Remembering Rammohan: An essay on the (re-)emergence of modern Hinduism

History of Religions

Volumn 46, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 50-80

  Hatcher, Brian A ^a  

^a ILLINOIS WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61249599272     PISSN: 00182710     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/507928     Document Type: Review

References (90)

1. Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion, trans. Ephraim Fischoff (Boston: Beacon, 1964), 46.
2. This emphasis on founders is repeated in the phenomenology of religion; see Gerardus van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation, trans. J. E. Turner (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1967), 2:650-54
3. . For its more popular expression, see Clifford G. Hospital, Breakthrough: Insights of the Great Religious Discoverers (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1985).
4. Max Weber on Charisma and Institution Building, ed. S. N. Eisenstadt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 48-49.
5. Michael J. McClymond, "Prophet or Loss? Reassessing Max Weber's Theory of Religious Leadership," in The Rivers of Paradise: Moses, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, and Muhammad as Religious Founders, ed. David Noel Freedman and Michael J. McClymond (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001), 616.
6. This is the substance of Richard S. Cohen's response to McClymond's essay in Freedman and McClymond, The Rivers of Paradise, 661-67.
7. See Lionel M. Jensen, Manufacturing Confucianism: Chinese Traditions and Universal Civilization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).
8. See Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India, and "the Mystic East" (New York: Routledge, 1999).
9. Helpful background on Rammohan may be found in David Kopf's The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979),
10. and in Wilhelm Halbfass's India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988).
11. See Brajendranath Seal, "Rammohun Roy: The Universal Man," reprinted in Rammohun Roy: The Man and His Work, Centenary Publicity Booklet (Calcutta: Satish Chandra Chakravarti, 1933), 96.
12. J. N. Farquhar, Modern Religious Movements in India (1914; repr., Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1967), 29.
13. Rather than speaking of nationalism, patriotism seems the better word here, in light of the linkage of nation and paternity. For recent uses of "patriotism" in the context of Indian nationalism, see C. A. Bayly, The Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998),
14. and Rajat Kanta Ray, The Felt Community: Commonality and Mentality before the Emergence of Indian Nationalism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003).
15. As with the Jesuits and Kongzi, the role of European observers in elevating Rammohan to fatherhood needs to be kept in view, from the status he earned in the eyes of his earliest Christian interlocutors and Unitarian supporters to his elevation by the likes of Max Müller to the status of the first Indian practitioner of the comparative study of religion. Indeed, Müller's Biographical Essays (1883) was of immense importance for anointing several founders of modern Hinduism, including Rammohan, Keshub Chunder Sen, and Sri Ramakrishna - leading some to claim that Müller was himself in part responsible for Bengal's so-called renaissance; see Eric J. Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History (New York: Scribner's, 1975), 38.
16. Weber spoke of the "elimination of magic from the world" (Entzauberung der Welt) in his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Scribner's, 1958), 105.
17. Some recognized that the withdrawal of religion would not be total; see Bryan Wilson, "Secularization and Its Discontents," in his Religion in Sociological Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), esp. 51.
18. For an early critique of the "air of inevitability" surrounding the secularization thesis, see Jeffrey Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth, 1870-1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), esp. 266.
19. A significant example of an attempt to revisit the problem may be found in Peter Berger, ed., Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999).
20. See Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
21. See Sumit Sarkar, "Rammohan Roy and the Break with the Past," in his Critique of Colonial India (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1985).
22. For a critique of this approach to modern Hinduism, evident in the work of scholars like Paul Hacker and Agehananda Bharati, see Brian A. Hatcher, Eclecticism and Modern Hindu Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
23. Partha Chatterjee, "Our Father," Economic and Political Weekly 11, no. 44 (October 30, 1976): 1727.
24. Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Religion as a Chain of Memory (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), trans.
25. Simon Lee from the French original, La religion pour mémoire (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1993).
26. On collective memory, see Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans. F. Ditter and V. Ditter (New York: Harper & Row, 1980),
