhi – the rules about worship.
There is much more to say about the role of Sanskrit in negotiating family
roles, but suffice it to say here that the role of Sanskrit in Hindu family life
was crucial for these women, and articulated as such.
Most significantly for our purposes, in postcolonial India, the public role
of Sanskrit was also Hindu. Sanskrit plays a role in bulwarking the cultural
scene at home while Brahmin men forsake their previous Sanskritic calling
to work in the minefields of technology. A large portion of the women
interviewed – fifty-nine out of eighty – spoke about the protection and culti-
vation of Sanskrit as stridharma – the duty of women. These women do
so because the men must compete in the global economy, and need higher
87
salaries than the field of Sanskrit can provide, either in the ritual sphere or in
the university. ‘Women must take up this work’, said one woman; ‘we have
the ability now and the men do not because they are busy in other fields –
fields which are necessary if India is to become the leading country it prom-
ises to be in the world’.
This idea of protecting Sanskrit when the men cannot was a sentiment
expressed in many different ways – in stories about brothers who would have
taken up Sanskrit but could not, stories about the new ways in which women
are now taking a part of the public recitation contests, and so on. (And just
to pause briefly to correct a western stereotype: this public participation does
not mean that they are all right wing extremists; indeed, the majority of
them, when the subject came up [and it did often], were quite mild, even
critical, of the right wing in their political views.)
Such a view is a particularly but not exclusively Brahmin sentiment, as the
Brahmin men are the ones who are moving into fields of science and tech-
nology most dramatically. But this leads me to my final point. In a majority
of my interviews with women under sixty-five, technology came up at least
once as a way of thinking about the relevance of Sanskrit. The largest major-
ity (all of them with two exceptions) were women under the age of thirty-five.
Either it was understood as a language compatible to computers (the articles
on Sanskrit grammar and the Boolean system were not referred to, but rather
this connection was usually stated as a kind of general cultural fact), or,
more importantly, technology was seen as the next step in the chain of learn-
ing which began with Sanskrit. Indeed, technology is now seen as part of the
parampara, part of the heritage. As one person from Lucent technologies in
Atlanta, Georgia, USA, put it to me (slightly, but not completely, tongue
in cheek) in 2003, ‘My family is Yajurvedin, and most of the Yajurvedins
go to Lucent’.
Some possibilities to think about

Sumathi Ramaswamy (1999) has shown the ways in which the postcolonial
government of India has invested a great deal in the idea of Sanskrit as
constituting the nation, and queries the fate of ancient languages in the
regime of a modern nation state, and, following Pollock (1996, 2003, 2006),
traces Sanskrit’s participation in modernity. As she writes, the Sanskrit
Commission of 1956 understands the prestige and dignity of the language to
give prestige and dignity to the nation, and create a singular identity out of
the many regional identities that existed in the new nation (1999: 373–74).
Moreover, she argues that by attaching itself to Sanskrit’s antiquity, the
nation can make up for its own lack of antiquity, glossing over its own youth
with the depth of Sanskrit (ibid.: 278–79).
My own data contribute to this beginning social history of Sanskrit
by moving beyond the ‘official narratives’ and showing the ways in which
88
Sanskrit was experienced and learned personally by women of different gen-

erations. What this comparison between generations suggests, then, is a way
in which Sanskrit constituted a form of exchange which only became ‘reli-
gious’ as such in postcolonial realities. For the senior women in the Freedom
Movement, it was a language (not necessarily the language) in which Indians
could assert an independent identity. It was clearly not just the Gita that took
on this role, an observation that has often been made, but also a whole realm
of other texts, and indeed, the entirety of the language itself.
Let me be very clear here: am I saying that Sanskrit was not understood as
a Hindu language in colonial India? Of course not. Sanskrit was always part
and parcel of Hindu identity, and colonial debates about Hindu identity.
That is a truism which we all can accept. What I am saying is that, at the
swansong of colonial India, Sanskrit was for these women also something
more: part of a general technology of cultural exchange when the power
balance between India and the British Empire was permanently shifting.
In later years, Sanskrit has become caught up with the colonial legacy of
the university system, but no longer as a medium of cultural exchange. While
it might function as a form of internal cultural empowerment now, it is com-
puter technology and biology and medicine which form the new technologies
of cultural exchange. And intriguingly, for women working and teaching in
the field today, Sanskrit has become identified as a ‘religious’ language as
such. My data suggests that, for these women, Sanskrit became more of an
explicitly religious, ‘Hindu’ language when its efficacy as a form of resistance
and global empowerment was replaced by the information technologies of
the neo-liberal economy. In postcolonial India, Sanskrit is of course under-
stood as a powerful ally to these technologies, and akin to it in many ways.
But people are voting with their feet, and their feet are not moving into the
Sanskrit classrooms.
It might be worth thinking here of Sanskrit in this study in terms of
Foucault’s understanding of two forms of resistance, as elaborated upon by
Kevin Thompson (2003). In the Freedom Movement, Sanskrit functioned
as a kind of ‘tactical reversal’, where ‘a specific configuration of power and
knowledge can be thwarted by reversing the mechanisms whereby this rela-
tion is sustained’ (ibid.: 113). In these women’s memories, Sanskrit was a
reversal of the colonial mode of living, and it found a place in the sites of
resistance – salons, maidan, rallies, secret routes across cities.
For the women in the later period, when a form of nation-building apart
from the West was paramount, Sanskrit participates in the ‘aesthetics of
existence’, a governmental model of power that holds that it is possible ‘to
forge autonomous forms of life in and through such forms of governance’
(ibid.). For the middle aged women, Sanskrit is a form of ‘craft’ that ‘can
shape a new form of existence’ (ibid.: 125). And such existence is separate
from that western power which governs it in the larger economic system. It
should be clear that this form of imagination about Sanskrit is, however,
89
most attentive to power relations within the globe, and less attentive to the
power relations that Sanskrit itself might perpetuate.
I don’t know how generalizable these findings are, but they suggest some-
thing important about the way in which ‘religious’ identities and linguistic
identities intersect in India. Apart from their lessons about gender (see Patton
2002, 2007), these findings have taught me that colonial and postcolonial con-
structions of religion have everything to do with linguistic formation and tech-
nological efficacy – what communicative technology ‘counts’ in resistance, and
what technology ‘counts’ for the new, and later newly liberalized, nation.
Notes
1 See personal communication, V.L. Manjul and Devi Tai, Upasani Kanya Kunari
Sthan, August 2004. Also see V.L. Manjul (1997; 2003); Damle (1997); as well as the
newspaper articles ‘Maidens mastering man’s mantra-Veda’ in the Sunday Herald
Spectrum; and ‘Starting Vedic studies’ in Hinduism Today.
2 R.N. Dandekar himself was always interested in cultural variations and local
transmutations of Sanskrit practices. In a personal conversation (1997) he told me
that he was sad that the ‘village’ Sanskritists were fewer and fewer these days,
because they provided the most interesting studies of ‘Sanskrit dialect’.
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91
Part II
THEORETICAL
REFLECTIONS
6
COLONIALISM, HINDUISM AND
THE DISCOURSE OF RELIGION
Richard King
Introduction
In the 2008 Hollywood blockbuster movie Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of
the Crystal Skull, our hero – the dashing and brilliant professor of archae-
ology Indiana Jones – responds to an academic colleague who proudly cites
physicist Robert Oppenheimer’s famous comments upon the detonation of
the first atomic bomb, ‘I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’, by
explaining that the words are not in fact his but are from ‘the Hindu Bible’
(by which he means of course the Bhagavad Gita – verse 11.32). This cine-
matic moment captures the central problem of the representation of Hindu
traditions in the modern world – namely the prevailing Christocentrism of
contemporary discourses of religion. This is no more clear than in the debate
about the category of ‘Hinduism’ itself.
In the following chapter I will outline my argument with regard to the
question of ‘are there native religions in India’? and ‘is “Hinduism” a colo-
nial construction?’ in the form of six paragraphs (in bold), which I will then
endeavour to unpack in greater detail in the narrative below each point.
(1) The extent to which Eurocentric epistemologies and categories impose
limits on contemporary thought is so obvious that it is either invisible or,
when pointed out, dismissed as inevitable (‘yeah, yeah, but that’s in the past,
let’s move on’). Either way, powerful ideologies, inequalities and entrenched
geopolitical structures are naturalized and rendered normative – the ‘gospel
of no alternatives’ rests on a bedrock of 500 years of European colonial rule.
By representing colonialism narrowly as a political and economic phenom-
enon its long-lasting epistemological power is occluded (that is, its ability to
transform minds and institutions long after formal colonial rule has ended).
The systematic occlusion of the epistemological power of colonialism makes
possible the claim that we now live in a post-colonial age.
Colonialism colonizes minds in addition to bodies and it releases

forces within the colonized societies to alter their cultural priorities
once and for all. In the process it helps to generalize the concept of
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RICHARD KING
the modern West from a geographical and temporary entity to a

psychological category. The West is now everywhere, within the West
and outside; in structures and in minds.
(Nandy 1983: vii)
October 11th, 1992 brings to an end the 500th year of the Old World
Order, sometimes called the Colombian era of world history, or
the Vasco da Gama era, depending on which adventurers bent on
plunder got there first . . . The major theme of this Old World Order
was a confrontation between the conquerors and the conquered on
a global scale. It has taken various forms, and been given different
names: imperialism, neocolonialism, the North-South conflict, core
versus periphery, G-7 (the seven leading state capitalist industrial
societies) and their satellites versus the rest. Or, more simply, Europe’s
conquest of the world.
(Chomsky 1993: 3)
What year is this? I ask this question not because I have a very poor memory
but rather because I want to draw attention to what has otherwise become
inherited ‘common sense’. The year is 2008, once called Anno Domini (‘in the
year of our Lord’) but now often more euphemistically referred to as CE – The
Common Era. One hardly need dwell upon the historical reasons why this has
become the common temporal narration for most people on the planet, but
sometimes it can be effective to state the obvious – that such periodization
and its naturalization reflects the ongoing hegemony of a broadly Christo-
centric account of human history. One might counter this by suggesting that
the year is actually 2551 BE (Buddhist Era), or the Islamic Year 1429 A.H.
(Latin: Anno Hegirae – in the year of Hijra) or perhaps even the Hindu year
5109 (dated by some from the beginning of the Kali Yuga in 3102 ), but
this will hardly get us very far because, as we all know, these examples are
provincial, culturally specific narrations of history and for that reason are
unlikely to gain global acceptance. This should give us pause for thought as
to what counts as ‘universal’ and what counts as ‘provincial’ and why.
Following Chomsky’s lead, the year 2008 Anno Domini, I suggest, could
be creatively re-narrated as the year 516 Anno Dominati (‘in the Year of
Our Domination’) in recognition of the pivotal global significance of the
year 1492 as the beginning of the period of European colonial domination
that has so dramatically reconfigured not only the geopolitical map of the
world but also impacted upon the cognitive mapping of worldviews amongst
European and non-European peoples alike.
The five centuries of European (now ‘Euro-American’) domination (which,
may or may not be in the process of unravelling – it is perhaps too early to
say for sure) has had an unprecedented impact on non-European civiliza-
tions and their ability to narrate alternatives to hegemonic and universalist
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COLONIALISM, HINDUISM AND RELIGION
histories that continue to place Europe at the centre of modernity (as

noted by Dipesh Chakrabarty 2007). One of the key categories (perhaps,
as Daniel Dubuisson [2003] has argued, the key category) in narrating a
Eurocentric vision of the world has been the category of ‘religion’. It is
through this category, I would suggest, that Christian – and now post-
Christian secularist – histories of the world have been and continue to be
narrated. What follows are a series of very brief and condensed points
designed to unpack (very roughly) this point.
The category of ‘religion’, colonialism and the spread of

Western worldviews
The category of ‘religion’ is a social construction, forged in a specifically
Christian and post-Christian (‘Enlightenment’) European context. Its expor-
tation during a period of European colonialism and of western military
and political expansionism in general has had a profound impact upon the
ways in which Indian traditions have come to be understood in the modern
period. By describing the category of ‘religion’ as a social construction I
wish to make two points. First, that the category and its associated tropes
and assumptions reflect an already cultured interpretation of the world.
As Jonathan Z. Smith noted back in 1981 in his book Imagining Religion,
‘religion’ is not a pre-existing ‘datum’ in the world waiting to be discovered,
but is rather a category of the imagination – a way of ordering human cul-
tural experience. Second, because ‘religion’ for most of its history has been a
central category (perhaps the central category) of only one particular geo-
political region (tentatively labelled ‘the European West’), it represents the
product of a specifically Euro-American cultural experience of the world. As
such, ‘religion’ should not be treated as if it were a simple cultural universal,
or as corresponding unproblematically to some pre-existing and universal
feature of reality beyond specific human interpretations and classifications
of the world. Moreover, contemporary public understandings of ‘religion’
remain conditioned by a long and well-entrenched history of Christian and
(post-Christian) secularist assumptions about reality that most Europeans
and Americans simply take for granted as normative and universal features
of the world and human cultural experience in general.
Although the category of ‘religion’ has a long and varied history in Europe
it has been fundamentally moulded by two overarching and universalist
worldviews – firstly western Christianity (which predisposes us to think of
‘religion’ as a phenomenon characterized by faith, belief, adherence to a
creed, and to one of a number of variant forms of mono-/poly-/pan-theisms)
and more recently the European ‘Enlightenment’ leading to the birth of secu-
lar humanism and the modern nation-state (an episteme that predisposes us
to think that ‘religion’ is somehow associated with violence, intolerance, fun-
damentalism and division). Careful attention to the history of non-western
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RICHARD KING
civilizations demonstrates that these assumptions are not only problematic

but also distort our attempts to understand the history of non-western
civilizations. In a very real sense then, dominant construals of ‘the religious’
and its strict separation from a realm known as ‘the secular’ reflects a post-
Christian and post-Enlightenment view of the world. Deployment of this
category therefore remains significantly framed by a Eurocentric account of
the world.
In terms of the universalized discourse of ‘religion’, it is during the late
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that western scholars and commentators
began to coin a number of neologisms to denote the newly discovered ‘reli-
gions’ of Asia: in particular ‘Hinduism’ (a term apparently first used by the
British evangelical Baptist Charles Grant in the 1770s and subsequently
adopted by Hindu reformers like Rammohan Roy), ‘Buddhism’ (1820s),
and ‘Taoism’ (1820s). As western accounts of Asian traditions benefitted
from their relatively easy circulation across colonial networks of power
they became increasingly valorized in terms of the emerging global political
system – a system dominated by western nations and based upon the
Westphalian model of the secular nation-state. The ‘religion vs. secular’
division of society came to function as the dominant template through
which colonized and semi-colonized Asian countries sought entrance to
‘modernity’ – that is to gain recognition as civilized and sovereign nation
states in a context of military, economic and political encroachment into
their regions by western powers. Thus, in the late nineteenth and early twen-
tieth century we see the rise of a variety of new ‘reformist’ and ‘modernizing’
agendas in various Asian countries, exemplified by the Meiji regime in Japan
(1868–1912), the establishment of the Republic of China (1912–49) and
trends such as the late nineteenth-century ‘Bengali Renaissance’ in India,
which sought, in their own ways, to respond to a western-driven conception of
modernity. These ‘reformist’ trends sought to organize and reform indigen-
ous traditions and polities in response to such demands. Thus, in the late
nineteenth century new terms were coined such as the words ‘shukyo’
and ‘tetsugaku’ in Japan to translate foreign, western distinctions between
‘religion’ and ‘philosophy’, or well-established but multivalent concepts (such
as the Sanskritic term ‘dharma’) were adapted and translated in terms of the
western notions of ‘the religious’. In terms of the category of ‘religion’, the
result has been that what we now call ‘Buddhism’, ‘Daoism’, ‘Hinduism’
etc., actually represent aspects or residues of vast civilizations that have
been ‘downsized’, ‘homogenized’, ‘modernized’ and appropriated by new
indigenous elites in these regions who then set themselves up as ‘religious
spokesmen’ for ‘Hinduism’ or ‘Buddhism’ etc. Towards the end of the nine-
teenth century, key elite figures such as Swami Vivekananda and Anagarika
Dharmapala rose to prominence and found that their own colonially
inflected visions of ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Buddhism’ gained sufficient traction for
them to be widely considered spokesmen for their respective ‘world religion’.
98
As a result the rich and complex civilizations that these terms purport to
represent became pared down, translated and subjected to a ‘conversion to
modernity’ premised on the cultural diffusion of a broadly Eurocentric and
Christian or perhaps we might say post-Christian view of the world (van der
Veer 1995).
We should note then that the modern conceptual distinction between a
realm of life known as ‘the religious’ from another called ‘the secular’ has
not been a feature of non-western civilizations before the advent of European
colonial expansion and the eventual spread of western(ized) conceptions of
the world and of history. It does not map well onto non-European civiliza-
tions without severe distortion of their own local histories and indigenous
categories (Fitzgerald 2000, 2007; King 1999). At an epistemological level,
the story of the normalization of western conceptions of the world is an
important chapter in the larger story of the birth of the modern world and
the transformation of non-western civilizations that this influence represents.
Through European colonialism and broader western influence across Asia,
the Americas and Africa, European assumptions about ‘the religious’ were
gradually universalized. ‘Religion’ effectively became naturalized as a feature
of ‘universal history’. The category could be re-defined and re-shaped to
a degree from one context to the next (indeed, recognition of a variety of
members of the genus ‘Religion’ required this), but the concept became
established as a normative category to such an extent that it becomes
increasingly difficult to question the category as a ‘naturally’ occurring fea-
ture of all cultures. Today, we simply assume that all cultures have one or
more ‘religions’ and never ask why this ‘common-sense’ appears so obvious
to us, when it would not have appeared so self-evident to many before the
advent of European colonialism. This largely unquestioned ideology
(though contested in a variety of ways, including ongoing attempts to re-
shape the category to fit non-European contexts) became the linchpin first
of a Christian missionizing vision of the world (‘they are all heathens and
we need to convert them to the truth of the gospel’) and then of a similarly
missionizing secularist modernism (‘we must bring our “enlightened” and
secular view of the world to liberate these poor superstitious and funda-
mentalist masses from their mystifying worldviews’). In this way the diverse
histories and civilizations of the ‘rest of the world’ become reduced to a
series of footnotes to the West.
As Tomoko Masuzawa has intimated, the cultural imperialism of the
‘world religions’ paradigm is less easily recognized as such because it does
not manifest itself in explicitly Christian terms. Christianity in fact becomes
one of a number of ‘world religions’ in this reconfiguration of world history.
However, what such apparently pluralistic and multicultural accounts occlude
are the set of broadly Christian cultural assumptions that prevail as forma-
tive features of the discourse. One no longer need accept explicit allegiance
to Christianity as a specific institution or communitas since the dominant
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RICHARD KING
conceptual framework into which one is interpolated is already Christianized

in its general cultural assumptions. This of course is precisely how cultural
imperialism operates, as a largely invisible force that transforms its subjects
by setting the new framework and limits within which legitimate differences
can be played out (and managed).
Amongst the partially Anglicized Hindu intelligentsia of the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth century, the focus on Vedantic philosophy, an
inclusivistic and hierarchical monotheism and the rebranding of classic texts
like the Bhagavad Gita as ‘the Hindu Bible’, opened up the possibility of
entering the colonial discourse of ‘world religions’ and staking a claim for
‘Hinduism’ to be treated as an equal (and perhaps even in some instances
superior) tradition to Christianity at the high table of global civilizations.
Thus, the great civilizations and traditions of the world were increasingly
passed through the prism of the ‘world religions’ discourse as they moved
through colonial networks of power and their Eurocentric re-configurations
of knowledge. In so doing Asian traditions have become conceptually trans-
formed into analogues of European Christianity, which of course always
functions in such discourses (even when unmentioned) as a spectral figure
‘haunting’ the representation of other traditions by virtue of its status as the
embedded, paradigmatic example of what a ‘world religion’ is like.
Of course South Asian traditions have many important and revered texts.
The issue however is the way in which the role of these texts in such societies
becomes ‘re-coded’ during the colonial period according to a broadly
Protestant emphasis on the importance of maintaining doctrinal conformity
in relation to the teachings of these canonical texts. As Brian Malley (2004) has
argued, this focus on the cognitive (‘meaning-based’) dimensions of scripture
in Euro-American Protestantism (scripturalism) contrasts quite markedly
with their primarily ritualized functions in other traditions. Through the
spread of a broadly Protestant re-formulation of tradition along colonial
networks of exchange, Asians sought to respond to western demands that
they remain true to their own textual traditions in a way that profoundly
transformed both the institutions and practices of mediation through which
those texts were encountered.
In the case of the various Hindu traditions (increasingly subjected to
the homogenizing discourse of ‘Hinduism’) the philosophical tradition of
Vedanta – one of a number of Brahmanical philosophical schools (darshana) –
was pushed to the forefront in western orientalist accounts as the main can-
didate for a central unifying theology of Hinduism that could be compared,
contrasted and classified alongside the various Christian theologies. This
notion – that Hindu traditions could be understood in terms of a singular
and centralizing theological framework – makes no sense at all in the
highly pluralistic context of Indian intellectual history (see King 1999). By
the beginning of the twentieth century however, Vedanta had come to repre-
sent the essentialized philosophical core of Hinduism. This reconstruction
100
appealed to German idealists (such as Schopenhauer, Schlegel and Schilling),

romanticizing orientalists (such as Paul Deussen and Max Müller), as well
as to Christian polemicists eager to use Hinduism as a foil for their attacks
on the dangers of ‘pantheism’.
(2) Current historical evidence suggests that the concept of ‘Hinduism’
developed initially amongst protestant commentators before being adopted
by nineteenth century reformists such as Rammohun Roy.
In his recent book Imagined Hinduism (2006, following up on his 2003
article), Geoffrey Oddie established that the earliest known use of the term
‘Hindoo-ism’ was not in fact its adoption in the early nineteenth century
by the Hindu reformer Rammohan Roy in 1816 (as I, following the work
of Dermot Killingley had suggested in King 1999) but rather in the personal
correspondence of Charles Grant, an evangelical Christian, commercial agent
and later Director of the East India Company. Although Grant first uses the
term in a letter dated September 1787, Oddie points out that ‘Grant seems
to have assumed that an England-based recipient of his letter would already
understand the meaning of the word’ (2006: 71). Similarly, William Ward
was already using the term in his diary in 1801 (see Oddie 2003: 156–57;
2006: 70–72, 170–71). Thus, Oddie notes that Europeans employed the
term ‘Hinduism’ at least twenty-nine years before Rammohan Roy used it in
1816. Furthermore, he contends, evidence that Hindu reformer Rammohan
Roy met Yates (a Serampore missionary) in 1815 and visited Serampore in
the following year leaves open the possibility that he borrowed the term
‘Hinduism’ from the Baptist missionaries. Oddie’s analysis also demonstrates
that there remained an ongoing debate within Protestant circles over the
question of the unitary or plural nature of Hinduism as a phenomenon, despite
the emergence of a dominant paradigm (represented by Ward and Carey)
which emphasized the links between ‘Brahmanism’ and ‘Hinduism’ and a
unitary model, based strongly on the paradigmatic example of (European)
Christianity as the supreme religion and yardstick for all comparative analy-
sis. Lorenzen (2007) has also pointed out that within Catholic missionary
circles a similar debate about the unity or plurality of Hindu traditions also
unfolded. This no doubt reflects the fact that Christian commentators were
continually confronted by evidence that challenged their assumptions about
the nature of ‘religion’ and their search for a unitary basis for the postulation
of ‘Hinduism’ as ‘the religion of the Indian people’.
(3) The category of ‘Hinduism’ emerged in the colonial encounter and was
fundamentally moulded according to western/orientalist/Protestant assump-
tions about religion, but it is not a mere western invention.
In recent years there has been an explosion of (mostly) western scholarly
debate focusing upon the status of the term ‘Hinduism’ and the issue of its
historical provenance. Emphasis upon the emergence of this term in a colonial
context has precipitated a number of works that have sought to pinpoint when
talk of ‘Hinduism’ as a unified religious tradition began to emerge and the
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RICHARD KING
extent to which this notion can usefully be read back into a pre-modern/
pre-colonial India. In the 1990s a number of scholars (e.g. Frykenberg 1991;
King 1999; von Stietencron 1989, 1995) argued that an indigenous sense of
‘Hinduism’ as a unified religious tradition arose in the specific context of the
colonial encounter between European missionaries and orientalists (armed
with their own presuppositions about the nature of ‘religion’) and indigenous
Indian figures, most notably key members of the Brahmanical and pundit
communities. The popularized (if misguided) version of this thesis has dis-
seminated more widely as the ‘Hinduism is a western invention’ thesis.
When stated in this popularized fashion rather than interrogated, however,
such a view reflects an insufficiently nuanced understanding of the complex
colonial dynamic out of which ‘modern Hindu consciousness’ has emerged.
This popularized position has in turn come under increasing contestation
by scholars (notably David Lorenzen and most recently Brian Pennington)
who have argued that there was in fact a developed sense of Hindu religious
identity that preceded the introduction of Christian missionary and orientalist
influences from Europe. These important contributions require more attention
than I can pay to them in this context but I will nevertheless make some brief
remarks about them.
While it seems likely that the impact of the rise of Islam on the subcontinent
precipitated an awareness that ‘indigenous’ ‘Hindu’ communal identities,
beliefs and practices differed in significant ways from Islamic ones, this is not
the same as saying that ‘Hindu’ was universally understood in such a con-
trastive or ‘hermetically sealed’ manner in the pre-colonial period (indeed the
evidence suggests not), nor need such developments imply that differences
were coded according to a concept of ‘the religious’ (moreover, which concept
of ‘the religious’ would we be talking about here as the term is not uniformly
applied even in European discussions in the period 1200–1800 ). Finally,
it is not clear to me that one is avoiding anachronism when one speaks of
‘Hinduism’ as a unified religious tradition during this period. Nevertheless,
the impact of Islam and the long rise to prominence (in particular) of
Vaishnava monotheistic trends in parts of India from the thirteenth to eight-
eenth century may well have contributed to creating the conditions for a
greater receptivity to the notion of a unified ‘Hindu’ tradition in the pre-
colonial period. The catalyst for this modern development, however, I would
suggest, remains the colonial encounter with European rule and the assump-
tions that the European colonizers brought to the table about Indian society
and ‘religion’ – assumptions that derive from their own local histories and
not from India.
This is not (to restate my position) to argue that Hinduism is a western
colonial invention but rather to point out that the modern notion of
‘Hinduism’ was framed initially by European observers of Indian cultural
traditions and emerged out of the colonial encounter between Indians and
Europeans (particularly the British). Recognition of the disparity of power
102
relations precipitated by British colonial rule is not the same as suggesting

that the British simply imposed their ideas about religion onto a largely
passive native population.
Scholars of South Asian traditions have long been aware of issues related
to the use of the term ‘Hinduism’. Much of the work exploring the colonial
emergence of the concept of ‘Hinduism’ in the 1990s attempted to highlight
the role of orientalist influences rather than deny indigenous agency. Although
a number of scholars have emphasized the role of western colonial presup-
positions in the development of modern notions of ‘Hinduism’ (e.g. Vasudha
Dalmia, Robert Frykenberg, Richard King, Romila Thapar, and Heinrich von
Stietencron), none, to my knowledge, have argued that ‘Hinduism’ is merely
a western colonial imposition upon a largely passive indigenous population.
Indeed, the role of indigenous agents in the construction of such categories
is a key element of post-Saidian postcolonial scholarship. It would be more
accurate, then, to characterize the ‘constructionists’ (as scholars advocating
such positions have been labelled) as holding the view that the modern con-
cept of ‘Hinduism’ is the product of a complex colonial encounter between
elite Hindu groups and western administrative, orientalist, and missionary
influences. Nevertheless, because such scholarship has often been popular-
ized as the ‘Hinduism is a western orientalist invention’ sound bite, it has
become necessary to restate the more nuanced position taken by most of the
scholars writing on this topic, most if not all of whom highlight the role of
indigenous elites in the emergence of ‘Hinduism’ as a modern, largely taken-
for-granted category.
(4) The deconstruction of the myth of unity/homogeneity associated
with the category of ‘Hinduism’ should not be taken in isolation from the
wider critique of the discourse of ‘religion’ and ‘world-religions’. Saying
that, historically, Hindu traditions do not represent a primordial, singular
and bounded ‘religion’ in western Christian (and post-Christian secularist)
terms, is a challenge to the Euro-Christocentric assumptions embedded in
the universalized discourse of ‘religion’ and ‘world religions’. It should not
be read as a denigration or demotion of Indic civilizational forms on the
global stage.
Anxiety about the historical usefulness of the term ‘Hinduism’ as indica-
tor of a unified religious tradition stretching back into history should not
be divorced from the wider debate concerning the category of ‘religion’
itself. Some works (including my own) have sought to link the debate about
‘Hinduism’ to a wider critique of the ‘world religions’ discourse in which
such categories are so readily deployed (see Fitzgerald 2000, 2007; King 1999;
Masuzawa 2005). The importance of this linkage for understanding what is
being argued for in such contexts cannot be underestimated.
In his recent book Was Hinduism Invented? Brian Pennington has expressed
concern that theories arguing ‘that religion is a meaningless category and
Hinduism a bungled western construct best dispensed with effectively
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RICHARD KING
undercut the geopolitical claims of some Hindus to be taken seriously after

