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The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions Bharatendu
Harischandra and Nineteenth Century Banaras Vasudha
Dalmia Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Vasudha Dalmia
ISBN(s): 9788178243047, 8178243040
Edition: Paperback
File Details: PDF, 9.77 MB
Year: 2010
Language: english
The Nationalization of
Hindu Traditions
The Nationalization of
Hindu Traditions
Bharatendu Harischandra and
Nineteenth-Century Banaras

V ASUDHA DALMIA

With a new Foreword by

FRANCESCA ORSINI

permanent black
 Published by
P [ I< M A N E NT ll L .\ C K
'Himalayana' , Mall Road, Ranikhet Cantt,
Ranikhet 263645
[email protected]

Distributed by
ORIENT BLACKSWA N PRIVAT E LTD
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Chennai Ernakulam Guwahati Hyderabad Jaipur
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www.orientblackswan.com

Copyright © 1997 vASUDHA DALMTA

Copyright © 20 I 0
(reprint with new Foreword) VASUDHA DALMIA
for the text of the book

Copyright© 2010 FRANCESCA ORSINI

for the Foreword

Third impression 2017

ISBN 81 -7824 304-0

First published by Oxford University Press in 1997

This edition, with a new Foreword
by FRANCESCA ORSINI, 2010

Printed and bound by Sapra Brothers, Delhi 110092

 For my scholar
and poet mother
Saraswati Dalmia
 Acknowledgements

It is my pleasant duty to thank the following:

Prof. Monika Boehm-Tettelbach and Prof. Heinrich von S tietencron
for encouragement and scholarly support at the most crucial moments,
Maharaja Vibhuti Narayan Singh for his generosity in allowing me to
use the Ramnagar palace library, Shri Chandradhar Prasad Narayan
Singh, 'Bhanu Babu', for his patience in question-answer sessions,
Prof. Anand Krishna, most of all, without whom Banaras would mean
half as much, Rani Bhabhi for her gracious hospitality, Dr Kalyan
Krishna for information on the Vallabha Sampradaya and much else,
Sushmaji for companionship, Dr Girish Chandra for receiving me in
Bharatendu Bhavan and allowing me access to his papers, Dr Dhirendra-
nath Singh foropening up his treasures and letting me profit from his vast
knowledge and love of the poets of the Bharatendu era,
Shri Shradvallabha Betiji Maharaj of Gopal Mandir, Varanasi, for
graciously receiving me in the temple,
Dr T. K. Biswas, Director, Bharat Kala Bhavan, Varanasi for making
possible massive photo-copying, as well as Dr Lakshmi Datt Vyas for
his unwavering resistance to scholars, Prakash Rao for photography,
Dr R. S. Kushvaha for enthusiastic help,
Dr George Baumann, University Library, Tiibingen, for sustained
support over the years,
Dr Richard J. Bingle, India Office Records, British Library, and
Prof. Ravinder Kumar, Director, and S . K. Bhatnagar, Deputy Librar-
ian, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, for prompt help and support
Prof. Sudhir Chandra for his generosity in sharing his extensive
knowledge of nineteenth-century controversies and contexts, Prof. Veena
Das and Prof. Anuradha Kapur for the width of their understanding and
for their warm support,
Drs Rupert Snell, Rukun Advani and R. P. Jain for substantial contri-
bution to the final shaping of the manuscript,
Dr R. S. McGregor for generously provided correctives on the vexed
issue of language,
v111 Acknowledgements
Prof. Juergen Lu ~ tt for the kind loan of microfilms,
Dr Martin Chris.of-Fi.ichsle for help at all hours , Dr Srilata Raman
Mueller for close of readings of texts one can only foist on friends , Dr Eva
Warth and Dr Gita Dharampal-Frick for support at incisive moments,
Rainer Kimmig, as always , for emotional and technical help with com-
puter, Eva Orthmann for resolving Perso-Arabic intricacies,
Dr Bhakti Datta, Prof. Derek Gupta, Christa Mellis , Professors
Margarete and Alois Payer, Gert, Damini and Taru Luederitz for the
shared way ,
my mother and the family in Delhi for the shared traditions ,
finally, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for awarding me a
stipend from October 1991 to October 1993, which made it possible for
me to devote myself entirely to research.
Implicated deeply in this enterprise and therefore beyond thanks:
Dr Angelika Maliniar, Dr Martin Fuchs, as also my research assistant,
Nicole Merkel who did much more than was due, the errors which remain
being entirely mine.
V ASUDHA DALMIA
 Note on Transliteration

Hindi words which have become part of the English language , for ins-
tance Brahman or Pandit, have been written without diacritical marks.
When citing directly from the Hindi , the transliteration followed by
.. S. McGregor in his Outline ofHindi Grammar [1972] 1977, has most-
ly been used. The rather vexed question of the difference in Hindi and
Sanskrit transliteration has been sought to be resolved, in that the Sans-
krit has been employed only in contexts where Sanskrit works are under
discussion. Thus Bhiiratvar~ in the Hindi context and Bhiiratavar~a in
the Sanskrit. For the Urdu transcription I have mainly relied on the
scheme adopted by R. S . McGregor in Urdu Study Materials , 1992.
When citing from secondary sources, the author's usage has been re-
tained.
 Contents

1 Introduction 1
2 Constituting Tradition in Colonial India: Hindi,
Hindu, Hindustan 21
How CAN INDIA PROGRESS : HARISCHANDRA·s VIEWPOINT 21
THE COLONIAL GOVERNMENT AND THE FORMATION OF
PUBLIC 0PINI0N 28
HINDUS AND MUSLIMS, HINDUSTAN AND BHARATVAR~ 32
ASSESSING HARISCHANDRA's Vrnw: DICHOTOMIES ,
AMBIVALENCES AND THE THIRD IDIOM 4'.?.
3 The Holy City as the Source of 'Traditional' Authority
and the House of Harischandra 50
BANARAS AS THE HOLY aTY OF THE HINDUS : THE MYTH
IN INTERPRETATION 50
THE RAJAS OF BANARAS AND THE CREATION OF HINDU TRADITION 64
THE BRAHMAN PRESENCE AND THE TRADITION OF LEARNING 94
THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE: THE MISSIONARY IMPACT AND
CULTURAL INTERACTION 107
THE HOUSE OF HARISCHANDRA OF BANARAS 117
CONCLUSION 143
4 Hindi as the National Language of the Hindus 146
THE GENESIS OF HINDI 146
THE DEVELOPMENT OF HINDUf/BHAKHA AS A LITERARY
LANGUAGE 152
EAST INDIA COMPANY: THE LANGUAGE SPLIT AND THE
COLLEGE OF FORT WILLI A~! 161
ADDRESSING THE HINDUS IN HINDU!: MISSIONARY TRACTS
AND SCHOOL BOOKS 169
THE COURT LANGUAGE CONTROVERSY: I NCREAS ING
POLITICIZATION AND IDEOLOGIZATION 175
CODIFYING THE LANGUAGE; GRAMMARS AND DICTIONARIES 181
OccuPYING THE P UBLIC SPHERE: HARISCHANDRA AND THE
NATIONALIST ASPIRATIONS OF HINDI 191
CONCLUSION 217
Xll Contents
5 The National Identity of the Hindus an.: ''1e
Emergence of Hindi Literature: The Periodicals as a
Discursive Sphere 222
LANGUAGE, LITERATURE AND THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION 222
HINDI JOURNALS AND THE FORMATION OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE 227
THE ROLE OF HARISCHANDRA: LITERARY AND JoURNALISTIC
PERSONA 232
KAVIVACHANSUDHA 236
HARISCHANDRACHANDRIKA 241
BALABODH!Nf 245
SOCIAL AND POLITICAL SPACE: DEMARCATING THE MIDDLE
GROUND 251
HINDI AS A LITERARY LANGUAGE AND HINDI LITERATURE AS
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THE NATION 267
MAPPING THE LITERARY TERRAIN: THE GENERIC ENCOUNTER 279
POETRY 282
PROSE NARRATIVE 291
DRAMA 300
PROSE ESSAY 314
TRAVELOGUES 322
BOOK REVIEWS 328
CONCLUSION 335
6 'The Only Real Religion of the Hindus' 338
THE TRADITIONALIST RESPONSE AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE:
HARISCHANDRA'S THREE PHASES 338
THE COLONIAL FRAMEWORK: MISSIONARY REPRESENTATIONS 342
THE FIRST PHASE: ROOTS AND THEIR OFFSHOOTS 351
THE KA.sf DHARMA SABHA 355
CRITIQUE OF SACERDOTAL TRADITION 362
SECOND PHASE: ASSIMILATIONS AND DEMARCATIONS 366
THE DEBATE WITH THE REFORMISTS: THE DEFENCE OF
IMAGE- WORSHIP 381
ORIENTALIST DISCOURSE: CONSTRUING THE TRUE RELIGIOUS
TRADITIONS OF THE HINDUS 390
THE THIRD PHASE: DHARMA AS CONSTITUTING THE NATION 411
CONCLUSION 425
7 Conclusion 430
Bibliography 440
Index 467
 Foreword
Francesca Orsini

