1, November 1970, P.11, [5] Talbot. Examples from the first chapter alone demonstrate various attempts to show Hinduism in a light that would make it more difficult for Christians to define it as heathen. Theory, Culture, and Society, 26 (7-8): 1-23. Colonial conquest made possible (even as it was made possible by) the marking of new territories with the dimensions and coordinates of colonial interest. The main conclusions drawn on the ‘invention’ of Hinduism by Europeans are twofold. The second means through which Hinduism was invented was through India’s clash with British social and religious traditions. JSTOR®, the JSTOR logo, JPASS®, Artstor®, Reveal Digital™ and ITHAKA® are registered trademarks of ITHAKA. That might have led them to construct a class-based discriminating society out of the multiple sampradayas and castes co-existing peacefully. Bayly (2004), and Dipesh Chakravarty (2011), among many others; but his preferred term “early colonial modernity” does partake of and extend the notion of early modernity, with his stress on the distinctiveness of the ‘early-colonial’. This is in support of the claim that multiple sources contributed to what was later generalised as the Hindu religion by British colonials. While this demonstrates an affection for Indian culture, it also leads to misconstruction of the reality of Hinduism. Nicholas Dirks argues that caste is, in fact, neither an unchanged survival of ancient India nor a single system that reflects a core cultural value. The East India Company arrived in India to engage in trade for goods craved by Europe, only to find local political struggles irresistible, and opportunities for wealth—both private and public—incomparable. The first conclusion to be drawn is that the social group of the Indus river valley from where the name Hindu derives did not exist as a recognisably Hindu social group. 3, May 1980, Dirks. Colonial state institutions contributed to Hinduism’s construction by creating the bureaucratic categorising that created Hinduism as a religion due to it not belonging to other religious groups. The modern term ‘Hindu’ more than likely derives from the name given to the people who lived in the areas surrounding the Indus River, located in what is now Pakistan. When thinking of India, it is hard not to think of caste. Talbot states that endowments and the like were “recorded in Sanskrit on copper plates, a traditionally kingly type of gift and inscriptional medium.”[6] This indicates that the language had potential to be utilised for political as opposed to religious means. Dirks does not contend that caste was invented by the British. In 1862, a proposal that each district have a manual of its own was revived by the Government of Madras, which subsequently charged Mr. Carmichael, collector of Vizagapatam, and Mr. Nelson, collector of Madura, to compile model works for their respective districts. P.B, ‘”Sultan among Hindu Kings”: Dress, Titles, and the Islamicization of Hindu Culture at Vijayanagara’, The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol.55, No.4, November 1996, [1] Orientalism and religion, Richard King, Routledge, London, 2006, P.98, [2] Fitzsimmons. Colonial governmentality was not merely dependent on knowledge, it was also embedded in the forms of knowledge that provided the basis for the principal practices of the colonial state. 193, 2004, P.219, [37] Lorenzen. The British Empire utilised modern state institutions, therefore determination of population identity was important. A. For example, beliefs range between monotheism and polytheism in different denominations. Abdullah, Taufik has written in this respect an exemplary study on the Minangkabau. This section will demonstrate that this caste system is part of the ancient content of Hinduism and therefore should not be considered as a British colonial construct and that British involvement and contributions with regards to the caste system are typical of ruling classes in Indian history. 41, No.4, October 1999, P.654, [28] Eaton. Some view it as an unchanged survival of Brahmanical traditions of India. Nicholas Dirks argues that caste is, in fact, neither an unchanged survival of ancient India nor a single system that reflects a core cultural value. H. V, Representing Hinduism: The Construction of Religious Traditions and National Identity, Sage Publications, London, 1995, P.23, [22] Orientalism and religion, Richard King, Routledge, London, 2006, P.99, [24] Pennington. As King states, “the predominant Christian perspective among the Europeans classified Indian religion under the all-inclusive rubric of Heathenism. It uses the idea of caste as the basis for a magisterial history of modern India. 4, October 1995, Vaidyanathan. ©2000-2020 ITHAKA. D. N, ‘Who Invented Hinduism?’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. This essay will assess the nature of Hinduism and the caste system before, during and after the period of British colonialism in India, while assessing the changes that were brought about by colonialism. Dirks, for example states that, “Caste achieved its critical colonial position because the British state was successful in separating caste as a social form from its dependence on pre-colonial political processes.”