27. and Dominique MacNeill, "Extending the Work of Halbwachs, Danièle Hervieu-Léger's Analysis of Contemporary Religion," Durkheimian Studies 4 (1998): 73-86.
28. For a recent summary of theoretical concerns surrounding Halbwachs's work, see Elizabeth A. Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 19-24.
29. Hervieu-Léger, Chain of Memory, 124-25.
30. See Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 4. As this reference suggests, Hervieu-Léger's work may be profitably read alongside the growing field of social memory studies.
31. See Barbie Zelizer ("Reading the Past against the Grain: The Shape of Memory Studies," Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12 [1995]: 214-39), who defines social memory as "the shared dimension of remembering" (214).
32. Hervieu-Léger sees two broad tendencies at the root of the challenge: (1) the expansion and homogenization of memory, and (2) the fragmentation of memory (see Chain of Memory, 128-29). Following Halbwachs, she connects these developments to the rise of a bourgeois social system.
33. See MacNeill, "Extending the Work of Halbwachs," 80.
34. For a succinct statement of this dynamic, see Hervieu-Léger's introduction to Identités religieuses en Europe, ed. Grace Davie and Danièle Hervieu-Léger (Paris: Éditions la Découverte, 1996).
35. One thinks of the so-called new religious movements that survive in relation to the larger society by creating alternate communal structures; see Wilson, Religion in Sociological Perspective, chap. 5.
36. For discussion of the role of symbolic "emblems" in French culture, see Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, 3 vols., trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996-98).
37. Where Grace Davie has described the post- religious attitude in contemporary Britain as one of "believing without belonging," Hervieu-Léger speaks of "belonging without believing" (see Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging [Oxford: Blackwell, 1994]).
38. On Rammohan's debt to Islamic thought, see Sophia Dobson Collet, The Life and Letters of Raja Rammohun Roy, repr. ed. by D. K. Biswas and P. C. Ganguli (Calcutta: Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, 1988), 32.
39. Early works challenging the dichotomy include Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967),
40. and Amales Tripathi, Vidyasagar: The Traditional Modernizer (Calcutta: Orient Longman, 1974).
41. See Rammohan's introduction to Precepts of Jesus: The Guide to Peace and Happiness (1820), in The English Works of Raja Rammohun Roy with an English Translation of "Tuhfatul muwahhiddin" (Allahabad: Panini Office, 1906), 485.
42. "The Brahmunical Magazine, or the Missionary and the Brahmun. No. IV," in The English Works of Raja Rammohun Roy, 198.
43. See Farquhar, Modern Religious Movements in India, 34.
44. See Dilipkumar Biswas, "Rāmamohaner dharmacintā," in Rāmamohana Smarancombining dot belowa, ed. Pulinbihārī Sen et al. (Calcutta: Rāmamohana Rāya smrcombining dot belowtirakscombining dot belowancombining dot belowa samiti, 1989), 368-69.
45. See Brian A. Hatcher, Idioms of Improvement: Vidyasagar and Cultural Encounter in Bengal (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1996), 201-6.
46. For an example of a scholar who does draw this conclusion, see Bryan Wilson, "Secular ization and Its Discontents," in his Religion in Sociological Perspective, esp. 50-51.
47. Summarizing Hervieu-Léger, Grace Davie remarks that the "paradox of modernity" is that in its amnesiac forms it destroys the sense of religion, but in its Utopian forms it fosters a sense of the religious; see Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 31.
48. This was apparently little more than an informal gathering - Sophia Dobson Collet calls it "not quite public" - for conversation and debate (Life and Letters, 76).
49. It has been estimated that in the sixty years from the founding of the Ātmīya Sabhā to the founding of the Indian Association in 1876, at least 200 voluntary associations were formed in Calcutta; see Rajat Sanyal, Voluntary Associations and the Urban Public Life in Bengal (1815-1876) (Calcutta: Riddhi-India, 1980), 14.
50. A cognate approach, which demonstrates familiarity with Hervieu-Léger's arguments, may be found in Olivier Roy's treatment of contemporary Islam; see Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (London: Hurst, 2004).
51. cf. Collet, Life and Letters, 220;
52. and Sibnath Sastri, Rāmtanu Lāhidcombining dot belowī o tatkālīna Bancombining dot belowgasamāja, repr. ed. (Calcutta: New Age Publications, 1983), 103.
53. Weber, The Sociology of Religion, 46.
54. See Benoy Ghosh, Sāmāyik-patre bāncombining dot belowglār samāj-citra, pt. 2 (Calcutta: Vikscombining dot belowancombining dot below, 1963), 17-18.
55. Hem Chandra Sarkar, The Religion of the Brahmo Samaj, 3rd ed. (Calcutta: Classic, 1931), 5.
56. On the relationship between Rammohan and Rāmacandra, see Hatcher, Idioms of Improvement, chap. 8.
57. These facts are reported in a short life of Rāmacandra published in Tattvabodhinī Patrikā, no. 21 (1 Vaiśākha 1767 Śaka), 165-67.
58. See Ghosh, Sāmāyik-patre bāncombining dot belowglār samāj-citra, 24-25.