It is rare for an academic book to combine a strong line of argument

with a profusion of sources, all carefully presented and analysed, over
a very broad canvas, covering a number of different themes: a book in
which every small detail makes sense both in itself and as part of a
much larger picture. Vasudha Dalmia's The Nationalization of Hindu
Traditions: Bharatendu Harischandra and Nineteenth-century Banaras
is such a book. It is unusual in being at the same time utterly convincing,
thorough and light-footed, sensitive to nuances, ambivalences, and con-
tradictions, and so assured in its reading that there is never any feeling
of it forcing an interpretation upon its material. Re-reading it now, nearly
fifteen years after it first appeared, is like reading a classic, a work that
has not so much shapd our understanding of this period as having cre-
ated the field, the discipline through which to study it. Cultural history
had not been done in this way for India before.
For a long time the "colonial er;counter", and what was termed the
''Indian Rena i';sance''. were defined by studies of Bengal, or more
precisely Calcut.:i. We picmrecl wionial intellectuals as babus, suited
and booted in pub;i c nnd donning dhotis and sacred threads at home,
intellectuals who were equally at home in the English classics (often
also Latin and Greek) and Sanskrit texts, even as they forged modem
literature and the press in Bengali. Other regions and language areas
were viewed as variations on Bengnl, a little more radical here, a little
belated there.
To some extent Bengal still determines the meridian of modernity in
India-can for instance Nazir Akbarabadi be considered a modem p0et,
given that he lived and wrote in Agra at the tum of the nineteenth century?
I doubt there would be much difficulty considering his irreverent, street-
smart poetry "modem" had he lived in Calcutta over the same period .
One of the merits oi Vasudha Dalmia's book, as of David Lelyve!d'o;;
Aligarh 's First Generation and Barbara Metcalf' s studies of Indian Islam,
has been to consider modernity from the perspective of areas and groups
xiv Foreword

where living o:raditions of knowledge, authority, and culture were still

strong. In fact, the rich crop of regional studies on the growth of the
press as well as public sphere institutions all over India has now made
it amply clear how different and specific the trajectories of colonial
modernity were in each separate case. There is no longer one meas-
ure that, more or less, fits all. The picture we get of Harischandra from
Dalmia's book is of a colonial intellectual with long, curly hair and the
richly woven angarkha of the pre-colonial elite, with his courtesan-
companion Mallika on his lap, the pair gazing seriously at each other,
encapsulating the complex historical background of Banaras that this
book traces so thoroughly.
Being a study of the writings and ideas of a singular colonial intel-
lectual, this book acknowledges Sudhir Chandra's The Oppressive
Present (1992) as a predecessor. And indeed Chandra's book was re-
markable for the range of writers and texts it discussed as well as for
the issues it focused on: these were to dominate discussions of colonial
culture in the years that followed-historical consciousness, communal-
ism, nationalism. But whereas the vernacular intellectuals of colonial
times are in Chandra's depiction beset by anxiety and ambivalence
("Crushed by English Poetry" is the title of one of the chapters), Dalmia' s
Harischandra is a much more self-assured character whose attitude to
orientalist discourse is confidently selective. Dalmia' s careful tracing
of the development of the historical discourse on Indian monotheism is
illuminating in this respect, highlighting not only the significant overlap
between European orientalists and Indian intellectuals, but also their
contrasting agendas and the selectiveness with which Rajendralal Mitra
or R.G. Bhandarkar or Harischandra, for instance, made use of orientalist
auctoritas. Her meticulous outlining of "three idioms" in her Introduction,
and of the third idiom in particular-the "modem Indian", as a sanskrit-
izing idiom which formed itself "in the very process of negotiating the
relationship to past idioms and classical texts in the light of present
needs and claims, in order to project itself as a coherent and even homo-
geneous entity" (p. 15)-is borne out in subsequent chapters through
her analysis of literary and religious debates and activities.
As a cultural-historical study in English of a hallowed figure of the
Hindi literary tradition, this book participates in the productive cross-
disciplinary trend that has seen primarily historians and scholars of
English literature mining regional-language archives to produce rich
cultural histories of colonial India. This process acquired particular
urgency because of the shadow cast by Hindutva. Scholars searched
for the origins of its xenophobic views and counterfactual arguments,
 Foreword xv

and for the "communal common sense" (as one scholar called it) that
was apparently firmly rooted in the popular imagination d..)spite decades
of Nehruvian secularism. Views that condemned Indian Muslims into
being eternal foreigners, Sudhir Chandra had shown, could be found in
profusion within the writings of Harischandra and his contemporaries.
In a different way, given the fractious and hierarchical relationship of
Hindi with English, her critical perspective on these themes also exposed
Vasudha Dalmia to criticism. Does not writing "angrezi men hindi"-
about Hindi in English-it was asked, mean choosing to be an outsider
in the world of Hindi, cut off from its concerns and struggles? The answer
seems clear: anyone who reads this book will see that Dalmia writes
with great engagement as well as historical balance about Harischandra.
Her whole book is a plea for patiently listening to the source material
in Indian languages, to look carefully at their longer genealogies and
unexpected conclusions. Harischandra' s position in the Hindi firmament
has always been secure, regardless of whether the emphasis has been
placed on his modernity and radicalism or on his loyalty and traditional-
ism. So, if I may push the planetary metaphor further, the merit of this
book is to make Harischandra' s moon part of several crisscrossing orbits,
not in order to diminish its importance but to see how the movement of
this particular system interacted with other systems. And because she
does not take on the role of critic as censor or judge-as so often hap-
pens in critical works originating in Hindi-Dalmia does not expect
consistency or political correctness in Harischandra, be it his ideas on
Hinduism, Hinduness, or Hindi. Rather, she brings to life a much more
sparkling and nuanced historical character and social animal, someone
who made the fullest use of the possibilities provided by print and the
new culture of associations. Striking are his many unfinished essays,
travelogues, and narratives which reveal a keenness to experiment and
write down ideas and experiences even when a genre is not fully formed,
an argument incompletely worked out. In this respect, Vasudha Dalrnia' s
chronological approach to Harischandra's ideas on Vaishnavism and
his theatrical writings highlight this "work in progress" very well.
Another feature that sets her book apart from other studies of the
"colonial encounter is its delineation of a social stage comprising many
actors. Dalmia does not frame the intellectual encounter simplistically as
a binary relationship between colonial masters or orientalists or
missionaries on the one hand, and Indian intellectuals or informants
ornative rulers on the other-whetherone calls that relationship a "nego-
tiation" or a "transaction" or a "dialogue" or something else along the
same lines. By drawing a social map ofBanaras in which the maharaja,
xvi Foreword

the pandits, and the merchants each had their own source of authority and
sphere of influence, she is able to show how eac!1 of these negoti::!ted
their positions in the new colonial set-up, how their mutual relations were
affected, how they moved in the new spaces of social interaction and
intervention provided by the press, schools, and associations, and how
their idioms were shaped by these encounters "in interaction and ulti-
mately in resistance to the British" (p. 64). Though the focus is primarily
on Harischandra, what we are given is an overall picture of a changing
society in which everyone is an actor both influenced by and influencing
everyone else. One of her arguments-that even the pandits in Banaras
were affected by the colonial encounter, directly in the Benares Sans-
krit College and more generally by the growing authority of Western
orientalisls-has been followed up in detail by Michael S . Dodson in
Orienwlism, Empire And National Culture (2007). li1 Dalmia's work,
however, ,.;ud:. processes are traced both within wrilings as well as
inst,tutionaJ arrangements, and placed within a much wider social and
cultural web.
While rich as cultural and social history-Chapter 3 could be a bQok
on its own-Dalmia's book is also very powerful as intellectual history.
This seems most in evidence in the last chapter, where every strand of
religious thought--for instance monotheism, be it Indian or European-
is analysed, its origins and developments traced, its claims tested, and
its similarities and differences with respect to other strands carefully
drawn out. All t'1e time, Dalmia is keen to point out, Harischandra ' s in-
tellectual articulation ofVaishnava monotheism and religious innovation
did not impede his full participation in the rituals of his sampradaya. No
book in Hindi nr; Harischandra has considered his religious ideas and
activities in such detail.
Throughout. Dalmia makes it clear that her focus is the making of a
national Hindu idiom, and that a significant part of this process was the
bypassing of Islamic and Islamicate traditions that had been the dominant
elite features of the region for several centuries. She notes that "if the
consolidation was emancipatory, it was in its tum repressive, and if it
included, it also excluded, not only the Muslims, but also those on the
periphery of the Hindu social order" (437). She skilfully analyses Haris-
chandra' s skit in which "Pan ch" objects to a young and beautiful Mehtarani
getting an education-" And what do you have to do with learning? The
jans which have to do with learning are qmte different from yours." The
girl replies: 'Tho~e days are past now, sir, now all grain is weighed by
the same ounce" (259)-underlining her interlocutor's middle-class
doubts over education for women and the lower cla~ses.
 Foreword xvii