[34] In arguing that caste was a British creation, Dirks notes that it is inevitable for a ruling power to embrace local traditions and utilise them for their own means. While beseeching the Mughal emperor to treat them as a privileged vassal, they... History had not always been unimportant to the British in India. Fitzsimons states that “the Harappan religion featured worship of a mother goddess with different manifestations in the realms of vegetable farming and animal-raising and hunting. This conclusion was reached through an assessment of the origins of the caste system which showed that caste existed in not just a religious context but was also socially implemented. This content was originally written for an undergraduate or Master's program. As Macdonell states, “Turning to the old law-books, of which the code of Manu (about A. D. 200) is the most representative for our purposes, we are confronted with a society that is already strictly organized on a basis of castes.”[31] Any degree of societal organisation based around caste demonstrates that it was not a purely religious concept adapted for social use by British colonialists. V, Stietencron. Histories Implicated in Colonialism. The nature of this manifestation needs to be explored in order to investigate whether Hinduism was invented by British colonials, as opposed to Indians themselves. He states that “The colonizers were part of the Abrahamic tradition, which believes in homogenization, and the heterogeneous and non-conflicting Indian society would not have suited their design. This suggests that the popular uprising was Indian as opposed to Hindu. Firstly that British colonials contributed heavily to the categorisation of the religion of Hinduism or of Hinduism as a unified body and system of religious doctrine, texts, rituals and practices, which it had not previously been and secondly that the social and religious content of the Hindu group was not in any way invented but developed over thousands of years. All Rights Reserved | Site by Rootsy. The European viewpoint of religion in India was that all non-Abrahamic religions were considered Heathen. For example, while Mahatma Ghandi was a “nationalist and pious Hindu,”[26] he was not a Hindu nationalist but an Indian nationalist. However it can be noted that while Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism contain many similarities, notably for example the belief in Karma, they also contain many differences. caste, colonialism and counter-modernity: notes on a caste, colonialism and counter-modernity: notes on a postcolonial hermeneutics of caste paperback 25, pp. Problems arose however in his attempts at interpretation and assumptions on facts of Indian culture, Dalrymple for example notes that Jones, “passionately believed that the Hindus were a lost tribe of Egypt.”[19] This shows an earlier example of attempts to connect Indian culture to recognised ‘Western’ civilisation in the pursuit of Orientalists to legitimise Indian culture in the eyes of Western Christianity. By Debjani Ganguly. The book also surveys the rise of caste politics in the twentieth century, focusing in particular on the emergence of caste-based movements that have threatened nationalist consensus. 37, No. http://www.sdstate.edu/projectsouthasia/upload/Book-III-Concerning-Law.pdf, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/aug/25/art.art, http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Ce2oxAVsZWgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=hindu+pantheon&hl=en&sa=X&ei=B1WDT43KNuGm0QXDxMjnBg&ved=0CDcQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=hindu%20pantheon&f=false, http://www.dnaindia.com/money/column_caste-discrimination-a-british-invention-bigger-than-steam-engine_1152940, An Analysis of the Indian Further Education System Regarding Gender Inequality, Popular Culture & the Representation of Women’s ‘Agency’ During Indian Partition, The Impact of the Alternative Trading System to Small Producers, Revisiting Inevitability and Misperceptions: The 1962 Sino-Indian War, Navigating Nkrumah’s Theory of Neo-colonialism in the 21st Century. 37, No. 39, No. Firstly, however an understanding of pre-colonial European conceptions of Hinduism must be achieved. This further demonstrates the fact that Hinduism was not generally viewed as a cohesive religion as Islam was not treated as aggressive on religious grounds. C, ‘Inscribing the Other, Inscribing the Self:  Hindu-Muslim Identities in Pre-Colonial India’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. Dirks, Nicholas B. Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India.Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Like many postcolonialists, decolonialists seek to draw attention to the relati Princeton University Press Radu Ban and Vijayendra. 8, No.1, January 1895, Rig Veda, Book 10, Hymn 90, online, accessed on 5th March 2012, , Sugirtharajah. The reason for looking at Hinduism before British involvement will be to demonstrate that before British colonialism there was not a cohesive, self-determined, large-scale ‘Hindu’ religious group. These observations means that the content existed before British colonialism at was at some point during the period generalised into Hinduism. British colonial construction of Hinduism occurred through categorising institutions such as censuses, and Christian Scholars utilised the generalisation of Hinduism in order to create a common religious antagonist due to their missionary nature. Aspects of Modernity The term colonial modernity has come to acquire a delightful vagueness in recent writing. colonial discourse as the defining structural feature of Indian society. 