centuries of stereotyping, misrepresentation and demonizing by the Chris-
tian West’ (2005: 179).
This is indeed how the deconstruction of the modern category of ‘Hinduism’
will be understood if it is not read alongside the more general theoretical
challenge to categories such as ‘religion’ and ‘world religions’. This broader
critique goes to the heart of the construction of homogeneity and the
authority to speak – and relates to all traditions that come to be classified
as ‘religions’ in the modern world. Hinduism in this context is a key example
but hardly a special case and so should not be treated as if it is being denied
a putative identity that the other ‘world religions’ are (mistakenly) taken
to possess.1 ‘Christianity’ is similarly a network of a variety of disparate
trends and movements. There is no ‘essential Christianity’ uniting all Christian
movements and trends across time and space. Christianity then, like
Hinduism, is an ‘imagined community’. A key difference however is that
historically Christian movements, unlike most Indic traditions in the pre-
colonial period at least, have generally sought to define their tradition in
strongly unitary, ‘bounded’ and ‘centripetal’2 terms, grounded in a self-
identity linked to adherence to common creeds, scriptures, an exclusivist
monotheism (‘you are either with us or against us’) and a singular ecclesi-
astical authority and/or apostolic tradition. The category ‘Hinduism’ I
would suggest, particularly when discussed within a universalized discourse
of ‘world religions’ (which is always the larger context in which it is being
deployed, even if not explicitly stated as such) predisposes us to see the his-
tory of Indian civilization according to a Euro-Christocentric template. As
Tomoko Masuzawa (2005) has recently argued, the discourse of ‘world reli-
gions’, whilst appearing on the surface to represent a liberal and pluralistic
improvement on the older nineteenth century discourse of Christian
superiority, continues to perpetuate an underlying Eurocentric logic that
frames the ‘rest of the world’ as little more than ersatz versions of European
civilization – variations on a single theme. This has been the main con-
sequence of the universalization of the category of religion across disparate
geographical, temporal, ethnic and civilizational zones, namely the estab-
lishment of a paradigmatic template for writing ‘universal history’, framed
by the categories, experiences and local histories of white Europeans.
(5) The language of ‘religion’ and the ‘world religions’ represents the
universalization of a narration of world history that reflects dominant occi-
dental (by which I mean ‘European’ and ‘New World-centred’) accounts
of history. The translation of non-western civilizations in terms of a binary
opposition between ‘religion’ and ‘the secular’ results in a distortion of their
own histories and a transformation of their (‘colonial/post-colonial’) pres-
ent. In the (formal) colonial era such translation, whilst always uneven and
resistant to closure, became the necessary step in any society’s ‘conversion
to modernity’.
104
Through the idea of religion, the West continuously speaks of itself

to itself, even when it speaks of others. For when it does so, it is
implicitly in relation to the perfected model that it thinks itself to be.
This is narcissistic objectification.
(Dubuisson 2003: 95 [French original 1998])
[T]he world today speaks Latin (most often via Anglo-American)

when it authorizes itself in the name of religion.
(Derrida, in Anidjar (ed.) 2002: 64)
Looking back at the specifics of British colonial rule and the emergence
of the concept of ‘Hinduism’, I would suggest that the dominant Anglo-
Protestant conception of religion that was at play in the British colonial
encounter with Indian traditions (and which continues to inform public dis-
course about ‘religion’) involved a strong emphasis upon the following six
basic and inter-related assumptions:
(1) The root assumption – the universality of religion as a distinct domain

of human societies: that all societies have one or more ‘religions’ – which
constitute particular instances of a universal genus to which they belong –
‘Religion’ – and which can be clearly distinguished from other cultural
phenomena such as ‘science’, ‘politics’, ‘economics’ etc.
(2) The creedal emphasis (as in ‘the world faiths’): that religions (especially
the so-called ‘higher religions’, or what became known later as the ‘world
religions’) are primarily to be understood as systems of ‘beliefs’ involving
‘faith in’ or ‘assent to’ a set of specific truth-claims that all members of the
community are expected to adopt.
(3) Scripturalism: that each (‘world’) religion is fundamentally grounded in

‘scripture’ and a closed canon, and that such texts – treated primarily in
terms of their cognitive meaning rather than as ritual artefacts – constitute
the primary authoritative yardstick by which the beliefs and practices of
each tradition are to be evaluated.
(4) Discreteness: that ‘religions’ by definition are (or at least should be) dis-
crete entities. Any evidence of ‘border-crossing’ or an ‘inappropriate’ mixture
of such ‘pure’ essences is evidence of contamination and ‘syncretism’.
(5) The primacy of pure origins (mirrored in an Indian Brahmanical context

by the belief that we are living in Kali Yuga): that religions that do not
display the above characteristics are either primitive and underdeveloped or
have devolved from a prior state of purity to which they should be encour-
aged to return – usually through a process of reform designed to divest them
105
RICHARD KING
of adventitious features, superstitious accretions and foreign elements, and

finally,
(6) Centripetalism: that religious identities exhibit a profoundly centripetal

dynamic that seeks to overcome difference and plurality and unify all mem-
bers of the group under a common rubric.
This sixth assumption plays itself out in terms of two main ideological
constituencies:
(6a) Exclusivism: that religions (as discrete entities – see (4)) are naturally in
conflict with each other, grounded as they are in their own specific (absolutist)
and competing truth claims, or
(6b) Inclusivism: that religions have an underlying commonality – all reli-

gions actually say the same thing at their core. Both of these positions have
been well represented in public discourse about ‘Hinduism’ and the other
‘world religions’ but what they share is the postulation of an essentialized
identity at the root of each of the various ‘-isms’. In other words they
presuppose the kind of ‘centripetalism’ that I would argue is embedded in
the dominant discourse of ‘world religions’.
It is not that these paradigmatic assumptions remained unchallenged in
the minds and works of western administrators, orientalists, missionaries
and especially Hindu agents in late colonial India. Far from it. Rather, my
point is that these remained for the most part the core assumptions embedded
in the dominant colonialist and Anglophone understanding of global history
and the place of ‘religion’ within it. They constitute the default position from
which one starts, and from which specific authors and thinkers might
occasionally dissent but without ever successfully subverting the basic
frame.3 I would contend, however, that there is much in the history of Indian
civilization that presents a rather different model of social interaction and
organization, one that frequently challenges all six of these core assump-
tions. The story of the translation of these assumptions into vernacular
idioms and subjectivities and their naturalization (though again, neither
universally, nor evenly) is a case study of the cognitive imperialism embedded
in mainstream accounts of ‘the birth of modernity’ and is a product of the
last five hundred years of (unequal) Indo-European relations.
Challenging centripetal accounts of Hindu traditions

(6) The history of the Indian Sub-continent offers one of a number of civili-
zational alternatives to Eurocentric models that challenge, in various ways,
the six assumptions outlined above.
In response to work such as my own 1999 book Orientalism and Religion,
Gauri Viswanathan has offered an important methodological warning to
106
those so keen to deprive Hinduism of its unity as a ‘religion’. She remarks

that:
The notion that modern Hinduism represents a false unity imposed

on diverse traditions replays a western fascination with – and repul-
sion from – Indian polytheism. In this enduring perception, the exist-
ence of many gods must surely indicate they were the basis of many
smaller religions and therefore to describe them under the rubric of
‘Hinduism’ as if they constituted a single religious system must be
false, a distortion of heterogeneous religious practices. The reluctance
of many scholars to call Hinduism a religion because it incorporates
many disparate practices suggests that the Judeo-Christian system
remains the main reference point for defining religions.
(Viswanathan 2003: 28)
This is an important point requiring careful consideration. Nevertheless, see-

ing Indian civilization as a complex network of movements will only be seen
as negative if one continues to privilege mono-centric and centripetal models
of identity as the superior mode of cultural organization. Why must civiliza-
tions be seen as centripetally organized in terms of unitary identity-relations
to be accorded cultural respect? How might one move to portray non-
western civilizational traditions in the public sphere in a way that resists the
framing of discussions about ‘Hinduism’ in terms of the binary logic of its
‘sameness or difference’ in relation to Christianity (or say, Islam)?
Viswanathan’s criticisms, however, bring out something that remained
implicit in my ‘deconstruction’ of ‘Hinduism’ in Orientalism and Religion,
but which has only become clearer to me over time as requiring more explicit
exposition, namely the more positive or ‘constructive’ dimension of my
thesis, namely that the link between a prevailing mono-(theistic/atheistic)
centripetal logic within dominant strands of European civilization and a
strong emphasis on one’s own particularity and bounded unity as a group
distorts our attempts to understand pre-existing indigenous models of char-
acterizing identity-relations in pre-colonial India.
I would contend that a centripetal mono-logic of this kind, with its concern
to maintain homogeneity and a non-porous and bounded, unitary identity in
the face of ‘the other’ (whether labelled heterodox, pagan, heathen, or ‘other
world religion’) has not been the dominant model in operation in Indic
identity-formation. This is not to say that Indic movements have had no
interest in constructing an identity in opposition to ‘others’ (mlecchas; varna-
jåti; brahmanic-ßråmanic classifications etc.), but rather that the lack of a
single dominant ecclesiastical institution (such as the Church) within Indian
society resulted in models that took accommodation, plurality and a certain
degree of interactive boundary-porousness (what in the West has often been
pejoratively labelled ‘syncretism’) as normative. Rejecting the centripetal
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RICHARD KING
model embedded in dominant western assumptions about ‘religion’ when

speaking of an Indian context does not entail the representation of Indian
traditions as ‘chaotic, undifferentiated collections of religious beliefs and
practices’ (Lorenzen 2007: 204), unless one is unwilling to think beyond the
kind of (false) binary opposition through which mono-logical systems of
representation operate – where ‘unitary’ and ‘chaotic and undifferentiated’
become the only possible conceptual options.
There is of course no singular model at work in Indic civilization for mak-
ing sense of group identities and collective imaginaries. This, in my view,
is one of the reasons why India is such an important long-term cultural
experiment to draw upon. I should also make it clear that I am not arguing
that the history of Indian civilization and its major traditions is one of over-
arching tolerant inclusivism (read: good) to be positively contrasted with an
intolerant and exclusivistic Christian West (read: bad) as Vivekånanda did so
eloquently (but in my view problematically) when he posited Hinduism as the
‘home of spirituality’. Nor should we assume that because Indian traditions
have not foregrounded a centripetal identity that ‘Hinduism’ is thereby ‘cen-
trifugal’. This too would play into the kind of binary polarization that I
believe we should be seeking to displace. Perhaps more appropriately, we
might follow Julius Lipner (1996) in characterizing Indian tradition as poly-
centric. My point is merely that the Indian sub-continent is NOT Europe by
another name and has in fact been one of the most remarkable long-term
cultural experiments in diversity that we still barely understand in and on its
own terms. Vivekånanda’s inclusivist claims about ‘Hinduism’, I would sug-
gest, carry much of their cultural and rhetorical power not just because he
so cleverly inverted prevailing orientalist narratives about ‘Indian religiosity’,
but also because he was indeed tapping into the deep cultural reservoir of
indigenous self-representations on the sub-continent that have not defined
themselves in terms of either an exclusivistic mono-theism or an exclusivistic
a-theism, and which have not grounded their claims in a one-dimensional
account of truth as singular and context-independent.
The long history that one is attempting to speak about when speaking
of ‘Indian civilization’ is so rich and complex that any generalized character-
ization runs the risk of rendering highly variegated and complex historical
processes in an overly abstract, essentialized and ahistorical manner. The
situation is rendered more complicated by the awareness that there does seem
to have been a movement towards greater centripetal identity-formation
amongst Indian traditions in the period after the rise of Islam in India and
also with the rise to prominence of certain forms of bhakti-oriented mono-
theisms from around the thirteenth century onwards. These trends, analyzed
so cogently by scholars such as David Lorenzen, were further bolstered
by the political and economic unification of India as a nation-state under
British colonial rule and the rise of an indigenous nationalist consciousness
that was so crucial to the overthrow of that rule.
108
The challenge of representing Hindu traditions in a public sphere satur-

ated by Christian and post-Christian conceptions of ‘religion’ can be seen for
instance in the dialectical movement between representations of ‘Hinduism’
that focus to varying degrees on its monotheistic or polytheistic aspects. As
we all know, historically speaking Hindu traditions have been one or other,
most often both, occasionally neither. Since the late colonial period however
‘high-culture’ emphasis on the unitary nature of ‘Hinduism’ in the public
realm has generally been premised on a broadly Neo-Vedantic hierarchical
inclusivism that has tended to frame polytheistic trends as subordinate to
an underlying centripetal unity.
As Prema Kurien (2007: 155–57, 197–98) notes in her recent book A Place
at the Multicultural Table. The Development of an American Hinduism, in a
post-9/11 context many modern Indians have shown an increased receptivity
to emphasizing the polytheistic aspects of their tradition as a way of con-
trasting ‘Hinduism’ (and ‘Indic traditions’ in general) from what are often
called ‘the Abrahamic traditions’. Three of the most vocal diasporic repre-
sentatives of this trend have been Arvind Sharma, professor of Hindu Studies
at McGill University, Professor S.N. Balagangadhara of Ghent University
and the computer/telecom entrepreneur and philanthropist Rajiv Malhotra
(founder of the Infinity Foundation).
This growing trend of focusing upon ‘Indic’ (as opposed to ‘Indian’) tradi-
tions can all too easily slip into a stereotyping and essentialization of cultures,
a fear of boundary-crossing or ‘cultural miscegenation’ and a fetishization
of origins – three of the features I have already highlighted as embedded in
the dominant western discourse of religion. Thus, Islam, Christianity, Judaism
and Zoroastrianism may have existed as traditions in India for centuries but
they are not considered ‘Indic’ because they originated and developed in
West Asia rather than in the Indian subcontinent. This broad classification
makes it much easier to make the ideological claim that ‘the Abrahamic
traditions’ are in fact ‘foreign’ to India. Of course on these terms one might
similarly argue that Christianity remains a foreign import to Britain and
America. Where does one draw the line? Islam has had a significant presence
in India and developed its own local and indigenized sensibilities for the best
part of a millennium – at what point will it be deemed indigenous?4
The strategy of distinguishing ‘Hinduism’ from ‘the Abrahamic traditions’
(particularly in a post-partition and post-9/11 context – the re-emergence of
Islam as a key counterpoint) is at the same time an instance of anti-colonial
resistance to dominant Christocentric conceptions of religion as well as a
perpetuation of many of its standard tropes and underlying assumptions. I
am reminded here of the famous Zen story where a master and his pupil
encounter a young woman seeking help in crossing a river. The master car-
ries the woman across the river in his arms and then continues on his walk
with his student. After a period of silence the student reminds the master of
the monastic prohibition against physical contact with women and asks why
109
RICHARD KING
he broke the precept. The Master replies, ‘I left the young woman by the side
of the river, but it seems that you are still carrying her with you’.
Similarly, the post-colonial challenge in articulating a ‘public Hinduness’
in the twenty-first century for both scholars and members of the Hindu
community is to develop new conceptual tools for representing the diversity
and distinctiveness of Indian culture, moving beyond a conception of Indian
civilization that remains just a little too culturally determined by Christian
and post-Christian conceptions of the world. The danger in such an
endeavour of course is that such strategies can (and sometimes do) morph
into a kind of reactionary indigenism that replicates many of the essentialist
and separatist features of the discourse it is seeking to displace.
The modern story of the rise of ‘Hinduism’ as a category seems to be a
story about the ways in which Indic civilization in its complexity and rich
diversity has become recoded and re-framed in a colonially framed modern-
ity according to a hegemonic, Euro-centred (mono-)logic – resulting in the
birth of ‘Hinduism’ (and other ‘-isms’ such as ‘Daoism’, ‘Confucianism’ and
‘Buddhism’) as ‘world religions’ and the partial occlusion (partial because
historical layers of Indic civilization continue to reassert themselves and
brush up against colonial epistemologies) of the polycentric nature of Indic
identity-formation. In my view we have yet to be able to develop appropriate
non-binary (dare I say: non-dualistic?) models to capture this polycentrism,
with the debate about ‘Hinduism’ remaining largely caught up in a binary
logic of ‘sameness (unity) vs. difference (fragmentation)’ that fails to capture
something significant about the relational-identities of Indic civilization.
One obvious way to explore such possibilities is to engage constructively with
indigenous Indian epistemologies and theories themselves, particularly those
that pre-existed the introduction of the universalized ‘discourse of religion’.
As Latin Americanist Walter Mignolo (2000: 9) has suggested, ‘alternatives
to modern epistemology can hardly come only from modern (western) epis-
temology itself’. This, in my view, remains the single most important task
confronting us – namely, how to extricate the history of Indian traditions
from its Eurocentric narration.
The key then is to change the language game – to develop models of repre-
sentation that are not premised on centripetalism, a myth of homogeneity
and an essentialist and hermetically sealed conception of mutually exclusive
‘religions’. Some of the intellectual resources for such a reconception can be
found from within the history of Indian thought itself. It may very well be
then that the quest for a postcolonial discourse of ‘Hinduism’ may require, if
not the explicit abandonment of the term itself, at least a rejection of many
of the modernist and Christocentric assumptions upon which it has been
based – with the aim of developing a public discourse about ‘Hinduness’ that
more adequately reflects rather than distorts an understanding and appreci-
ation of the internal dynamics and history of Indian civilization.
Finally, I would suggest that much of the scholarly debate about the
110
category of ‘Hinduism’ turns on the rather pragmatic question of its useful-

ness as an academic tool for understanding specific periods of Indian civili-
zational history. I would contend for instance that in the historical period
that has most preoccupied my own research (viz. intellectual/philosophical
movements from the first century CE to the eighth century CE) the term
‘Hinduism’ has virtually no critical purchase other than as a means of dis-
tinguishing Vedic/Brahmanical traditions from Śråmanic-based movements
such as the Jains and the Buddhists. Even here, relations between these two
strands are complex and multi-faceted, but rarely understood better by
recourse to the language of ‘religion’ and strongly bounded ‘-isms’. With
regard to the specific term ‘Hinduism’ I would suggest that it is best avoided
in such historical contexts because of the dangers of anachronism such use
poses. Nevertheless, in the late colonial/modern context, the term ‘Hinduism’
certainly does take on increasing significance and social power as an indica-
tor of Hindu national identity and has become a powerful cultural vector
through which Indian civilizational history has been and is being interpreted.
The problem that remains however is how to take seriously the complexity of
Indian history – to learn from the examples and indigenous models emerging
from Indic civilizational discourse, when the paradigms and terms of con-
temporary debates remain so strongly skewed, as a consequence of European
colonialism, by a Eurocentric template for narrating world history.
The rendering (almost) invisible of the work of translation involved in
the representation of Indian civilization in the language of ‘religion’ and ‘the
world religions’ persists. It is a conceptual legacy of five hundred odd years
of European colonial rule and, in my view, remains an obstacle not only to
understanding the diversity of the histories and philosophies that constitute
our global cultural heritage, but also to the possibility of imagining alterna-
tive post-imperial and, dare I say it, post-western futures.
Notes
1 Pennington, however, rejects much of the contemporary critique of the concept of
religion and, in fact, suggests that it is dangerous because it undermines the ground
for further interreligious understanding between Hindus and Christians. Such a
characterization, of course, begs the question. Moreover, it occludes the subtle
Christocentrism of much ‘interfaith dialogue’. In describing Hinduism and Christi-
anity as ‘two great faiths’ in need of ‘better representation’ [185], the author seems
unaware that this characterization itself privileges one of the dialogue partners
[Christianity] in the emphasis upon ‘faith’ as a determining element in a tradition’s
identity formation. Thus, one could just as easily argue that the concept of ‘religion’
is an obstacle to a genuine appreciation of cultural difference. Pennington argues
that scholars of South Asia should remain sensitive to the needs of Hindus ‘to be
understood on their own terms, according to their own categories’ [182], yet this is
precisely why some question the usefulness of the term when applied to pre-colonial
Hindu traditions.
2 My use of the metaphor ‘centripetal’ here denotes an approach to identity-formation
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RICHARD KING
that seeks to draw in diverse strands towards the centre, reflecting a strong impulse
towards homogenized unity and singular truth-claims. It can be implicitly contrasted
with ‘centrifugal’ models of identity-formation that resist a unitary, centralizing
focus and operate instead on the basis of interactive dispersal across a polycentric
network of nodes. I am aware that I am mixing my metaphors here, but this high-
lights the conceptual paucity of prevailing models for rethinking Indian traditions
and movements outside the terms and paradigms set by the universalized discourse
of ‘religion’.
3 For instance, H.H. Wilson’s emphasis on medieval bhakti as constitutive of the
essence of the Hindu tradition challenges premise 5 (on page 164); the conflictual
nature of religions is contested by those who argued for a mystical core common to
all traditions etc.
4 The classification of certain ‘world religions’ into ‘Abrahamic’ (or ‘Semitic
Religions’ or ‘Religions of the Book’) and ‘Indic’ is of course itself a by-product of
mid- to late-nineteenth-century attempts at a definitive classification of ‘religious
families’ and is further reinforced in a contemporary context by the disciplinary
specializations of scholars of religion who rarely cross this boundary in their schol-
arly and linguistic training.
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Oddie, G. (2003) ‘Constructing “Hinduism”: the impact of the Protestant missionary
movement on Hindu self-understanding’, in R. Frykenberg and A. Low (eds),
Christians and Missionaries in India: cross-cultural communication since 1500,
Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.
—— (2006) Imagined Hinduism: British Protestant missionary constructions of
Pennington, B. (2005) Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians, and the colonial
construction of religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sharma, A. ‘An Indic contribution towards an understanding of the word “religion”
and the concept of religious freedom’, unpublished paper.
Smith, J.Z. (1981) Imagining Religion: from Babylon to Jonestown, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Stietencron, H. von (1989) ‘Hinduism: on the proper use of a deceptive term’,
in G.-D. Sontheimer and H. Kulke (eds) Hinduism Reconsidered, New Delhi:
Manohar.
—— (1995) ‘Religious configurations in pre-Muslim India and the modern concept
of Hinduism’, in V. Dalmia and H. von Stietencron (eds) Representing Hinduism:
the construction of religious traditions and national identity, New Delhi: Sage.
van der Veer, P. (ed.) (1995) Conversion to modernities, New York: Routledge.
Viswanathan, G. (2003) ‘Colonialism and the construction of Hinduism’, in G. Flood
(ed.) The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism, Blackwell Companions to Religion,
Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
113
7
WHO INVENTED HINDUISM?
RETHINKING RELIGION
IN INDIA
Timothy Fitzgerald
Introduction
In this chapter, I will reflect on the issue of the representation of India in
Anglophone and more widely Europhone categories (‘religion’ being our
prime focus). I will take issue with the claim, made by David Lorenzen1 and
others, that ‘religions existed in India’ independently of colonial interven-
tions. More specifically I will introduce a number of features of the Anglo-
European history of the category ‘religion’ directly into the context of
a critique of David Lorenzen’s analysis of the situation in India. I will do
this mainly as it has been published in his famous essay ‘Who invented
Hinduism?’ (1999: 630–59) though I will also connect this with claims he has
made in his conference paper ‘Gentile religion in South India, China and
Tibet: studies by three missionaries’.2 What I hope to add to the discussion
is a view from the Anglo-European end of the relationship of the birth of the
modern Anglophone category ‘religion’ and its plural form ‘religions’ since
the seventeenth century, as well as its ideological function in the wider
colonial enterprise. I have also included a section on the use of the term
‘sects’, which Lorenzen seems to use as an unproblematic placeholder for
modern generic ‘religions’.
Many of the problems raised in the discussions and debates about the
category religion in India are paralleled in other non-western contexts such
as Japan. One of the virtues of Lorenzen’s paper ‘Gentile religion in South
India, China and Tibet: studies by three missionaries’ (2007) is that it draws
attention to the colonial classifications not only of Hinduism as a religion,
but of widely diverse ideologies such as Buddhism, Confucianism and
Daoism. He might also have added Shintoism. One problem is that Indolo-
gists, like Japanologists, Sinologists, or Tibetologists, tend to concentrate
their attention on what happens within India (or Japan or China or Tibet)
without considering in much detail either the wider picture of colonial power
114
or what was happening at the Anglo-European end of the relationship. When

we see that even in Christian Europe the term ‘religion’ has a contested
history, is embedded in competing discourses, and does not have one
essential meaning, then much of the discussion about religion and religions
in India requires revision. As I will show, historical usages of the term ‘sect’
and ‘sects’ are also deeply embedded in Christian history, almost always with
negative meanings, and it is only in the bright modern era that scholars have
felt able to simply ignore this contested semantic history and talk about sects
and religions as though they are obviously and self-evidently universally
applicable analytical categories carrying no English, European or Christian
ideological baggage. One of my aims is to promote the methodological
principle that the topic requires analysis at both ends of the colonial and
postcolonial relationship simultaneously. In this I believe I am rather close
methodologically to S.N. Balagangadhara in his book ‘The Heathen in His
Blindness . . .’ (1994 [2005]), where he historicizes terms like ‘religion’ and
Latin religio and charts out some of the major semantic shifts.3
The magical power of words: reification

Let me make one initial point here. No-one has ever seen a religion (nor a
sect, nor a society, nor a nation state), and for this reason I will use terms
such as imagined, invented or constructed when talking about such ideas.
Thus for example when someone asks the question ‘Do religions exist in
India?’ or ‘Did religions exist in India before the colonial interventions?’
they are not using the term ‘exist’ in the same sense that we might ask if
‘elephants’ or any other empirically observable object exists or existed in
India. We are asking a question about the kind of categories that exist or
existed for ordering the world. Asking if ‘religions’ existed is therefore a
question about meaning and translation. It is also a matter of rhetoric – the
power of rhetoric to persuade us to see the world, and to classify the world,
in one way rather than another. Part of my argument will be that it would
be a highly problematic claim to say that ‘religions’ existed, not only in India
(or China, Tibet and Japan) but also in Europe. This, in my view, is sup-
ported by the genealogy of the term ‘sect’, which is almost always used in
English up until very recently to refer to the negative impact of divisions
within the totality of ‘religion’ understood as Christian truth.
Contemporary usages misleadingly suggest that ‘religions’ are observable
things in the world, which is a form of misplaced concreteness or reification.
On the contrary, the idea of ‘a religion’ is an act of the imagination which
we are persuaded to believe in by the rhetoric of academics, politicians,
media people, and by general discourse. Much the same can be said historic-
ally for a range of other abstract and mythical concepts such as nation states.
It has been persuasively argued by historians that nations in the modern
sense have been invented or imagined since around the late eighteenth
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TIMOTHY FITZGERALD
or early nineteenth century. Why should we think any differently about

‘religions’?
One example which is relevant for imagining what ‘religion’ might have
meant in early modern England is the Commonweal, which was one of the
most powerful metaphors for an encompassing Christian civility and soterio-
logical order. This was an imagined divine order based on analogy with the
human body. In a typical version, the sacred king was the heart, his advisors
(both ecclesiastical and temporal) the head, the nobility (lords temporal and
ecclesiastical) his arms and shoulders, the agricultural peasants the feet. This
imagined order pertained to the hierarchy of rational men (women and chil-
dren were only considered partially rational). Religion (Christian truth) was
not one part of this picture. The whole body politic was encompassed by
religion. The Commonweal was religion (Christian truth) seen from the point
of view of the divine ordering of human relations. This was also an imagined
community, but it had entirely different ideological implications from the
modern rhetoric on religion and religions with its privatized separation from
the non-religious state. One of the implications of the Commonweal was that
there was no modern separation between the church as a religious institution
and the state as a non-religious institution. Such a concept was not imagined
before, say, the second half of the seventeenth century, as I will explain below.
The church-state was encompassed by Christian truth. And a further implica-
tion was that no-one born outside the imagined Christian Commonweal
could have religion in anything other than an ironic or parodic sense.
Christian truth, revealed religion and natural religion

This last point needs qualifying, since one of the central historical claims of
Christian writers has been that God implanted the desire to worship him in
the heart of Adam and Eve’s descendants, and in that sense all humans have
religion. This theological belief is called natural religion and is distinguished
from revealed religion. However, three points need to be made about this.
One is that humans who live outside the Christian revelation do not have true
religion, but only some distorted image of it, and pagans and barbarous
savages could only be said to have religion in a very weak and perverse sense.
The second point is that the humanity of such pagans and barbarous savages
could be questioned, in which case they could be said to be too irrational to
have religion at all, a strategy which saves the formal theological premise. For
example, many of the Spanish theologians and lawyers who advised the king
at the time of the colonization of the Americas invoked Aristotle’s concept
of the natural slave to justify using the human-like creatures of Central
America as pack animals (see Pagden 1982).4 They were opposed by others
such as Bartolomé de Las Casas and Francisca De Vitoria, who argued that
the indigenous people were human and were not completely irrational, but
more like children who could be educated into some notion of Christian
116
truth and thus could be saved, though admittedly with difficulty. And thirdly,
without Christian conversion and baptism none of this natural religion by
itself could save one from hell anyway. Thus, the question concerning who
had true religion and who did not was a matter of heaven or hell,5 not merely
a middle class academic game. And probably the idea that religion must be
universal, which is such an article of faith among modern social scientists
and experts in various fields of the humanities, derives in the first place from
this Christian theological premise. The point here is that, when Indologists
(or Sinologists, Tibetologists or Japanologists) claim that religions existed in
India (or Tibet, China or Japan) before Christian colonization, how will they
distinguish their claim from this theological premise?
Much of modern British history has happened in other people’s countries,
and yet at the same time much of modern Indian history has happened
in English (as well as Portuguese, French, Dutch etc.). We cannot under-
stand the problems of representing India in English or more generally
Europhone categories without paying attention to what Christian missionar-
ies (or company and civil servants, traders and capitalists, or soldiers) pursu-
ing their interests in India were able to think within the discursive constraints
of the English, British or more widely European Christian imaginaire. For
example, if some scholar makes the claim that there were ‘religions’ in the
plural in pre-colonial India at a time when the concept would have seemed
absurd or ironic in England or Europe more generally then we should sense
that there is a problem with the claim. We would want to ask, why, if the idea
of ‘religions’ in the plural was conceptually problematic in Europe until the
seventeenth century, except possibly in an ironic sense, and only by the late
eighteenth century did it become an influential discursive formation among
the liberal elites in mainly Protestant countries – why should we imagine that
missionaries should be thinking in such liberal, enlightenment terms in an
earlier period? And why should people who were thinking in Hindi, Sanskrit,
Tamil or any other Asian language be thinking in such terms? This relates
back to the point just made: that ‘religions’ are not empirical objects that
exist in the world but classificatory categories and acts of the collective
imagination with dire practical implications. It matters very much what one
means when one makes claims about the existence of religions.
The meanings of ‘secular’: a ‘non-religious’ priesthood?