There is little sense in Harischandra' s Banaras of the momentous

history of the lower classes in this period, documented by William Pinch
(Peasants and Monks in British India, 1996), and by Nandini Gooptu
(The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth-century India, 2001)
for a slightly later period. Parallel to Harischandra' s articulation of
Vaishnnavism, the lower castes continued to embrace a different kind
of Vaishnavism, such as that of the Ramanandis which was open to all
castes, not to speak of Dalit assertion through bhakti towards Ravidas
and Kabir, also significant presences in Banaras. Similarly, the focus
on Banaras necessarily reduces emphasis on the continuing currency
of Urdu throughout the nineteenth century, and the linguistic, literary,
and religious consolidation that was taking place in Urdu, parallel with
Hindi. Muslim weavers are mentioned via Nita Kumar' s study (The
Artisans of Banaras: Popular Culture and Identity, 1880-1986, 1988)
and we have a tantalizing glimpse of Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan as an act-
ive member of the Benares Institute: indeed one wonders how he and
Harischandra behaved when they met there and what they said to each
other. 1 What role did Persian-educated Kayasthas and Muslims play in
Banaras in this period, what did they think? A few decades later one of
them, Munshi Dhanpat Rai "Premchand", would write his first major
novel about contemporary Banaras in Urdu, Bazar-e Husn, about which
Dalmia has written eloquently elsewhere. 2
The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions has not just stood the test c~
time but continues to stimulate questions and open up avenues of
research and reflection. By paying equal attention to nuances in the
murces, to the genealogies of ideas, and to the social and political context
in which diverse actors simultaneously and diversely moved, this is a
book that has become something of a benchmark for how cultural history
E-hould be written.

1 Sagaree Sengupta has explored Harischandra's ambivalent relationship to

Urdu-heaping scorn on it in his public statements and satirical poems, but also
writing devotional poetry about Krishna in Urdu, continuing an earlier tradition:
S . Sengupta, ' Krsna the Cruel Beloved: Hariscandra and Urdu', Annual of Urdu
Studies, vol. 9 (1994): 82-102.
2
Originally written in Urdu in 1916, the novel first found a publisher in Hindi
and appeared under the title Seva-sadan in 1919; in Urdu it was published in 1924;
see Vasudha Dalmia, 'The House of Service, or the Chronicle of an Un/holy City' ,
Introduction to Premchand, Sevasadan, tr. Snehal Shingavi, New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2005 .
 1
Introduction

Urban votaries of Hinduism in the twentieth century generally see no

reason to question its monolithic character. All doubts on this score tend
to be regarded as academic quibbling by the resurgent movements
which have largely instrumentalized religion for political ends.1 Yet,
for all the efforts to eradicate signs of former pluralities, the fissures
remain apparent even today. Any serious analysis of the process of
cementation, which is still under way, leads back to the nineteenth cen-
tury, for the movements to reformulate and reassert Hinda dharma were
to converge-and in some instances to clash-with unprecedented mo-
mentum in the last decades of the century. Hinduism as it formed itself
in the late nineteenth century worked with the postulation of a race of
'ancient' Hindus: thus, for instance, the title of R. C. Dutt' s book, Early
Hindu Civilization, 2000 to 320 BC. Based on Sanskrit Literature (1888),
as typical of the retrospective projection of a religion conceptualized as
mono linear. To question the mono linearity is not to assert that the affin-
ities invoked had not existed at all. There had been common traditions
and common reference points in the past, but they had not necessarily
solidified into the consolidated mass which 'Hinduism' in the nine-
teenth century came to signify, and which had new socio-political
dimensions.
Dharma sabhiis in the cause of saniitana dharma had begun to spring
up across the subcontinent since the thirties, whether as a defensive
measure against proposed legislation, as in the case of the Dharma
Sabha founded in Calcutta in 1831 when the practice of sat! was banned,
or against rising missionary invective, as in Maharashtra. The dharma
sabhas wen~ no novel institution, they had always mediated between the
precepts of the Dharmasiistra and actual contingency. In the nineteenth
century, however, they no longer. functioned with the authority of the
1
It is in this connection that Romila Thapar has coined the apt phrase·' Syndicated
Moksa' (1985 : 14-22).
2 The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions
political legislator to back them, but, rather, against this very authority.
Further, they were no longer composed of learned Brahmans alone, but
also of the western educated urban intelligentsia.2 They were organized
according to British models, had presidents, executive boards and
secretaries, and often functioned in strict accordance with British
parliamentary procedure. 3 The notion of sanatana dharma itself had re-
mained anything but stationary through the ages .4 Its renewed propaga-
tion tended to congregate around these sabhas. However, it would be a
mistake to imagine that these institutions came into being only to con-
serve inherited practice. As always, one of their vital functions was also
to sanction change, however minimal it might have appeared at first
sight.
While sifting a wide range of Hindi literature in the nineteenth
century~ I have found that even while defending tradition, while empha-
sizing the saniitanata, constancy, of the vedpurii!J vihitiirya dharma, the
dharma of the Ary as as authorized by the canonical Vedas and Pural).as,
the spokesmen, in the very name of orthodoxy, of tradition itself, were,
in fact, accommodating and articulating wide-reaching changes. The
sanatanata which they so firmly posited was shifting ground, whereby
certain features, which were proclaimed as characteristic, were being
foregrounded in a heretofore uncharacteristic manner. Though a num-
ber of studies of sanatana dharma leadership in the nineteenth century
have been undertaken in the last two decades, 5 these movements, often

· 2 Detailed knowledge of the original Sanskrit sources had been the exclusive
preserve of learned siistris. The translation of Sanskrit legal treatises into regional
languages began to appear from the mid nineteenth century, prompted both by the
example set by the British in the late eighteenth and the early decades of the nine-
teenth century, as well as the need of the vernacular elite for easy access to the origi-
nals.
3 For some details on the organization of the Calcutta Dharma Sabha, see Kopf

( 1969: 266ff.).
4 See Kane (1977: 1628 ff.) for the changing connotations of the term sanatana

dharma from the sixth century AD onwards.

5 The pioneering suryey by Farquhar ([I 914) 1977: 291-308), consisting of a list

of societies and organizations within what he termed 'the chief Hindu sects', which
sprang up in self-defence in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, was long to
remain the sole venture in this direction, In the last twenty years, however, there have
been various attempts to document the process. The following is less an exhaustive
survey of the literature on the subject than an effort to chart the main analytic trends.
Tucker(l976) offers a lucid survey ofa broad spectrum of the 'traditional' response
in nineteenth-century Maharashtra, of tracts and b•Joks such as, for instance,
 Introduction 3

summarily denoted as 'revivalist', have yet to be charted in any com-

prehensive fashion. There was no centrally co-ordinated traditionalist
movement.of subcontinental breadth. To these efforts to defend tradi-
tion, which had certain features in common, were added the more radical
reform movements, which have often been lumped together under the
category 'neo-Hinduism'. This so-called neo-Hindu rejoinder, fore-
most in formations such as the Brahmo and Arya Samaj, has been taken
to represent the modernization of Hinduism. The more widespread, less

MorobhattDandekar' s Sri hindudharmasthiipanii ( 1831), Gangadhar Shastri Phadke' s