4, No. Many thanks! Although the putative divide between Muslims and Hindus became the more dominant colonial charge, caste division had been used throughout colonial history to explain India’s “lack” of politics, and when that did not work, to trivialize its politics as localistic, particularistic, and inherently divisive. J.H, ‘Caste in India’, American Anthropologist, Vol. The missionary desire to spread Christianity came from the growth of evangelical Christianity and it was this evangelical trend that was most instrumental in the invention and systemization of Hinduism. Date written: May/2012, All content on the website is published under the following Creative Commons License, Copyright © — E-International Relations. Wagoner concludes that the assimilation of Islamic culture was not due to any aggression of Islam but “the result of conscious and deliberately calculated acts by creative individuals seeking to maximize their opportunities in an ever-widening world.”[9] This demonstrates that Hindus in Vijayanagara, by to not feeling threatened by Islam on religious grounds, cannot have viewed themselves as a single religious entity. This further supports the conclusion that the ‘actual’ content of Hinduism was not invented. H. V, Representing Hinduism: The Construction of Religious Traditions and National Identity, Sage Publications, London, 1995, Dalrymple. The religion of the Harappan civilisation was typical of river valley areas. (2011). 121, No.2, April 1977, Dalmia. D. N, ‘Who Invented Hinduism?’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. There was a cult of explicit fertility.”[3] A key aspect of modern Hinduism, ritual bathing, is noted by Fitzsimons as being prevelant in the Harrapan city of Mohenjo-daro. A. of modernity was coloniality. It demonstrates the invention of Hinduism due to the fact that Hindu nationalism only came to prevalence after an extended period of British colonialism, as opposed to an original ‘Hindu’ resistance. support open access publishing. This unifying factor can be considered to be one of cultural as opposed to religious similarities for pre-colonial Hinduism. Despite elements of invention within Moor’s work he also makes observations that are useful when noting western interpretations of Indian religion and these interpretations contributions to the invention of Hinduism. Furthermore it was demonstrated that British contributions to the caste system were typical of pre and post-colonial situations. An example of generalisation demonstrated by Pennington is the missionary obsession with idol worship. Created through Indian religions, the caste system divides people into four Varna categories; Brahmins (priests), Kshatriyas (warriors), Vaishyas (agriculturalists), and Shudras (servants). Try logging in through your institution for access. talked about modernity in an elaborate way. Log in to your personal account or through your institution. Due to the naturally Western approach taken by these academics, Indian religion was misconstrued, albeit unintentionally. Arguments for the ‘invention’ of caste centre more around the way it was utilised within British colonialism. V, Stietencron. An assessment of the origins of the caste system demonstrates not only that caste certainly existed before British colonialism, but it existed beyond religious contexts in a very tangible social manner. This is despite evidence that suggests that use of Sanskrit was not exclusively Hindu. Aspects of ‘Hinduism’ before British colonialism to be observed will be its development from the Indus Valley, Hinduism’s tentative existence alongside Islam, and whether Hinduism existed in a religious form. 4, No. The third conclusion is that the Sanskrit language, which British scholars would use to generalise Hindus, is the liturgical language for many religious denominations where the majority have been generalised into Hinduism regardless of huge diversity between them. 5.4 CASTE AS THE INVENTION OF COLONIAL MODERNITY OR A LEGACY OF BRAHMANICAL TRADITIONS As we hinted above, two opposing viewpoints see caste differently. Whereas the revenue and authority that accrued from the relationship between land and the state were fundamental to the formation of the early colonial state, the general agrarian revolts that followed hard on the heels of the 1857 “Mutiny” and the steadily increasing economic investment in imperial power (propelled in particular by the joint stock arrangement of the railways and other infrastructural projects) made it clear that things had to change. On this view there were four major religious groups [in India], Jews, Christians, Mahometans (i.e. The Portuguese have been credited with the initial use of the termcastato refer to the social order of India, although according to at least one source the first use of the word was applied only to the lowest Indian classes in contradistinction to their overlords.¹ In the early sixteenth century, the traveller Duarte Barbosa reported some features of a caste order after extended stays in India, in particular on the basis of his stay in the great kingdom of Vijayanagara. Rather, colonialism involves various forms of resistance and subversion that emerge from colonial meeting (COOPER; STOLER, 1997). British religion contributed to Hinduism’s invention by creating a coherent religious ‘other’ in relation to which Christianity could be viewed as superior. Whereas the nineteenth century was the great century of imperial power, the most astonishing accomplishment of the twentieth century has been the struggle to consign colonial rule to the past tense. B.K, Was Hinduism invented?, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005, Porter. Your donations allow us to invest in new open access titles and pay our