The term ‘secular’ is also a useful gauge of the possibilities about what dif-
ferent classes of people, different interest groups, different nationalities,
were able to think at different historical moments. Today the dominant dis-
course, which is embedded in slightly different ways in the US, French,
Indian and Japanese constitutions (to take just four important examples), is
that the secular is separated from religion as a ‘non-religious’ domain. Non-
religious does not necessarily imply hostility to religion (though it can do
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TIMOTHY FITZGERALD
and often does) but neutrality and separation. In general terms the non-
religious domain includes the modern nation-state, its judiciary, legislature
and executive, and politics, economics, educational system, laws and so on.
Epistemologically it is underwritten by the invention of modern science in
the seventeenth century which created a non-religious domain of knowledge.
However, in the older discourse on religion the secular was a class of priests!
Within the context of that older discourse it would clearly have made no
sense to talk about non-religious priests, except in the entirely different sense
that the secular priests were not members of the religious orders. In a world
in which the Commonweal had been the dominant metaphor for God’s order
on earth, the modern nation-state and its written constitution which makes
‘religion’ a private right was either unthinkable or blasphemous before a
particular historical point of paradigm change.6
I would like to add here the point that the invention of the ‘non-religious’
was also the invention of the ‘religious’ in the modern generic sense of
special religious experience (as distinct from non-religious experience); or
religious institutions as distinct from secular (in the sense of non-religious)
institutions. The much older meaning of ‘the religious’ was a reference to
monks, nuns and friars, and the religious orders that they belonged to. The
medieval religious orders (which still survive) were not opposed to the
non-religious in the modern sense, but were distinguished from the secular
priesthood. These orders, like the secular priesthood, were all encompassed
by Christian truth, and were licensed by the papacy. These semantic distinc-
tions are unavoidable if we wish to see our problem clearly.
Thus historically speaking in the Christian European context there are at
least two quite distinct discourses with different semantic properties operat-
ing today, one of which did not exist before around the seventeenth century.
The modern idea of the distinction between religion and the non-religious
domain of civil governance and ‘politics’ seems to have been first clearly
imagined in the seventeenth century by Dissenters such as John Locke and
the Quaker William Penn7 who founded Pennsylvania and wrote its first Bills
of Rights. The new discourse which they generated held an elective affinity
with certain interest groups in North America, provided a powerful counter-
discourse to Puritan theocracy, and culminated in the US constitution.
However this counter-discourse was actively resisted in England which
arguably remained a confessional church-state well into the nineteenth cen-
tury. In England and presumably for the rest of Europe the secular and
secularization did not have a modern connotation of non-religious. For
example the entry for ‘secularization’ in the 1815 edition of the Encyclo-
paedia Britannica referred to the formal process whereby the governance of a
cathedral was formally transferred from a regular8 canon to a secular bishop.
It bears thinking that the Encyclopaedia Britannica was edited and published
in Edinburgh, the very city where forty years earlier Adam Smith had
published The Wealth of Nations. The point that I am making here is that
118
there were at least two competing discourses on the meaning of religion in

the eighteenth century and they had fundamentally different implications
for the ordering of human life (later I will point to further varieties and
complications). Even within the Anglophone Christian West we cannot
assume we know what was meant by ‘religion’ in 1800 without taking careful
stock of who was speaking to whom, where, and in what context.
The Anglo-European and Anglo-American rhetorical context

It would seem necessary to take this Anglo-European and Anglo-American
complexity into account when considering what various missionaries in India
may have meant by the English (or Dutch, German etc.) word ‘religion’ – if they
used the term at all, for some were speaking and thinking in languages such as
Italian and Latin, and while much is made of the derivation of religion from
the Latin religio there is no easy equivalence between the terms, as Balagan-
gadhara (1994) and King (1999) have argued. In the complex semantic context
within Christian Europe itself, words like ‘religion’ and ‘secular’ in their
English versions alone went through huge shifts in meaning, and other words
that we today think are eternal such as ‘politics’ and ‘economics’ were actu-
ally being invented as distinct non-religious domains of natural rationality.9
Lorenzen’s paper ‘Gentile religion in South India, China and Tibet: studies
by three missionaries’ helpfully widens the issue of the category ‘religion’ and
its plural form ‘religions’ by considering representations of Confucianism,
Daoism and Buddhism as well as Hinduism. Though I do not have the space
to go into the whole discussion about these latter inventions, we are at least
reminded that the problems with the application of the category ‘religion’ in
the construction of Hinduism share a general problematic with the construc-
tion of these other so-called religions. One of the issues which drives my own
interest in this subject can be put in the form of a question: Why is it so
important for Lorenzen and a large number of other writers across the
humanities and social sciences to capture these diverse complex abstractions
under the one single category ‘religion’? I am tempted to ask another ques-
tion, which is not facetious but conveys a serious methodological point: why
do we academics not include our own belief in the pursuit of a university
career as a ‘religion’ or as a religious practice? I am not sure if there is a
rational explanation for this but I do believe there is a deep anxiety about
classification and that it has an unconscious ideological impetus driving it.
It could usefully be borne in mind, by the way, that the Japanese and the
Chinese were still debating how to translate the term religion into their own
languages in the second half of the nineteenth century. For the Japanese elite
it looked like Christian imperialism and had no obvious counterpart in their
own way of construing the world (Isomae 2007: 93).
We should also not neglect the point that identifying and describing
people’s practices as religion or as not-religion or as a parody of religion
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TIMOTHY FITZGERALD
has not been a harmless game but has had dire consequences. Thus when
Protestants claimed that theirs was true religion and that the Catholic
Church was the Whore of Babylon and the epitome of superstitious barbarity
they were not merely playing a game of reclassification; people were whipped,
tortured and burnt. Christian missionaries in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries (and still today in the twenty-first century) were propagating
religion in order to save the world from pagan idolatry. The idea that they
were modern relativists who were primarily concerned with describing
people’s ‘systems of beliefs and practices’ in a mild and uncritical manner
must surely be a fantasy which only moderns (especially modern academics)
could believe. On the other hand individual missionaries who lived in
isolated conditions with courage and intelligence and without great power to
back up their zealous efforts of conversion may well have learnt to take a
more philosophical attitude to the practices they considered to be pagan
and damned, and perhaps even to have been partly converted to the local
practices themselves. This experience may have created the psychological
conditions for relaxing the normally absolute difference between true religion
and its irrational pagan substitutes. Out of this more relaxed atmosphere
have emerged liberal ecumenical theologies which have been an important
factor in the development of a modern idea of plural religions all leading to
the one truth. But this is a specifically modern form of theological enterprise.
This does not give us an unproblematic neutral category for what exists in
the world. It only tells us how a liberal minority elite uses words to express
their ideas in specific and limited theological contexts.
The issue therefore is not whether ‘religions’ existed in India (or Rome)
but whether and who could have imagined them to exist, and what kind of
imagining it was. Religion today is used rhetorically in so many diverse
contexts that it is very difficult to give the category any clear and specific
content, but there is no doubt that it is perceived widely as having strong
Christian meanings. Since, as I argue, European Christians did not imagine
religions to exist in the plural until the birth of modernity in approximately
the late seventeenth or eighteenth centuries (arguably much more recently)
except in the stretched parodic or ironic sense, it raises a very big doubt
about why we should wish to attribute these entities to the Sanskritic, Tamil,
Chinese or Tibetan imaginaires.
Historicizing religion, religions, sects and gentiles

Neither in his article ‘Who invented Hinduism?’ (1999), nor in his ‘Three
Missionaries’ article (2007), is Lorenzen actually concerned to problematize
the category ‘religion’, even though he does in passing acknowledge, contra-
dictorily, that ‘world religions’ are an invention, as suggested by his appreci-
ation of Tomoko Masuzawa’s book The Invention of World Religions (2005;
see Lorenzen 2007: 203–4). One might as well acknowledge, methodologically
120
speaking, that if a discourse on world religions can be developed in the

nineteenth century, then so can a discourse on religions.
Lorenzen’s lack of concern with the historicization of the term ‘religion’
is obvious from the absence in these articles of any real discussion of the
issue. It is tacitly assumed throughout his discussion of the term ‘Hinduism’
that he has already decided that it is ‘a religion’. It is simply assumed that
Confucianism, Buddhism and Hinduism are religions which already existed
before 1775:
Before about 1775, the European scholars who directly studied

Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism and other Asian religions in
Asia itself were almost all Catholic missionaries, many of them
Jesuits. After this date, secular scholarly administrators stationed
in Asian countries, especially those associated with the colonial
projects of the British and French, began to undertake their own
studies of Asian religions and cultures.
(Lorenzen 2007: 203)
The assumption that religions existed in Asia is embedded in this opening

statement. Note also that the scholarly administrators are ‘secular’. The
meaning of this term is apparently self-evident and requires no historical
comment. However, methodologically speaking we need to be able to ask
‘Who says or said they are “secular”, and what did they mean by that term if
they used it at all?’ This is because the meaning of ‘secular’ is significantly
connected to the meaning of religion, and these meanings have changed
historically and in tandem. As he goes on to acknowledge, ‘Many of these
scholars had a deep personal commitment to Christianity’ (Lorenzen 2007:
203). Even if we can assume that these were Protestant Christians, we would
still need to know what they intended to mean by referring to themselves as
secular, if this is what they did. There was a significant difference between
Christian scholars and administrators who respected and even romanticized
India and those who openly or tacitly believed that all non-Christian prac-
tices were in the final analysis pagan and outside the sphere of salvation.
And even those who deeply respected Indian forms of life were themselves
engaged in a project which was constructing the Enlightenment values of
disinterested and objective knowledge free from value judgements. But who
today can argue that such a position is attainable? The very concept of secu-
lar knowledge in this historically specific form is highly contentious. Fur-
thermore, this concept of the possibility of objective knowledge free from
value judgements is only historically conceivable in conjunction with the
reification of complex cosmologies into objects of description and analysis.
Sometimes Lorenzen refers to ‘systems of beliefs and practices’, but he
does not seem interested in what it is that makes a system of beliefs and
practices a ‘religious’ system of beliefs and practices. To do so, I suggest,
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TIMOTHY FITZGERALD
would require considering the different contested usages I have indicated. He

never asks what would be a ‘non-religious’ system of beliefs and practices,
and who would have the authority to decide between these. If India has
always had ‘religions’, then has India also always had secular (in the sense
of non-religious) institutions?
The idea that such imagined entities as Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism,
Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism can be harmlessly lined up as equal
members of the same genus religion, which is loaded with Christocentric
history, is itself part of modern ideology, as I argued in detail in my book
The Ideology of Religious Studies (2000b). Apart from the question which
I feel compelled to raise again, at the risk of being repetitive, viz. why do we
wish to create this class of objects? – which I do not think is at all trivial,
because it is a question about how we want to order the world – there is
another issue internal to Christianity. For this concept of ‘religions’ in the
plural introduces the idea of Christianity as ‘a religion’, merely one among
many. At what point in historical time would it have been conceivable for
Christians to think of calling religion – Christian truth – ‘a religion’?
In his paper Three Missionaries (2007) there are some passages where
Lorenzen attempts to historicize terms such as ‘sects’ and ‘gentiles’. He says:
In this essay I examine how these three missionaries categorized the

Asian sects and religions they encountered and offer a discussion of
why their categories are organized in the ways that they are. My basic
claim is that the missionaries organized their religious categories
principally on the basis of categories already elaborated by the
Asians themselves and that these native categories were constructed
by emphasizing, in a relatively arbitrary way, specific doctrinal and
ritual differences . . . In my view, neither the early European mis-
sionaries nor later secular European scholars played more than a
marginal role in the construction of these religious categories. They
were constructed mainly by the Hindus, Buddhists, and Confucians
themselves.
The use of language is important here. In the first sentence of this paragraph
Lorenzen rhetorically established the pre-existence of sects and religions
before any encounter with Christian missionaries. When they arrived they
encountered what was already there, even though in the same sentence they
categorized them. I do not think that Lorenzen is deliberately using language
to confuse the reader, but I do think that unconsciously he is adopting a
rhetorical technique by embedding the problematic classifications into the
text in a way that naturalizes them and makes them seem unchallengeable.
The same with the terms Hindus, Buddhists and Confucians; they already
constructed the categories that are in question! Note also the uncritical use
122
of the terms ‘religious’ (in ‘religious categories’) and ‘secular’ (in ‘secular
European scholars’). Again, the assumption that the categories are ‘religious’
is slipped into the discussion without any proper examination. What do these
terms mean and to whom are they applied?
One of the advantages of historicization is greater accuracy concerning
the nuances that actually have been conveyed by words; and Lorenzen shows
that the term ‘gentile’ has been used by Christians to refer also to heathens,
pagans and infidels, all of which terms had negative connotations:
Before the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, most

Christian missionaries continued to usually refer to the followers of
all these various religious traditions as Heathens, Gentiles, Pagans,
or (in Spanish America) infidels (infieles), although the more discern-
ing missionaries also often made clear distinctions among the
different ‘sects’ of Gentiles, especially in Asia.
Note again the way the term ‘religious’ is slipped into the discussion in the
expression ‘religious traditions’ without any critical comment. This allows
Lorenzen to by-pass the issue at stake, which is what is meant by calling
such traditions ‘religious’. Furthermore, it is not accurate historically to
distance this kind of biased and value-laden usage to ‘[b]efore the beginning
of the nineteenth century’ (Lorenzen 2007: 205), since many missionaries
still use this terminology with these meanings today.10
Lorenzen identifies the terms ‘sect’ and ‘religion’ in the usages of Catholic
missionaries:
My own impression is that before about 1700 Catholic missionaries

most often used the word ‘sect’ when they were referring either to
any religion or to any sect in the sense of an institution comprising a
doctrine, rituals and followers, with of course the exception of
the Christian Church itself. Thus they refer, for example, both to the
Muhammadan sect and to the Vaishnava sect and only rarely use
the word ‘religion’ for either. Before 1700, the word ‘religion’ seems
to have usually referred to ‘religion’ in the general sense of a way of
conceptualizing the relation between man and God (or some other
supernatural being). We still use this sense when we talk about
religion in a generic sense in phrases such as ‘the study of religion’ or
‘a university department of religion’ or ‘a personal sense of religion’.
It will hopefully be clear to the reader of the earlier parts of my argument

that this summary of usage of the term ‘religion’ before about 1700 is insuffi-
cient, being too vague and dehistoricized. It is full of empty generalities and
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TIMOTHY FITZGERALD
all the key Anglophone terms he uses (‘man’, ‘God’, ‘supernatural’) are
unclear and need proper discussion. I would not contest his claim that the
Catholic missionaries used the term ‘sect’ to refer to Muslims or Vaishnavas
but I would suggest that this term is highly problematic in the context of
Anglophone history, and the kinds of very broad claims that Lorenzen is
making need to be tested against much greater historical accuracy, including
the incremental shift in meanings accruing from extension of typical Christian
usage to pagan practices.
I want to question what nuances usage of the term ‘sect’ may have had for
the users and for people who read their reports. I have analysed in detail
the relevant entry on ‘sect’ in the Oxford English Dictionary and the various
typical usages over the centuries.11 Close attention to the examples of usage
that are given by the dictionary’s compilers in my view dispels any illusion
that ‘sect’ has been a neutral analytical term which carries no Christian
bias. On the contrary, the predominant meanings and usages given in the
Oxford English Dictionary (OED) consistently tie this term to a negative
sense. The sense given for ‘sect’ as a verb resonates for the vast majority of
noun usages:
a. trans. To treat as a sect. b. to sect it: to behave as a sect.

1656 S. H. Gold. Law 13 Would you that Prelacy and Priesthood
should perk up again, and under pretense of Religion, . . .
be-heretick, and sect you, and then dissect you by persecutions? Ibid.
81 The Priests of all sorts sect it, so do all religious persons faction
and party it.
In the quote that the compilers of the Dictionary provide here to illustrate
typical usage, the reader should be in no doubt that religion here is best
glossed as Christian truth, that is religion itself rather than something that
pretends to be religion. The reference to ‘religious persons’ seems to be a
reference to members of the religious orders, as distinct from secular priests.
As a generalization based on the different examples given, the word
‘sect’ in its more common noun form has the sense of a ‘section’ of some
larger whole, or a ‘part’ or ‘division’ among people on the basis of some
belief, practice, following or organization. The larger whole is almost always
religion itself, understood as Christian truth, or the true Church. The sect is
that which destroys the unity of that larger whole. It also sometimes seems to
have the connotation of ‘faction’. It therefore has the sense of classification,
but rarely neutral. It has mainly been used as a negative, perhaps deriving
from the implication that when a part of the whole is emphasized or given
greater importance, then it is destructive of the unity of the whole. It also
provides no easy mandate for some generic modern usage that makes
sects the same as ‘religions’, and it would be doubtful what it would mean
(either for Catholic or Protestant missionaries, or for a contemporary scholar
124
such as Lorenzen) to say that Vaishnavism is either a sect, or a religion, or

both at the same time. It is only in the definitely modern and recent usages
that you get the sense of a religious ‘sect’ as distinct from a non-religious or a
political sect, division or faction. And it is only in the modern context of the
development of sociological relativity that this term has self-consciously
been theorized as though it can be used in a neutral, purely descriptive sense.
However, it achieves this only by rhetorically burying the history of ideo-
logical commitment in order to convince its users of their own disinterested
‘secular’ neutrality.12
As will be apparent from my earlier historical claims I also want to ques-
tion Lorenzen’s claim in the above quoted passage about the usage of the
Anglophone term ‘religion’ before 1700. It seems to me to be unhistorical to
claim that the generic and neutralized sense of the term ‘religion’ which he
proposes was available before 1700 and indeed for long after, though as I
have argued in Discourse on Civility and Barbarity (2007a) there has been
a tendency to transmute an ironic or parodic sense of other people’s supersti-
tions as ‘religions’ into a more neutralized descriptive sense during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.13 However, this leaves the term at best
ambiguous and hardly a safe ground for claiming that either religion or sect
can unproblematically be used as though they do not carry any load of
Christian bias or value judgement.
If at times the reader might be led by Lorenzen’s brief forays into the history
of a term such as ‘gentile’ to believe that he is concerned about the distorted
representation of India (and China and Tibet) in Anglophone categories, this
is not because he has anything to say about the category ‘religion’ (as we can
see, that issue has already been decided), but because he explicitly denies that
Hinduism (and Confucianism and Buddhism) is an invention of westerners.
But his argument in my view is misconceived. For the logically prior task is
to establish whether Hinduism ‘as a religion’ is a modern invention. It is
‘religion’, or Hinduism ‘as a religion’, which is the fundamentally problematic
category. (The same point applies equally to Buddhism ‘as a religion’, and
Confucianism ‘as a religion’, Daoism ‘as a religion’, or Shinto ‘as a religion’.)
Lorenzen establishes the supposed existence of religions in India by
concentrating on whether or not there was a pre-colonial system of beliefs
and practices in India which later came to be fixed with the appellation
‘Hinduism’. For him this is the central issue:
This essay argues that the claim that Hinduism was invented or
constructed by European colonizers, mostly British, sometime after
1800 is false. The evidence instead suggests that a Hindu reli-
gion theologically and devotionally grounded in texts such as the
Bhagavad-gita, the Puranas, and philosophical commentaries on
the six darsanas gradually acquired a much sharper self-conscious
identity through the rivalry between Muslims and Hindus in the
125
TIMOTHY FITZGERALD
period between 1200 and 1500 and was firmly established long
before 1800.
It is explicitly claimed here that ‘a Hindu religion’ in some sense existed, but
it is difficult to understand from this and all subsequent passages what is
being claimed. The term religion almost always arrives by stealth in Loren-
zen’s writing, as though it is the most natural and unproblematic term to use
– which in a sense it is, that is the problem. In this way he embeds it in the
reader’s mind without any conscious attention being paid to it. This is not a
conscious strategy, but is a wide-spread feature of all rhetoric which seeks to
embed contentious claims about reality into a discourse in a way that natur-
alizes the terms and makes them seem ancient, unchallengeable, and in the
nature of things. This technique obliterates the reader’s consciousness that
such usage has a controversial, historical genesis and had been accompanied
by deep animosity in European history. It obliterates the context of colonial
power in the development of this new form of classification.
On the other hand attention is drawn here to the matter of self-identity.
This ‘self-conscious identity’ should not be confused with an ethnic identity
because for Lorenzen (and presumably for the Hindus) there is a definite
distinction between ethnic and religious identity:
It is well known that variants of the word ‘Hindu’ were current in

Persian and in vernacular Indian languages long before the nine-
teenth century. If this word always meant simply a follower of beliefs
and practices drawn from the religion we now call Hinduism, then
the constructionist argument would be refuted from the start. This
would be the case even if no specific word or phrase equivalent
to ‘Hinduism’ could be identified. In point of fact, however, the
religious sense of Hindu has long coexisted and overlapped with an
ethnic and geographical sense. What the constructionists are obliged
to argue is that this ethno-geographical sense of Hindu remained
overwhelmingly dominant up until the nineteenth century and that
only then did the religious sense become widespread as a result of the
British invention of Hinduism.
(Lorenzen 1999: 634, my italics)
There are a number of features of this passage that benefit from close exam-
ination. One is the repeated claim that a religion of the Hindus existed long
before the term ‘Hinduism’ was used – ‘the religion we now call Hinduism’.
The assumption that a religion already existed whatever we choose to call it
is slipped under the radar screen and established in the text while the author
gets on with the real job of discussing the appellation ‘Hinduism’. The impli-
cation is that this religion existed in the same sense that Hinduism now exists
126
today, whatever that sense may be – for Lorenzen never explains this to the
reader. Yet whatever sense he means, he is sure the religious sense is different
from the ethnic sense. However, by avoiding any real discussion of what it
means to say that there was a Hindu religion before (or indeed during) the
modern period, or how a religious sense of Hindu might differ from an
ethnic sense, the real nub of the issue is side-stepped.
I find it difficult to understand which issue Lorenzen thinks is really
important: that there existed an identifiable system of beliefs and practices
before the Christian colonialists came on the scene; that there existed a sys-
tem of beliefs and practices called Hinduism before the colonialists came on
the scene; or that there existed a religion before colonialism came on the
scene. My own view is that the real issue is whether or not there existed a
religion before colonialism came on the scene, and existed in the sense that
the relevant concept of religion was understood in all its ideological implica-
tions and contested complexities by Indian people whose own concept was
the same as the one indicated by the English language term ‘religion’. Once
the absurdity of this latter claim is clearly seen, then all the other issues
become irrelevant. No one, surely no one would doubt that there existed
coherent systems of beliefs and practices (institutions) which Indian people
created, named and classified in their own languages before the colonialists
came on the scene. The issue is: were they ‘religious’ institutions in all the
conflicting senses of that Anglophone (or more widely Europhone) word?
And this question leads us immediately into the semantic minefield of
contested Christian history that I outlined earlier.
In his Three Missionaries paper Lorenzen says
Over the past fifteen or twenty years . . . academic scholars have

interpreted the explosion of European studies on Asian religions
in such a way that they claim that the nineteenth-century European
authors of these studies in fact were the first to ‘invent’, ‘imagine’, or
‘manufacture’ these Asian religions. In this view, these religions
simply did not exist as conceptual entities before these European
scholars invented them. All that existed were chaotic, undifferenti-
ated collections of religious beliefs and practices that had no real
unity and were not conceptualized as having any real unity by the
people who believed these beliefs and practiced these practices.
(Lorenzen 2007: 204, all italics are mine)
The reader should notice that such expressions as ‘these Asian religions’, and
‘religious beliefs and practices’ are used again and again as though religion is
an unproblematic descriptive and analytical category. They are already
embedded in the text, and thus slipped beneath the reader’s critical radar
screen. They have become naturalized as though there never have been any
issues of meaning and ideology behind their formulation. Lorenzen is thus
127
TIMOTHY FITZGERALD
not really engaged in an open-ended inquiry about ‘religion’ for he has

already closed the issue by building in the problematic terminology from the
start. The whole issue which we thought that Lorenzen was investigating has
already been decided. What Lorenzen is problematizing here is not the
Anglophone category of religion itself but the idea that there existed (or did
not exist) coherent systems of practices (institutions) before the westerners
came on the scene. I doubt if any of the authors he refers to deny that there
existed coherent systems of institutionalized practices before the westerners
brought their own systems of classification. But whose criteria of coherence
are at stake here? Lorenzen is offering an either-or: if ‘these religions’ did not
exist then the alternative is ‘chaotic, undifferentiated collections of religious
beliefs and practices that had no real unity . . .’ But why should we assume
that, without the application of English language categories to order the
world everything must fall into chaos?
Which of the various contested meanings of ‘religion’ and

‘religions’ do Indologists want us to read?
Which of the various meanings of religion in western discourses on religion
does Lorenzen (or other Indologists) wish to claim existed for the people of
the Indian sub-continent and other Asian peoples, and which also existed
for the various foreign observers at different historical moments? This ques-
tion is really not directed only at David Lorenzen but at all scholars who
assume that the universal application of the category religion is relatively
unproblematic. Which of the possible readings of religion should the reader
take away with him or her?
For example, if it could be established, as I believe it can, that for most of
the period of colonial engagement with India the English word ‘religion’
meant Christian truth, mainly in its Protestant senses, and that the normal
and normative alternative to Christian truth was superstition, paganism,
and barbarity, then we would need an explanation as to why irrational super-
stitions (as non-Christian practices were considered by most Europeans well
into the twentieth century, and for many still today) should be referred to
so casually and unproblematically as religious? As I discussed near the
beginning of this chapter, it is true that there is an ancient and flourishing
Christian literature on natural religion, which says that God had implanted
knowledge of Him in the hearts of all humans, and that after the Fall and
the dispersals of the Flood those who were cut off from the sources of
Christian revelation still in theory had a yearning to worship God. It is also
true that this theory guarantees the universality of religion, but at some
cost. For one thing this faded and confused memory of truth does not itself
bring salvation, it only makes it possible for missionaries to bring the lost
and the damned back to the true revealed religion. It is therefore very much a
second hand affair, not the real thing. This attitude is still rife among some
128
Evangelical missionaries today. Secondly, a perceived absence of religion in

any form among the barbarous could be explained on the grounds that these
were not real humans after all.
On the other hand it is also true that the English term ‘religion’ was being
extended and multiplied since the seventeenth century in the context of the
needs of colonial classification and a new emergent modernist ideology. There
is a historical trajectory to the application of the term religion by analogy
with Christian institutions and practices onto those of non-European peoples
that needs to be traced. Superstitions, or the barbarous practices of ‘ethnikes’
and ‘savages’ were sometimes called ‘religions’ ironically, as with Samuel Pur-
chas in his Purchas, His Pilgrimage; or, relations of the world and the religions
observed in all ages (1613 [1626]), because they were considered to be the
distant and irrational grovellings of the blind who had been denied the light of
the one truth revealed only in Jesus Christ and the Bible.
When Lorenzen insists that ‘religions’ are native to India, does he mean
that the natives had some distant and distorted version of Christian truth
implanted in their hearts which rendered them in principle capable of being
saved? Or does he mean it ironically in conformity with this ancient Christian
discourse? Or that pre-colonial institutions in India were parodies of true
Christian ones? I don’t believe for a moment that he does mean this, yet
there are still Christian missionaries who think in these terms, and this is
unsurprising, given the history of Christian thought.
Religion and the church-state