Hindudhannatattva ( 1852), a learned defence of the existing beliefs and practices
of Hinduism, against both missionary attack as well as the threat posed by the newly
anglicized youth of Bombay, and VishnubawaBrahmacari' s Vedoktadhannaprakiisa
(1859). He considers, further, the work ofVithoba Anna Daftdar in the organization
of the Hindu Dharma Vyavasthapaka Mandali in Bombay in 1868, as well as the
operations of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha (est. 1867), which was soon to gain a coun-
try-wide reputation. Though the topic is sympathetically treated and the contradic-
tions explicitly addressed, Tucker finds no analytical framework for adequatel:-
treating the work of persons and institutions working for the cause of sanatan dharma
from a variety of perspectives and positions and the phraseology remains restricted
to labels such as 'orthodox' or ' revivalist fashion'. Broadly the same approach is fol-
lowed by Conlon and Hudson in Jones (1992). Conlon deals at length with the work
ofVishnubawa Brahmachari (1825-71), the ascetic defender of a Vedic golden age
who operated primarily in Bombay, a forerunner ofDayanand Sarasvati in some res-
pects, but different in that he found rationalist means for the acceptance of ritual and
van:iiisramadharma. Conlon uses the analogy of the renaissance to introduce his
topic; he cites the usage of the model by historians such as David Kopf (1969) ~ ~
also R. C. Majumdar in his British Paramountcy and Indian Renaissance, Part II
(Bombay, 1965). Hudson analyses the work of Arumuga NavalarofJ affna ( 1822-79),
defender of Shaiva Siddhanta against Christian missionary attacks. Navalar' s
formulation of Shaivism, which affirmed ritual practice and made Shaiva texts
widely available for the first time, was to spread and be acclaimed on both sides of
the Strait. Hudson also sees Navalar's activities as part .of.a general Hindu renais-
sance. The monograph by Ami ya Sen ( 1993) re-establishes the use of labels such
as reformist and revivalist (12) amongst others, s ince he finds , as againstTapan Ray-
chaudhuri ( 1988), that they do, after all, adequately denote the difference in attitudes
between the nineteenth-century propagators of Hinduism. Though conceding that
the revivalists also allowed for a measure of reform, he finds that what distinguished
them from the reformists, was the inconsistency of their attitude in this respect. He
sees the Hindu ' revival' of the last decades of the nineteenth century in Bengal
(1872-1905) as primarily a conservative reaction. Useful, in that he works through
a quantity of material by contemporaries less luminous than Ba '1ki!11c h ~ ndra and
Bhudeb Mukhopadhyaya, which lies buried in files of the journals of the period, his
4 The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions
radical movements which together went into the making of modern
sanatana dharma have often been seen as the slow adjustment of tradi-
tional Hinduism to the challenge of the modern age. Though the more
radical reform movements served as catalysts, the most vital issues
concerning notions of cultural, religious and political identity were
thrashed out in the traditionalist quarters as well, and perhaps with more
lasting effect, and it was here that the face of modem Hinduism-within
which temple and va~a continue to play a prominent role-was finally
to be coined. The whole process of change, accommodation and re-arti-
culation, whereby usually only the so-called neo-Hindu movements are
taken into consideration, is generally described as the Hindu renais-
sance or simply renaissance. A closer inspection of the categories used
to circumscribe and distinguish the movements may help to clarify the
perspective adopted in this study.
Kenneth Jones, who has to his credit detailed studies of the social and
ideological impact of the Arya Samaj in Panjab in the period, comes to
the conclusion that in fact two broad types of response can be estab-
lished (1989: 39). The one he sees as 'transitional', i.e. when the move-
ments concerned had their roots in the pre-colonial world, were based
on traditional forms of socio-religious dissent and had little or no con-
tact with the colonial milieu, though later, when they perforce came in
touch with it, they had to make limited adjustments to it. The other kind
of movement, which he terms 'acculturative', led by South Asians who
had enjoyed English education, he sees as originating in direct transac-
tion with the colonial milieu. It is a telling fact that when Jones comes
to consider the situation in the North-Western Provinces, though he
records the Deoband movement as specimen of the 'transitional'
variety from Islam, there is no documentation of any Hindu formations
of the sort. The changes in traditional formations, widespread as they
are, are simply not registered, since they do not choose to define them-
selves as different, and in fact emphasize the constancy of the tradition

work finally remains restricted by the analytic framework in which he chooses to

operate. The paper by Jones (1993) is a pioneering effort to trace the work of two
sanatanists of the Panjab, firstly , Pandit Shraddha Ram PhiUauri (1837-81), de-
fender of Vai~i:iava Hinduism, writer of the now forgotten Dharma Raksha (1867)
and co-founder of the Amritsar Dharma Sabha, and secondly, Pandit Din Dayalu
Sharma (b.1863) who founded the Bharat Dharma Mahamandal (1887) which was
to bring together all leaders of the orthodox Hindu community. Though aware of the
thin line dividing these thinkers from the reformists, Jones also speaks of Hindu
revival in this connection.
 Introduction 5
they stand for. As against this, the Arya Samaj allows itself to be readily
classified as acculturative, though its founder stemmed from as tradi-
tional a milieu as any. Thus, the social origin of the founders of the res-
pective movements does not necessarily betray their programme.
Further, though Jones' is a useful distinction, it is equipped only to deal
with movements which in the intensification of their position stand out
sharply from the rest. When applied to the actual situation in colonial
India it leaves much of the broad-based developments and changes
undocumented. The task then is to collect evidence and locate the fea-
tures which gained new emphasis in the confrontation with Christianity
and the learning from the West and which in their tum made for cohesion
in the broad base as it constituted itself in the late nineteenth century.
An overall analysis can only take place at any satisfactory level of abs-
traction once the evidence for the subcontinent can be pieced together
from a number of regional studies.
The Hindu response can obviously be divided into two broad groups
for the purposes of analysis. Is it meaningful to retain the terms
'revivalist' and 'reformist' to distinguish between the two? 'Revival' or
'revivalism' has in the past often been seen in opposition to moderniza-
tion. At first sight, this seems justified, since the sanatana dharma
movements propagate concepts and practice rooted in sanskritic tradi-
tions. As we shall have occasion to note time and again in the course of
this study, the nineteenth century social and religious leadership,
specially when defending sanatana dharma, developed its own deliber-
ately antiquarian vocabulary to designate its priorities and preferences,
and equally deliberately, it set itself off from the modem. The tradi-
tional/modem polarity, used to establish the distinction between the
indigenous and the alien, was a part of the self-representation of those
who sought to depict their tradition as standing firm against the pressure
of change. 6 Yet to accept these poles as genuinely apart and immune to
the influence of the other would be contrary to all the evidence presented
in the documents of the period, which bear witness to incessant change
and exchange. There was intense interaction with missionaries,
orientalists and western ideas, and many of the positions occupied by
the votaries of sanatana dharma were commonly shared with the leaders
of the reform movements, who more explicitly propagated change.
Though it needs to be noted here that if indeed there was change, there

6 Cf. Anuradha Kapur.on the mutually dependent and restrictive function of these

polarities (1990: 3).

6 The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions
were continuities as well, and for certain strands of traditions continued
to maintain their own and were set forth in one guise or another. The
creative act of invention consisted in the rearrangement of older and
newer concepts and practice and the historical links in time and space
that were forged anew. 7 A century later, then, it is important neither to
be taken in by the antiquarianism of this language nor to fall into the trap
of tracing all that was taking shape as sheer imitation of western models,
nationalist or otherwise. 'Revival' then is not only misleading since it
disallows the possibility of change, it has the added disadvantage of
having been used pejoratively all too often, as if it referred to no more
than outmoded religious practice which had lain inert up to then, but
which had ultimately refused to be suppressed by the more enlightened
reform movements, such as the Brahma or even Arya Samaj. Labels
such as 'revivalist' have served to create closures and more often than
not precluded any serious attempt to discern the selective criteria which
were evolved in order to transpose traditional practice into a modernist
mould, a process which ostensibly functioned well enough to enable the
varied streams of tradition, which subsumed themselves under sanatana,
to flow into what was to constitute Hinduism as a single religious and-
by extension-political and national tradition.
The difference between the so called neo-Hinduism and traditional
Hinduism have been treated most explicitly by Paul Hacker (1978). He
sees nationalism in its peculiar Indian garb as being the chief impulse
and distinguishing feature of neo-Hinduism, religion being made sub-
servient to the nationalist objective. The common trait which binds
these otherwise heterogeneous movements is the predominantly west-
ern orientation of their intellectual formations. Further characteristics
of nee-Hinduism are the assertion that Hinduism is a spiritual unity and
that it has a message to proclaim to the world. While Hacker concedes
that the traditionalists also share some of these concerns, it is only in

7 Since Hobsbawm and Ranger' s The Invention of Tradition ((1983] 1990) first

appeared, all emphasis on tradition tends to be regarded with s uspicion, as if it were