59. For reports of upper-caste Hindu members of Young Bengal buying meat kebabs from a Muslim vendor and eating them in plain view, see Sastri, Rāmtanu Lāhidcombining dot belowī, 172.
60. Ramgopal Ghosh, cited in Susobhan Sarkar, "Derozio and Young Bengal," in Studies in the Bengal Renaissance, ed. A. C. Gupta (Jadavpur: National Council of Education, 1958), 19.
61. I would like to thank Paul Courtright, who has studied this period and the satī contro versy in particular, for suggesting to me how vilification of Rammohan could have worked to shape or even suppress public memory of him after his death. For further context, see Brian K. Pennington, "Constructing Colonial Dharma: A Chronicle of Emergent Hinduism, 1830-1831," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 69, no. 3 (2001): 577-603,
62. as well as his Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construction of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), chap. 5.
63. Amiya Kumar Sen, Tattwabodhini Patrika and the Bengal Renaissance (Calcutta: Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, 1979), 12.
64. See Sen, Tattwabodhini Patrika and the Bengal Renaissance, 13.
65. He has been called "India's first modern-style entrepreneur" (Kopf, The Brahmo Samaj, 162).
66. On Dwarkanath, see Blair Kling, Partner in Empire: Dwarkanath Tagore and the Age of Enterprise in Eastern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).
67. Tagore, Autobiography, 13-14.
68. See Halbfass, India and Europe, 205.
69. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (New York: Free Press, 1965), 420.
70. Quoted in Frans L. Damen, Crisis and Renewal in the Brahmo Samaj (1860-1884) (Leuven: Catholic University, 1988), 34.
71. April DeConick, Recovering the Original Gospel of Thomas (New York: Continuum, 2005), 12.
72. See R. Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).
73. See "Report of the Tuttuvoadhinee Subha, 1843-44," Tattvabodhinī Patrikā, no. 13 (1 Bhādra 1766), 103-4.
74. 1768 Śaker Sāmvatsarika āya vyaya sthitir nirūpancombining dot belowa pustaka (Calcutta: Tattvabodhinī Sabhā, 1846), 1-2.
75. Interestingly, the first biography of Rammohan appeared around the same time. Writing in the Calcutta Review for December 1845, Kishorychand Mitra cast Rammohan in the role of cultural progenitor, remarking that Rammohan "was evidently the first who consecrated, so to speak, the Bengali language." See J. K. Majumdar, Raja Rammohun Roy and Progressive Movements in India (1941; repr., Calcutta: Sadharan Brahmo Samaj, 1983), 279.
76. See Dilīpkumār Biśvās, "Tattvabodhinī Sabhā o Debendranāth Thcombining dot belowākur," Itihāsa 5, no. 1 (1954): 47. The textual expression of this new identity would soon follow in the form of Debendranath's new Brāhmo "scripture," entitled simply Brāhmo Dharmahcombining dot below (Calcutta, 1850).
77. Damen, Crisis and Renewal in the Brahmo Samaj, 30, referring to Keshub's remarks in the Indian Mirror (January 1, 1865).
78. Life and Works of Brahmananda Keshav, 2nd ed., compiled by Prem Sundar Basu (Calcutta: Navavidhan Publication Committee, 1940), 126-27.
79. For a Weberian approach to Rammohan's charisma, see David Kopf, "Rammohun Roy and the Bengal Renaissance: An Historiographical Essay," in Rammohun Roy and the Process of Modernization in India, ed. V C. Joshi (Delhi: Vikas, 1975), esp. 22;
80. cf. his earlier essay, "The Brahmo Samaj Intelligentsia and the Bengal Renaissance: A Study of Revitalization and Modernization in Nineteenth Century Bengal," in Transition in South Asia: Problems of Modernization, ed. R. I. Crane (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1970), 7-48.
81. Recent literature on this topic is extensive. Influential studies include David N. Lorenzen, "Who Invented Hinduism?" Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no. 1 (1999): 630-59;
82. Brian K. Smith, "Questioning Authority: Constructions and Deconstructions of Hinduism," International Journal of Hindu Studies 2, no. 3 (1998): 313-39;
83. Wendy Doniger, "Hinduism by Any Other Name," Wilson Quarterly 15, no. 3 (1991): 35-41;
84. John Stratton Hawley, "Naming Hinduism," Wilson Quarterly 15, no. 3 (1991): 30-34;
85. Robert Frykenberg, "The Emergence of Modern 'Hinduism' as a Concept and as an Institution," in Hinduism Reconsidered, ed. G. D. Sontheimer and H. Kulke (New Delhi: Manohar, 1989), 29-49.
86. See Pennington, Was Hinduism Invented? 170-71.
87. On the process of selection involved in the poesis of religious creation, see Hatcher, Eclecticism and Modern Hindu Discourse, chap. 2.
88. On the Kartābhajās, see Hugh B. Urban, Economics of Ecstasy: Tantra, Secrecy, and Power in Colonial Bengal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
89. The reinvention of the Bāuls in modern Bengal suggests the same process of reiterative invention we have been reviewing here; see Jeanne Openshaw, Seeking Bāuls of Bengal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
90. On the tendency to take the history of the Brāhmo Samāj as shorthand for the history of the so-called Bengali Renaissance, see Brian A. Hatcher, "Great Men Waking: Paradigms in the Historiography of the Bengal Renaissance," in Bengal: Rethinking History. Essays in Historiography, ed. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay (New Delhi: Manohar, 2001), 135-63.