Another aspect of this same discourse on religion as Christian truth that
needs to be understood is that the Pope’s adoption of the Roman Emperor’s
title of pontifex maximus indicates the encompassment of the church-state by
Christian truth. The Pope is also a Prince. It was not just about ‘belief in
God’ but about the true ordering of human relationships and the sources
of legitimate power. This was true in the context of the Catholic Church
and in a different way in the context of the post-Reformation, Protestant,
national church-states. King Henry VIII of England, as head of the Anglican
church-state, was (like all Christian monarchs) anointed by the bishops and
addressed as sacred majesty.
I use the term church-state to contest the assumption that the church and
the state have always been conceived as two distinct separate entities corres-
ponding to our modern distinction between ‘religion’ and ‘the secular’ or
religion and politics. Modern historians write quite misleadingly in this way,
a point I have argued in Discourse on Civility and Barbarity (2007a). In late
medieval and early modern England (and this point can be extended much
more widely) the church was not aligned with ‘religion’ and the state with
‘secular politics’. Religion as Christian truth encompassed both equally.
Just as the Pope was a prince, so the monarch was anointed as a priest.
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TIMOTHY FITZGERALD
Both temporal and ecclesiastical lords were involved in government. New

laws were promulgated from the pulpits. Holy Communion was celebrated in
parliament. The civil courts had it as their fundamental duty to co-operate
with the ecclesiastical courts (not the religious courts) in bringing heretics to
justice. In modern parlance it was totalitarian.
In these encompassing senses of religion as Christian truth there was not
much room for alternative systems of belief and practice to flourish as is
obvious by such sins as heresy (which was often virtually the same in practice
as the crime of treason in England), the Inquisition, and, in the Protestant
context, the bitter struggles over centuries for toleration. Here the meaning
of religion is deeply embedded in Christian church-state contexts. In these
European Christian scenarios the modern discourse on ‘religions’ in the
plural is highly problematic and requires careful historical study. In the
Protestant context there was an increasing fragmentation and different
churches did begin to get referred to as ‘religions’, but usually these were
still competing interpretations of Christian truth, not the generic systems of
beliefs and practices posited by modern scholars. This process of fragmenta-
tion was not merely a theological set of divisions for university debating
societies but part of the transformation of Europe from the older empires
into the new nation-states such as the Dutch Republic or the establishment
of either Catholic or Protestant German principalities as a result of the
Treaty of Westphalia. It is these massive and dangerous shifts of power
which created new classes of interests and which gave rise in the late seven-
teenth century to an alternative and increasingly powerful discourse driven
by such ideologies as Calvinism.14
The privatization of religion and the possibility of ‘religions’

We can refer to this as the privatization of religion and the transformation of
churches into voluntary associations licensed by the non-religious state and
the ‘neutral’ domain of civil society. It allowed for modified liturgies and
differently nuanced beliefs about God (Lutheran, Calvinist, Presbyterian,
Quaker, Baptist, Methodist) and theologically increased the emphasis on
private, inner experiences of redemption through Christ. In this new dis-
course, which became enshrined in Enlightenment constitutions, especially
the US and French, religion became a universally available inner experience,
a personal voluntary practice licensed by the non-religious state as a right.
Religions became universalized as part of the ideology of the Enlightenment
and its imperialistic desire to classify the world in Euro-American terms.
This huge semantic shift in the meaning of ‘religion’ is not an isolated event,
for it also makes possible the invention of the non-religious nation state, civil
society and the domain of modern politics.
This new discourse may have been invented in England in around the
1680s but it was in North America that it found fertile ground in the
130
Charters and Bills of Rights of the dissenters who fled there. Most of
Europe, including England, remained confessional church-states with little
room for what was now being called toleration. My point is that these dis-
tinct and even contradictory discourses render the meaning of ‘religion’ pro-
foundly problematic. Which of these would be intended by scholars who
claim that religions existed in India in pre-colonial times? Are they referring
to the totalitarian or holistic concept of encompassing Christian truth? Or
to the modern, liberal constitutional idea of religion as a private ‘faith’ and
religions as voluntary associations allowed by the non-religious state? It
seems highly unlikely that either of these metaphors applied to the unique
constellation of practices and formations of power that operated in the
diverse regions of the Indian sub-continent. Until these issues are at least
addressed it seems doubtful that the current debate can make much sense.
Conclusion
I have argued that the question ‘Are there religions in India?’ or ‘Were
there religions in India before colonial intervention?’ is in the first place
a question about meaning and translatability. No one has ever seen ‘a
religion’, just as no one has ever seen a society or a state or a nation. These
are all abstract categories, not empirically observable phenomena. But
‘abstract’ here does not mean devoid of power or without consequences for
the ordering of human life! These meanings are conveyed in discourses that
express the interests of powerful elites (including modern academics) at dif-
ferent historical moments. They constitute attempts to classify the world
in accordance with imagined orders of power. I have argued that the English
language term ‘religion’ and associated terms such as ‘religions’ and the
adjective ‘religious’ need careful historical contextualization in order to
understand their complexity and to see that such terms do not have any easy
and self-evident meanings, and are not mere harmless labels. ‘Sect’ is also far
from being the easy, neutral and natural term that Lorenzen seems to believe.
I have suggested that the term ‘sect’ in most of the usages that the OED
provides as examples of its historically contextualized meanings link
it strongly to damaging divisions within the unity of Christendom. Usages
by missionaries and other scholars may have exemplified the stretching
of normal usage in the need for classification in a profoundly different lin-
guistic and institutional context, but in that case we have a shift from one
power context to another, in which the agents of a foreign ideology seek
to submit India (or China, Tibet and Japan) to its own categories. I have
argued that the meaning of a term such as ‘religion’ or ‘sect’ is not an
isolated event but is deeply connected to the meanings of other English
and more widely Europhone categories such as ecclesiastical, secular,
non-religious, nation-state, constitution, civil society, politics, law and eco-
nomics. All of these important terms have changed their meanings (some
131
TIMOTHY FITZGERALD
have been invented quite recently) and are sustained by discourses which
have never operated in the kind of vacuum that Lorenzen and many other
writers uncritically assume. To translate a term such as ‘religion’ into San-
skrit, Hindi, Chinese, Tibetan, Japanese or any other language is also to ask
what it is being distinguished from; if we say that religions have always
existed in India, does this imply that non-religious institutions also always
existed? Did they also have written constitutions, secular law courts, and
capitalist economic concepts at the time of Buddha, or the Guptas? Did they
have these things in Europe at the time of the Medicis or the Tudors? My
proposal is that we go much more deeply into the historical and contextual
analysis of related terminology, and become more self-critical about our own
motivations, conscious or unconscious, for assuming that the world can fit
into our own categories in order to satisfy our own unanalysed classificatory
urges.
Notes
1 In this chapter, I am partly reacting to David Lorenzen’s position paper pre-
sented at the Rethinking Religion in India I conference, in January 2008, in
New Delhi. I am also grateful to David Lorenzen for sending me a copy of
‘Who invented Hinduism?’, which I have subsequently been able to locate in its
published form; and also ‘Gentile religion in South India, China and Tibet: studies
by three missionaries’, which was a paper Lorenzen wrote for another conference,
later published in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East
(2007), and which I have taken the liberty of referring to several times here.
2 This paper was subsequently published as Lorenzen (2007: 203–13).
3 A similar point could be made about Richard King’s method in Orientalism and
Religion (1999).
4 For a discussion, see Fitzgerald 2007a, especially Ch. 4.
5 In the case of the Spanish colonization it was a matter of whether slavery was or
was not justified. Even Las Casas, who opposed the enslavement of the indigenous
Americans, did not object to the importation of black African slaves.
6 I have discussed these points in some detail in a recent book Discourse on Civility
and Barbarity (2007a), and what I say here is more or less a summary adaptation
of those discussions.
7 I am not saying that other writers did not imagine the non-religious space earlier
than this. Many of the conventional ways of thinking were subverted during
the revolutionary period of the interregnum. See my Discourse on Civility and
Barbarity (2007a) for a more detailed argument.
8 A ‘regular’ here refers to a member of the religious orders, as distinct from a
secular priest.
9 The ideas of natural reason and natural religion participated in this paradigmatic
shift, from meaning that which God had implanted in humans at creation to that
which inhered in the natural scientific order. Deism was a transition phase between
these two paradigms.
10 To take just one example, a US-based Protestant missionary in Mexico recently
told a researcher that her strategy was ‘impacting lostness’; see Carolyn Gallaher
(2007: 97), for this and other current usages including ‘pagan’ and ‘idolatry’.
11 There is no space to provide such a detailed analysis here.
132
12 The sociologist Eileen Barker argues against the use of terms such as ‘sect’ and
‘cult’ on the grounds that they have negative connotations in everyday parlance
and ‘it is neither necessary nor helpful to start from the implicit premise that the
movements are always “a bad thing” ’(Barker 1989: 4–5). See also her references to
the pejorative use of these terms and the consequent need to avoid them, in Barker
(1998: 11–16). It follows from my own view that her defence of the expression
‘New Religious Movements’ as a preferable alternative to ‘sect’ and ‘cult’ is also
theoretically problematic.
13 See for example my Ch. 7 on Samuel Purchas (2007a).
14 I do not mean that Calvinism was necessarily an individualistic ideology, and
there were Calvinist theocracies, the most obvious being the original in Geneva.
However, Weber has argued that, Calvinism lent itself through a process of
elective affinity to individualism and capitalism.
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8
ORIENTALISM,
POSTCOLONIALISM AND THE
‘CONSTRUCTION’ OF RELIGION
S.N. Balagangadhara
In this chapter, I do two things: while showing both the strengths and weak-
nesses of the postcolonial story about the creation of religions in India, I
also spell out a clear hypothesis on what religion is. There is much discussion
in contemporary religious studies about the status of the concept ‘religion’.
Some argue that the word is a creation of the scholar or that it has no
reference to anything in the world or that it is not possible to talk about
‘religion’ intelligibly. I argue that we need to have a theory of religion, if we
have to take an informed standpoint on any of the above issues. As a first
step in the process, I formulate a hypothesis about the nature of the phenom-
enon. I do this, however, while critically engaging with the arguments of some
of the contemporary scholars.
Criticizing a postcolonial saga1

Consider the claim that most would give their assent to: Hinduism, Buddhism,
Jainism etc., are the religions of India. Postcolonial intellectuals would prob-
ably add two or three qualifications to this claim. They would probably say
that it is not possible to speak of one Hinduism, one Buddhism, one Jainism,
and, instead, one should speak about many ‘Hinduisms’, many ‘Buddhisms’,
many ‘Jainisms’, and so on. Second, they would also raise questions about
who could speak about these religions. Third, they are likely to add that the
British ‘created’ or ‘constructed’ these religions in India during the colonial
period. Actually, the first two qualifications are either misguided or cogni-
tively uninteresting. The first qualification is misguided because it is not pos-
sible that a plural has meaning and reference while the singular has neither.
The second qualification is uninteresting because we are not after ‘canonical’
descriptions of these phenomena. In this sense, it matters very little who
speaks ‘about’ these religions. By far the most interesting qualification is
the third one. Let us look at it closely.
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S. N. B A L AG A N G A D H A R A
During the colonial period, the British created many things: an education
system, a legal system, a bureaucracy, roads and railways. None of these
existed in these forms before the British colonized India. Were religions like
‘Hinduism’ etc. also created in this way? Some postcolonial thinkers are
inclined to answer this question in the positive: the British, with the help of
a few upper-caste collaborators, created Hinduism as a religion in India,
the way they created the Indian Civil Service (ICS). In that case, it follows
that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the orientalist writings on
Hinduism. Some of them might have made false claims but we can correct
them as more accurate information accumulates. The contemporary writings
on Hinduism etc., whether from the field of Indology or of Religious Studies,
would remain continuous with the orientalist writings on the subject. That
is, the ‘facts’ that the orientalists provide become the point of departure for
the writings in social sciences. The latter either add to these facts or explain
them. In fact, this is also the status of the field today: the writings in the
humanities and social sciences maintain an unbroken line of continuity with
the orientalist writings on these ‘religions’ in India.
If this is the case, one can hardly understand what the excitement is about
regarding ‘orientalism’ or ‘postcolonial studies’. Of course, if one adds other
items to this creation story, one can blame western culture as the ‘big bad
wolf ’: the British, together with native collaborators, created ‘Hinduism’,
‘the caste system’, ‘communalism’ and anything else one feels like. Not only
is this exercise in apportioning blame uninteresting but it also transforms the
Indians into people bereft of all reason: a handful of people could do
what they wanted to with the Indian culture, introduce and create whatever
took their fancy, while the Indians stood around without even wanting
to move the thumbs they were sucking upon. To put it in the language of
postcolonial thinkers: such a story deprives the colonial subjects of their
agency.
A different creation story

There is, however, another way of looking at the claim of creating these
religions in India, which I would like to defend. Despite limitations, drawing
an analogy could make the point more perspicuous. Imagine an extraterres-
trial coming to earth and noticing the following phenomena: grass is green,
milk turns sour, birds fly, and some flowers put out a fragrant smell. He is
convinced that these phenomena are related to each other and sees hipkapi in
them. The presence of hipkapi explains not only the above phenomena but
also how they relate to each other. To those who doubt the existence of
hipkapi, he draws their attention to its visible manifestations: the tiger eating
the gazelle, dogs chasing cats, and the massive size of elephants. Each of
these is a fact, as everyone can see it. However, they do not tell us anything
about hipkapi. When more extraterrestrials come to earth and reiterate the
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O R I E N TA L I S M , P O S T C O L O N I A L I S M A N D R E L I G I O N
presence of hipkapi, other conditions permitting, hipkapi not only becomes

a synonym for these phenomena but also turns out to be their explanation.
Thereafter, to ask what hipkapi is, or even how it explains, is an expression of
one’s idiocy: does not everyone see hipkapi, this self-explanatory thing? In
this analogy, the extraterrestrial visitor has ‘constructed’ the hipkapi. To him,
it is an experiential entity. He talks, as his fellow-beings do, about this
experiential entity in a systematic way.
This is what the Europeans did. The puja in the temples, the sandhyavan-
danam of the Brahmins, the sahasranamams etc., became organic parts of
the Indian religion. Purushasukta was the cosmogony of the caste system,
and ‘untouchability’ its outward manifestation. Dharma and Adharma were
the Sanskrit words for ‘good’ and ‘evil’, and the Indian ‘deities’ were much
like their Greek counterparts. To the missionaries, Indians were idolaters; to
the contemporary liberal, ‘polytheism’ has to do with the conception of ‘the
deity’. In terms of the analogy, these visitors ‘construct’ a hipkapi. To them,
it is an experiential entity. They talk about this experiential entity in a
systematic way.
This analogy entails suggesting that Europeans created ‘Hinduism’ etc.,
as their experiential entities. Under this construal, the orientalists did not
describe what exists in the Indian culture. Instead, they created a hipkapi,
constructed a pattern and a structure that lent coherence to their cultural
experience of India. In such a case, claims about Hinduism become some-
what akin to claims about having visions of Mother Mary in Lourdes. Only
‘somewhat’, because such a vision could be characterized as a hallucination,
whereas one cannot say that the West has been ‘hallucinating’ about the
Indian religions.
When the Europeans came to India and wrote down their experiences,
they were not hallucinating. They did not write about their dreams nor
did they compose stories. Whether of a merchant, a missionary or a bureau-
crat, the reports had some kind of a structure. Reflections about such reports
at second remove, or reflections on experiences at a later stage or in a distant
way, led to finding a pattern or a structure in these experiences. That struc-
ture is the Orient and the discourse about it is the orientalist discourse.
The previous sentence is not a description of how the pattern or structure
was found. It is not as though any one person pored over these reports
(though many did), trying out one inductive hypothesis after another (even
though a few were formulated), until a satisfactory pattern finally emerged.
These reports lent structure to what the Europeans saw. At the same time,
they filtered out phenomena that could not be structured in this fashion.
Thus, these reports contributed to structuring a European way of seeing and
describing phenomena in India. Such texts, which embodied an explanatory
structuring of the European experiences, ended up becoming the ‘ethno-
logical data’ or the ‘anthropological fieldwork’ that the social theories would
later try to explain.
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‘Orientalism’ is how western culture came to terms with the reality that the
East is. That is, ‘orientalism’ refers not only to a discourse about experience
but also to the way of reflecting about and structuring this experience. In this
sense, even though orientalism is a discourse about western cultural experi-
ence, it is oblique. It is oblique because it appears to be about other cultures.
It is also oblique because the experience is not directly reflected upon. It is
western in the sense that it refers to the experiences of the members from
a particular culture. Orientalism is the western way of thinking about its
experience of non-western cultures. However, it takes the form of an apparent
discourse about the Orient.
This means to suggest that the West did two things: (a) created ‘Hinduism’
and ‘Buddhism’ etc. as coherent and structured units and (b) did so as reli-
gions. The issue is not whether western culture created a monolithic religion
instead of recognizing the multiplicity of theories and practices that go
under the label ‘Hinduism’. It is not even whether they experienced ‘Hinduism’
as a monolithic entity. Instead, it lies in the fact that ‘Hinduism’, as a concept
and as an experiential entity, provided the westerners with a coherent experi-
ence. To the extent it is a concept, it is a human construct, like all other
concepts. It is also a construct because, as an experiential entity, it unifies the
western experience. However, this concept has no reference in the world, i.e.,
there is no ‘Hinduism’ (whether as a religion, or as a multiplicity of religions)
in the Indian culture.
In his Orientalism, Said distinguishes between the Orient as a place and
‘the Orient’ as an entity that exists only in the western experience. Similarly,
one could argue that ‘Hinduism’ is both a false description of Indian reality
and it is an imaginary entity. It is false not because the West gave a false
description of some reality (‘Hinduism’ in this case) but because they falsely
assumed that their experiential entity was also a real entity in the world. It is
imaginary in the sense that it does not have an existence outside the experi-
ence of western culture. The same considerations apply to the caste system.
The notion of such a system unified the British experience of India; they
implemented certain political and economic policies based on their experi-
ence. However, this experience was not of the caste system. In fact, this
experience was of no particular object but constituted the basis of their
going-about with the Indians. By creating such a ‘system’ the British lent
stability, coherence and unity to their cultural experience. Both the caste
system and the Indian religions are constructs in this specific sense.
It is not as though colonialism brought ‘Hinduism’ and ‘the caste system’
into existence. The Europeans spoke about these entities as though they
existed. They acted as though these entities were real. However, neither before
nor after colonialism have such entities or phenomena existed. They are hip-
kapis. These entities merely lend structure and stability to the European
experience.
This, then, is the thesis I want to put across: except for Christianity, Islam
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and Judaism, there are no other religions in India. Entities like ‘Buddhism’,
‘Hinduism’, ‘Jainism’, ‘Sikhism’ etc. which are called the ‘religions of India’,
exist, it is true, but they do so only in the western universities. These ‘reli-
gions’ are the ‘imaginative’ creations of the western savants and of the culture
to which they belong.
This means that all the books and articles, all the PhDs and all the com-
monsense talk about these religions tell you as much about India as other
‘relevant’ books, articles and interviews tell you about the length of the
unicorn’s horn – a creature which only virgins can see – or about the relation
between the upper and lower torso of a satyr or about the need for a curric-
ulum reform at Harry Potter’s magical school, Hogwarts.
A Newtonian anecdote
As soon as such a thesis is put across, huge questions appear on the horizon.
Here are some: are we to say that nearly four centuries of western intel-
lectuals and nearly two centuries of English speaking Indians (and others)
have been hallucinating? If they were not, what made them speak of Indian
religions? If they were, why were they hallucinating, whereas I claim I am not?
It is no part of my theory to suggest that the earlier generations were
hallucinating. Of course, by the simple privilege of being born after them,
from my vantage point and looking back, I do suggest that they were wrong.
However, I do not merely record that they are wrong and claim that I have
found ‘the truth’. What I do is something different altogether.
What I would like to argue is the following: thanks to their mistakes, we
have the possibility of correcting some of these mistakes today. To us, these
mistakes take the form of cognitive problems that our theories have to solve.
Not only that. The very same theories should also explain (without adding
any additional and ad hoc hypotheses) why thinkers from the earlier gener-
ations had to commit the mistakes they did commit. This cognitive require-
ment is important enough for us to think through a bit.
Let me recount a charming anecdote that circulates in intellectual circles
and which makes the epistemological point I want to make. It appears that
Sir Isaac Newton, one of the greatest geniuses we have known, was once
congratulated for being ‘a genius who towered over both his predecessors
and his contemporaries’. The alleged reply of Newton goes as follows: ‘Even
the shortest of pygmies sees farther than the tallest of men, when he stands
on their shoulders. And I, Sir, am standing on the shoulders of giants’.
Quite apart from expressing enviable intellectual humility, Newton’s reply
does something more: it tells us something about the growth of scientific
knowledge itself. Amongst other things, it tells us that Newton’s break-
through was possible only because other, earlier theories were there to build
upon. In exactly the same way, we can hope to create new theories today by
building upon the theories of earlier generations. That is to say, the orientalist
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description of India becomes the foundation for building theories about

India. Today is possible only because of yesterday.
Consequently, it is not sufficient to say, as the postcolonial scholars do,
that the orientalist writings about India are wrong. In the process of provid-
ing alternate descriptions, we have to show why and how we would have
committed the same mistakes were we to be placed in their situation. Here,
the postcolonial writers fail abysmally: all they can say is that the orientalist
writers were misguided by their ‘racist’, ‘imperialist’, ‘sexist’ and ‘colonial’
motives. Obviously, only the postcolonial writers of today are the ‘truly
enlightened’; all others before them were either bigots or unconscious ser-
vants of the ‘exigencies’ of the colonial administration.
Not only do I argue that the West ‘imaginatively’ created Hinduism but I
also explain why it was compelled to do so. Its compulsion is rooted in the
nature of religion, and I advance a hypothesis about religion that accounts
for this compulsion (see further). Consequently, my story emerges as an
alternative; it is a competitor theory to those in the marketplace about what
religion is. This hypothesis breaks the ‘structural unity’ that orientalism has
constructed. ‘Hinduism’, ‘Buddhism’ etc. become hipkapis. Consequently, it
becomes possible to investigate which of the ‘facts’ that went into construct-
ing the hipkapi belong together, which do not, and how. Indians can now
start probing deeper into their own culture, because their experience becomes
accessible for reflection. ‘What is Hinduism? What is Buddhism?’ do not
become definitional questions; instead, they translate themselves as tasks,
which require an alternative explanation of those facts that lend credibility
to the existence of the hipkapi.
Such an explanation also takes care of David Lorenzen’s objection (1999),
which is quite fatal to those theories that speak of the ‘colonial construction’
of Hinduism. Even though Lorenzen focuses upon the occurrence of the
word ‘Hinduism’ in India before the advent of British colonialism, there is
a larger question to be raised. Why did Islam identify the presence of alterna-
tive and competing religions in India centuries before the British did?
Even here, how do we understand the fact that both Islam and Christianity
identified more or less the same phenomenon as the native religion of India?
My hypothesis about religion answers these questions by arguing that those
who come from a religious culture are forced to identify religions in other
cultures as well and construct them, where they do not exist. That is, there
is a logic to such constructions and this logic is provided by the religions
to which the observers belong. This explanation takes care of two issues:
why both Islam and Christianity spoke of religions in India and why, this
is more important, they identified (more or less) the same phenomenon as
the native religion of India. Their construction followed analogous lines
because of the shared heritage of the Semitic religions. In this sense, the
identification of ‘Hinduism’ by the Muslims before the advent of the British
does not testify – as Lorenzen argues – to the existence of that religion in
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India; instead, it shows that there are deep lines of continuity between Islam
and Christianity.
In that case, what about generations of Indian intellectuals? Why do they
see religions in their own culture? The answer has to be located in what
colonialism is and what it does to a people: among other things, it generates
what I call a ‘colonial consciousness’ in its subjects (Balagangadhara et al.
2008). It is generated through violence, reproduced through asymmetries in
power and sustained by an ideology. Even though I cannot expand on this
theme here, let me draw attention to one aspect of such a consciousness.
Because the Indian culture does not have ‘native’ religions, its intellectuals
are blind to the existence of religions in their midst. Even where they look at
the Semitic religions in India, they think that these are variants of what exists
in India, namely, traditions. Consequently, either they simply mimic the
western thinkers while talking about religions or, where they do not, try to
re-describe Islam and Christianity as variants of Indian traditions. Hence
the reason why many Indian intellectuals call the Muslims to ‘reform’ the
Koran or call upon the Christians to ‘rewrite’ the Bible, so that they might
become better suited to the Indian culture.
In this sense, I cannot dream of suggesting that all our intellectual pre-
decessors and all the contemporary English speaking Indians were/are
hallucinating. Instead, I suggest that the theoretical frameworks and the
existing methodologies in the domain of religious studies are secularized
variants of Christian theology. That is to say, what we call ‘secular’ religious
studies is embedded in a Christian theological framework. There is nothing
secular or scientific about the domain of religious studies today.
Some additional theses

Immediately, the next questions force themselves upon us. Why are all theor-
ies from the domain of religious studies Christian-theological in nature?
How can one make this kind of claim, if we take the diversity of theories and
methods into consideration? After all, we know for a fact that not all those
who study Indian religions are believers much less Christians. So, how could
these people accept a theological framework to study the so-called Indian
religions? I will answer these questions and give more body to my earlier
explanation by formulating the following hypothesis: I suggest that religion
(in general) and Christianity (in particular) are characterized by a double
dynamic of proselytization and secularization. I call this the process of uni-
versalization of a religion. Universalization wins converts in two ways: one
through the process of conversion, where someone is inducted into a religious
community; the other through the process of generating secular variants of
its theology which also win adherents. Let me explain.
Not many would challenge the claim that Christianity has been highly
influential in the development of western culture. We need to take this
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statement utterly seriously. It means that many things we take for granted,
whether in the West or in India, are influenced by Christianity. As I said,
I claim that Christianity expands in two ways. Both of these have been pres-
ent ever since the inception of Christianity and have mutually reinforced
each other. The first is familiar to all of us: direct conversion. People from
other religions are converted to Christianity and this is how the community
of Christian believers grows. This is the surface or explicit expansion of
Christianity.
In a manner of speaking, the second way in which Christianity expands
is also familiar to us: the so-called process of secularization. I claim that
Christianity secularizes itself, as it were, in the form of ‘de-Christianized
Christianity’. Among other things, what this means is that typically Christian
doctrines spread wide and deep beyond the confines of the community of
Christian believers dressed up in ‘secular’ (that is, no longer recognizably
Christian) clothes.
The enlightenment period, which is identified as ‘the Age of Reason’, is
alleged to be the apotheosis of the so-called process of ‘secularization’.
What people normally mean by ‘secularization’ here is the following:
the enlightenment thinkers successfully fought against the dominance that
religion (especially, Christianity) had exercised over social, political, and
economic life. From then on, so goes the standard textbook story, human
kind began to look to ‘reason’ instead of ‘religion’ in matters social, civic,
political etc. The spirit of scientific thinking, which dominated that age, has
continued to gain ascendancy in our own day and time. As heirs to this
period, which put an end to all forms of irrational subservience, we are
proud citizens of the modern-day world. We are against all forms of despot-
ism and we are believers in democracy; we believe in the role of reason in
social life; we recognize the value of human rights; and we should under-
stand that religion is not a matter for state intervention, but a ‘private’ and
personal affair of the individual in question, and so on. As I say, this is
the standard textbook story. The problem with this story is this: the
enlightenment thinkers have built their formidable reputation (as opponents
of ‘all organized religions’ or even ‘religion’ tout court) by selling ideas from
Protestant Christianity as though they are ‘neutral’ and ‘rational’.
As an example, consider the claim that ‘religion’ is not a matter for state
intervention and that it is a ‘private’ affair of the individual in question.
If we look historically, we discover that the contrast between the ‘secular’
realm and the ‘religious’ realm (often formulated also as a contrast between
the ‘temporal’ and the ‘spiritual’), and the debates about the relationship
between these two realms (or ‘spheres’) have characterized the history of
Christianity for the last two thousand years. This debate was primarily a
theological one. It revolved around the question of who the Vicar of Christ
was. With the Gregorian revolution and the emergence of Canon Law (about a
thousand years ago), the Catholic Church settled this issue in one particular
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way. This theological debate was an answer to the question of the relation-
ship between the king (the emperor) and the Pope. That is to say, it was an
issue about the relationship between the Church as a ‘spiritual’ entity and its
relationship to ‘secular’ authorities: was the king subordinate to the Church
or the other way round? Did they both have different spheres of influence,
viz., the spiritual and the temporal? If the latter, what was the relationship
between these two spheres? And so on.
With the Protestant Reformation, this theological debate became more
generalized, especially in continental Europe. It now involved every single
Christian: could the laws and institutions of men (the secular structures and
their injunctions) in any way restrain the revelations of God? Could an insti-
tution like the Catholic Church, which was seen as a human institution by
the Protestants, add anything to the word of God? Much like the earlier
debate, this was also theological and political. Theologically at stake was the
nature of the Catholic Church and its theology; politically, it involved the
relationship between ‘religion’ and ‘state’.
Protestant theologies make the following claim: nothing can come between
an individual and God except God’s revelation. No human law or organiza-
tion can dictate how a man worships or what he worships. Neither the Catholic
Church nor the secular authorities could interfere in the affairs of religion,
which involves the relationship between the individual and God. Any such
incursion in the worship of God is the corrupting influence of the Devil.
Being a Christian believer is a matter between the Maker (i.e. God) and the
individual. It was ‘God’ (i.e. the Christian God), who judged man; and men
could not judge each other in matters of faith.
The theories of state neutrality we have (the so-called liberal theories)
secularize this Protestant theological claim. That is to say, the separation of
state from religion (to put it crudely) is a theological doctrine of Protestant
Christianity. Over the centuries, intellectuals and political thinkers in Europe
have been ceaselessly selling Protestant theology (albeit dressed in secular
clothes) as the summum of human civilization (De Roover and Balagangad-
hara 2008). Note well that though a Christian claim, it is typically Protestant
in nature. The triumph of Protestantism in Europe has led even the Catholic
Christians to accept a watered-down version of this theological claim as a
political doctrine.
This claim makes sense only in relationship to what religion is (i.e. in what
form and fashion Christianity is a religion), and the line it draws between
the ‘secular’ and the ‘sacred’. That is, the lines of distinction between the
‘religious’ and the ‘secular’ spheres are drawn within a religion. Historically
speaking, this demarcation is the work of Christian theology and our polit-
ical theories are Christian theologies in disguise. The enlightenment thinkers
repeated this Protestant story and this has become our ‘secularism’.
That is to say, the so-called ‘religious-secular divide’ is a distinction drawn
within a religion and is internal to it. No possibility exists of conceptualizing
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such a distinction outside of some or another theological framework; no