virtually no more than an invention, a device used as a mere cover for the modern.
However, as pointed out by Hobsbawm in a recent lecture (1993), though the past
always needs to be moulded to suit the needs of a given ideolcgy, it is seldom entirely
invented. There are certain 'hard facts ' which go into its constitution as well. Further,
there are genuine continuities, which cannot be relegated to the realm of the imagi-
nary or the merely playful. It is the configuration of the new and the old, of conti-
nuities and innovations, then, which needs to be studied in periods of accelerated
change.
 Introduction 7
subsidiary fashion, for, as he sees it, they owe primary allegiance to and
stress the continuity of the Hindu tradition, which, by and large, remains
impervious to changes in the modem world. As Monika Horstmann has
pointed out, these assumptions cannot really stand the test of a closer
inspection of the traditionalist positions.8 They not only constantly
reinterpret and modify inherited practice, they are fiercely nationalist
as well and develop increasing missionary fervour with time.
What of the label 'reformist'? Social reform was the one great con-
cern of the century and reformist tendencies were common to all the
movements. The difference lay only in selection and the degree of em-
phasis. However, formations such as the Brahmo and Arya Samaj were
more radical in their approach, and propagated more sweeping reforms
than the dharma sabhas wou~d have been prepared to concede.
What, then, are the differences and which nomenclatures can be
meaningfully retained? I would suggest 'traditionalist' as against ' re-
vi,·a list' to describe the one, for their one binding feature was the stress
on-the sanatanata or constancy of tradition, rather than any breach with
some original, more pristine past, which the more radical reform move-
m~nts claimed to fill. The past invoked by the traditionalist was
accessible in texts, ritual, social practice and institutions, some of them
going farther back in time while others were no older than the late
eighteenth century. For the second group, for lack of a better term, while
discarding 'neo-Hindu', which reeks of inauthenticity, I would continue
to use 'reformist' .
The differences and similarities between the two groups can be
broadly summed up as follows: 1) The traditionalists recognize the
scriptural authority of both sruti and smrti whereby itihiisa and puriilJ.a
are considered a legitimate part of the evolution of scriptural tradition.
As against this practice, the reformists isolate one part of the scriptural
tradition as exclusively authoritative; this distinction being usually re-
served for the Vedas. They tend to see the rest as corrupt or degenerate.
2) For the first group, the Dha1masiistras remain authoritative as
sources for formulating religious and civil law and the essential validity
8 Horstmann ( 1995), while dealing with Hinduism as propagated in the tracts and
publication of the Gita Press (beginning with the publication of the immensely popu-
lar journal Kalyai:i in 1926), is dealing with a slightly later phase of the traditionalist
positions, when the fissures in Hindu dharma, propagated as a monolith, had closed
somewhat more than they had in the late nineteenth century, but her arguments re-
ga rding the essential similarity of the so-called neo-Hindu and traditionalist in this
regard hold true for the older period as well.
8 The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions
of van:iasramadharma is not considered open to question. Though there
is obvious modification and repeated concession to social change, the
authority of the Dharmasastras is sought to legitimate this: thus the vari-
ous Dharma sabhas, many of them short-lived, which were called into
life by the exigency of British legislative measures. The second group
con.s iders its own respective leaders as authoritative in this respect and
does not recur to the authority of the Dharmasastras. 9 3) The tradition-
alists continue to lay stress on the centrality of the temple and ritual
practice, though here again various reformist measures are called for
and sometimes even implemented. The reformists break away from all
older places of worship and ritual and establish their own. 4) The modes
found to validate the respective traditions are often commonly shared,
for in addition to scripture the traditionalists also mobilize rationalist
arguments in support of their cause, as also historical scholarship, fore-
most that of western orientalists. 5) It is hereby that popular religious
practice-which continues to be considered a part of Hinduism, since
it is not to be allowed an autonomous existence-is increasingly brand-
ed as 'superstition' and downgraded. Traditionalists as well as reform-
ists are alike in their condemnation of this 'superstitious' practice.
The term renaissance has been accepted widely for this process of
modernization. It came into use in the nineteenth century itself and was
certainly a part of the perception of those who contributed most vitally
to the process, like Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Aurobindo Ghose and
Bepin Chandra Pal. 10 Nationalist historiography has tended to make
9 Dayiinand Sarasvafi rejected the smrtis, though he recognized the Manusmrti,
albeit in a considerably mangled form, for he rejected as blatant 'interpolations' all
those precepts which did not concur with his teaching.
10
Cf. Kopf (1969: 3). Kopf sees no further explanation as necessary and accepts
this term as an adequate designation for the process. He sees the Bengal Renais-
sance as essentially taking place in the interaction between the Bengali intelligentsia
based in Calcutta and the British orientalists , as a 'merging of interests between the
two comm1mities ' (7). The Bengali intellectual, between 1800 and 1830, according
to Kopf, was-
a confused but optimistic individual striving to reconcile partially digested alien
traits and unsatisfactory indigenous traditions ... It was his good fortune that the
distance between Britain and India was great and that the Orientalists with whom he
came into contact had already become 'Indianized' . The Bengali' s view of the West
during the sympathetic Orientalist period helped to establish good rapport between
European and Indian and offered good hope for the future . (8)
Kopf s study focuses on the workings of the College of Fort William. His view
has been challenged and corrected by Sisir Kumar Das, who has pointed out that the
 Introduction 9
uncritical use of the term. If, on the one hand, the British colonial period
has been condemned as one of relentless exploitation, on the other it has
been eulogized as the era of 'the great cultural renaissance in India in
the 19th century which transformed her from the Medieval to the
Mod~rn Age'. This cultural renaissance consisted of 'great social and
religious reforms, literary revival, and political aspirations .. .' .11
There are, however, several problems connected with the continued use
of the term. As Barun De has pointed out, the political and social pre-
mises of the term as used in Europe were based on a periodization, on
a sequencing of epochs, which was to culminate in the emergence of
civil society and finally, of bourgeois domination. This cannot be held
to be uniformly true for all of Europe, and thus even here cannot have
a model-building function. The sequence is obviously not analogous to
the Indian colonial situation, where no civil society was possible (1977:
186). The subaltern middle class-the social and economic basis of
which were new groups created by British rule-worked within a frame-
work of alien rule. The 'enlightenment', which set in under conditions
of territorial statehood and the dependent aegis of British intervention,
consisted of the cultural response of this subaltern middle class to the
modernizing bourgeois of Europe (191). 12 The basic assumption of the
concept of Indian Renaissance is that British rule had positive aspects,
bunched together in one phase, in which the revival of Indian culture
took place. Yet the linkage was not necessarily beneficial to Indian
development (195). In all 'renaissance ' is too rosy a view of a much

two groups worked under constraints of conflicting interests and the relationship
was based on all else but equality . The inner rhythm of life in the College of Fort
William was regulated by the relationship of sahibs to their munshis ( 1978: xii-xiii).
11
Majumdar ([1963) 1.970: xxiv) .
12
De would go so far as to use the term non-organic and non-traditional for this
urban intelligentsia, whereas I would see them as mixed. According to him, and here
I would concur with him, the subjects of British India, even the urban intelligentsia,
should not be called elites since they were made to feel racially inferior, discrimi-
nated against for advancement in careers in official service, and faced metropolitan
commercial protection when they sought to build up their activ ity in production or
mercantile activity. They cannot be seen as other than a dependent sub-elite (211).
Unfortunately De works with rather an uncritical use of the label 'revivalisµi ', which
is undisguisedly pejorative, though even he admits that the difference between pro-
gressive and revivalist is rather arbitrary . Further, he operates with terms such as
communalist, the use of which in .the nineteenth century remains anachronistic. I
shall return to the issue in the next chapter, when discussing the multifarious uses
of the term 'Hindu'.
I0 The Nationalization of Hindu Traditinns
more intricate interaction, which remained fraught with unresolved
issues and tensions.
In this study, I have preferred to work with the concept of consolida-
tion-rather than renaissance-of Hindu tradition. In tracing this con-
solidation, itself no monolinear process, but in its tum fraught with
tensions and contradictions, I focus on the work of Harischandra of
Banaras (1850-85) which constitutes one significant, but 'cellular>I 3
response in the construction of Hindu tradition in northern India.
Significant, in that it represents and highlights vital trends ; cellular, in
that it remains organically linked to the intricate tissue of social, politi-
cal, religious and cultural movements in colonial India, to which it was
itself a response . Harischandra typified the new spokesman for tradi-
tion; it was no longer to be left to the Brahmans alone to speak in the
name of orthodoxy. He was a 'lay religious leader', 1 ~ who used the
power of his knowledge of the new as well as of the old to coin the new
traditionalist idiom, and who could effectively wield the modem print
media to initiate and direct change. His influence was supra-regional,
both because he spoke with the authority of the holy city of Kasi-
representing the new merchant aristocracy reinforced by the Maharaja
and the traditional repute ofleaming-to back him, but also because he
propagated and made Hindi the literary language, which even then
::!aimed national status. Today, Harischandra is known primarily as the
father of modem Hindi literature, and here again it is his dramatic work
wi1ic h occupies the most space in literary histories. Yet, it was as a
publicist, aware of the political potential of public opinion, that he coin-
ed and shaped views on a wide variety of issues, which were inextric-
ably bound to the question of political and national identity.
Harischandra' s literary work has acquired canonical status over the
past century. In the process it has become customary toeithermarginalize
his affiliation to tradition, as befitting the initiator of modem literature,
or there has been a tendency to view him as a revivalist, minimizing his
cultural-political innovations. Literary studies have, in any case, tended
to relegate the historical to 'background information '. Historically
oriented st11dies, on the other hand, even those considering the forma-
tion of social consciousness, have had little use for the historicity of
poetics and for literary categories. The two approaches, the literary and
the social-historical, have tended to remain mutually exclusive.
The .recent research on nationalism and colonialism provides a
13 Cf. Sathyamurthy (1983: 36).
14 The expression is Metcalf's, in Jones (1992: 23'.'J.
 lntroditction 11
certain conceptual framework within which it is possible to integrate
both the above-mentioned perspectives. 15 The studies on nationalism,
though seldom devoting space to the formal aspects of literature, have
considered language and literature in their eminently political roles,
vigorous discussion having been initiated by Benedict Anderson's
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nation-
alism (1983). Anderson's definition of nation as 'an imagined political
community, imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign ' ( 15) has
been widely recognized. At the same time, it has been his achievement
to free the term 'imaginary' of its fictitious and 'false' connotations.
This has the merit of taking away the ground from under the feet of dis-
cussions which seek to separate the false from the genuine varieties of
nationalism. Anderson sees the nation as growing from the roots pro-
vided by religious communities and dynastic realms primarily by the
means of print capitalism which supported nationalist ideologies in
their endeavour to associate particular languages with particular terri-
torial units. The print languages which thus emerged further laid the
basis for national consciousness in that they created unified fields of
exchange and communication, gave a new fixity to language, creating
thereby languages of power different from that of the older administrat-
ive vernaculars (46-8). Here I will not enter into a discussion of the three
models of nationalism as conceived by Anderson. Suffice it to note that,
according to him, the former colonies have been unable to deviate from
the models created in the West in order to create new models of nation-
alism moulded according to their own needs.16
This is an issue which is taken up by Partha Chatterjee in his mono-
graph on Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Dis-
course? (1986), which most acutely summarizes and dissects the
discussion on nationalism in its colonial context. 17 He distances himself
15
Apart from the works mentioned in the following pages, in the context of the
present study, Kemi!ainen (1964), Seton-Watson (1977), Gellner (1983), but most
of all Hobsbawm (1990) were found useful for understanding the nationalist pheno-
menon. However, since they do not deal specifically with nationalism in the colonial
world, they have not been discussed here in any detail.
16
As Deshpande (1993: 6) has noied, Anderson ' s analysis of the socio-economic
conditions surrounding the coming of print as a commodity is restricted in the non-
western contexts to an arialysis of high literary texts, rather than a consideration of
socio-economic conditions or the evidence offered by popular literature and jour-
nals .
17
Chatterjee discusses the work of Bankimchandra as a creative writer and the
two eminent politicians Gandhi and Nehru. His consideration of the three is linked
I2 The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions
equally from the liberal apologists of nationalism, who tend to see what
they consider as irnperfect varieties of nationalism, most of all in the ex-
colonies, as stages on the way to at least some measure of the progress
and democracy achieved in the West, as well as from such conservative
critics who see nationalism as false or even perverted ideology, parti-
cularly unsuited to the needs of politically unripe societies. According
to Chatterjee, nationalism as a concept was historically bound to the
social and political preconditions of enlightenment as it unfolded in the
countries of its origins. It could not on this basis acquire universal appli-
cability to all phenomena, specially those developed under colonial
rule, which were first labelled 'nationalist' and then found wanting in
comparison to the western models. Since there could be no knowledge
independent of culture, there could be no unbounded universality of con-
cept. Categories of thought originating in an alien culture were bound
to acquire new meaning in a new cultural context (27). In the colonial
context, the assertion of national identity was a form of struggle against
colonial exploitation (18). In spite of the fact that Chatterjee is also
doubtful as to whether the nationalist project, bound as it is to the same
essentialist ·conceptions based on the distinctions between East and
West, can ever take off in the colonial context, he nevertheless remains
convinced that it ·is worthwhile to explore the changing relations of
power within societies under colonial domination. 18
Europe Reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth-Century
Bengal (1988), Tapan Raychaudhuri's study of three prominent nine-
teenth-century figures-offers further critical insights.19 The three
figures studied belong to the same milieu; yet w~ thin the apparently
narrow range of upper-caste Bengali culture, their experience and
assessments remained diverse. According to Raychaudhuri, apart from
ignoring the diversity of the response, theoretical analyses of third