Second, concentrating on the local articulations and dissemination of modernity means paying less attention to the grand designs of the colonial or modernizing state and more attention to the myriad local sites where the modern is produced, and transformed, in its encounter with, and production of, the non-modern. Dirks traces the career of caste from the medieval kingdoms of southern India to the textual traces of early colonial archives; from the commentaries of an eighteenth-century Jesuit to the enumerative obsessions of the late-nineteenth-century census; from the ethnographic writings of colonial administrators to those of twentieth-century Indian scholars seeking to rescue ethnography from its colonial legacy. All Rights Reserved. The arrogant nature of claiming the caste system to be a British construction is well noted by Lorenzen, who states, “As the Hindi critic Purushottom Agrawal recently quipped: “We Indians may well have been denied the capacity to solve our own problems, but are we so incapable that we could not even create them on our own?””[37] This demonstrates that modern India should not be viewed in a way where even the most Indian of problems is considered to be the product of its most significant interaction with the West, without regard for centuries of independent history. As of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, 'Aryan' caste Hindus were widely said by both Indian and British … 42-52 Nicholas B. Dirks. At no point should the British be considered to have invented any of the actual content of Hinduism itself, only the general label given to this content. This work can be used for background reading and research, but should not be cited as an expert source or used in place of scholarly articles/books. As Walter Mignolo and Nelson Maldonado Torres have shown, the invention of race cannot be articulated apart from the emergence of the modern concept of religion. languages. This suggests how the people of the ‘Indus’ could come to be identifiable as ‘Hindus’ even after the end of the Harappan civilisation. And in making a powerful case that the colonial past continues to haunt the Indian present, it makes an important contribution to current postcolonial theory and scholarship on contemporary Indian politics. When thinking of India it is hard not to think of caste. Although that struggle has been successful, it has not only been drenched in violence but it has also led to the general recognition that the effects of imperialism have by no means disappeared with the demise of formal colonial regimes of rule. (2007). Rather than a basic expression of Indian tradition, caste is a modern phenomenon--the product of a concrete historical encounter between India and British colonial … It refers to the way in which the concepts (modernity and coloniality) are inseparable –two sides of the same coin. In conclusion, while Hinduism as an appellation can be considered to be a colonial invention all of its content is the result of millennia of social and religious development. 121, No.2, April 1977, P.183, [21] Dalmia. B, ‘Inventing Caste History: Dalit mobilisation and nationalist past’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, Vol. There is a considerable school of thought suggesting that Caste, as well as Hinduism, was a British invention. King states that “describing religions of the East as ‘mystical’ is a way of differentiating the essential historical truth of Christianity from its inferior rivals.”[23] This attack contributed to the mass generalisation of many ‘mystical’ Indian religions into Hinduism. D. N, ‘Who Invented Hinduism?’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. Here, secularism functions as the mirror twin of modern religion that welds together the two ends of modernity/coloniality. First Published 2006 . This led to the unintentional invention of a religion that never existed before that point in a coherent form. Modernity, a topic in the humanities and social sciences, is both a historical period (the modern era) and the ensemble of particular socio-cultural norms, attitudes and practices that arose in the wake of the Renaissance—in the "Age of Reason" of 17th-century thought and the 18th-century "Enlightenment".Some commentators consider the era of modernity to have ended by 1930, with … E, The Hindu Pantheon, London, 1810, online, accessed  on 1st March 2012, , P.1, [17] Dalmia. Additionally to the orientalists, however, there were other factors that contributed to the construction of Hinduism. Sanskrit was a useful political tool as it demonstrated a connection to the ancient religions of local populations. In this form, construction and invention of Hinduism developed through attempts to understand and categorise Hinduism. V, Stietencron. With Christianity being one of the pillars on which the British Empire was built, the religion of Indians was targeted by colonial missionaries in the similar fashion as had happened across the empire. A brief look at the situation after the period of British colonialism demonstrates further evidence of Hindu invention and also demonstrates the nature of this invention. These writers often engaged a growing body of assertion and argumentation about the fundamental nature of Indian society and its civil and political institutions, in the context of extensive debates about the colonial project of conquering and ruling India. For the ‘invention’ of caste: Civil Society in colonial India: social Analysis revolution and nor was it standard... 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