‘neutral’ or ‘scientific’ description of such a divide will ever be forthcoming.
Similarly, western intellectuals were mistaken and continue to be mistaken
in seeing religions in India, because they make use of a ‘theological frame-
work’ to study other peoples and cultures. This theology is primarily
Christian in its nature and Semitic in its origin. This framework compels
them to ‘discover’ religions in every culture; in fact, the belief that all cul-
tures have some or another native religion is itself theological in nature.
In this sense, western intellectuals mistakenly see religion in all cultures
because of the compulsion exerted by the religious framework in which they
are situated.
Let me summarize what I have said so far. Christianity spreads in two
ways: through conversion and through secularization. The modern-day
study of religion embodies the assumptions of Christian theology, albeit in a
‘secularized’ form. This is an insidious process: the process of secularization
of Christian ideas.
Christianity, in my story, has also brought forth western culture. In this
sense, a particular religion, namely Christianity, has brought forth a ‘secular’
phenomenon, namely, western culture. This thesis is consistent with my claim
that the secular is generated by the religious and that the secular remains
within the boundaries of the religious. This western culture is, therefore,
religiously secular: it is a secular world within the ambit of a religious world
and is created by the latter.
Why has this movement of secularizing the religious come about? I claim
that we should seek the answers in what makes Christianity into a religion.
That is to say, we should locate the causes in those properties that make
something into a religion.
Religion: a hypothesis 2
Which properties transform some phenomenon into a religion? What makes
the Semitic religions into religions at all? Why do I argue that Indian culture
does not have ‘native’ religions? Even though I cannot give detailed answers
to these questions in the course of this article, let me provide the outlines
of my answer. My characterization of religion is that it is an explanatory
intelligible account of both the cosmos and itself. The reason why the Semitic
religions are ‘religions’ and not something else has to do with the fact that
each possesses this property: each is an explanatory intelligible account of
the cosmos and itself. What does it mean to speak of explanatory intelligibil-
ity accounts? Let me use an analogy to explain the sense in which religions
are such accounts.
Consider a non-smoker who objects to others smoking in the same room
where he is present. Let us say that we need to account for this behaviour:
why does he object if others smoke in his presence? Let us now consider the
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two kinds of accounts, an explanatory and an intelligibility account, both

of which answer the above question in their own way.
One could make the objection of the non-smoker intelligible by appealing
to the (reasonable and justifiable) beliefs held by him: he believes that smoking
is injurious to health; and that passive smoking is also a form of smoking;
and that he does not desire to injure his health etc. Hence, we can understand
his behaviour by appealing to his belief-states (or intentional states). That is
to say, by looking at this behaviour as an intentional act. ‘Why does this
non-smoker object to the others smoking in his presence?’ ‘Because’, so the
intelligibility account goes on, ‘he believes that . . .’ The ellipsis would get
filled in by the above beliefs. It is important to note that his beliefs are
connected to his actions by means of principle(s) of sound reasoning.
Because I merely want to illustrate the difference between two kinds of
accounts using the same example, let me introduce myself into this picture as
the possessor of some piece of information in order to elucidate an explanatory
account. Let us suppose that I am his friend and that one day, in strict
confidence (which I am, alas, breaking for the good of science) he informed
me that he cannot withstand smoke. (He has severe asthma and some other
allergies that make him react physically to smoke.) He does not believe that
the smell is injurious to health and that, in fact, he likes it. Smirking smugly,
I now tell you that the cause of his objection has nothing to do with his ‘beliefs’.
‘Because’, I say grinning from ear to ear, ‘he cannot withstand smoke . . .’.
On the one hand, it appears impossible to speak of human actions without
appealing to desires and beliefs, but doing so reduces the predictive power
(or the problem solving capacity) of the accounts we may give. On the other
hand, the search for the underlying (contingent) causal laws governing
human behaviour has not yielded fruits either. In any case, we have two kinds
of accounts, an explanatory account and an intelligibility one, each of which
appears to focus on different questions.
Consider now an account, which promises to give us both. It suggests or
hints that some sets of actions are intelligible because they instantiate some
sets of beliefs. And that the relationship between ‘intending’ and ‘acting’ is not
only constant but that nothing else interferes between the former and the
latter to such an extent that they become identical. To those from the outside
who only observe the actions, knowledge of these actions is sufficient to draw
inferences about the reasons for actions. There is only one proviso attached.
Because the observer’s knowledge of these actions is always framed in some
description or the other, one can only read-off the purposes of the actions
exhaustively if the descriptions of these actions are themselves exhaustive.
That is to say, a complete and totally accurate description of the actions is
required before we can be said to have complete knowledge of the reasons for
the actions.
Such an account, when it is forthcoming; of such sets of actions, if they
are possible; of such a being, if it exists; these, together, will give us an
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explanatory intelligible account of that being and its actions. The reason for
calling it thus must be obvious: the causes of the action are also its reasons.
Further, because each type of action instantiates one and only one purpose,
prediction becomes possible as well. The causal law will be general, predict-
ive power is not reduced, and the causes are the intentions of such a being.
Suppose that we now have a doctrine which says the following: such a
being exists, such actions exist too, but we could never provide a complete
description of the actions of such a being, nor possibly observe all the
actions of that being. At best, we could have a very fragmented and partial
description of such actions. It adds further that this being has communicated
its purposes to us – the understandability of this message is again restricted
by the descriptive possibilities open to us. In such a case, we have two sources
of knowledge: some sets of actions that we try to understand; the message,
which we try to make sense of.
Suppose further that this being is called ‘God’; His actions are the uni-
verse; His message is precisely the above doctrine. We now have on our hands
what we call a ‘religious doctrine’. This doctrine makes the cosmos into
an explanatorily intelligible entity but not by providing us with a detailed
explanation of all events, happenings, and phenomena. It claims that all
there is, was, and shall be (the ‘cosmos’, that is) are expressions of a will that
constitutes the cementing bond of the cosmos. However, this claim about the
nature of the cosmos is not a bare and simple statement but is itself couched
in the form of an account. Which kind of account? It is an account that not
only says that the cosmos is explanatorily intelligible but also one which
makes the cosmos into such an entity. Among other things, the latter involves
that the ‘religion’ itself exemplifies such explanatory intelligibility.
To get a better grasp on the issue, consider what religion does. First, it
imparts knowledge by saying that the world is the expression of the purposes
of God. Because this is what the world is, the knowledge of the world will be
an explanatory intelligible account. Since the religion in question is making a
claim about the world, it is a knowledge claim. It is not just any knowledge
claim but one which brings reasons and causes together in an extraordinary
way. In so far as it makes this particular claim about the cosmos, it must also
exemplify that property which makes the universe into a specific kind of a
place. That is, a religious account must itself be explanatorily intelligible.
Second, this knowledge of the world is also in the world. If the universe is
explanatorily intelligible, so is this knowledge about the world. Consequently,
it is not enough that the doctrine ‘says’ that the world expresses the will of
God, but it must also exhibit or ‘express’ the very same will of God as well.
Religion makes both the cosmos and itself explanatorily intelligible. That is,
it must not only tell us why God created the world and us but also why He
gave religion to humankind.
This, then, is what makes an explanation ‘religious’: it is knowledge of the
cosmos which includes itself. It is the explanation of the universe which
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includes itself as an explanandum. There would have been a logical problem

here, the threat of circularity perhaps, if this were to be the result of our
(human) understanding or theory of the world. But this problem does not
arise, because God has revealed His purposes by speaking to us about them.
‘Revelation’, then, is the crucial component that breaks the possible circular-
ity. As religious figures would put it perhaps, religion need not prove the
existence of God at all; the existence of religion is the proof for the existence
of God. In this sense, as an explanatory intelligible account, religion is
God’s gift to mankind and not a human invention.
Religion and meaning

To accept this account is to accept that everything in the universe has a
purpose. As human beings, we are born and die in the cosmos. Consequently,
both events have a purpose as well. To be part of a religion – as a first
approximation – is to believe that human life and death have significance, a
meaning, and a purpose. A religious doctrine need not specify the purposes
of any individual life or death; it is enough that it merely says that there is
one. Consequently to accept that life, including one’s own life, has meaning
and purpose is to accept this doctrine. As an individual, you do not know
what the purpose or meaning of your birth or death is. But because you
believe that your life itself is explanatorily intelligible, your actions appear
to you as constituting (or exemplifying) the meaning of your life.
One of the oft-heard claims about religion is that it helps human beings to
find meaning and purpose in their lives. Equally often heard claims suggest
that one of the problems in the secularized societies of ours is that individuals
experience ‘anomie’ or ‘alienation’ by virtue of not finding such a meaning;
finding that life is meaningless; or, used often as a synonym in this context,
absurd.
However, it is not always clear what this claim amounts to. Are the diverse
religions so many different attempts to find solutions to the question of the
meaning of one’s life and death? Some would say ‘no’. Yet others would say
‘yes’. However, it is not evident that religion answers this question at all.
What religions have done is to assert that life and death have a meaning and
purpose. I know of no religion that has been able to answer a specific indi-
vidual’s ‘existential question’.
In fact, if you talk to people who do believe that they have found their
meaning and purpose in life, you get the following reply as an explication of
the said meaning of their lives: they describe what they are doing, and inform
you that this description is the meaning of their lives. That is, they merely
reply that their lives have meaning and that the meaning of their lives is the
lives they are leading. To understand this better, let us consider the following
event and its account.
Suppose that you have a friend who attends parties or goes to dancing
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clubs very regularly. Equally regularly, he chases after women on such occa-
sions and, let us say, he succeeds in picking them up – each time a different
woman. Puzzled, you ask him one day why he does this. His answer goes
like this: ‘I always want a woman I cannot get – that is why I go after women
at the parties. As soon as I get them, I lose all interest, which is why I drop
them.’ Even though what you have on your hands is a mere re-description of
his action, which you yourself have observed, this account makes it intelli-
gible. As Davidson (1963) formulates it: ‘[T]here is no denying that this is
true: when we explain an action, by giving the reason, we do redescribe the
action; redescribing the action gives the action a place in a pattern, and in
this way the action is explained’ (in Davis (ed.) 1983: 64). That is, ‘a reason
makes an action intelligible by redescribing it’ (ibid: 67).
Those who have found meaning in their lives do precisely this: re-describe
the lives they are leading. ‘Where I can help people using my skills’, said a
doctor to me once, ‘I do so; this is what makes my life meaningful to me’.
Neither you nor I are any the wiser for this piece of knowledge; but we can
see that it has the structure of an intelligibility account. Your friend made
his action of chasing after women intelligible not merely by describing the
pattern in his actions; by re-describing the pattern he also appears to place it
in a bigger pattern accessible to you. The description of a pattern in one’s life
also re-describes the pattern in one’s life; it also places it in a bigger pattern.
To those from the outside, the bigger pattern appears absent, which is why
this account of life does not appear intelligible. From the inside though,
i.e. to those to whom their own lives appear meaningful, a pattern appears to
be present. They feel that their lives are placed in a pattern and not merely
that their lives have a pattern.
They cannot tell you what that pattern is, any more than your friend can
tell you about the pattern where his women-chasing activity is placed. In this
sense, it is not true to say that one cannot communicate the meaning one has
found to one’s life because it is ‘an intensely personal thing’ or because such
a deep personal thing is not communicable. No. In fact, these people are able
to communicate the meaning of their individual lives; from the outside, to
someone who listens to such accounts, the intelligibility appears missing
because the pattern where it requires to be placed is not known.
Put in general terms, the answer to the question of the meaning of life is
not to be sought in the answer to the question but elsewhere, namely, in that
belief which enables the formulation of such a question. Religion enables one
to raise such questions because it is the only framework where such queries
can be formulated. Religion was not invented to answer questions about the
meaning and purpose of the life of some or another specific individual. Such
questions come into being within the framework of religion. These problems
do not antedate religion; instead, religion generates them. Having done so,
the religious framework tantalizingly hints that the problem is solvable. Take
religion away, you will also take these questions away.
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By saying this, I do not imply that life is either meaningless or that it is

absurd because, even this answer is given within a framework, which makes
either meaning attribution or its denial sensible with respect to individual or
collective life. Rather, what I am saying is that the questions about the mean-
ing of life are internal to religion; they are religious questions no matter what
the answer is. They are not questions that a ‘primitive’ man raised 10,000
years ago; nor are they the questions of the ‘modern’ man; they are those of
a religious man – homo religiosus. Religion makes the world intelligible to us,
promises also to relate us intelligibly to the world.
Clearly, the difference among religions will revolve around the specifica-
tion of these purposes. What, then, makes them into rival religions is their
characterization of this explanatory intelligibility of human life and death
(at a minimum). Their affirmation that the Cosmos is an explanatorily intel-
ligible entity makes them into religions. In a deep and fundamental sense,
to grow up within a religious tradition is to grow up with this fundamental
experience where the Cosmos has explanatory intelligibility. Equally, to have
a religion is to have this experience.
This does not imply that in any particular religion some or other statement
need occur to the effect that the Cosmos is an explanatorily intelligible entity.
What I am saying is that such is the claim or affirmation of religion: it makes
the world explanatorily intelligible by structuring experience accordingly. In
doing so, it avoids a crippling circularity by placing the origin of this account
outside those who accept it. In simple and simplified steps, both the problem
and its solution can be described as follows:
Step 1: Created by God, the Cosmos exhibits His purpose;

Step 2: As human beings, we know this because God has revealed it;
Step 3: God’s revelation consists precisely of both the above steps,
including this step.
As an account, religion tells us what the Cosmos is like (step 1); makes itself
into an object by telling us how we could know that such is the case (step 2);
characterizes both itself as an account and the account of the Cosmos as
true (step 3). What is paradoxical, perhaps even impossible, when viewed
from the standpoint of finite individuals with finite knowledge and abilities,
ceases being so when claimed to instantiate the infinite knowledge of some
‘totally other’ kind of being. The problem that we could have with respect to
such knowledge is not epistemic but hermeneutic in nature: our interpret-
ative abilities are finite; therefore, the sense that we could make of this know-
ledge is fallible unless, of course, this divine Being would also help us out in
this case. Candour requires me to add: rumour has it that this Being is
known to do precisely that, even if His criterion for selecting individuals
remains rather vague and mysterious.
Looked in terms of what human beings do and what they think, religion
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involves a peculiar kind of reflexivity. It is its own justification, its own truth,
founded on nothing that is human. Given the nature of this object, we need
not wonder anymore that we have to take recourse to religious/theological
vocabulary in order to explicate the concept of religion.
The biblical example

The creation of the world and all that is in it, the Bible tells us, is the work of
God. As a Being with goals and purposes, He brought forth everything for
some purpose or another. The cosmic products and processes embody the
will of this God. What we human beings see are the phenomena; but under-
lying them, and expressed in them, is the will of God. The same God, the
Good Book further tells us, has manifested His will to us in two ways:
through revelation, as expressed in the scriptures; and in His product, viz.
nature. We can study His works and through such a study learn inductively
about His will; and then, there is also the Biblical revelation. In a deep and
fundamental sense, the world is governed by the will of The Sovereign.
How can we know the will of an actor by studying his actions? From our
experience in the world, we do know that there is a hiatus between the
actions we perform and our belief states. Even such a ‘trivial’ action as
my opening a door could not be said to instantiate some or other belief
unambiguously: perhaps, I feel that the room is stuffy or that it is too cold;
perhaps I want you to get out; or I sense an eavesdropper. You cannot,
in other words, read-off my intentions unambiguously by looking at my
actions. You could also ask me the reasons for my action: but I could deceive
you by telling a plausible lie; or I forgot my own reasons; or I am not even
sure that I have reasons etc. This being the case, how can we know (or even
hypothesize about) God’s will by studying His actions?
The answer must be obvious. God is perfectly good, perfectly consistent
and His actions perfectly express His intentions etc. The Sovereign’s will is
not arbitrary but perfectly constant. Because He is a Being who is perfectly
trustworthy, His works do not deceive us. The ascription of predicates of
perfection to God, which many authors use as an argument for the impossi-
bility of His existence, I suggest, was a necessary condition for the emergence
of human knowledge about the natural world. Consider, by contrast, the
‘gods’ of the so-called religions like those of the Greeks, the Romans, or
the Hindus. What is constant about these gods is their capriciousness or
unpredictability. They ceaselessly interfere with the affairs of mankind but in
ways that are both unpredictable and mysterious.
Let me reformulate the earlier paragraphs in the following way: the Bible
inculcates an experience of the Cosmos as a particular kind of order, and
this order consists of the fact that phenomena express a deep, underlying
constancy. This constancy is the will of The Sovereign. His will governs the
world.
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Religion and truth

In our daily activities in the world, we assume that many of our beliefs and
theories are true. One such candidate, for example, is that the earth revolves
around the sun or that we do not change shape while we sleep. Even though
we do not know whether they are true, we have no reason (as yet) to presume
their falsity. The assumption about the truth of these beliefs is merely
strengthened by a whole number of other actions and beliefs – from sending
satellites to circle the earth to biological theories and medical practices – and
we do not really despair about the tentative and hypothetical nature of our
theories. Commendable and necessary though such attitudes are, our indif-
ference does not affect the epistemological point: any and all of our theories
could turn out to be false.
Religion not only tells us the way the Cosmos is but also makes itself
explanatorily intelligible. Based on human knowledge and human cognitive
abilities, both of which are finite, we could never arrive at an explanatory
intelligible account, which includes itself as an explanandum. Religion and its
claim to be the truth about the world are radically independent of our prior
theories about the world. Whether one believes in the existence of witches,
ancestors, or quantum particles; whether one can understand Gödel’s the-
orem or the mechanism of gene splicing; whether one can drive a car or not;
one’s access to the ‘message’ of religion is not affected. Grasping the truth of
the religious account does not depend on our finite knowledge of the world
and this truth, note well, is about the Cosmos. On our own, as these religions
have explained themselves, we could only arrive at a ‘vague’ conception of
God as the creator. But this notion does not make the world explanatorily
intelligible. God has to reveal himself and aid us in seeing the truth because
this truth does not depend upon human knowledge and what we, at any
given moment, believe to be true.
What we have on our hands, then, is an account that has no parallels in
the domain of human knowledge. We know of partial explanatory accounts;
we think that our folk-psychology makes use of intelligibility accounts.
Religion alone is both an explanatory and an intelligibility account. Not of this
or that individual phenomenon, but of the Cosmos and itself.
Corresponding to this, the question of truth takes a radical form. The
problem is not whether a religion is true in the same way my belief about
Brussels being the capital city of Belgium is true. The latter’s truth depends
on other beliefs being true as well. This is not the case for religion at all. If
we use the predicate ‘true’ to describe religion, it looks as though we cannot
use it for anything else: what makes religion true cannot make anything else
true. Religion is the truth in the specific sense of not being dependent on the
truth of any other belief we hold about the world.
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Religion ‘sui generis’?

To the reader and to someone familiar with contemporary religious studies,
two things must be clear by now: (a) my hypothesis about religion attempts
to make sense of the experience of the believers. In contemporary jargon,
I ‘privilege the insider perspective’ as against the ‘outsider perspective’. (b) In
doing so, I seem to talk as though religion cannot be studied using methods
and theories from other sciences. In the words of McCutcheon (1997), I seem
to speak of ‘religion as sui generis’. Because I cannot fully answer these
objections in the course of this chapter, let me make a few points in my
defence, using a realist language.
What we have in human cultures are specific phenomena like Christianity,
Islam, Judaism and such like. If they are ‘religions’, then they are that by virtue
of possessing some property that makes them into religions. In this sense,
‘religion’ is a property of these specific phenomena. The ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’
problem makes sense only with respect to specific religions because, besides
being religions, they also have other properties. However, with respect to that
property which makes them into a religion (the explanatory intelligibility
that I talk about), there is no ‘outsider’ perspective available to us human
beings. Only that entity (‘God’, in our case) whose will is the causal force
of the Cosmos has an ‘outsider’ perspective with respect to the explanatory
intelligible account that religion is. Consequently, we cannot study religion
as religion (or under the description of ‘religion’) from the outside, ever.
I am not speaking about what makes some phenomenon into Christianity
but what makes Christianity into a religion. From the outside, without having
any such account, I cannot say what makes some account an explanatory
intelligible account of the Cosmos; why it does this to some and not to
others; what does the explanatory intelligibility consist of etc. Maximally,
one can do what I have done: take note of the fact that religion is an explana-
tory intelligible account. To be sure, we can ask the believers to explain
themselves. In such a case, we will be studying what it means ‘to believe’ for
these people; if and where we can understand their answer to the ‘meaning’
of the Cosmos and life, we will have some idea about what it means to be
religious. But that is a different issue altogether.
In fact, my hypothesis says as much. Religion exhibits reflexivity: religion
includes what it says about itself; religious language is both the object lan-
guage and its own meta-language. Consequently, the possibility of a ‘science
of religion’ resides in our willingness to accept theology as science. However,
this does not mean that one cannot study religion scientifically. If we study
religion as religion, only then are we forced to do theology. But religion can
be studied at different levels of description: (a) as religion, (b) as world view,
(c) as a causal force in a culture, (d) as specific religions etc. In this sense,
yes, we can study religion scientifically but we must know the level at which
we can provide a scientific description. Consequently, I am not in the least
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suggesting that we cannot study religion using theories and methods from
the sciences.
But my characterization of religion does imply the following: it enables us
to come to grips with authors like Schleiermacher and Otto, who have spoken
of religious experience, without accusing them of bad faith or imputing
‘apologetic motivations’ to them. Both argue that having a religious experi-
ence presupposes that one belongs to a religion, and that the non-rational
elements are related to the rational. Indeed so. Religion is an account that
involves concepts. To accept it is to feel a part of the purposes of that Being
and depend on Him. Without such an account, there is no question of
experiencing the ‘absolute dependency’ that Schleiermacher talks about; at
best, all we can experience is a kind of relative dependency upon each other.
In such a case, the ‘other’ is not ‘the Totally Other’ of Schleiermacher. To
have the kind of experience that Schleiermacher talks about, we need to accept
the explanatory intelligible account of the Cosmos, i.e. accept religion.
It is this property that makes not only Christianity but also Judaism and
Islam into religions. However, that which makes them into religions also
divides them and this dispute among them is unsolvable, because it has no
solution. Each is a specific religion, that is, each is an explanatory intelli-
gible account and each makes the Cosmos into an explanatory intelligible
entity to those who accept this account. Some individual, at any given moment
of time, may switch from one to the other on the ground that one is superior
to the other. But his ground is that one succeeds better than the other in
making the Cosmos explanatorily intelligible to him. He may even believe –
and, indeed, he has to – that this superiority arises from the fact that one is
better than the other. But he can only do so after the other account has made
the Cosmos explanatorily intelligible to him but not before. That is to say, he
can judge that one religion is better than the other, only after trading places.
A ‘formal’ conversion may (and often does) come later, but the point is that
there is no vantage point for the human being to judge the superiority of
one religion against the other. The reason is, of course, simple: religion must
make the Cosmos explanatorily intelligible to the individual in question.
Very often, believers make the claim that one cannot investigate the nature
of religion, unless one is a believer oneself. Brilliant and reputed thinkers
have tried to argue for this point of view. Equally often, such people have
been accused by their opponents of bad faith and dogmatism, and suspected
of harbouring apologetic motivations. Any phenomenon can be studied
scientifically, the opponents have maintained, including both religion and
science. Why should one believe in God in order to discuss His existence?
One does not have to be a stone to describe its fall, any more than one has
to be a neurotic to discuss the nature of neurosis. Therefore, why should one
be religious to scientifically investigate religion?
Consider what I just said above regarding how anyone could judge the
superiority of one religion against the other. One can only do so from within
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the framework of some specific religion or another. The reason lies in the
fact that they are all explanatory intelligible accounts. Only from within
the framework of one religion can we judge the ‘adequacy’ of the other.
In the starkest possible terms: to investigate religion – as an explanatory
intelligible account of the Cosmos – we need to accept some or another
explanatory intelligible account of the Cosmos. That is, religion can be
investigated only by being religious yourself; religion is an object of investi-
gation from within some or another religion. This position stands to reason
because, as I have said, religion makes itself explanatorily intelligible too. The
believers are not, I submit, dogmatic when they say, as Söderblom did, that
the only science of religion could be theology.
Again, it is important to note what I am saying and what I am not. Any
specific doctrine within a specific religion – say, for example, the doctrine of
trinity – is not immune from criticism or beyond discussion. After all, those
who do not accept it do criticize and discuss this doctrine. In this sense, in
all probability, every single doctrine of every religion has been discussed and
criticized at one time or another. So, if a Jew can criticize the doctrine of
trinity, why not someone else, who denies the existence of God? Belonging
to a religion is not equivalent to holding a party card.
Some contemporary criticisms

My attempt at developing a hypothesis on religion has met with criticisms. I
should like to answer a few of them. Will Sweetman (2003) believes that my
‘definition’ of religion is flawed because I take Christianity (especially, accor-
ding to him, Protestant Christianity) as an exemplary instance of the category
of religion (for a similar criticism, see Pennington 2005: 175). Sweetman
detects the following ‘logical’ form in my argument:
First premise: Christianity is prototypically what religion is.