to an explication of Antonio Gramsci' s concept of passive revolution, which he

seeks to refine further in its application to the Indian situation. This is to have a
model-building function for the consideration of nationalism in the colonial world.
The thinking of the three Indian nationalists is then seen as stages in the unfolding
of this process. For a critique of the monolinearity of this position as reducing the
polyvocality of civil society, see Tham (1989a).
l8 Though at the same time he sees the possibilities of the middle class to initiate
change as being inherently limited in the colonial situation.
l9 These are Bankimchandra (1838-94), creati ve writer, Bhudev Mukhopadhaya
( 1827-94), civil servant as well as writer on social and political issues, and Viveka-
nanda (1863-1902), the religious luminary.
 Introduction 13
world nationalism do not take full account of the autonomous positive
cultural contents of Afro-Asian nationalism. In the Indian case this is
sought to be undermined in that the sanskritic tradition is seen as also
mediated by western Orientology. The access to the indigenous tradi-
tion, in the Bengali case, was not necessarily routed through the western
understanding of it. In India, there had been an unbroken tradition of
Sanskrit scholarship as an autonomous source of knowledge about the
past.
In this study, it is not the autonomous contents alone which are sought
to be emphasized. Rather it is in the interaction with the western, within
the special framework provided by the colonial situation, that their
nineteenth-century genesis is traced. This process is neither viewed as
renaissance nor as revival, but as a complex tissue of assimilation and
welding, as also of antagonism and resistance.
Methodologically, two perspectives emerge as determining the
course of this study. Firstly, in seeking to trace and disentangle the auto-
nomous positive contents of the nationalist discourse as represented by
Harischandra and his contemporaries, it will be one aim of the study to
trace their connection with western notions and their subsequent modu 1-
ations. At least three distinct interacting strands, which are together
woven into the fabric of the nationalist tradition specific to this period,
allow themselves to b~ distinguished to a certain extent in Harischandra' s
works :
1. Direct access to pre-colonial tradition, literary as well as social-
religious (as demonstrated in the composition and translation of tradi-
tional literary genres, perpetuation of public festivities, of royal and
temple rituals).
2. Ancient 'Hindu' texts and institutions as mediated also by British
and western orientalists (such as, for instance, the whole historio-
graphic complex connected with the notion of 'Aryan').
3. British colonial administrative, legislative and educational mea-
sures (themselves shaped by attitudes prevalent in Europe) and mis-
sionary activity.
It was in the interweaving of these strands that the various Hindu
nationalist tradition formed and consolidated itself. To trace and hold
apart these strands in retrospect is a complicated procedure, for the
terminology used by the emergent tradition was almost always anti-
quated.
The traditional or indigenous Indian attitude and the alien western
attitude were posited as polarities by those who considered themselves
14 The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions
as representing these . The self-consciously Hindu intelligentsia, by
virtue of having to maintain their own, culturally and politically, were
constrained to emphasize the indigenous . In creating the new public
sphere, they used a deliberately Indian terminology to circumscribe the
concepts needed to articulate the nationalist agenda for the future.
These were developed in response and resistance to the colonial
government, and in this respect everything that it stood for was branded
formally as alien. Yet, in the given political constellation, the polarities
posited could be none other than interactive.
The question, then, is one of negotiating the difference between the
two extremes. Two impmtant insights developed by Ranajit Guha 20 sug-
gest fresh methodological possibilities, the one is concerned with the
political framework, the other with the interaction of idioms within it.
According to Guha, the historical articulation of power in colonial India
can be conceptua)ized in its institutional, modal <;tnd discursive aspects
as the interaction of the two principles of dominance and subordination.
Dominance consists of persuasion as well as coercion, whereby the lat-
ter decidedly outweighs the former. Subordination, similarly, consists
of resistance as well as collaboration. These interacting pairs then offer
1 conceptual framework within which it is possible to place the
ontradictions and ambivalences of the relationship of the colonized to
he colonizer.
Guha distinguishes between dominance and hegemony. Hegemon·y
as he understands it, is based more on persuasion and consent rather
than on coercion. Once the military occupation of India had been accom-
plished and
colonialism outgrew its predatory, mercantilist beginnings to graduate to a
more systematic, imperial career ... the exclusive reliance on the sword, too,
gave way to an orderly control in which force (without losing its primacy in the
duplex system ofD[ominance]) had to learn to live with institutions and ideo-
logies designed to generate consent (234).
Thus there existed aspirations to hegemony though in subordination to
dominance. The British occupation of India, according to Guha never
became hegemonic, since it worked more with coercion than consent
and was to finally generate more resistance than collaboration.
One of the central theses in Gu ha' s essay, significant, though with
some modification for the present study, proposes that within the four
10 In Gu ha (1989), whence the citations in the following passages.
 Introduction 15
constituents of dominance and subordination a principle of differentia-
tion between dual idioms was at work. One of these idioms derived from
the metropolitan political cultures of the colonizer, in this case typically
British, the other from the precolonial tradition of the colonized, that is,
from the typically Indian (233). Since, as Guha has convincingly shown,
colonial rule never achieved hegemony, the indigenous Indian idiom
always retained more than a measure of autonomy. The task, then, con-
sists in working out how the two idioms overlapped, crossed or subvert-
ed each other, in order to flow and coalesce into the third idiom, which
was the modern Indian. This third idiom could neither be a replica of the
western, nor of the ancient Indian concept. The constituent elements
formed a new compound 'a new and original entity .. .' (271 ).
However, convenient as this scheme is, grave complications set in
once we try to apply it. Though Guha, referring unabashedly to the Hindu
tradition alone, maintains that tradition did not remain inert, he seems,
in fact, to affirm just this, in that he takes for grante'd the continuity into
the present of the indigenous Indian tradition, conceived of as a kind of
master code to be derived from the texts of classical Indian polity. As
against Guha, I would maintain that Hindu tradition as it articulated it-
self in the nineteenth century, as any close scrutiny of texts of the period
testifies, formed itself in the very process of negotiating the relationship
to past idioms and classical texts in the light of present needs and
claims, in order to project itself as a coherent and even homogeneous
entity. In doing so, the nineteenth-century Hindu tradition attempted to
bypass the long stretch of Muslim rule , which had possessed its own
sophisticated judicature and administrative terminology, and which had
remained in operation till Persian was replaced as the language of the
courts in 1837. However, by branding it as alien and just as foreign as
the western/Christian, the spokesmen of the Hindu/Indian tradition
sought deliberately to establish the Dharmasastras as a contemporary
reference point. Though the terms used were genuinely drawn from
classical Sanskrit texts, their nineteenth-century usage obviously dif-
fered from the previous, since they were put to contemporary uses. In
retrospect, these tendencies can indeed be labelled as 'sanskritizing'
since they sought to present the concepts invoked as unchanged and
eternally valid, as authentically Indian in fact. Though nineteenth-cen-
tury intellectuals indulged profusely in the practice of offering Sanskrit
terms as equivalents for British concepts of government and social
institutions, their proposition that these terms and concepts had come
16 The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions

