Brian A. Hatcher

In a nutshell

This is an ambitious book that grew out of a rather simple question. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, two Hindu leaders on either side of the subcontinent created new religious organizations. Each transformed their local contexts and also transcended them to become influential on the global stage. The strange thing is, only one of these leaders, Rammohun Roy (1772-1833), would go on to figure prominently in the literature on modern Hinduism. The other, Sahajanand Swami (1781-1830), has been largely overlooked by scholars. Why is that?

The answer boils down to a single word, “reform.” Reform is an interpretive category and narrative trope that has structured modern accounts of Hinduism since the moment Rammohun and Sahajanand first came to the attention of western observers. Even though both men were labelled reformers during their careers, it was Rammohun alone who became the face of Indian reform. To appreciate why, it helps to know that Rammohun was active at the epicenter of British rule in Bengal, while Sahajanand promulgated his teachings far from the cosmopolitan salons of Calcutta. Within the discursive chronoscape of reform, Rammohun figures as central and progressive, while Sahajanand is rendered peripheral and backward looking. And so the dominant narrative of modern Hinduism takes shape.

As a scholar of modern Bengal there was much to recognize in this story. And yet as a scholar of modern India, it is also clear how radically the landscape of religion is shifting. The current Prime Minister represents a political party committed to a brand of Hindu majoritarianism at odds with the vision of Rammohun. He also hails from Gujarat and represents the face of post-liberalization India, with its middle-class aspirations. Today Rammohun’s Brahmos are a vanishing community, while the followers of Sahajanand have built a massive temple-museum-theme park in India’s capital. It all strains the seams of the familiar narrative.

Clearly the time has come to rethink the accomplishments of Rammohun and Sahajanand and to search for new ways to tell the story of modern Hinduism. To do that we need to step back “before” the concept of reform came to exercise its critical pull on modern accounts of Hinduism. This requires, to begin with, attending more closely to the early colonial moment when Rammohun and Sahajanand were both active. This was a distinctive moment and must not be too quickly conflated with the later era of high imperialism. Equipped with a better understanding of their times, we then need to adopt a new set of tools for making sense of what they accomplished and how; we need tools not already shaped by the presuppositions of reform. I therefore buck convention and treat Rammohun and Sahajanand not as reformers but as religious lords at the head of two new religious polities—the Brahmo Samaj and the Swaminarayan Sampraday, respectively.

One could rightly say this is not a book about modern Hindu reform movements; it is a book about two colonial religious masters, each of whom embodied—and traded on—a distinctive mode of religious sovereignty. To think of Rammohun and Sahajanand as lords in this way is unsettling, not least for those accustomed to viewing Rammohun at the vanguard of India’s march toward enlightenment and freedom. Nonetheless, I take the risk because we do not need another history of Hindu reform; we need to revisit the period and their lives in a way that can help us reckon better with the India we see today. It may be unsettling, but much can be done by bringing together Bengal and Gujarat, Rammohun and Sahajanand, in ways that have not been done before.

A close-up

When it first dawned on me that Rammohun and Sahajanand were nearly exact contemporaries my immediate thought was: What a wonderful opportunity to bring into view the character and complexity of a short-lived moment in South Asian history. One of the things I try to do is to provide a sense for what is distinctive about the period from roughly 1750 to 1850. I refer to this as the early colonial period in order to stress that many of the developments we associate with “colonialism” in India are features of a world that only really began to emerge after the 1857 Rebellion. The early colonial period, though colonial had not yet become the British Raj. As such, when one looks at this earlier moment, one notices it is less rigidly structured by racist attitudes; that the actors on the ground, Indian and Briton, often inhabited shared spaces and enacted shared agendas. This is not to ignore the implementation of colonial legislation, the devastating economic policies of the East India Company, nor the fact of British supremacy; but it is to say that the early colonial moment was one in which a figure like Rammohun could articulate his leadership in relation to Indo-Persianate norms of learning and ethics while cultivating British connections to advance his religious agenda. Similarly, a figure like Sahajanand, who is often pictured as being aloof from British power, was in fact deliberate in his efforts to meet East India Company officials and open to theological discussions with Christians in the area.

Chapters like “Fluid Landscapes” work to bring these issues to light by sketching economic, political and religious life in early colonial Bengal and Gujarat. One has a chance to appreciate the agency of various actors like peasants, landholders, urban merchants, and nouveaux riches, not to mention the complex legacy of mendicant communities and devotional polities. Here the historiographical goal is to move beyond the still prevalent idea that eighteenth-century India was the site of economic decay and socio-political anarchy. One can easily appreciate how this trope has helped underwrite both imperialist and nationalist narratives of reform. Once one commits to looking anew at this period, one realizes that the era of Rammohun and Sahajanand was one of incredible fluidity and immense opportunity.

Lastly

So here we are. Today Calcutta is known as Kolkata and the city is sprouting skyscrapers and mega-malls. The tenor of politics is changing too, as decades of Marxist leadership have given way to new electoral tensions. Some of the parties making headway in Bengal today would have been almost unimaginable in pre-liberalization Calcutta. The Hindu majoritarianism of the BJP is making striking inroads, and side by side with the gleaming skyscrapers one spots the distinctive spires of North Indian nagara temples. It seems as if the twain has finally met—Rammohun’s Calcutta must make room for the Swaminarayanis (see image).

For many, changes like this strike a dissonant chord. And I am not thinking only of the spiritual and cultural heirs of Rammohun. Scholars of religion in modern India are themselves confronted with the challenge of rethinking some of their most cherished teleologies around progress in Indian religion and public life. Hard questions arise. Does the rapid expansion of the Sampraday in the past few decades register the return of the repressed in modern religious life? If the modern comparative study of religion has tended to celebrate the sober Vedantic inclusivism inaugurated by Rammohun, how will our textbooks make sense of the current landscape, with its soaring temples and exuberant devotional communities? If we continue to tell the story of modern Hinduism in terms of the inevitable spread of progressive religion across South Asia, we paint ourselves into an interpretive corner. Not only do the terms of our comparisons fail, but we face the uncomfortable challenge of confronting the colonial genealogy of our own disciplinary tools. But this is a task we must undertake. Along the way we should strive to develop new analytical tools, such as the model of religious polity construction I offer—tools that will allow us to bring together for comparison what scholarly accounts have for so long kept asunder. In the present-day confluence (or collision) of Gujarat and Bengal we face the challenge of assessing anew the place of religion in 21st century India.