Second premise: Hinduism does not share all (or perhaps any) of
the relevant properties of Christianity.
Conclusion: Hinduism is not a religion.
(2003: 337)
To begin with, let me make three logical points about his ‘reconstruction’ of
my argument. In the first place, the ‘conclusion’ that Sweetman attributes
to me is not derivable on the basis of these two premises alone: as it stands,
no one can derive from the above argument (without adding additional
premises) that ‘Hinduism is not a religion’. As a result, second, as it stands
now, the conclusion is invalid: the only possible conclusion that one can draw
from the above is the following: ‘Hinduism is not prototypically what a
religion is’. (Of course, this could imply that ‘Hinduism’ is a religion, even if
it is not prototypically what a religion is). Third, Sweetman wants to take
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issue with the truth of the conclusion but he does so by throwing doubts upon
the truth of the premises. This is not possible. In deductive logics, truth is
transmitted from the premises to the conclusion, but not falsity. Falsity
travels, again in deductive logics, the other way round: falsity is transmitted
from the conclusion to the premises. In other words, there is an asymmetry
in the transmission of truth and falsity in deductive logics. Thus, Sweetman
cannot contest the truth of the conclusion (that he attributes to me) on
logical grounds by challenging the truth-value of the premises.
Let me take up the more substantive issues. In my book, I do take Christi-
anity as a prototypical example of religion. There are multiple reasons for
this move, including an understanding of what a definition is and what it
should do. Let me enumerate some of these reasons, beginning with the kind
of definition I provide.
My statement about the exemplary (or prototypical) nature of Christianity
must, above everything else, be situated in the context of providing an ostensive
definition of the (English) word ‘religion’. Such an ostensive gesture – though
given in language instead of in physical gestures – does not make any claims
about the nature of religion except to point out that, in our language-use (in
western languages), the English word ‘religion’ refers at least to Christianity.
Such an ostensive definition does not mean that Christianity is the best
religion or the most perfect one or the only one. In fact, it is easily conceivable
that Christianity is not even a religion and that our language use is wrong.
However, it is sensible to say this only when we have a theory of religion and
not before. In other words, one’s view of Christianity – whether it is a ‘true’
religion or merely false consciousness – does not affect the definition I am
putting forward. My definition registers a fact about language use but makes
no further ontological assertions either about Christianity or about religion.
I am not providing an explicit definition of the word ‘religion’; I am simply
identifying an example, a prototypical example, of the category ‘religion’.
I am not making any assumptions about what religion is, or what makes
Christianity into one. My only argument is: if Christianity is not an
exemplary instance of ‘religion’, then we have no other examples of religion.
Therefore, I make no assumptions about the nature of religion or of Christi-
anity in beginning a study of religion. In fact, I do not even assume the
existence of religion. Rather, I merely point out the fact that unless we can
show that our language-use refers to an entity that does not exist in our
world – in which case we need not study religion at all – we may not reject
our linguistic practice. If ‘religion’ refers to something at all, and the history
of our natural language-use with respect to this word suggests that it does,
it must at least refer to Christianity. Otherwise, it picks out a ‘fictitious entity’
– and this is a theoretical claim that one cannot make at the preliminary
stage of defining a word in a theory.
Suppose that we extend this argument further. The very same linguistic
practice that I talk about also refers to the following entities: ‘leprechauns’,
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‘Cyclopes’, ‘satyrs’ and ‘unicorns’. Our linguistic practice not only assures us
that these words refer to creatures in the world, but also provides us with
entertaining tales about the behaviour of such creatures. We can take issue
with the claims about the existence of such creatures (and, thus, whether
these words have any reference in the real world) by accepting the theories in
evolutionary biology and not merely by talking about some or another
philosophical claim about ‘meaning’ and ‘reference’. In this sense, if one
wants to challenge the linguistic use with respect to the word ‘religion’, it is
advisable that one possesses a substantial theory about the relevant part of
the world. A bare philosophical claim about ‘meaning’ and ‘reference’ will
not do (see De Roover and Claerhout in this volume).
On the reference of the word ‘religion’

I suggest that when we use the category ‘religion’, we minimally refer to
Christianity. Why ‘minimally’? What if someone refuses to recognize that
Christianity is a prototypical instance of the category ‘religion’? My answer
is that this is the only option open to us, unless we make epistemic assump-
tions about the object before having studied it.
Suppose that someone denies the prototypicality of Christianity as a
religion. Then, one has to (a) either deny that the concept ‘religion’ has
any reference to any entity in the world; (b) or claim that it has some other
reference. If one argues the first position, one is running counter to our
linguistic practice where the word does have a reference. Of course, one is
at perfect liberty to counter the linguistic practice; but, then, one must also
have some kind of a theory about what ‘religion’ is and what it is not. Not
only that. Such a theory also has to explain why, for more than 2,000 years,
the word found a home in Christian theory and practice.
Regarding the second point, the following could be said: the concept could
have other references, but it minimally picks out Christianity. To argue that it
refers to some other entity without referring also to Christianity is to take an
epistemic decision: after all, Christianity has described itself as a religion,
and the word has its home in the European languages. To go against either of
these two facts is to have a theory about both.
This linguistic practice itself is not neutral. After all, it is the practice of a
community that speaks this way and not another way. This fact about the
linguistic practices of a community having a cultural history reflects a more
general point, viz. that as socio-cultural entities, we function in a context. To
be sure, it also underlines the fact that scientific enquiries have a context too.
But then, these are the general presuppositions of any human enquiry – not
merely of this one. Needless to say, I am a human being and, consequently,
the fact that I am situated in a cultural and intellectual milieu is not quite the
same as accepting presuppositions either about religion or the relation of
Christianity to religion.
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Let us say that in some phenomenon this or that property, or even a group
of them, is absent; let us assume that these very same properties are present
in Christianity. This situation does not tell us a great deal: it could be that the
former is merely less prototypical than Christianity; or that the former is a
‘truer’ religion than Christianity; it could be that both have all the properties
of religion etc.
Could we answer the question about the existence or nonexistence of
religion by simply looking at the properties of Christianity? That is, can we
argue that because some properties characteristic of Christianity are absent
from traditions elsewhere, (say, in ‘Hinduism’ or ‘Buddhism’) the latter can-
not possibly be religions? Such an argument is possible only if one is able to
show that the properties of Christianity which one has identified are also the
properties of religion. In the absence of such a proof, all that one can do is
to notice that Christianity and some other tradition differ from each other.
However, one cannot argue that, because of these differences, some other
tradition is not a religion.
This is so obvious a point that one wonders how Sweetman (2003) could
possibly see me arguing the opposite. Consider the distinction between
Christianity as a historical movement and Christianity as a religion. Today,
the former owns buildings, land, telephones, television studios, aircrafts etc.
These are the properties – in both the senses of possessions and predicates –
of Christianity. Is it any more or less of a religion because of that? The only
way we can answer this question either way is by postulating (or having a
theory about) the relation between Christianity and religion. One may want
to argue that Christianity has progressively become less of a religion because
it is now more interested in earthly possessions. Or the other way round.
Notice, however, that this argument can work only if we know what religion
is. By looking at Christianity alone – as a prototypical example of the con-
cept of religion – we can make no such claim.
The second objection

Authors like Sweetman further argue that my ‘definition’ of religion is based
upon a Protestant model of Christianity. Such a criticism misses recognizing
three crucial issues: (a) the crucial differences between providing a definition
of a word and building a hypothesis about an object; (b) the function that
the ostensive definition plays in my hypothesis; (c) the way I build the
hypothesis.
The ostensive definition, which registers the language-use, tells us that any
hypothesis that we might formulate about religion can be tested against at
least one object. However, despite the internal variety in Christianity, this is
not sufficient, since our hypothesis would then be able to account only for
those features that make these varieties into instances of a generic Christianity.
In that case, the hypothesis will not be about religion, but only about what
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generic Christianity is. In other words, one cannot test a hypothesis about
religion through building a hypothesis by studying the properties of generic
Christianity. That is to say, any inductive generation of hypotheses is doomed
to failure. That is why I do not build a hypothesis inductively: neither generic
Christianity nor Protestant Christianity is at the basis of my hypothesis
about religion. In fact, it is my claim that such induction is neither interesting
nor possible. The definition of ‘religion’ (that is, Christianity as a proto-
typical example of religion) is quite distinct from my hypothesis about
religion (that is, religion is an explanatory intelligible account of the Cosmos
and itself). How, then, does my argument proceed? There are four distinct
steps to the building of my hypothesis.
As I have argued, if the word ‘religion’ picks out something, it refers at
least to Christianity because the latter refers to itself as a religion (i.e. it uses
the word with respect to itself). This self-reference is not a few centuries old:
it has been so used ever since the inception of Christianity. If Christianity
refers to itself as a religion and recognizes itself as one, then the terms in
which it does so gives us ‘its’ concept of religion. This concept not only
enabled Christianity to describe itself as a religion, but also helped it to
recognize some of the rivals it encountered as religious rivals. Therefore to
study Christianity as a religion is to study those properties by virtue of which
not only did Christianity think of itself as a religion but also confronted rival
or competing religions. This is the first step of the argument. This step
merely allows us to establish the terms of description. These very same
terms, however, allow us to take the second step.
Christianity is a historical movement. So are Judaism and Islam. The for-
mer has construed the latter as rival religions. Whatever goals they were/are
competing for, they did/do so as religions. Judaism and Islam were not merely
baptized as rival religions by Christianity. These two also saw Christianity
as a rival religion under the same description.
The second step establishes that the terms under which Christianity recog-
nized itself as religion are also the terms under which Islam and Judaism
recognize themselves as religions (using whatever word they use). That is
to say, the concept used by Christianity to call itself a ‘religion’ is also the
one which makes some (Judaism and Islam) who do not call themselves as
‘religions’ into religions (because it is also their self-description). Therefore,
the ‘Christian’ concept is not just Christian. It cuts across the three Semitic
religions. This is not my concept or your concept, but the self-descriptions of
these religions. At the same time, it suggests that the concept of religion is
itself part of a religious framework and vocabulary. This lends greater
probability to the claim that whether or not Judaism and Islam use the word
‘religion’, they too are religions. That is, if Christianity is a religion, so are
Judaism and Christianity. These two steps merely succeed in telling us that
any hypothesis about religion will be tested at least against these three
phenomena.
158
However, this is not enough. Indeed, one could build a hypothesis that
captures the generic properties of these three Semitic religions. Consequently,
a hypothesis that tells us why and how Judaism, Christianity and Islam are
religions could merely be informing us about the generic properties of Semitic
religions without telling us what makes these three into religions. After all, a
hypothesis about religion should tell us what religion is. Here is where the
subsequent two steps come in.
The third step picks out two salient facts. One: the terms under which
Christianity transformed Islam and Judaism are also those that make Judaism
and Christianity rivals to Islam, and Islam and Christianity rivals to Judaism.
The possibility that Judaism and Islam were merely reacting to the attacks of
Christianity – and were, therefore, forced to accept the terms of Christianity’s
self-description – is ruled out by the second salient fact: all three singled
out exactly the same rivals under the same description elsewhere unerringly.
Judaism had singled out the Roman religiones as its rivals before Christianity
was even born; Islam had picked out precisely those Indian traditions as its
rivals, which Christianity was also to identify, centuries before the European
Christians launched their major and massive evangelizing activities.
The fourth step completes this argument by looking at the reaction of the
rivals identified by Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. These rivals, the Roman
religiones and the Indian traditions, did not recognize themselves in the
description provided by Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Nor did they
see the relationship between themselves and the latter as religious rivalry.
Incomprehension of the terms of description and indifference to the alleged
rivalry characterize the reactions of those belonging to the Roman religiones
and the Indian traditions. ‘There are different roads to heaven’, said one
shrugging his shoulders; ‘How could only your religion be true and ours
false?’ asked the other uncomprehendingly. Even under persecution, this
tone did not change. The persecution of Christians in the early Roman
Empire did not take place using those terms which Christianity would use
to persecute the pagans centuries later.
The third and the fourth step, together, establish the following case: the
terms under which Christianity recognized itself and identified rival religions
were also those that provided self-identity and rivals to Judaism and Islam.
Precisely this description was incomprehensible to those in whose language
the word ‘religion’ existed (the Roman ‘religio’) and to those who had no
such word (the Indians). Neither recognized itself in this description; neither
fought the others as rivals under this description.
These four steps constitute the historical constraints under which we must
generate our hypothesis about religion. On the one hand, our hypothesis
must capture the self-description of the Semitic religions; further, it must
also explain why ‘Hinduism’, ‘Shintoism’ etc., also appear as ‘religions’ (even
if they are ‘false religions’) to them. On the other hand, the very same
hypothesis must also explain why neither the Hindus nor the Romans were
159
able to recognize themselves as ‘religions’, whether true or false. Why this

double constraint and what does it do?
Quite apart from the issue that these are historical facts that any hypoth-
esis on religion has to explain, there is something more intriguing here. If one
merely generates a hypothesis about religion that tells us why both the
Semitic religions and the Indian traditions (and the Roman religiones) are
religions, then there is no reason to choose a ‘non-theological’ hypothesis
above a theological explanation: both explain the same phenomenon in the
same way, viz. they are all ‘religions’. Actually, the situation is far worse:
theological theories tell us more about the differences between, say, Hinduism
on the one hand and the Semitic religions on the other. That is, apart from
noticing all kinds of detailed differences between these two groups (which a
‘non-theological’ hypothesis can also do), the theological explanation pro-
vides additional accounts of these differences: Hinduism is a ‘false’ religion
because it practices idolatry, for example. In other words, if one intends
being scientific, then one has to choose a theological explanation above a
‘non-theological’ hypothesis because the former explains more facts than the
latter can possibly do. This is one side of the coin.
The second side of the coin is this. If, on the other hand, we develop a ‘non-
theological’ hypothesis about religion that merely shows that ‘Hinduism’,
‘Buddhism’, ‘Jainism’ etc. are not ‘religions’ (because there is no ‘religion’ in
the world, say), then we side with the pagans and discount more than two
thousand years of human history. For this kind of hypothesis, the Jews,
Christians and Muslims (and the fact that they saw religions in India and
ancient Rome) simply do not exist or do not form a part of human history.
Only the arrogant or the foolish would take this route.
Consequently, the only reasonable and scientific avenue is to generate a
hypothesis that accounts for both sets of facts in the same move. The histor-
ical constraints that I have identified vouch for a hypothesis generation under
constraints, which is another description of scientific theorizing. In simpler
terms, we face two problems that we need to solve. One appears as an empir-
ical problem and the other is a historical problem. The solutions to these will
give us a preliminary hypothesis about religion.
The problem which appears empirical is the following: what is Christianity’s
concept of religion, and how is it possible to show that its concept is also that
of Judaism and Islam? Let us appreciate this problem in its complexity,
because doing so will enable us to realize why we have to move not only
beyond the ‘concept of religion’ but also beyond any inductive generation of
a hypothesis by studying this or that variant of Christianity.
One obvious solution to the above problem is not only a herculean job,
but also, in all probability, an unsolvable one. This is the inductive task of
trying to find out what Christians have said about ‘religion’ over the course
of the last two thousand years. Even a preliminary survey, which involves
the use of the word ‘religion’ (after all, that is the only way we can begin)
160
in extant writings will lead us to the conclusion that the word was used in
a variety of ways, that it disappeared for centuries to re-emerge much later
in yet other ways, that the meaning of the word has undergone changes
according to the multiple linguistic and historical contexts in which it was
used etc. In fact, one does not even have to do a survey to predict such a
conclusion. As though this is not enough, we have to do the same with
respect to Judaism and Islam. Here, we confront another unsolvable prob-
lem: neither uses the word ‘religion’ – unless in modern writings on the
subject. Consequently, this avenue is closed to us, if we intend to understand
what religion is.
There is another solution to this empirical problem. If one can generate a
hypothesis of religion and show that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam recog-
nize themselves in such a portrayal, then this problem is solved. That is,
by talking about the object that religion is; by arguing that the presence
of ‘something’ makes Christianity, Judaism, and Islam into religions; and
showing that it captures their self-descriptions; one can argue backwards
to their ‘concept of religion’.
This generates the historical problem: such a hypothesis of religion has to
solve two further questions: (a) Why do Semitic religions see religions every-
where? (b) Why have neither the Roman religiones nor the Indian traditions
recognized themselves in this description? Needless to say, these questions
would have to be answered without appealing to ad hoc hypotheses. That is,
any hypothesis on religion will have to simultaneously solve both the empir-
ical and the historical problem in one move. That, precisely, is what my
hypothesis does (see Balagangadhara 1994: 362–69).
Conclusion
Let me bring this rather long chapter to its conclusion. In contradistinction
to many writers on the subject, I do argue that religion can be studied.
However, I add that it could be studied at multiple levels: studying religion as
religion is to accept its self-description and, in that case, being forced to do
theology. The peculiar self-reflexivity of religion explains to us how to under-
stand authors like Schleirmacher, Otto and Söderblom without accusing
them of apologetic motivations. In a very specific sense, they were entirely
right when they suggested that one could study religion only by being a
believer oneself. At this level of description, that is, at the level of self-
description of religion, it is simply impossible for us human beings to have
access to an ‘outsider perspective’. Our ‘data’ are the experiences of the
believers and the properties of religion (‘faith’, ‘worship’ and such like).
Jonathan Smith (1982) is totally wrong when he says there is ‘no data’ for
religion. As he knows, the word was historically not coined by ‘the scholar’
during the enlightenment period: it was used in polemics and apologetics in
Ancient Greece and Rome. The believers took over the word ‘religio’ and
161
gave it a different meaning than the one it had in Classical Rome. However,
this does not mean that one cannot study religion scientifically: one can and
should do this, but at a different level of description. It is only at this level
that we could hope to develop a scientific theory about religion and the role
it plays in human societies and cultures.
‘Religions’ were constructed in India as experiential entities by people who
had a religion. There is no ‘religion’ in India, nor has there been one, pro-
vided one does not take the presence of Judaism, Christianity and Islam
in India into account. In any case, entities like ‘Hinduism’, ‘Buddhism’,
‘Jainism’ are fictional entities the way the ‘satyr’ and the ‘unicorn’ are.
Notes
1 This and the following subsection reproduce material from Balagangadhara and
Keppens (2009).
2 The subsections in this part reproduce material from Balagangadhara (1994).
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the West, and the dynamic of religion, New Delhi: Manohar.
project: beyond the strictures and structures of Orientalism’, Interventions, 11:
50–68.
Davidson, D. (1963) ‘Actions, reasons, and causes’, The Journal of Philosophy, 60:
685–700; reprinted in S. Davis (ed.) (1983) Causal Theories of Mind: action, know-
ledge, memory, perception, and reference, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
De Roover, J. and Balagangadhara, S.N. (2008) ‘John Locke, Christian liberty, and
the predicament of liberal toleration’, Political Theory: an international journal of
political philosophy, 36: 523–49.
Lorenzen, D. (1999) ‘Who invented Hinduism?’, Comparative Studies in Society and
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and the politics of nostalgia, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
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Pennington, B. (2005) Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians, and the colonial con-
struction of religion, New York: Oxford University Press.
Said, E. (1978) Orientalism, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Schleiermacher, F. (1799; reprint edn 1988) On Religion: speeches to its cultured
despisers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Smith, J.Z. (1982) Imagining Religion: from Babylon to Jonestown, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
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Söderblom, N. (1913) ‘Holiness’, in J. Hastings (ed.) Encyclopedia of Religion and

Ethics, vol. 6, New York: Charles Scribner’s.
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163
9
THE COLONIAL CONSTRUCTION
OF WHAT?
Jakob De Roover and Sarah Claerhout
Statements concerning ‘the construction of religion’ have become common-

place in postmodern scholarship in religious studies and other domains.
Particularly in the contemporary study of India, the idea of a colonial con-
struction of Hinduism has gained popularity (Dalmia and von Stietencron
(eds) 1995; Frykenberg 1989, 1993; Inden 1990; King 1999a, 1999b; Oddie
2006; Pennington 2001, 2005; Sugirtharajah 2003; Viswanathan 2003). Many
share the sense that the notions of religion and Hinduism in modern descrip-
tions of India are peculiar and this sense of peculiarity is expressed in terms
like ‘construction’, ‘creation’, ‘imagining’, ‘invention’, ‘manufacturing’ and
‘making’.
As the proliferation of terminology indicates, such accounts about the
construction of Hinduism suffer from a lack of conceptual clarity. It is
unclear what ‘constructs’ are and how they are different from any concept or
theoretical term or what kind of process ‘construction’ is and how it is to be
distinguished from conceptualization or description (Engler 2004; Hacking
1999). Clarity cannot be gained by defining these terms, since we then end up
with as many meanings as there are authors who define them. Rather, we are
in need of theory formation on the nature of this process of construction.
By raising three central questions, this chapter aims to clear some of the
conceptual ground required for such theory formation. The first section deals
with the question ‘Is religion a construct?’ The thesis that religion is only a
construction or creation of scholarly study is surrounded by confusion about
its precise meaning and implications. We argue that this thesis and the con-
comitant claim that ‘there is no data for religion’ fail to make sense in the
absence of any theory of religion. In the second section, we answer the ques-
tion ‘Is Hinduism a construct?’ in the positive. We explain a specific hypoth-
esis on the empirical process through which Hinduism was created as a
conceptual unit in European descriptions of India. In this limited sense,
Hinduism could indeed be called a ‘construct’.
This specific hypothesis needs to be situated in the more general debate on
164
T H E C O L O N I A L C O N S T RU C T I O N O F W H A T ?
the colonial construction of Hinduism and contrasted to some current views

on the nature of ‘modern Hinduism’. Therefore, the third section raises
the question as to what is constructed in the process of construction. On one
hand, one could argue, as we do, that Hinduism has been created as a concept
in certain dominant descriptions of India. Naturally, these descriptions have
had some effect on Indian society, but this does not imply that Hindu religion
exists in India today. On the other hand, one could suggest that Hinduism
has come into being as an object also, a new religion that materialized on the
subcontinent.
In the concluding section, we briefly indicate how the current discourse on
the construction of Hinduism prevents alternative theory formation, rather
than encouraging it. This is the case, because one does not realize at which
level the contemporary descriptions of, and common sense on, religion
have been produced by a particular theoretical framework, namely, generic
Christian theology. The very ‘facts’ accepted by most authors are already
descriptions that have been structured by this framework.
Is religion a construct?
The academic literature of the last few decades has seen an explosion of
writings on ‘social construction’. In addition to gender and race, quarks,
genes and countless other things have also become ‘constructs’ (see Hacking
1999: 1–34). Religion could not remain absent from this list. Unfortunately,
this increase of things ‘socially constructed’ has not given rise to growing
clarity in the notion of construction. What could it possibly mean to say that
religion is a construct?
Famously, Jonathan Z. Smith was one of the first to make the point that
religion is only a creation of the scholar’s study:
[W]hile there is a staggering amount of data, of phenomena, of

human experiences and expressions that might be characterized in
one culture or another, by one criterion or another, as religious –
there is no data for religion. Religion is solely the creation of the
scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his
imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no
independent existence apart from the academy.
(Smith 1982: xi)
From this perspective, religion is nothing but an analytical category created

by the scholarly community to classify and theorize cultural phenomena.
It has no reference to anything ‘real’ in the world. More recently, Russell
McCutcheon has stated the point as a normative precept: ‘The category of
religion is a conceptual tool and ought not to be confused with an ontological
category actually existing in reality’ (McCutcheon 1997: viii).
165
J A KO B D E RO O V E R A N D S A R A H C L A E R H O U T
To make sense of this argument, let us build an analogical argument and

identify the conditions under which it would be admissible. Take the follow-
ing claim: the words ‘gravity’ and ‘gravitational force’ are only categories
in scholarly discourse and do not refer to anything actually existing in the
world. Imagine also that we do not have any theory of gravitation. In the
absence of such a theory, what could we possibly conclude about the refer-
ence of these words? Epistemically speaking, it is impossible to conclude
anything, because we cannot know what the data sets for these words are.
Only a theory about these phenomena can tell us that the free fall of objects,
the ebb and tide of the seas, the presence of the atmosphere on earth, planet-
ary motion etc. all have to do with gravity and gravitational force. Such a
theory also postulates relations between these phenomena and gravitational
force.
In other words, it is the theory of gravitation that tells us what ‘its’ facts
and data are. Without such a theory, we might notice some facts: that objects
fall downwards if unobstructed, that there is ebb and tide in the seas, that
planetary motion follows certain orbits, and so on. Our problem then is:
Which theory and concepts should explain these facts? Should a theory in
geography or one from physics or even a theory about fairies and angels tell
us ‘why’ these things happen? Could one particular theory explain all of the
above facts, or are they discrete facts for different theories? In the absence of
a theory that effectively solves these problems, there is no way we can answer
such questions. Therefore, it would be meaningless to make the claim that
‘there is no data for gravity’.
The same point is valid for ‘religion’ also. Only if we have a theory of
religion, which clarifies its characteristic structure and its relation to other
phenomena, is it sensible to discuss whether certain facts are or are not data
for (this theory of) religion. Consider the example of Christian theology.
Among other things, this is also a theory of religion, making a series of
claims about its object of theorizing: religion is the human awareness that
God is the creator and sovereign of the universe and the desire to recognize
and worship Him as such; it is also God’s revelation of His will; religion
becomes false, when human beings are seduced to worship the created
instead of the Creator or follow human precepts as though these are divine
law; religion is also a set of beliefs about the divinity etc. This theory allows
one to identify and describe a set of relevant facts and relate these facts to
each other and to religion in a particular way. The practices, stories and
metaphysical speculations of a variety of peoples all become expressions of
religion. Without Christian theology, these may seem disparate and unrelated
facts, but under the descriptive framework of this theory, they become ‘data
for religion’.
How do we then understand the claim that religion is only a conceptual
tool? Philosophically, one could meaningfully suggest that ‘gravity’ and
‘gravitational force’ do not refer to anything in the real world, provided that
166
we have a theory of gravitation. This is a stance that some philosophers

assume with respect to scientific theories: one considers such concepts as
‘theoretical terms’, ‘theoretical entities’ or ‘unobservables’ that do not really
exist, but are only useful models or instruments of prediction (see Feyerabend
1999). This meta-scientific standpoint tries to account for scientific theories
by denying reference to theoretical terms. Parallel to this philosophical argu-
ment, could one not argue that religion is a category helpful to the scholarly
tasks of comparison and generalization, but without empirical reference?
One cannot, because we are not in a parallel situation where it concerns
religion. None of the authors, who claim that religion is only a creation of
the scholar, possesses anything resembling a theory of religion. Under these
conditions, ‘there is no data for religion’ becomes a meaningless statement.
It is more accurate to say that we do not know which sets ‘of data, of phe-
nomena, of human experiences and expressions’ are relevant data for a
theory of religion. Some might consider this ignorance as evidence for claims
on the construction of religion. Since the criteria under which we categorize
phenomena as religion are both unclear and unstable, this could be taken to
confirm that the category of religion does not correspond to any empirical
reality. However, the notion of ‘construction’ or ‘creation’ does not do any
useful work here, but further mystifies the problem.
The problem is the following: without having any theory about the phe-
nomenon of religion, scholars engage in disputes that can be settled only
by such a theory. Some dispute whether certain phenomena are religion or
whether specific facts are related to religion, as though such disagreements
could be resolved by giving definitions of the word ‘religion’. Others claim
that there is no data for religion, as though this is a matter of epistemological
fiat. This is as absurd as disputing the presence of gravity on some planet or
questioning whether the ebb and tide of the seas and planetary motion have
to do with gravitational force, in the absence of any theory of gravitation.
The problem we face today is not that ‘there is no data for religion’, but
rather that there is no theory of religion.
In addition to these conceptual problems, claims about the construction of
religion also conceal a fundamental empirical problem. By talking of religion
in general, they make it seem as though a symmetrical and equivalent process
is at work in the construction of all religions: since religion is a construct,
Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Taoism are
all equally constructed. However, as Balagangadhara (1994, this volume)
explains, Christianity has described itself in terms of religion and also
recognized certain others as its rival religions, while these descriptions in
terms of religion failed to make sense to many of these others. Throughout
history, both these self-descriptions and descriptions of the other in terms of
religion have made sense to Christian Europeans, whereas pagan Romans
and Indians responded with incomprehension. The suggestion that all
religions are products of construction ignores this fundamental asymmetry.
167
Is Hinduism a construct?
If it is pointless to speak of religion as a construct, claims about the con-
struction of Hinduism may face similar difficulties. Yet, we will argue that
Hinduism is indeed a construct, but only in a limited empirical sense, not as
a part of some general epistemological thesis of social construction. We will
draw upon Balagangadhara’s hypothesis that ‘Hinduism’, ‘Buddhism’ and
several other ‘religions’ are fictitious entities, which exist in the minds, books
and libraries of the West and the western-educated, but not among the
people whose religions they are supposed to be (Balagangadhara 1994).
This hypothesis about the creation of Hinduism and Buddhism does not
depend on any general proposition that religion is a construct, but rather on
the empirical conditions under which Europeans approached and understood
other cultures. When European travellers, missionaries and scholars tried to
make sense of the cultural traditions they confronted in Asia and elsewhere,
they could not but construe these as religions.
First of all, Christian theology had predicted that religion would exist
among all nations, because God had gifted religion to humanity at the time
of creation. Over the centuries, different perspectives developed on this issue.
For instance, some said that God had given knowledge of His will to Adam
and that it was later corrupted by Satan and his minions. Others suggested
that the Creator had inscribed a sense of divinity in the human soul, which
was misdirected to the worship of false gods; yet others that He had created
human reason in such a way that it naturally discovered religion. Later some
thinkers substituted ‘nature’ for ‘God’ and suggested that human nature was
the cause of the universality of religion. Generally, however, the theological
prediction that one would find religion among ‘all nations and tribes’ shaped
the expectations and experiences of travellers to Asia and elsewhere. Even
when one did not find religion among certain groups at first sight, different
conceptual manoeuvres and modifications ensured that it would turn out
that ‘no nation was so barbarous, no people so savage, that it had no religion’
(see Kors 1990).
The empirical process of the ‘construction’ of Hinduism built on the
foundation of this theological certainty that India could not but have religion.
Elements of the traditions of India – their intellectual treatises, stories, rit-
uals, practices, temples, their devas and devis etc. – were gradually interpreted
and linked to each other in such a way that coherent patterns came into
being in the European descriptions of India. From treatises and stories,
European scholars extracted the presumed sacred doctrines, beliefs and
laws; rituals became worship practices that embodied these doctrines; temples
had to be houses of worship; and devas and devis were gods, of course. While
one had originally described internal variations or sects within what was
called ‘pagan’ or ‘heathen religion’, one began to distinguish these coherent
entities as several separate religions in the course of the nineteenth century:
168
Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism (Masuzawa 2005; Oddie 2006: 14–15;