down straight from ancient Indian polity, untouched by the ravage of

time, cannot be taken at face value by present-day analysts of the nine-
teenth-century situation. 21 This, however. is what Guba seems to be
doing. He overlooks that links with the past, and even more so with the
immediate pre-colonial past, need to be clarified. The task, then, is to
trace the usage of the classical Sanskrit terms/concepts thus invoked in
the intervening 'Muslim ' centuries, to search within and thence back-
wards from the traditions in which the users were actually rooted them-
selves, and here perhaps continuities are indeed to be found. If the terms
remain untraceable, then the respective usage has to be taken as part of
the historical task that the nineteenth century intelligentsia were faced
with, that of endowing the tradition they were constructing with a
respectable ancestorship , to fulfil which task they obviously sought
their points of reference in ancient texts. The colonial legislature played
no inconsiderable part in this enterprise, since here the belief in the
authority of the Dhannasiistras and the Brahmanic tradition as it was
accessible was never in doubt. Herein it was widely supported by
western orientalists, who mediated and interpreted texts and terms in
the contemporary modes available to them. In fact, the whole procedure
would lead rather to the conclusion that the second idiom that Guha him-
self posited as already given in fact only constituted itself in the nine-
teenth century.
While it is difficult to quarrel with Guha's notion that the concept of
'order' which structured the coercion exercised by the Raj could find an

21 One recent work which is based on the premise that all nineteenth and twentieth-

century Hindu thought remains essentially and archetypically rooted in the ancient
texts of the 'Hindus' , the Arthasiistra, Manusmrti and the various Dhannasiistras,
is the otherwise most useful and lucid account of modern Hindu political thought
by Klimkeit (1981). Thus when in the adoption of western sociological terminology
Klimkeit detects 'eine eigentuemliche Aushoelung und Neubestimmung dieser
urspruenglich westlichen Begriffe .. . und eine gle.ichzeitige Anreicherung derselben
miteinheimischen, hinduis tischen Wertvors tellupgen' (14), he does not so much see
the creation of an entirely new idiom as the subversion of the new by the age-old,
which he summarizes at the end of his work as rooted in dharma as the ' metaphysisch
begruendete Grundordnung' (304) . The division of the work into a preliminary
section which deals with political thought in ancient India, to be immediately
followed by s ections dealing with the developments in Hindu nationalist thought in
Bengal in the nineteenth century as well as the other .regions of India, culminating
in the pan-Indian thinking of Vivekananda and Gandhi, is indicative of an approach
which has itself bernme victim to the Hindu nationalist rhetoric of the past two
centuries, which claims direct and unmediated descent from the ancient Aryan.
 Introduction 17
equivalent in and interact with the Indian idiom of da/1{;/a, which govern-
ed a large area of indigenous politics, it is more difficult to concede that
'the Laws of Manu may be said to speak for all of them'. (1989: 238).
For, in tracing the career of the term dai:ic;la , it would be necessary to
track the steps in its usage, consecutively and one by one, over the cen-
turies that separate Manu from the colonial period and not leap from
ancient Indian polity to the nineteenth or even to the twentieth century.
The intermediate stages, the concrete historical usage in a given com-
munity or group of texts, would need to be located with some precision. 22
Guha chooses to bring the principle of subordination, which is the co-
relate of dominance, in correspondence with the notion of bhakti. There
are passages in Bankimchandra and Dinbandhu Mitra which use the
term in the sense of the loyalty owed to the (colonial) state. However,
to relate this subservience in a global fashion to the use of bhakti in the
whole medieval devotional literature and summarily categorize it as the
'ideology of subordination' (25), with dasya, servitude, as its ruling
principle, is a questionable procedure. 23 The semantic field of a concept
as rich as bhakti, profusely used and in the most variable of contexts,
in the course of at least two millennia, remains difficult to circumscribe
with any precision. I dwell at such length on these equations because in
22
Within the element of persuasion, according to Guha, the two idioms were
similarly at work. The Victorian notion of improvement, which pervaded all efforts
of the colonial rulers to relate non-antagonistically to the ruled, found correspon-
dence in the indigenous notion of dharma. That the nineteenth-century intelligentsia
built a bridge between the Ashokan and Nehruvian phases of its career seems
reasonable enough, and the use of the term by men as different as Tagore and Gandhi
is proof of its resilience. However, it still remains necessary to bridge the gap
between the Ashokan phase of its career and the nineteenth century. Otherwise one
becomes an inad vertent victim of the orientalist constructs of the Eternal East,
besides falling victim to the ideologically highly questionable practice of exclud-
ing all the developments which took place in the vast temporal stretch described as
the Muslim period, simply because they are to be viewed as 'alien'. Were there no
Persian or Arabic terms for these concepts? Within the sanskritic tradition itself,
apart from the linguistic shifts, were there no conceptual shifts through the cen-
turies? Did the terms remain frozen in time till they were taken up and used with
newer connotations by the nineteenth-century intelligentsia? To resort to Gonda or
even Kosambi as authorities instead of tracing these shifts is a dangerous enterprise
at best.
23
It is possibly also not too sound a practice to make these statements on the basis
of a few translations and commentaries in English, without reference to any primary
texts, either in the Sanskrit or the ve rnaculars. It seems, at the least, to be a s uperficial
reading of complicated theologies.
18 The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions
the course of the present work we shall have to do with some of these
terms, most specially bhakti , in their re-use with newer as well as older
connotations. There was, as we shall see, when Hindu dharma is dis-
cussed at some length in Chapter Six, a development peculiar to the
nineteenth century, when the concept ofbhakti_, newly interpreted, was
used as an overarching principle to bring about cohesion in the manifold
theological directions within what was to come to constitute modem
Hinduism. In order to understand these developments, it seems impor-
tant to remain grounded in the later tradition, that is, in the more imme-
diate pre-colonial past, from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, and
then from there to trace the tradition as it was alive and still actively
known in the nineteenth century, rather than take immediate recourse
to the authority of ·remoter periods.
If I have engaged in such a lengthy tussle with Guha's thesis, it is
not so much to dismantle it, as rather to qualify it. It offers impo1tant
insights, since it not only provides a political and social framework for
the interaction of the tw0 idioms, but also allows for contradictions.
Further the concept of the three idioms allows for the tracing of the two
streams, which flow into the third, without the constraint of having to
view this third, which is being created as entirely traditional or entirely
derivative. Here, once again, the principle of differentiation between the
four constituents of dominance and subordination serves as a check on
any tendency which would view the whole as a harmonious blending of
East and West. The dominance made it impossible not to be accosted
by the idiom of the colonial masters , the fact that this dominance never
achieved complete hegemony made for more than q measure of resist-
ance. Thus if the third idiom as it emerged carried all the signs of a strug-
gle , it also carried the burden of unresolved tensions . However, though
useful as a heuristic device , there remains a very real danger that the
two idioms, the colonial and the traditional Indian, themselves come to
be regarded as homogeneous , as fixed entities. Most of all, it is the tradi-
tional Indian idiom which cannot be taken for granted, for, even while
the modem Indian/Hindu was beginning to find articulation in the strug-
gle with the metropolitan/colonial, the ancient Indian/Hindu was itself
also engaged in the process of being construed as the second idiom.
The interaction of indigenous agencies , newly forming and other-
wise, with the metropolitan, and the subsequent crystallization of the
third idiom, determines the methodological perspective of the present
study.
The second methodological perspective, while moving within the
 Introducrion 19
framework of the creation of the third idiom, has to do with the problem-
atic of considering literature primarily as a source of historical know-
ledge. An almost inexhaustible supply of information is available in the
journals which Harischandra had edited for over a decade and a half
and which became legendary in their own times-the Kavivachansudhii
(1868-85), and the Harifrhandra<>handrikii (1873-85). They were to
create a literary public, which was to grow to occupy a politically func-
tional public sphere. 24 However, since this study seeks a complemen-
tary approach, the writings of Harischandra and his contemporaries, in
these journals and elsewhere, are considered not only thematically, as
sources of political, social and cultural information, but also in their
literary context. The two famous journals themselves are treated as a
literary genre and extensive profiles are sought to be drawn. The style
of address is considered in detail as well as the new genres in modern
Hindi literature, which were first experimented with in these journals. 25
Both the explicitly literary as well as popular works are sought to be
understood by the laws of their own poetic composition.
Further. for all the foregrounding of Harischandra himself as an
. editor and a public figure, there is an attempt to document a measure of
the polyvocality of public opinion, in that the various voices in the jour-
nals, where much of the writing went unsigned, are also given promi-
nence. Thus, as against Anderson who studied the use of print media in
the colonial world only in an explicitly literary context, editorials, letters
to the editor, social and political essays and religious tracts are taken
into consideration as together constituting the literary activity of the
public sphere.
The sources for this kind of history , however. could not be only
literary even in this wider sense. In addition to popular literature, tracts,
public appeals and pamphlets, texts such as grammars , dictionaries ,
primary school books, and also official reports and documents, contri-
buted, for instance, to the standardization and codification of the new
print language. There was , as always , the vast amount of informational
material put together by British administrators. While retaining a mea-
sure of caution as regards their obvious bias, it is surely time to abandon
defensiveness when approaching colonial archives, for here again there
24
Cf. Jiirgen Habermas (1962), and Terry Eagleton ([l 984] 1987).
15
Wolfgang Martens ( 1968) provides a detailed account of the press in Enlighten-
ment Germany. Richmond Bond in a series of publications has performed the s ame
task for the English. I am not aware of this having been attempted in the Indian context
as yet, in any extended study. This is possibly the first attempt to do so.
20 The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions
are a number of-often warring-voices. It should be possible to view
them as historical sources, sifting and evaluating the evidence they
offer and to consider their contribution to the discussion and opinion for-
mation of the times. 26
The present study, in seeking to embed and contextualise the
traditionalist response of Harischandra and his contemporaries', struc-
tures all but the following chapter in such a way, so as to historically lead
up to, rather than necessarily begin with their discourse, thus question-
ing its very first premise, that it was self-evidently constant and
consistent in its evolution. This historical perspective often necessi-
tates a detailed account of the preceding formations, conceptual and
institutional, and their interaction with a variety of instances. The
crystallization of late-nineteenth-century tradition as propagated by
Harischandra and other votaries of sanatana dharma can then, in its turn,
be traced in all its perorations. This methodological decision needs to
be borne in mind when, page after page, no mention of the late nineteenth
century seems in sight. To some extent, then, since they recur in detail
to the earlier developments specific to the themes handled therein, each
of the following chapters may seem self-contained, though they also
build upon each other and their link to each other is ostensible. The
sequence of the chapters is determined by the primary features of t~e
collective identity of the Hindus as they emerge from the analysis of a
key text, a speech made by Harischandra in 1884, at the end of his short
life.