Pennington 2005: 111–18).
In this way, ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Buddhism’ emerged as concepts within the
framework of generic Christian theology, which guided the European under-
standing of the traditions of India. This background framework determined
the particular interpretations and translations of texts and practices. It also
established the relations among those elements fractured and extracted from
the Indian traditions, which were viewed by Europeans as doctrines, scrip-
tures, sacred law, worship, priests and gods. Against the background of this
framework, ‘the Hindu and Buddhist religions’ could come into being as
coherent patterns of description.
To further explain this hypothesis, let us turn to a now defunct distinc-
tion from the philosophy of science. Central to logical positivism and its
understanding of science was the distinction between theoretical and obser-
vational languages. The belief was that sense data, objects and properties
that could be directly observed or measured, could be stated in theory-
neutral observational terms. Through a set of rules, called the rules of cor-
respondence, the terms of a theoretical language could then be correlated
to such observational terms and thus one could give empirical content to a
theory. Later it was discovered that this distinction between observational
and theoretical terms did not hold. One of the reasons why it failed was that
observational terms and statements were already informed by specific back-
ground theories; no theory-neutral observational language was to be found
(Suppe 1977).
Our point is that terms like ‘religion’, ‘worship’, ‘sacred’, ‘secular’, ‘gods’
and ‘priest’ are not neutral observational terms, but theoretical terms
embedded in the generic framework of Christian theologies. This background
framework has provided meaning to these terms and related them to each
other in a conceptual grid. Over the centuries, it has shaped the natural-
language use in European vernaculars where these discuss religion and human
nature. Similarly, statements like ‘religion has throughout history been uni-
versal in human societies’, ‘Brahmins are the priests of Hinduism’ or
‘Buddhism was a reform movement against Brahmanism and its caste
hierarchy’ are not mere factual or historical observations, but theoretical
statements of the same theological framework.
Rather than leading us into philosophical debates about the theory-
ladenness of observation, this gives rise to further puzzles: How could such a
generic theological framework continue to structure the European experience
of India, even when people are no longer familiar with Christian theology?
How is this theology able to reproduce itself in secular guise? How can con-
cepts like ‘Hinduism’, ‘worship’, or ‘religion’ contain within themselves a
particular conceptual logic, even though the theological framework that
shaped this logic has disappeared into the background?
At one level, we can explain why terms like ‘religion’, ‘Hinduism’ and
169
‘Buddhism’ have been mistaken for neutral observational terms. To

Europeans, Hinduism and Buddhism were not only concepts, but also some-
thing more: they were experiential entities that ordered and structured their
experience of the alien cultures they encountered in India. That is, Europeans
truly experienced the existence of these religions, when they saw Indians
do puja rituals, go to temples, sing songs, tell stories or engage in many other
practices (Balagangadhara and Keppens 2009; see also Balagangadhara in
this volume). In fact, western travellers still experience the presence of Hin-
duism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism as religions, when they visit India.
These conceptual schemes have become the preconditions of order in the
western experience of India; without these schemes, Europeans and North
Americans would confront chaos there.
Currently, the average westerner confronts ‘religions’ that are occasionally
felt to be chaotic, because the Indian traditions do not correspond to con-
ceptual schemes like ‘Hinduism’. Given that the basic outlines of these
schemes cannot be challenged without the risk of losing the structure of one’s
experience, such problems of lack of fit are resolved by displacing the prob-
lem. That is, one transforms the chaotic nature into a property of Hinduism,
rather than a problem of one’s own conceptualization of India. For instance,
to evade the lack of fit, one can make a distinction between philosophical or
textual Hinduism and the popular practical Hinduism of the masses, or sug-
gest that religion permeates Indian society so deeply that it is impossible to
distinguish between the religious and non-religious, or characterize Hinduism
as an ever proliferating jungle or banyan tree of a religion (e.g. Lipner 1994:
5–6; Zaehner 1966). This indicates the extent to which one conflates the con-
ceptual scheme of ‘Hindu religion’ with the empirical reality of India. Instead
of appreciating these problems for what they are – namely, conceptual prob-
lems and empirical anomalies that undermine the very foundations of one’s
descriptions – they are projected as properties of the imagined religion itself.
It is important to note that this is not some general thesis about human
knowledge and the way in which the human mind constructs the world
around it. Instead this process has to do with the particular way in which the
European experience of non-western cultures was structured by Christianity
and how this particular cultural experience was then mistaken for a true
description of these other cultures. In other words, it concerns a hypothesis
about the way in which one culture has understood other cultures and about
the shaping forces in this process of understanding. In order to make the
hypothesis richer, more research needs to be done into the specific phases and
manifestations of this process and its links to particular developments within
Christianity and European culture.
In any case, the importance of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism etc. as ‘con-
structs’ lies in the fact that they have indeed been mistaken for empirical
realities, not only by western scholars and laymen, but also by the western-
educated classes of India and elsewhere. That is, we speak and act as though
170
these fictitious entities really exist. Yet again, this should not lead us to a
philosophical puzzle about whether religion really exists out there in the
world or is only a conceptual tool. Rather, it generates research questions
concerning the mechanisms behind two processes. First, we should examine
the process that has allowed Europe to present a description of its own cul-
tural experience as a valid description of India. Second, the process needs to
be discovered that has caused Indian intellectuals to also accept this reflec-
tion of the western cultural experience of India as a veridical description of
their own country and culture (Balagangadhara et al. 2008).
In spite of the occasional overlap, the hypothesis about the creation of
religions like ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Buddhism’ is logically independent of any
general thesis about the construction of religion. Epistemologically, one
can be a constructivist, empiricist or realist and still accept the claim that
‘Hinduism’ and ‘Buddhism’ are entities or patterns within the western cul-
tural experience of India, which do not exist in Indian society. One could
consistently take the realist position that Christianity exists ‘in reality’ and,
at the same time, deny the existence of Hindu religion, because that religion
is a fictitious entity.
What is constructed?
Today, most accounts about the colonial construction of religion in India
agree on the following: modern Hinduism was constructed as a result of the
colonial encounter in India, but this process of construction was not a simple
one-sided process. Orientalist scholars, colonial officials and Indian elites col-
laborated in the construction of a uniform religion of Hinduism, modelled on
Brahmanical texts. Thus, the construct of Hinduism emerged out of the agency
of Europeans and Indians – the product of dialectical exchange between
colonizer and colonized, incorporating both pre-colonial and colonial ele-
ments. As one author puts it, Hinduism should be understood as ‘a negotiated
territory between factions instead of solely being the creation of one dominant
group’ (Haan 2005: 13).
In his The Social Construction of What? (1999), Ian Hacking points out
that there is no clarity as to what is being constructed in the so-called process
of ‘construction’ – concepts or objects, ideas or things? In the contemporary
study of India also, accounts about colonial construction alternate between
the claim that ‘Hinduism’ is a concept constructed by the colonial encounter
and the claim that it is an empirical reality or object that has really come into
being. These are two very different claims. What is the product of the dialect-
ical process of construction? Is ‘Hinduism’ only a concept or has it also
become a reality in modern India?
Take Robert Frykenberg’s early constructionist account, which initially
discusses the concept Hinduism and relates its ‘jumble of inner contradic-
tions’ and multiplicity of definitions to the historical circumstances in which
171
it emerged. He explains how ‘Hindu came to be the concept used by people

who have tried to give greater unity to the extreme cultural diversities which
are native to the continent’ (Frykenberg 1993: 524–26). Frykenberg describes
three historical logics or structural systems (the logic of Brahmanical separ-
ation, that of regal/imperial integration and that of Indo-European oriental-
ist synthesis), which together or cumulatively ‘produced what we now call
Hinduism’ (ibid.: 527). Here, the ambiguity begins: this formulation appears
to presuppose that some new object was produced, to which we now refer
with the term ‘Hinduism’. This ambiguity never disappears. Frykenberg writes
about institutional and ideological developments that ‘established the sub-
structures of modern Hinduism’. He adds: ‘In institutional terms, a modern
and organized Hinduism, intermingling all sorts of previously unconnected
elements, became part of the imperial establishment – something which had
never before existed’ (ibid.: 535–37). Later, he returns to the ‘idea that
“Hinduism” was a single and ancient religion’ (an idea that became ‘domin-
ant’ and ‘pervasive’), but then again speaks of a ‘special kind of official
Hinduism’ or ‘a New (All-India) Hinduism’, which was in the process of
being formed by the nineteenth century (ibid.: 539, 542, 547; italics in the
original). This switching back and forth between Hinduism as a new idea
and Hinduism as a new institution illustrates the lack of clarity as to what
has been ‘constructed’.
More recently, Brian Pennington makes the point explicitly in his Was
Hinduism Invented? He argues that the
colonial encounter certainly created the circumstances under which

Hinduism, in terms of a world religion, comparable to other ‘great’
traditions such as Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam emerged not
only as an idea, a composite portrait of various, sometimes contra-
dictory traditions, but also as an incipient reality.
(Pennington 2005: 5; italics in original)
Hinduism emerged not only as an idea, but also as a reality. That is,
Pennington suggests that Hinduism started out as the idea that a range of
divergent traditions in India could be understood as manifestations of one
pan-Indian religion called ‘Hinduism’. He discusses the crystallization of
this concept, but adds that the changes he charts are ‘both conceptual and
actual’ (ibid.: 1–2). The changes are actual as well as conceptual, because this
Hinduism gradually became a reality through the agency of British colonials,
Brahmin elites and Hindu self-representation. In other words, the Hindu
religion came into being as an object also.
In order to acquire some clarity, let us distinguish strictly between the
construction of Hinduism-as-a-concept and that of Hinduism-as-a-reality.1
If it concerns the construction of concepts alone, the constructionist argument
can be understood in several ways. It could mean that Europeans introduced
172
new words to designate social phenomena that existed in India and that
native informants adopted these words. Even though Indian languages had
no equivalent for the term ‘religion’, one might argue, India did know of
the religions of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism, long before
Europeans called them so. From this perspective, the fact that Indians did
not have a word for ‘religion’ is as relevant as the fact that they had no word
for ‘genes’, before modern genetics showed that all human beings, including
Indians, have genes. Such a view would imply that the so-called ‘construction’
was simply a matter of coining terms to refer to already existing religious
traditions in the Indian society.
Since few would challenge that the British introduced a new language into
India, this interpretation is not very promising. The analogy with genetics
indicates its central problem: on what theoretical grounds could one con-
clude that India always had religions? In the case of genetics, we have a well-
developed theoretical paradigm that gives us criteria to infer and test the
presence of genes; in the case of religion, we possess no such criteria. Certainly,
the fact that the term ‘Hindu’ was used in pre-colonial times in order to
distinguish the majority population of India from ‘Turks’ or Muslim groups
does not provide any evidence as to the existence of a religious institution or
identity, since ‘Hindu’ could well be a marker of ethnic difference here (see
Lorenzen 1999).
Perhaps the most typical understanding of colonial construction is that a
variety of religious traditions had originally existed on the subcontinent and
that the construction of Hinduism reduced this variety to the conceptual
unity of one religion. Brahmanical elites, European scholars and colonial
officials created a Brahmanical, textual and uniform model of Hinduism to
be superimposed on the diversity of local Hindu traditions. This model was
then taken up by upper-caste Hindu nationalists in order to try and unite
these different traditions (e.g. Frykenberg 1989, 1993; Thapar 1989a, 1989b;
von Stietencron 1989).
However, this understanding of the construction of Hinduism is vulner-
able to several counter-arguments. The postulation of ‘Hinduism’ does not
deny that it could cover a variety of traditions, any more than the concept
of Christianity denies the variety of denominations within the Christian
fold. Many colonial authors acknowledged the diversity covered by the
label ‘Hinduism’ or distinguished between the coherent philosophical and
textual Hinduism of the Brahmins and the inchoate variety of practices of
popular Hinduism (e.g. Barrows 1899: 139; Crooke 1907: 223–24; Geden
1922: 47; Harcourt 1924: 19, 28; Strachey 1911: 317; Wilson 1862: 1). So,
rather than superimpose uniformity on variety, the concept of Hinduism
never prevented recognition of this variety of ‘religious traditions’ in India;
nor has it denied the difference between the so-called ‘Brahmanism’ and
other traditions.
Some point out that there has never been a single ‘Hinduism’ and prefer to
173
speak of Hinduisms rather than Hinduism. Nonetheless, it is both linguistic-

ally and logically impossible to speak about the plurality of any religion
without referring to it in the singular: ‘tigers’ are animals because ‘tiger’ names
a kind; ‘trees’ makes no sense if there is no ‘tree’ to speak of, and so on. One
could simply accept that ‘Hinduism’ does not name a unitary phenomenon,
but picks out a super set that includes many different sets of practices and
beliefs. One could assume that, in principle, it is possible to construct such a
super set, even if one is unable to practically do so at a given moment. One
could even add that the claim that Hinduism cannot be one religion, because
it is not a coherent unit, presupposes a Christian model of religion as a
coherent doctrinal entity and then assesses Hinduism according to this model
(Sweetman 2003; Viswanathan 2003: 32).
It is more promising to understand the claim about the construction of the
concept of Hinduism in terms of Balagangadhara’s hypothesis that we
explained earlier. Europeans built Hinduism as a conceptual unit in their
descriptions of India. They believed that this religion really existed, experi-
enced Indian society in this way, and in their colonial policies they also acted
as though this Hindu religion was a real entity. There is nothing particularly
colonial about this construction of Hinduism-as-a-concept, since earlier
European authors had conceptualized ‘Indian religion’ in much the same
way before the British coined the term ‘Hinduism’ (Gelders 2009). The prob-
lem is also not that a variety of religious traditions was reduced to one
uniform Hindu religion. Rather, because of the kind of cultural configuration
they belonged to, Europeans were compelled to postulate the existence of
religion in India and construct such fictitious religious entities in their
descriptions of the subcontinent.
In the light of this hypothesis, what could it mean to say that factions such
as the Brahmin elites and native informants also contributed to this con-
struction of the concept of Hinduism? Evidently, this claim about a ‘joint
construction’ could lead to fascinating questions: How did this dialogue and
dialectical exchange work? Did Indians, with their own background frame-
work and cultural experience, understand what the British meant when the
latter said ‘religion’, ‘law’, ‘scripture’, ‘priests’ or ‘caste’? Did the British
and other Europeans, with their specific background framework and cultural
experience, understand Indians when they spoke of ‘dharma’, ‘shastra’,
‘puja’, ‘brahmanas’ or ‘jati’ ?
Whenever Europeans invoked notions like ‘religion’, ‘worship’, ‘gods’ or
‘priesthood’ in order to describe India, their reasoning operated against a
background theology, which had determined the semantic content and sys-
tematic relations of these terms. Over many centuries, this background the-
ology had shaped natural language use in European vernaculars. Naturally,
Indians had their own cultural experiences, linguistic practices and semantic
schemes. Trying to make sense of the queries of the colonizer, Indians learned
to use English-language words (‘religion’, ‘revelation’, ‘God’, ‘worship’,
174
‘priest’, ‘idolatry’), without having access to the background theology that

related these terms to each other in a systematic way.
For instance, while puja rituals are not in any sense the equivalent of wor-
ship in Christianity, Europeans misunderstood these rituals as worship and
mistranslated ‘puja’ as ‘worship’. In the next step, Indians learned English
and accepted that ‘worship’ meant ‘puja’, without understanding what wor-
ship is in Christianity and without having access to the linguistic practices
and conceptual schemes, which related this notion of worship to other theo-
logical concepts like God, idolatry and religion. Given our current lack of
insight into this process, we cannot grasp the distortions that occurred when
the term ‘worship’ was mapped onto ‘puja’.
A similar process occurred for all such appropriations of English-language
terms and theological notions. As Indians took over these words, their ori-
ginal meanings were distorted accordingly as European-language terms
were mapped onto terms and semantic schemes from Indian languages
(e.g. ‘dharma’, ‘apaurusheya’, ‘deva’, ‘puja’, ‘purohit’, ‘murtipuja’). The dif-
ficulty in defending the claims about the joint construction of Hinduism,
then, is that we cannot begin to understand how Indians contributed to this
construction, since we do not know today how they made (and make) sense
of the western terminology, concepts and descriptions. The challenge is to
understand the cognitive agency of Indians in the colonial encounter, rather
than make the somewhat worn-out point that they also had agency.
This challenge provides a promising entry point into the study of Indian
cultural traditions. In the case of Europe, we study its cultural experience by
looking at how Europeans have described India. For instance, European
conceptions of ‘Hinduism’ give us insight into the common structures of this
European cultural experience and how these are constituted by Christianity.
It is tempting to assume that we can apply this ‘mirror principle’ to India
also and understand the Indian cultural experience by studying how Indians
have described Europe. However, this does not work for several reasons:
there exists no such massive and systematic body of Indian descriptions
of Europe; and, to a large extent, Asians have adopted European self-
descriptions as though these are valid (Buruma and Margalit 2004).
Instead, there is another key to finding out the common structures and
patterns in the Indian cultural experience: this key lies in the kinds of distor-
tions that occurred when Indians took over the conceptual vocabulary of
Europeans. There has to be a pattern to these distortions, precisely because
terms like ‘religion’, ‘worship’, ‘scripture’, ‘sacred law’, ‘conversion’ etc. were
mapped onto terms from the Indian languages. Consequently, the patterns
in these distortions indirectly give us access to the conceptual structures
common to Indian cultural traditions.
Let us return to the example of ‘worship’ and ‘puja’. In order to fully grasp
how Indians adopted English-language terms like ‘worship’ and ‘idol wor-
ship’, we will need a hypothesis on the nature of puja, its role in the Indian
175
cultural traditions and how this constrains the semantics of terms like ‘puja’
and ‘murtipuja’. But the most promising route to developing such a hypoth-
esis is to circumscribe the misunderstanding and distortion that occurred
when Indians began to talk in terms of ‘worship’ and ‘idol worship’. The
difference between their use of these words and the conceptual structures
behind the European-Christian understanding of ‘worship’ and ‘idol wor-
ship’ will reveal how the two groups were talking about completely different
things. This mismatch then allows us to characterize the underlying con-
ceptual structures of the Indian cultural experience by contrasting them to
the European-Christian conceptual structures.
A concrete illustration of this approach would take us far beyond the
confines of this chapter. Here, we merely intend to make the following theor-
etical point: in the process of theorizing the conceptual structures of Indian
cultural traditions, we will also reveal their decisive impact on the manner in
which Indians took over the vocabulary of the Europeans. It is only once we
have done this kind of research that we can meaningfully begin to analyse
the Indian contribution to the formation of ‘Hinduism’. In the absence of
this research, it is premature to present the fact that Indian elites also talked
in terms of ‘Hinduism’ and ‘religion’ as evidence for the claim that they
co-built Hinduism, as though Europeans and Indians had the same things in
mind when they spoke of ‘Hinduism’, ‘religion’, ‘worship’ etc.
Given this state of affairs, how viable is the suggestion that the colonial
encounter resulted in the construction of Hinduism-as-a-reality or a new
religion in Indian society? Inevitably, the use of ‘Hindu religion’ as a cat-
egory of colonial rule had certain effects on Indian society. Because of legal
procedures, censuses and several other policies and interactions between
Europeans and Indians, many Indians also began to talk about ‘Hinduism’,
‘religion’ and ‘worship’, as though these things truly existed in their society.
However, this does not entail that Hinduism has really come into being as
a religion.
As other authors have pointed out, it is unlikely that a relatively small
group of British colonials could transform the very structures of a body of
Indian traditions in less than two centuries (Pennington 2005: 5). Even if
certain groups of Brahmins and other elites collaborated with them, how
could they ever have created a pan-Indian religion, Hinduism? Whatever
their policies and categories, how could they have built a new religion and
then spread this over the subcontinent? This version of colonial construction
attributes miraculous powers to European colonials and Brahmanical elites,
granting them the ability to mould Indian society and Indian minds like clay.
In order to contemplate the effect that the creation of the concept of
Hinduism has had on Indian society, we can borrow Hacking’s idea of
‘interactive kinds’. As he explains:
The ‘woman refugee’ (as a kind of classification) can be called an
176
interactive kind because it interacts with things of that kind, namely

people, including individual women refugees, who can become aware
of how they are classified and modify their behavior accordingly.
(Hacking 1999: 32; italics in original)
‘Hinduism’ and ‘Hindus’ are interactive kinds. Some of the people classified
as ‘Hindus’ or ‘followers of Hindu religion’ have become aware of this clas-
sification and have indeed modified their behaviour. Some state officials and
politicians also behave differently towards the people described as followers
of Hinduism, because of this classification. Plenty of scholars and tourists
approach the same people as ‘believers of Hindu religion’ and this undoubt-
edly has had an impact upon many Indians.
One effect that has certainly occurred is that Indians have learned to use
the terminology of ‘Hinduism’ and ‘religion’ pragmatically. To give one illus-
tration, when the British Government of Bengal implemented a policy of
religious toleration, it proclaimed that it would tolerate certain practices only
if native subjects could show that these practices were religious, i.e. were
sanctioned by ‘Hindu scriptures’. In response, pundits employed by the colo-
nial courts began to argue about particular practices, which they desired to
retain, that these practices had scriptural sanction and thus belonged to
Hindu religion (De Roover and Balagangadhara 2009). Similarly, from the
nineteenth century onwards, educated Indians belonging to the relevant tra-
ditions have learned that they should respond with ‘Hindu’ whenever official
forms or informal inquiries ask them about their religion.
Another related effect is that many Indians have begun to believe that the
religion of Hinduism exists and act accordingly. They feel they have to iden-
tify the common foundation or central teachings and commandments of
this religion or show that it is superior to other religions. However, again,
this does not imply that Hindu religion has come into being. For one, the
problem remains that, even though these Hindus have adopted words like
‘religion’ and ‘Hinduism’ and certain ways of talking, one does not know
what these words mean to them and to what extent semantic distortion takes
place in the process of adoption. The ease with which many of the same
people – Hindu nationalists in particular – have conceded that ‘Hinduism is
not really a religion, but rather a way of life’ indicates that the term ‘religion’
does not mean much to them.2
Even if we admit that Hinduism has come into being in some sense,
because certain groups of people believe it exists and act accordingly, this
could never entail that Hinduism exists as a religion (certainly not a pan-
Indian one). Rather, within the variety of Indian traditions, there is now also
one that practices ‘Hinduism’ in the sense that it seeks to identify the true
teachings and commandments of what it believes to be Hindu religion. This
tradition is particularly vibrant among non-resident Indians in the United
States, among descendants of nineteenth-century Hindu reform movements
177
and among some Hindu nationalists. But this does not entail that Hindu
religion has come into being like, say, Christianity or Islam.
At this point, the following objection may arise: Is it not presumptuous
of academics to deny that Hindus have their own Hindu religion, when (at
least some) Hindus believe this to be the case? Or as Pennington puts it,
since academic historiography should not interfere in the sphere of religion,
‘a sphere over which practitioners alone should have custody’, scholars ought
not to argue that the Hindu religion is a modern invention, because this
is ‘tantamount to a theological statement about the normative constitution
of religious identity’ (Pennington 2005: 5). This type of argument begs the
question in several ways. First, it insinuates that the denial that Hindu tradi-
tions are religion implies a value judgement of some kind. It does not. This
is a cognitive hypothesis about the difference in kind between these traditions
and religions like Christianity and Islam. The hypothesis aims to explain
where the stubborn belief in the existence of religions like Hinduism originates
and what sustains it.
Second, the objection presupposes what it has to prove: namely, that there
is a sphere of religion in Indian society, that Hindu traditions are religion
and that Hindus have a religious identity. Only if that is the case could the
above concerns about religion as ‘a sphere over which practitioners alone
should have custody’ and ‘the normative constitution of religious identity’
be of import here. But our point is that there is no such sphere of Hindu
religion and, hence, these concerns about the special status of the religious
domain are largely irrelevant. Nevertheless, this objection remains valuable
if reformulated as an explanatory task: when one denies the existence of
Hinduism, one should be able to explain as to why certain Indians as well as
Europeans believe that Hinduism exists.
Conclusion
Fundamentally, most accounts on the construction of Hinduism operate
within the same framework as earlier orientalist descriptions of India, but
merely dispute specific ‘historical facts’ of that theoretical framework. Almost
all of these accounts begin with the certainty that there must be religion in
Indian culture. They may dispute the number of religions present and the
homo- or heterogeneity of these religions; they may disagree over how and at
what precise point of time ‘Hinduism’ came into being in Indian society; or
they may agree that ‘Christian presuppositions’ have informed the western
understanding of Indian religions and that we need a ‘better’ concept of
religion. Yet, most would find it absurd to doubt that Indian culture ever had
its own indigenous religions.
Where does this certainty come from? Does one possess clear empirical
criteria or properties to establish the presence of religion? Has one, at some
point in time, tested and demonstrated its existence in India? Or is there
178
some theory that has produced theoretical proof of the cultural universality
of religion, so that its existence in Indian culture becomes indisputable?
None of these is the case. Instead, there are two fundamental continuities
between orientalist descriptions of India and contemporary accounts of the
construction of Hinduism.
The first is that the Christian theological certainties of yesterday have
retained the force of self-evidence today. When early modern Europeans saw
religion in Indian culture and society, they could see it only because of a back-
ground framework that shaped their perception, experience and reasoning. If
we want to reconstruct the rational cognitive grounds of these descriptions
of ‘religion’ in India, we cannot but take recourse to a generic framework of
Christian beliefs about the world and humanity.3 However, this is not merely
some claim about the historical conditions under which the descriptions of
India in terms of religion emerged. It is a thesis about the basic intelligibility of
these descriptions: to this day, this intelligibility depends on the background
theological framework and so does the belief that Hindu religion exists.
Some may oppose this by claiming that the concepts of religion and
Hinduism are no longer theological and have now become ‘flexible’, ‘poly-
valent’, ‘elastic’ or ‘polythetic’ (Pennington 2005: 15, 175–83; Sweetman
2001: 218–19). However, a term like ‘religion’ is not some kind of free-floating
conceptual tool that can become more ‘elastic’ and ‘flexible’ in order to
encompass presumed manifestations of ‘religion’. Rather, it is embedded in
an entire system of concepts following a certain conceptual logic. In the case of
religion, this conceptual system is that of an increasingly generic Christian
theology. While conceptual change has certainly occurred within this system
and the connotations of the term ‘religion’ have changed over time, no alter-
native framework has been proposed to re-conceptualize religion and the
facts in need of explanation.
Of course, we do not mean to deny that modern thinkers have tried to
develop, say, ‘naturalistic’, ‘sociological’, ‘Marxist’ or even ‘biological’ theor-
ies of religion (Dennett 2006; Preus 1987). However, these secondary theories
intend to account for ‘facts’ that have already been structured by the primary
framework of generic Christian theology. They have never questioned the
existence of religion in Indian society or any other society; they have not
radically re-examined these different cultures, but have reproduced descrip-
tions of ‘religions’ around the world as ‘facts’ in need of explanation. The
constructionist accounts form no exception here. They do not dismantle
these descriptions at the basic level and re-conceptualize the ‘facts’; they also
presuppose that there has to be religion in India, but lament that it has been
homogenized and viewed through western-Christian lenses. In contrast, our
claim is not that Indian religions were incorrectly conceptualized because of
western-Christian biases, but rather that the very belief in the existence of
religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism is the product of an experience
constituted by Christianity.
179
This brings us to the second continuity between constructionism and

orientalism: the structure of the western cultural experience of India remains
intact as the dominant descriptive framework to make sense of the sub-
continent. As said, ‘Hinduism’ names an experiential entity of western scho-
lars and laymen. They really experience the presence of such religions; hence,
‘Hinduism’ and ‘religion’ appear as theory-neutral observational terms to
them. Constructionist accounts continue this fallacy by conflating the cre-
ation of Hinduism-as-a-concept with that of Hinduism-as-a-reality. Instead
of realizing that ‘Hinduism’ describes a pattern in the European experience,
they insist that it is a real religion built by European colonials and Indian
elites.
In this sense, the account of colonial construction is but a new strategy to
displace the kinds of problems that inevitably surface when one mistakes
descriptions of the European cultural experience of India for veridical
descriptions of Indian society. To some extent, one senses the lack of fit
between conceptual schemes like ‘Hinduism’ and the structures of Indian
traditions. Therefore, one speaks of a ‘construction of Hinduism’. Yet, by
postulating that the creation of the concept of Hinduism has also entailed
the growth of a new object, a new religion in the Indian social world, one can
retain one’s basic conceptual schemes as though these still correspond to
Indian realities. Rather than rethink the entire framework through which we
have looked at India, one merely modifies some of its claims: Hinduism
exists, but only post 1850 or so; before, there were several Hindu religions.
Given these continuities, the first step toward rethinking religion in India
will be to break this tendency to confuse experiential entities for real struc-
tures in Indian society. Paradoxically, this amounts to a call for alternative
theory formation on Europe. We have to study Europe as a specific cultural
configuration, which has experienced itself and India in certain limited ways.
We should not only identify the constraints on western thinking on religion,
but also the role played by Christianity in shaping these constraints. Histor-
ically, this means that we trace how coherent structures (‘Hinduism’, ‘Hindu
law’, ‘the caste system’) came into being in the European experience and how
these were transformed into ‘facts’ about India. Conceptually, it entails that
we show how these accounts of the ‘facts’ are intelligible only against a theo-
logical background and how Christian religion has compelled Europeans
to see religions in India. Only after initiating this exercise can we hope to
go beyond these constraints and re-conceptualize Indian culture and its
traditions as something other than religion.
Notes
1 Hardcore constructivists might have problems with this distinction, since an
abstract concept like Hinduism never corresponds to an empirical or ‘ontological’
reality according to them. However, they could reformulate the distinction as follows:
180
the construction of Hinduism could either name the emergence of a conceptual

pattern in the minds of westerners alone or it could imply the emergence of the
same conceptual pattern in the minds of westerners and Indians alike.
2 Contrast this to the difficulty Christian and Muslim believers would have with
the claim that Christianity or Islam is ‘not really a religion, but rather a way of life’.
3 This is not to say that all Europeans were theologians or even believers, but that
most were reasonable human beings, whose accounts of the facts of India appeared
true to themselves. In order to reconstruct the rational cognitive grounds of these
accounts, we have to demonstrate their apparent coherency and cogency, given a
particular background framework.
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183
INDEX
Abrahamic religions 31; Hinduism Bhagavad Gita 95, 100

compared to 36–7, 109 Bhandarkar Oriental Research institute
Adharma 137 81
Adi Granth 31–2 Bhate, Saroja 86
Africa: European view of paganism in Bhattacarya, Sukumari 84
44; need for information about culture Bible: creation in 150; proposal to
of 27 introduce as text in state schools 50
Age of Reason see Enlightenment Bills of Rights 131
al-Biruni [973–1048] 29 BJP Party: rule in India 28
Alvars: songs of 30 Boden, Joseph [d.1811] 71
America: colonization of 116 Brahmanism 4, 7–10, 43, 48, 137, 173–4;
ancestral property: legislation allowing constructionist theory of 13; doctrinal
converts to Christianity to inherit 50 system of 13; links between Hinduism
Appadurai, Arjun 59, 63 and 101; Sanskrit and 88
Arjan Dev, Guru [1563–1606] 25, 31–3, Brahmanical elites 173, 174, 176
35–7, 44 Brahmo Samaj 48
Arya Samaj 46, 48, 65–6 Brekke, Torkel 64
Asad, Talal 60 British Discovery of Hinduism, The 3
Ashoka, King [ 268–231] 41 British East India Company 59
Asia: modernity and 98; need for Brown, Norman O. [1913–2002] 26
information about culture of 27 Buddhism 2, 30, 110, 114, 119, 122, 125,
astrological studies: attempts under BJP 169–70; as international religion 37;
to create centres for in Indian missionary view of 73
universities 28
Aurangzeb [1618–1707] 43 Calcutta 63
Calvinism 130
Bābri mosque: destruction of 5 Cambridge Mission to India 70
Bagewadikar, V. 82 Canon Law: emergence of 142
Balagangadhara, S.N. 10–2, 36, 109, 115, Cantwell Smith, Wilfred [1916–2000] 43
119, 167–8, 174 caste system 136–8; religious aspects of
banking castes 59 42
Bapat, Shailaja 85 Césaire, Aimé Fernand David
Baptist missionaries 45, 101 [1913–2008] 69
Baptists 130 census: religious categorization in 65
Barthwal, Pitambar Datta [1901–44] 33 Central America: colonization of 116
Bengal: religious toleration 177 centripetalism: religion 106, 110
Bengali renaissance: India 98 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 97
185
INDEX
Chatterji, Bankimchandra [1838–94] 47 creation: Biblical 150