26 Cf. Aijaz Ahmad (1991b: 150) and Alok Bhalla,' A Plea Against Revenge Histo-

ries : Some Reflections on Oriental ism and the Age of Empire', in, Alok Bhalla and
Sudhir Chandra (1993: 1-13).
 2
Constituting Tradition in
Colonial India: Hindi, Hindu,
Hindustan

How can India Progress: Harischandra 's Viewpoint

In November 1884 the newly formed Arya Desopakarii:ii Sabha along
with the Ballia Institute jointly arranged a meeting on the occasion of
the annual Dadri mela in Ballia, a district town lying north-east ofBana-
ras. Harischandra, as the leading literary figure in the North-Western
Provinces, was invited to address the gathering. The assembly consist-
ed of the town's rafs , notables , and was presided over by no less a per-
sonage than the British Collector, D. T. Roberts, who had decided to
grace the occasion, once he heard that Harischandra was coming. The
address was entitled Bhiiratvar-? kf unnati kaise ho sakti hai, or, how can
India make progress; unnati was used to mean 'progress' as well as
'reform'. Harischandra himself chose to translate it as ' reform', thereby
stressing this one aspect over the other. 1 Here then was one central con-
cern of the late nineteenth century, the cleansing, reform , of tradition in
1
The Hindi text was published under the English title: 'How can India be
Reformed' in the Navoditii Hari §chandrachandrikii (11. 3 December I 884), Haris-
chandra' s journal, which, after an interval of seven years, he had recently taken into
his own management again and revived. The text of the address has been repri"nted
several times , but is most conveniently available in Granthiivall III (889-903).
Harischandra's works were firs t collected and publis hed by Ramdln Sirµh: Haris -
chandrakalii, 6 vols, Bankipur, 1888. These have long been out of print. The standard
edition is by Brajratnadas and Sivprasad Misra: Bhiiratendu granthiivali, 3 vols,
Banaras, 1950-75. Lately, the contents of the above three volumes as well as
some extra material ha ve been comprised in one volume: Bharatendu Samagra, ed.
Hemant Sarma, Banaras, 1987. All three collections are much more in the nature of
selected works; a large percentage of the work published in the journals continues
to remain inaccessible.
In the present study I cite from the Granthiivali, only recurring to the Samagra for
material not accessible in the former. The originals, unless specified otherwise, are
always in Hindi. The translation s into English are mine.
22 The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions
the very name of tradition. There could be no topic which had more con-
temporary relevance. The address was fittingly described as lalit, gam-
bhfr aur samayopayogf, gracious, profound and beneficial for the times,
when it was published soon after.
In considering the speech, which has attracted critical attention
lately, I hope to pinpoint the areas , cultural, religious and political, to
which Harischandra devoted his creative energies, as well as to use the
occasion to offer a survey of the critical evaluation of his works, in order
to provide an entry into the methodological perspectives and concerns
of the present study.
Broadly, Harischandra treated of two large thematic complexes in
order to explicate his propositions. Firstly, progress involved being
clear as to what could be expected from the governing classes, that is,
the British colon.ial government and its agents, the native chiefs. The
perspective was clearly that of the newly forming middle classes who
considered themselves the spokesmen of the nation. Since no political
representation was possible, only informed public opinion could create
some unofficial political hearing for this section of society. Secondly,
touching inevitably on the question of national identity, it meant working
together in the interest of the country. It also meant taking a stand on the
relationship of Hindus-in the sense of religious denomination-with
the Muslims of the country. Hereby, it was necessary to clarify what it
meant to be a 'Hindu' in the wider sense of 'Indian'.
After a few words of greeting, and some words of respect addressed
to the Collector, Harischandra plunged straight into his theme. Hindustan!
log, the people of India, were like the wagons of a train, which needed
a locomotive to set them into motion. If there was someone to perform
this arduous task, there would be nothing they could not achieve. But
who was to perform it? It could be either the ~industiinf riije mahariije,
the native chiefs, the nawab and rals, or the hakim, the high officers of
state. The first had no leisure, since they were constantly occupied with
piljii rituals, with food and with false talk. The colonial officers were
partly genuinely preoccupied with administrative work and partly with
their own social rounds of balls, theatres, horse racing and newspapers.
If they did have some time left, it was hardly going to be spent with ham
garlb gande kale iidmi, us poor dirty black people. Here there was not
only economic, but also racial distance. Thus change could not come
from above.
Who was to be responsible then, for spreading knowledge and autho-
rizing the changes needed for the times? Harischandra was suggesting
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 Group V. Plate 18.

BROOM HOLDER
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BENCH HOOK
RIGHT AND LEFT HAND
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TEAPOT BLOCKS (BLANK MODEL—TO BE MODIFIED)

SUGGESTIONS
STOCK—3⁄4″ THICK
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THERMOMETER BACK (BLANK MODEL—TO BE MODIFIED)

 Group VI. Plate 22.

CALENDAR MOUNT (BLANK MODEL—TO BE MODIFIED)

DESIGNED BY GORDON KELLAR
 Group VI. Plate 23.

CARD HOLDER (BLANK MODEL—TO BE MODIFIED)

SUGGESTIONS
 Group VI. Plate 24.

BILL FILE (BLANK MODEL—TO BE MODIFIED)

30d WIRE BOX NAIL
GLUE
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HANDKERCHIEF BOX (BLANK MODEL—TO BE MODIFIED)

MODIFIED EDGES
TOP-BOTTOM TOP-BOTTOM TOP
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GLOVE BOX (BLANK MODEL—TO BE MODIFIED)

MODIFIED
EDGES
TOP-BOTTOM
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TOP
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GROOVE JOINT (PREPARATORY TO GROUP VII)

GAGE SETTING
GAGE SETTING SAW HERE DADO JOINT GAGE SETTING
 Group VII. Plate 28.

BOOK RACK
ENDS HOUSED INTO
BASE 1⁄4″
TO SCREW
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NECKTIE RACK
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MAGAZINE RACK
ENDS HOUSED IN BASE
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FOOT STOOL
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PAPER OR MAGAZINE WALL RACK

DETAIL
OF SHELF
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WALL SHELF
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TABLE OR DESK SHELVES

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TABORET
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STOOL
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CROSS-LAP JOINT (PREPARATORY TO GROUP VIII)

SAW KERF
GAGE SETTING GAGE SETTING
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