China: establishment of Republic 98; creed: emphasis on 46
European view of paganism in 44 cultures: comparative study of 57
Chitale, K.V. 82
Chomsky, Noam 96 Dalmia, Vasudha 30, 103
Christianity 1, 3, 30–1, 104, 109, 116–17, Dandekar, Ramchandra Narayan 82
122, 140–1, 153, 155, 156, 157, 158, Daoism 110, 114, 119, 122, 125
167, 170, 175, 180; as de-Christianized darshana 100
142; as historical movement 157–8; as Darwinian theory 64
international religion 37; comparisons Date, Ranjana 85, 87
with Hinduism 47–8; conceptual De Vitoria, Francisca [1483–1546] 116
structures 176; conversion to 30, 45, Deccan College Dictionary Project 81
48, 117; expansion of 142, 144; generic deity: conception of 137; Judeo-
version of 157–9; Indian traditions and Christian concept of 8
10; missionaries 8, 30, 47, 49–51, 120; Dervish 34
modernity and 120; nature of 155; Deshpande, Maitreyee 82
presuppositions 178; properties of 157; Deussen, Paul Jakob [1845–1919] 101
proselytization 8, 141; as religion 152, Dharma 137
157, 158; rival to Islam 159; theology Dharmapala, Anagarika [1864–1933] 64,
165–9, 179 98
Christians: violence against 5 Discourse on Civility and Barbarity 37,
Christocentrism: discourses on religion 125, 129
95–111 discreteness: religion 105
church-state: religion and 129–30 Dissenters 118, 131; Charters of the 131
churches: transformation into voluntary ‘divine providence’: colonial rule as 60,
associations 130–1 69
Civilization and Its Discontents 28 doctrine 146
Cohn, Bernard S. [1928–2003] 3–4 Doniger, Wendy 9
colonial consciousness 141 double dynamic of proselytization and
colonialism 3, 49, 138–40; British 69–70, secularization 141
135–6, 172, 176; colonial rule as Dubuisson, Daniel 97, 105
‘divine providence’ 69–70; definition
69; Hinduism and 1–2, 58–61, 71; East India Company 45, 47, 101
history of 69; providing missionary economic development: India 59
opportunities 70–1; religion and Eliade, Mircea [1907–86] 25, 36; study of
69–77; representing religion under religions and 26–8
56–67 Encyclopaedia Britannica 118
colonization: America 116 Enlightenment 34, 121, 130, 142–3;
Commonweal: religion and 116 European 97
communalism 136 epistemology: Eurocentric 95–6
communications: early Indian 41–2; ethnic identity: religious identity
expansion of 60 distinguished 126–7
community identity 60 Euro-American Protestantism 100
comparative religion 72–3; precursor of Europe: expansion into India 44–5;
study of world religions 27 placed at centre of modernity 97
Confucianism 27, 110, 114, 119, 121, 122 evangelization see missionaries
constructionism 171–2, 179–80 exclusivism: religion 106
constructionist thesis: Hinduism 9 experience, Christian 179; European 169,
constructs 138, 164 170, 175, 180; Indian cultural 176;
conversion 141, 142, 144 religious 153; western 137, 138, 170,
corporate Hinduism: notion of 62 180
cosmos 146, 149–53 experiential entity 137, 138, 162, 170, 180
186
INDEX
explanatorily intelligible entity 146, 149 heresy 130

explanatory account 145, 151 hermeneutics: Hinduism 74–5
explanatory intelligible account 144, 146, Hindu: original meaning of 42
151, 152, 154 Hindu Mahasabha: establishment of 50
Hindu nationalism 4–6, 66, 173, 178;
Farquhar, John Nicol [1861–1929] 73–5 Indian rule by BJP party 28
fictitious religious entities 174 Hindu Reform Movements 8, 177
Fitzgerald, Timothy 36–8 Hindu Tract Society 48
folk-psychology 151 Hindu–Muslim conflict 2, 5, 12
Foucault, Michel [1926–84] 89 Hinduism 35, 122, 125, 169–80;
France: in competition with British Abrahamic religions compared with
imperialism 59 36–7, 109; adoption of term 7, 45; as
Freedom Movement 82–3, 89 a concept 172, 174, 180; as a reality
Freud, Sigmund [1856–1939] 28 172, 176, 180; as social construction
Frykenberg, Robert Eric 61–2, 103, 168–71; challenging centripetal
171–2 accounts of 106–11; colonial
construction of 1–2, 5–6, 58–61, 71,
Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand 95–111, 136–41, 164–80; comparisons
[1869–1948] 46–51, 82–84; definition with Christianity 47–8; concept of 173,
of Hinduism 48 174; conceptual unit 10;
generational difference: Sanskrit and 82 constructionist thesis 9; construction
gentile: use of term 125 of 164, 168, 173, 178, 180; creation of
Gentile religion in South India, China and 168, 171; deconstruction of 107;
Tibet: studies by three missionaries 114, during late Mughal rule 43–4; earliest
119, 122, 127 use of term 29; early written sources
Gentooism: forerunner of Hinduism 7 on 29–30; emergence of concept of
Gita: recitation of chapters from 85 105, 114–32; European definition of
God 146, 147, 150, 151; will of 146, 150 36; European expansion and 44–5;
Gokhale, Gopal Krishna [1866–1915] 43 fragmentation of 31; Gandhi’s
Gopaldas 32 definition of 48; hermeneutical
Gorakh [fl.11–12C] 9, 25, 29, 31, 33–4, framework 74–5; historical
36–7 construction of concept of 25;
Gorakh-bani 33–5 homogenization of 30, 100, 103;
Gorakhnath see Gorakh identity and 9, 37, 49–51, 62, 64–6;
Grandmother Language 81 inclusivity of 108; indigeneity of 57;
Grant, Charles [1746–1823] 29, 45, 98, links between Brahmanism and 101;
101 literature on 57; missionary view of 73;
modern notions of 103; modernity and
Haan, Michael D. 65 66; monotheism and 3; national
Hacking, Ian 171, 176–7 religion 37; nature of 74, 101; notion
Hamer, Dean 28 of ‘corporate’ 62; Orientalists’
Hatha Yoga 35 conception of 76, 136; origin of term
Hauser, Marc 28 6–7, 44–52; perceived as construction
Heathen in His Blindness . . . , The 115 of West 3–4, 6–9, 102–3; philosophical
heathendom 7 core of 100; pilgrimage and 42–3;
heathenism: European ideas of 44; popular 170, 173; pre-colonial 7–8;
Indian religion considered by questions on 12–14; representation of
European 14 76–7; Sanskrit representing
Hefner, Robert 60–2 householdership 82, 87; Sanskritized
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 5; significance of term 45–9; textual
[1770–1831] 70 170, 173; textualization of scriptures
Henry VIII 129 of 71–2; three elements of 6–7;
187
INDEX
unification of 48–9; unified religious Inquisition 130

tradition of 101–2; usefulness of term insider and outsider problem 152
103; variation within 173–4; whether intelligibility account 145, 151
one religion or multiple religions 12 interactive kinds 177
Hinduisms 174 international religions 37
Hindus: attainment of enlightenment 34; Invention of World Religions, The 120
conflicts among 42; European attacks Islam 30–1, 35, 109, 140–1, 153; as
on beliefs of 30; fear of conversion 50; historical movement 158; as
numerical relationship between international religion 37; Christianity
Muslims and 65 and Judaism rivals to 159; conflict with
Hindustani songs 33 Hinduism 2, 5, 12; conversion to
Hindutva movement 8, 66 Christianity 48; identity 37; Indian
hipkapi 136–8, 140 traditions and 10; introduction to
humanities 136 India 42; proselytism 8; settlement in
India 43–4
identity: community 60; ethnic and Islamic identity 60–1
religious distinguished 126–7; Hindu
37, 41–52, 62, 64–5; Islamic 60–1; Jagadeesan, Nainar 42
Muslim 37; public 62; religious 31, Jainism 2, 30; as national religion 37;
33–6, 61–2, 64–6; Yogi 37 missionary view of 73
Ideology of Religious Studies 122 Janam-sakhi 32
idolatry 44, 120, 160, 175; Indian religion Japan: Meiji regime in 98
considered by European 14 Jesuit missionaries 14
Imagined Hinduism 101 Jordens, Joseph Teresa Florent 48
Imagining Religion 97 Joshi, S.D. 85
imperialism: British 6; British and Judaism 31, 109, 122, 153; as historical
French in competition 59 movement 158; as national religion 37;
inclusivism: religion 106–9 Indian traditions and 10; rival to Islam
India: Bengali renaissance in 98; BJP 159
Party rule in 28; British rule in 7, 30,
135–6; condition of Sanskrit Kabir [1440–1518] 9, 25, 31–7
education in 80; difficulties of early Kabir Panthis 36
communication 41–2; diversity and Kabir-granthavali 32–3
conflict in pre-modern 41–4; economic Kabir-bijak 34
development 59; European expansion Kali Yuga 105
into 44–5; independence 30; Karnataka 41
introduction of Islam into 42; Islamic Ketelaar, James 64
settlement in 43–4; late Mughal rule Khare, Ganesh-shastri 86
43–4; multiplicity of languages 42; Khareshastri, Pandit 86
post-colonial studies 139–40; religion Killingley, Dermot 101
in colonial and post-colonial era King, Richard 56–8, 79, 103, 119
56–67; religious differences in 31–6; Kinjavadekar, Mandakini 86
religious diversity 42; Sanskrit Kirtilata 29
Commission (1958) 80; university Kodnikar, Menakshi 87
system 80; whether there are ‘native’ Kopf, David 3
religions in 95–111 Koran 35
Indian Civil Service (ICS) 136 Kurien, Prema 109
Indian National Congress 50
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the languages: Indian 175; multiplicity of
Crystal Skull 95 Indian 42
Indic tradition 109 Las Casas, Bartolomé de [1484–1566]
Indology 136 116
188
INDEX
Lipner, Julius 108 Nanak, Guru [1469–1539] 32

Literature: translation of English works Nath Yogis 35–6
into Sanskrit 83 nation-state: Westphalian model of
local religions 10 secular 98
Locke, John [1632–1704] 118 national religions 37
Lorenzen, David N. 9, 43, 108, 114, nationalism 7–8
120–8, 140, 173 Nationalization of Hindu Traditions, The
Lutheranism 130 30
natural religion 116–7
McCutcheon, Russell T. 26, 152, natural slave: concept of 116
165 Nayanars: songs of 30
Madras 61; Census (1921) 51 Nehru, Jawaharlal [1889–1964] 82
Maharashtra: Muslims in 43; women’s neo-orientalism 5
educational reform in 81 Newton, Sir Isaac [1643–1727] 139
Malkanas 65–6 Niranjan 33
Malhotra, Rajiv 109 ‘non-religious’ priesthood 117–19
Malkana shuddhi campaign 65–6
Malley, Brian 100 Observations 45
Manjul, V.L. 81 Oddie, Geoffrey 29, 101
Manufacturing Religion 26 Oppenheimer, Robert [1904–67] 95
Maratha Empire 59 Orient 137; as a place 138; as western
Marshall, Peter James 3 experience 138
Marshman, Joshua [1768–1837] 45 Orientalism 3–4, 136, 138
Masuzawa, Tomoko 27, 99, 104, Orientalism 136, 180; religion and 2–3,
120 138; as discourse 137; writings 136,
materialism 30 140, 178–9
maunavrata 86 Orientalism and Religion 106–7
meaning: religion and 147–50 Otto, Rudolf [1867–1937] 26–8, 153, 161
Meaning and End of Religion, The 3 Oxford English Dictionary 124
Meiji regime: Japan 98 outsider perspective 161
mercantile castes 59
Methodism 130 paganism 7, 128; European ideas of 44;
Michaels, Alex 80 Indian religion considered by
Mignolo, Walter 110 European 14
missionaries 72–3; Christian 8, 30, 47, pandita: role of 80
49–51, 120; colonialism providing pantheism: perceived dangers of 101
opportunities for 70–1 Papacy 129–30, 142–3
modernity: Asia 98; Christianity and pathashalas 80
120; Europe placed at centre of 97; Penn, William [1644–1718] 118
Hinduism and 66; religion and 58–61 Pennington, Brian 62–3, 79, 103–4, 172,
Monier-Williams, Monier [1819–99] 178
70–1, 74–5 perfection 150
monotheism 8; Hinduism and 3 philosophy: distinction between religion
Müller, Max [1823–1900] 64, 69–70, and 98
76–7, 101 pilgrimage: Hindu practice of 42–3
Mughal empire 60 Place at the Multicultural Table, A: The
murtipuja 176 Development of an American Hinduism
Muslims 6; attainment of enlightenment 109
34; numerical relationship between political theories 143
Hindus and 65; use of term ‘sect’ in polytheism 137
reference to 124; violence against 5 post-colonialism: representing religion
Myth of the Eternal Return, The 26 under 56–67
189
INDEX
postcolonial studies 2, 136, 140 contemporary criticisms 154–61;

Presbyterianism 130 creation of 135, 136; definition of 157;
priesthood: ‘non-religious’ 117–19 development of ‘science’ of 64;
Primer to Hinduism 73 differences in 31–6; discreteness of 105;
proselytization 8; Christianity 141 distinction between philosophy and
Protestantism 3, 142–3, 158; 98; early hierarchical subcategories of
fragmentation of 130; rivalry with 27; European view of 44; exclusivism
Catholics 120; theology of 143 106; Hindu 176, 178, 179; historicizing
public identity 62 120–8; hypothesis on 135–62; in
public spaces: significance in colonial and post-colonial era 56–67;
development of religious identities 61 inclusivism 106; Indian 138–44;
puja 86–7, 137, 170–6 indigenous models of 56; international
Pune University 83 37; interpretation of 72–4; language of
Purchas, His Pilgrimage: or, relations of 104; meaning and 147–50; modernity
the world and the religions observed in and 58–61; national 37; nature of 140;
all ages 129 organizational development in late
Purchas, Samuel [c.1575–1626] 129 19th century 63–7; Orientalism and
Puritanism 118 2–4; ostensive definition of 155, 157;
purushasukta 137 ‘privatization’ of 130–1; public
representation of 61–3; public
Quakers 130 understanding of 97; questionability
Queen’s Proclamation (1858) 64 of western concept of to non-western
questions: religious 149 traditions 10–11; questions and 149;
Quit India movement 83 reference of word 156–7; reflexivity
and 150–2, 161; relations between
Rai, Lala Lajpat [1865–1928] 46, 48, 51 secularism and 37–8; science of 152;
Rajputs 65 self-description of 159, 161, 167;
Ramabai, Pandita [1858–1922] 84 Semitic 140, 161; study of 1, 25–8, 161,
Ramaswamy, Sumathi 88 164; separation of state from 143; sui
Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan 80 generis 152–4; supernatural and 36;
reflexivity: religion and 149–50, 152, theory of 135, 164, 166–7;
161 transgressing boundaries imposed by
Reformation 143; Roman Catholicism normative western models of 56;
after 129 transformation into 144–54; truth and
reification 115–16, 121 151; universality of 105, 128, 168, 179;
religion 138, 139, 144, 148, 149, 151, 152, universalization of 141; use of term by
154, 155, 161, 165, 176, 177, 179; Catholic missionaries 123; various
Anglo-European/Anglo-American meanings of 128–9; whether there are
interpretation of 119–20; Anglo- ‘native’ Indian religions 95–111
Protestant conceptions of 105; as religious: meaning of 118
explanatory intelligible account of the religious diversity: India 42, 75
Cosmos 154; as construct 140, 168; as religious identity 31, 33–6, 62, 64–6;
a conceptual tool 166; as religion 152, ethnic identity distinguished 126–7;
161; as social construction 97–106, Hindu 41–52; importance of public
165–7; as sui generis 152; category of spaces in developing 61
154, 155, 156; centripetalism 106; religious-secular divide 143
Christian conception of 3, 12–13; religious studies 141
Christocentrism of discourses on religious toleration: Bengal 177
95–111; church-state and 129–30; resistance: forms of 89
colonial construction of 164–80; revealed religion 116–17
colonialism and 69–77; Commonweal revelation 147, 150
and 116; concept of 3, 135; rival religions 158, 159, 167
190
INDEX
Roman, Catholicism 142–3; pagan 167; Serampore 101; Baptist missionaries in

post-Reformation 129; religio 159, 45
161; rivalry with Protestantism 120 Sharma, Arvind 109
Roy, Ram Mohan [1772–1833] 29, 45, 48, Shintoism 114, 125; as national religion
51, 63, 98, 101 37
Shivaji Raje Bhosle [1627–80] 43
sacred 143 Sikh Panth: as national religion 37
sahasranamams 137 Sikhs 32; religious identity 35
Said, Edward W. [1935–2003] 3–5, 138 Smith, Adam [1723–90] 118
Samchar Chandrika 62–3 Smith, Jonathan Zittell 97, 161, 165
Samskrita-vidyapithas 80 Smith, Wilfred Cantwell [1916–2000] 3
Sanatan dharma 30 Söderblom, Nathan [1866–1931] 154, 161
Sanatani Hindu groups 65 social construction: Hinduism as 168–71;
sandhyavandanam 137 religion as 97–106, 165–7
Sanskrit 4, 30, 137; as a ‘religious’ Social Construction of What? The 171
language 80, 89; Brahmanism and 88; social organization 36
contemporary works in 82–3; domestic social reforms 50
rituals 86; education in contemporary social sciences 136
India 80; future potential of 88–90; songs: Hindustani 33
generational difference and 82; South Asia: traditions of 100, 103
government support for study of 80; in South Sea Islands: European view of
post-colonial India 84–6, 88; post- paganism in 44
colonial development of 81; protection Staal, Frits 10–11
of 87–8; research into 81; spread of Stietencron, Heinrich von 42, 103
41–2; symbolizes domestic life 87; stripurohits: increase in number of 81
technology and 88; textualization of subhashitas: recitation of chapters from
71–2; translations of English works 85
into 83; used in home 84–5; women subjecthood: colonial India 64
and 79–90 Subrahmanyam, Sanjay 42
Sanskrit and Maharashtra 82 sui generis: religion as 26, 152–4
Sanskrit Commission (1958) 80, 88 supernatural: religion and 36
Sants: attainment of enlightenment 34 suprarational consciousness 36
Sarva-darsana-samgraha 30 Sweetman, Will 154, 157, 179
Sarvangi 32
sati 63; legislation banning 50 Tagore, Debendranath [1817–1905] 46
Schilling, Hugo Karl [1861–1931] 101 Talbot, Ian 63
Schlegel, August Wilhelm [1767–1845] Tamil texts 30
101 Taoism: as national religion 37; early use
Schleiermacher, Friedrich 153, 161 of term 98; as constructed 167
Schopenhauer, Arthur [1788–1860] 101 technology: Sanskrit and 88
Schwab, Raymond [1884–1956] 3 temple endowments 61
Scripturalism 100, 105 Thakar, Manik 85
scripture: cognitive dimensions of 100; Thapar, Romila 30, 42, 103
need to study non-Christian 74; Theology 3, 11–12, 16, 72, 142–4, 152,
textualization of Hindu 9, 71–2 154, 161, 168–9, 174–5, 179;
sect: definition 124; use of term by background 174, 175, 179, 180;
Catholic missionaries 123–5 centralizing framework of 100;
secularism 97–8; meaning of 117–19, 121; framework 169; Protestantism 143;
relations between religion and 37–8 secular variants of 141, 144
secularization 118, 141–4 theoretical terms 169
Semitic religions: shared heritage 140 theories of state neutrality 143
separation of church and state 143 Thompson, Kevin 89
191
INDEX
Tilak, Lokmanya [fl.1880s] 82 Ward, William [1769–1823] 45,

tradition: study of 1; Indian 159, 161, 175 72–3
treason 130 Was Hinduism Invented? 103–4,
Treaty of Westphalia (1648) 130 172
truth: religion and 151 Wealth of Nations, The 118
Weber, Maximillian Carl Emil (Max)
United Kingdom: in competition with [1864–1920] 27
French imperialism 59 Westcott, Brooke Foss [1825–1901] 70
United States: imperial aspirations of 27; western thinking on religion, constraints
study of religion in universities in 25–8 of 180
universities: study of religion in 1, 25–8; Westphalia: Treaty of 130
study of Sanskrit in 80–1 Westphalian model: secular nation-state
University of Oxford 71 98
University of Pune 81 Who invented Hinduism? 29, 114, 120–8,
university system: India 80 172
Wilson, Horace Hayman [1786–1860]
Vaishnavas: use of term ‘sect’ in 74
reference to 124–5 Wilson Quarterly 5
Vaishnavite 42 Wink, André 42
Vedantic religion 8 women: Sanskrit and 79–90
Veda 35, 70, 76–7; recognition of words: magical power of 115–16
authority of 30 World Parliament of Religions, Chicago
Vedanta 100 (1893) 64
Vedantic philosophy 100 world religions: Christian bias in 28;
Vedic ritual: attempts under BJP to cultural imperialism of 99–100;
create centres for in Indian universities language of 104; model of 64; study of
28 27, 36
Veer, Peter van der 59–60 worship 175
Vidyapati [c.1352–1448] 29
vidyapithas 80 Yates, William [fl.1820s] 45, 101
visions 137 Yoga 34–5
Viswanathan, Gauri 106–7 Yoga: immortality and freedom 26
Vivekananda [1863–1902] 48, 51, 64, 66, Yogi: identity 37
98, 108 Yogis: attainment of enlightenment 34
voluntary associations: transformation
of churches into 130–1 Zoroastrianism 109
192

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(Routledge South Asian Religion Series, 4) Esther Bloch - Marianne Keppens - Rajaram Hegde - Rethinking Religion in India - The Colonial Construction of Hinduism (2010, Routledge) PDF

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RETHINKING RELIGION IN INDIA

Esther Bloch and Marianne Keppens are Doctoral Researchers at the

1. HINDU SELVES IN A MODERN WORLD

2. PARSIS IN INDIA AND THE DIASPORA

3. SOUTH ASIAN RELIGIONS ON DISPLAY

4. RETHINKING RELIGION IN INDIA

Edited by Esther Bloch,

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009.

© 2010 Esther Bloch, Marianne Keppens and Rajaram Hegde

ISBN 0-203-86289-9 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0–415–54890–X (hbk)

Introduction: rethinking religion in India 1

1 Hindus and others 25

2 Hindu religious identity with special reference to

3 Representing religion in colonial India 56

4 Colonialism and religion 69

5 Women, the freedom movement, and Sanskrit:

6 Colonialism, Hinduism and the discourse of religion 95

7 Who invented Hinduism? Rethinking religion in India 114

8 Orientalism, postcolonialism and the ‘construction’

9 The colonial construction of what? 164

The contributions in this volume were inspired by an intellectual gathering in

Oxford University Press for permission to reprint excerpts in Chapter 5:

Interventions for permission to reprint excerpts in Chapter 8: S.N. Balagan-

S.N. Balagangadhara for permission to reprint excerpts from Balagangad-

S.N. Balagangadhara (a.k.a. Balu) is Professor in Comparative Science of

the study of South Asian traditions and has published a number of

Marianne Keppens and Esther Bloch

Rethinking religion in India: a larger project

The colonial construction of Hinduism

religious studies. It raises fundamental questions such as: Is the concept of

Two threads: the concept of religion and orientalism

The concept of religion

A third thread: Hindu nationalism and native agency

At a time when scholars started to point out that the descriptions of

1999a: 146). Interesting to note is that it is almost exclusively the brah-

Why was Hinduism constructed?

British imperialism and the western concept of religion

The Indian contribution: Brahmanism, nationalism and the

or an enumeration of family resemblances (see Doniger 1991; Ferro-Luzzi

The inapplicability of Western notions of religion to the traditions

and claims a monopoly on truth. . . . In most parts of Asia, such

Why have generations of Indian intellectuals spoken as though they possessed

Newton’s physics was deeply inﬂuenced by his Christian theological pers-

The structure of the book

and Colonialism from the Ethnographic Present, Laurie L. Patton brings in an

religion. That hypothesis, which is brieﬂy elaborated in the volume, also

Eliade and the study of religions

Gorakh, Kabir and Guru Arjan

These diﬀerences are full of confusions:

This body sprang from clay, spontaneously.

I don’t keep [Hindu] vows, nor [fast] in Ramadan.

By birth [I am] a Hindu, in mature age a Yogi and by intellect a

Tell me, Dervish, [how to ﬁnd the divine] gate.

You know no pity, but are called a Pir.

Several other verses in the Gorakh-bani suggest a rather sharp rejection of

The Hindu meditates in the temple, the Muslim in the mosque.

normally think of as secular. Essentially, Fitzgerald argues that we should

Oddie, G.A. (2006) Imagined Hinduism: British Protestant missionary constructions of

Diversity and conﬂict in pre-modern India

Some underlying and inﬂuential ideas and practice

this practice was the establishment of a highly organized network of pilgrim

Changes during late Mughal rule